Quiz question to you
@jamahir : As a noob about economics, why cant we just print truckloads of money and give it to poor people. Most village folks with excellent common sense will agree that its bloody politicians who want to keep us poor which is why they wont print it.
Tell us what your common sense says.
For a simple reason that money is nothing but a piece of paper ,which act as reservoir of labour of a person. It does not have any intrinsic value by itself. Its value depend upon goods and services you could buy by it.
Assume that in a country ,say popatland, there are X number of people, Y amount of currency, and Z amount of goods and services. Now due to some bad financial advice, Rex, the sovereign of popatland increases currency circulation by printing currency of amount Y thus making it 2Y. Now when this 2Y currency goes into hand of X people, their nominal wealth has increased but supply of goods and services Z has not. When those X people would demand/buy those Z goods and services, there would be upward pressure of prices as people now would be willing to pay 2Y money for same Z services for which they were paying Y before new currency was printed, as . This would lead to increase in prices and would cause hyperinflation. Hyperinflation would destroy savings of subjects of "Rex of popatland", and value of currency.
In strict Mathematical world, prices would increase by same proportion as increase in currency, but inflation by its existence would create inflation expectations, and would motivate savers to dump their savings in market as fast as possible and buy some material good from them, whose value would only depreciate at its natural rate, thus further increasing money supply and further destroying currency of popatland. Eventually, hard currency would be replaced by barter as currency would not have any value.
This is the reason that central banks follow some formulas based on economic activity to print new currency. For example in India, RBI follows a formula ,unimaginatively termed as, Money Supply M3 formula.
This Wikipedia entry would help for starters.
Money supply - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia