I think Bob gets the idea of inflation. He seems to grasp that in Post 37.
Where he is amiss is:
“So are we saying there is literally not enough resources to go around and if we had less people there would be enough ( food water housing etc)”
As both you and Lemur point out, that’s not true. “Resources” are not things simply lying around; a resource is by definition something humans can use to create wealth. If you eliminate half the people, you eliminate half the humans who create wealth.
Though there can be local, temporally limited exceptions, “too many people and too few resources” is generally NOT a problem, especially post-Green Revolution, now that humans can produce way more food than they need.
Keep in mind too that a USD has a flexible value. I know that I can get a hamburger for $5, a decent hotel room for $80 and a new car for $20,000. But those are just values that happen to be true at this time.
If everyone has $1 million in spendable cash lying around, I’m not going to cook a hamburger for a measly $5, build a large building, subdivide it, and rent it out by the night for a piddling $80, etc.
If the supply of money is greatly increased, its value would be less. If it started raining gold tomorrow, do you think you could pick up an ounce of it, walk across your neighbor’s yard tripping over gold, and sell it to him for $900?
Could someone else outside our country destroy an economy by providing money to another countries citizens directly?
Let’s say the U.S. had some issues with some small-ish intransigent country we wanted to mess around with. Could we destabilize it by flooding the country with US dollars? I’m thinking a sudden influx of something in the neighborhood of $100M all at once. If not that amount, then how much? What would happen to their economy?
Aside from the Vatican City, there are some very sparsely-populated islands with only a few thousand people on them. If we picked one and gave them all big checks with a lot of zeroes at the end, I suspect they’d all just retire in style and live out the rest of their lives cruising the world, or ice-fishing in Alaska, or fulfilling whatever other wild dreams they had. Some non-natives would probably move in to perform various services for the now-very-wealthy island’s populations that didn’t want to move off the island but also didn’t feel like mowing their grass or scrubbing their own toilets anymore. I suspect some of them would take their new-found wealth and invest it into businesses of various sorts, either feeding and clothing the non-native help, or manufacturing rockets (just watched a SpaceX launch), or whatever. They’d probably have to fill out their labor force with more non-native immigrants, but I don’t think the end result would be a destroyed economy, and it hardly seems like a good way to ‘mess with’ them to me.