On the fifth day, God created fractional reserve banking.

I got into a debate about economics with someone online last week, during which they came up with the remarkable assertion that it's impossible to create more money.
Now, on the one hand this is plainly ridiculous. The UK and US are currently creating more money as fast as the presses can turn in order to reduce the relative value of our debts, but I think I understand what the person was really saying; and that is that it's impossible to create more wealth.

This is an idea I've encountered before from several sources - raggedhalo and jonnyargles have both come out with it at me in the past, and I can see why, to some, it might be an attractive idea. If there is a set, fixed, amount of wealth in the world, then it adds a great deal of weight to arguments in favour of wealth redistribution. After all, if it's impossible to create more wealth than currently exists, the only way for poor people to get richer is by moving wealth about from one person to another. If your political philosophy is based on a hatred of teh Greedy Bankst0rs then this view of wealth adds a moral weight to your beliefs which some* might say is otherwise lacking.
Indeed, there's only one problem with the idea that you can't create more money/wealth. It's complete bollocks. Apart from that, though, great idea.

But over the weekend it struck me; what if it wasn't possible to create more money? If that were the case then it would have to be possible to project all the money in the world backwards in time to the creation of the universe. Obviously, if that were the case, money cannot have been created out of the formless entropy of the big bang. It would have required some form of active agent to denominate it.
It seems strange to realise that the extreme left economic position is that the world - and all the money in it - was created in toto on October 23rd, 4004 BC, but it would appear Bishop Ussher was right. Who'd've thought?



^{* People who can do sums, for example.}