A huge concern on my mind right now is the relationship between investment and money printing.

The stock market provides a great service by acting as the brain of the economy, working hard to predict the future and more closely associate it with the decisions being made in the present. Contrary to what people may say, the stock market adds value to the economy.

The market itself is not stagnent. Change and innovation in the market are constantly working to increase the total amount of value in our market, and are also working to increase the rate at which value is produced. Some value is exhausted with the passage of time, (money makes the world go around!) but in general, innovation is a force that works against inflation.

When a dollar is printed, it can be seen as instantly stealing value from every other dollar in the market, but this is a bit simplistic. If 200 trillion dollars suddenly appeared on the moon tomorrow, it would have zero affect on the value of the dollar. Inflation can be modelled as a localized effect. The difference in inflation between two places is what makes the ability to print money such a powerful tool.

Think about it. The people hit first and hit hardest by inflation is the very people printing money. The extra money has zero cost for them to obtain, and has zero benefit for them to keep. All benefit comes from interacting with those who have not yet encountered the money. And some of the benefit for those who do business with the money printers comes from interactions with those who have not done business with the money printers.

Investing in the stock market is a good way to insulate yourself from inflation, but only because you are associating yourself with businesses that try to position themselves as closely to that source of new money as possible. In a way, "trying to protect yourself from inflation" is exactly identical to "trying to fulfil the wishes of those with access to newly printed money."

As someone who believes that inflation is immoral theft, the idea that investing in the stock market contributes to and profits from this theft is one that I find deeply disturbing. And I don't buy the idea that investing in gold or Bitcoin are fundamentally different.

And so that leads me to several questions. How does micro-inflation and micro-deflation operate in a market without new money? What happens when the market produces new value? What happens when it produces value at a faster rate? Without inflation, is there still an incentive for an ignorant individual to invest in the stock market? How is the value of good investing rewarded when no new money enters the system?

I know there are easy answers to these questions, but those are boring. I am looking for the HARD answers, the ones that relate to my personal model of the market. I want to know, can it still be ethical to invest in a market with money printers? I know that currency itself provides value to the market, but what role do money printing or inflation truly play?