Transcript of the above video:

I have been really debating whether or not I wanted to make this video and if I did, if I wanted to do a long form video over on my personal YouTube channel or just do kind of a quick one here, and if so how it kind of pertains to everything. Yeah strictly speaking this isn't exactly a legal video but monetary policy, fiscal policy has an impact on the overall system including the law at the end of the day much more in a longer term kind of more indirect way, but it does. I have noticed and I am not going to get into politics at all, but I've noticed one issue that has kind of been around, sort of floating around the ether in the last few weeks, maybe months comes from this whole notion of essentially basically "free money" essentially. This notion of, and this is in the United States as well, it's not just Thailand. If you elect so and so you are going to get this stimulus cheque in the US context; if you elect so and so, you are going to get this cheque. Then the same kind of ideas, I have seen them floating about in Thailand, then on top of it I read an article in the Bangkok Post, I'm not even going to cite it, it was from an author I really, really respect who has a good grasp on economics but I couldn't have disagreed more with the fundamental conclusions because at the end of the day, I had to remember that this person was a Keynesians are kind of a different breed of Economist than somebody like me who is I don't know if you call it Austrian whatever, I just call it kind of Common Sense Economics but I don't even want to get into those "oh this type of thinking versus that type of thinking", I just think of it as common sense. 

Look, at the end of the day printing money or whatever you want to call that, call it quantitative easing, call it whatever, stimulus, printing money, so-called free money, it's not free. At the end of the day they sometimes call inflation the 'hidden tax' because when you print money, and the definition of inflation especially the old school definition of inflation, regardless of the whole velocity of money and all of that stuff, the old school definition of inflation is basically just an expansion of the money supply. When you do that without a concomitant expansion of goods and services, it leads to inflation and inflation again is a hidden tax. It costs more to buy certain things. Again instead of having a tax it's this sort of hidden cost which brings us to this kind of notion of free money generally. For anybody that is really thinking about these kind of "solutions" in a Thailand context, I would urge Thais to just look at the West and look, where has all that "free money" gotten folks. It's not good, it's kind of bleak in fact. I don't really like to talk about those topics in detail because I don't really want in a way, well you have to face problems or else they get worse but I don't want to seem like just an absolute pessimist when I talk about this stuff but long story short, yeah look at the West. It's a really good example of what happens when you have policies that basically just result in "free money". It's not particularly beneficial for anyone and it can be a real problem for economies and even for whole societies because you go back to Roman times for example when they started debasing the currency through different methodology, basically they were diluting the metal, for example silver, gold, copper; they were diluting the metal component of the given coinage or they were clipping the coin so-called and over time that took its toll and one could argue it was a major contributing factor to the fall of the Western Empire. 

So again not to be too gloomy here, but one thing I like about Thailand is the commonsensical approach to things like economics and I have just got to say just on a conceptual level, the notion of "free money', it ain't free.