Charity

The question of charity is not one that need be deliberated extensively. For an Austrian, charity is defined very simply.

Within the Savings=Investment ambit, by a Saver withholding consumption he is both attempting to seize the price spreads (receive a rate of return) as well as assisting in advancing factors (providing needed capital for a company to Invest with).

When a person withholds consumption, he is Saving. Savings is represented either as money within a demand deposit (both Checking and Savings accounts), which then provide capital for the bank to issue loans, Loans=Deposits. In your contemporary Banking system, this accounting tautology holds.

A loan provides needed funds (capital) for a business owner or any consumer to borrow with the terms requiring repayment in installments over time, plus an additional mark-up. Loan, Debt and Credit are all commensurate, as each vocable describes a form of borrowing.

Everything is contractual as well. An equity, or company stock, through indenture allows an Investor to allocate Savings (withheld consumption) into a liquid asset. This contractual claim to ownership of a parcel of a company, can be bought or sold quickly on an exchange. Equities can be converted to cash forthwith.

The equity or stock is a standard Savings instrument, as is the Debt instrument or Bond. Various euphemisms are given to the contractual form of borrowing, such as Bills (short-term), Notes (intermediate-term) as well as Bonds (long-term). Moreover, any label can be given to this Debt instrument which allows an issuer, typically a corporation, to borrow funds.

In these respects, a Debt instrument is Credit money (as is comporting to the aforementioned). One entity borrows--buys money, the other lends--sells money. Debt instruments are less liquid, meaning that the amount of time at which they can be converted into Cash is longer than an equity.

Everything is subjective, therefore the interlude at which someone waits in order to reap a larger profit is dependent upon time preference. Risk is indeed a subjective factor more easily reduced with more certain terms to the contract entered into, one example, collateral.

Some equities are riskier than others, while some bonds are more riskier than others as well. Subjectivity also is an important facet in describing the array of risks involved in Savings-Investing, as inflation causes malinvestments.

Charity, therefore, is tantamount to withholding consumption, because as Savings increases, more factors are advanced and new jobs appear in the market. Less government intervention, less inflation that is, will allow for more accurate price gauging. The price mechanism is less deceptive as the enshrouded decrement of wealth, due to a higher money stock, becomes less efficacious and thereupon less harmful to an economy as a whole.

A robust economy is built on real wealth, not on palliatives or vast reductions in purchasing power. Moreover, the rate of interest is key in the process of assistance to those most in need of building up a capital stock, or growing their wealth. It is profits, or the agio, that every human actor desires to grow their wealth, as those with more Savings become the greater benefactors.

Inflation would be the great deceiver which harms all decisions and causes vast misallocation of resources for all actors. Time preference is misgauged, and therefore more heedless decisions are rendered.

Charity is, ergo, the lack of government intervention, as government is the monopoly on coercion. Monopolizing money and law (a result of the existence of government), force out the needed competition in finding the stabilized market value of each. It is these dynamics which also complicate the natural confection of the agio, that being price discovery.