system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Can a government reduce inflation by selling public property - i.e. trading assets for private cash and reducing the money in circulation?
gpt
This is possible. However the government kind of need most of their properties to provide the services to the citizen that they expect. Should the government sell their military equipment to the citizen? Most citizen do not want much military equipment and those who do want it at full price might not be the best people to sell it to. Should the government sell highways? People kind of need those to get around. It is hard to find anything the government can sell, most governments have already been slimmed to the bone from budgets cuts already and private industries have to provide a lot of the basic services which governments previously did. And doing a one time sale of property is a very short sighted way of reducing inflation, it might slow it down a tiny bit temporarily but the things that cause the inflation to be high in the first place is still there.