Burning money

Money burning or burning money is the purposeful act of destroying money. In the prototypical example, banknotes are destroyed by literally setting them on fire. Burning money decreases the wealth of the owner without directly enriching any particular party. However, according to the quantity theory of money, because it reduces the supply of money it increases by the same amount the collective wealth of everyone else who holds money.

Money is usually burned to communicate a message, either for artistic effect, as a form of protest, or as a signal. In some games, a player can sometimes benefit from the ability to burn money (battle of the sexes). Burning money is illegal in some jurisdictions.

For the purposes of macroeconomics, burning money is equivalent to removing the money from circulation, and locking it away forever; the salient feature is that no one may ever use the money again. Burning money shrinks the money supply, and is therefore a special case of contractionary monetary policy that can be implemented by anyone. In the usual case, the central bank withdraws money from circulation by selling government bonds or foreign currency. The difference with money burning is that the central bank does not have to exchange any assets of value for the money burnt. Money burning is thus equivalent to gifting the money back to the central bank (or other money issuing authority). If the economy is at full employment equilibrium, shrinking the money supply causes deflation (or decreases the rate of inflation), increasing the real value of the money left in circulation.

Assuming that the burned money is paper money with negligible intrinsic value, no real goods are destroyed, so the overall wealth of the world is unaffected. Instead, all surviving money slightly increases in value; everyone gains wealth in proportion to the amount of money they already hold. Economist Steven Landsburg proposes in The Armchair Economist that burning one's fortune (in paper money) is a form of philanthropy more egalitarian than deeding it to the United States Treasury. In 1920, Thomas Nixon Carver wrote that dumping money into the sea is better for society than spending it wastefully, as the latter wastes the labor that it hires.

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