Would you rather have a billion dollars a month or never having to pay for anything?
I feel like both would give you the same result
A billion dollars a month would destroy the economy in terms of inflation. That’s 12 billion additional dollars a year coming from fucking nowhere, even if you can’t spend it all if knowledge of it got out it would super-cascade into your assassination or the world stocks imploding.
Never having to pay for anything though, basically just removes you from the economy and gives a store statistically irrelevant loss margins
The cash option is actually not nearly that bad. The US economy alone is $18 trillion per year; an extra $12 billion is less than a tenth of a percent of that. Or, to put it another way:
* Getting a magic $1 billion/month
is (in utilitarian-economic terms) the equivalent of
* Founding a startup to do something that is in actual fact useless and impact-free, like “Instagram just for nachos” or something, and having that startup become slightly less successful than Google because people are dumb
Which would be kinda funny and kinda sad, but probably would not destroy the world.
I think the answer to this one has to depend on the meaning of “pay.” Having a Free Everything For Me card is less great than having enough money to buy everything I want plus enough to donate vast gobs to important charitable endeavors. If I “never have to pay” for charitable donations of arbitrary size, that’s functionally infinite money, which seems even better than the ludicrous $12 billion/year. But that does kinda feel like cheating.