:seinfeld:
Is it all lib hokum? I was in my local theory shop yesterday and was looking at The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, something I put on my reading list a year and a half ago.
Since then I've listened to and read Matt Bruenig's criticisms of MMT and found them pretty convincing but I haven't really spent much time reading the anything on the "pro" side.
Is this worth my time to read a book on MMT or is it just a distraction? Thoughts?
Yeah this is basically what I was going to say. One of its main cruxes is the "Governments dont KNOW you can tax rich people to control the supply of money!" and thats kind of what makes it toothless because it misses the WHY in absolutely all of this.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/316328.Super_Imperialism
looks interesting
MMT is bullshit until there's a way to quickly adjust some tax rate, primarily on the ultra wealthy and the corporations, to control inflation. As it currently stands, it takes months of political grandstanding to tweak taxes slightly and even then it's never on the wealthy, it's just months of bickering over which way to tax poor people more.
Until a proposal for that comes out, MMT is nonsense from a practical standpoint.
Isn’t that would the Federal Job Guarantee is supposed to do? I thought the idea was to somehow control inflation by expanding or contracting federal spending on the program as needed.
Yep. Businesses do poorly when there is not enough slack in the labor market. They want a certain level of unemployment to keep the workers' condition precarious.
Not sure if neolibs call it this, but I've heard it referred to as "surplus labor". It's a combination of people looking for jobs, people who can't currently work, people doing unpaid labor (disproportionately women), retired people, etc.
They can be called in to work if needed and then dumped back into the labor pool. See: women during WW2
I was specifically talking about more recent theory, specifically among the post-work or anti-work crowd. This book is fairly influential in that space and talks about this directly starting around page 92 of that pdf.
I agree and that's what I also see as the major flaw with MMT, though I think it could very well work if it ever were to be implemented correctly.
inflation is not a all the result of money creation at the moment so it could work
I don't know that there are sufficient control mechanisms in place if the inflation got out of hand though. It's a very drastic measure to adopt MMT, and I'd definitely want to make sure that we take inventory of the risks and prep for them before any attempt at it.
There's also the problem that it assumes the state is working in the interests of the people. With our government all I can imagine happening is an out of control party in which every politician sprays as much money as they can at every company who will smile at them and at their own personal business ventures. But then nothing for regular people because it's not like the political barriers to displeasing capitalists would dissolve. We'd have 100 the budget for the military and exactly the same budget for healthcare.
we were already doing mmt, though just for the rich as usual, not that i would implement mmt though, my preference would be a reversal of the money system where debt no longer exists. The government might not be working in our interests, but depoliticizing money AND pretending technocrats are neutral is worse, both for heightening contradiction purposes and if we manage to wrest the state power, plus it will make the shutdowns less likely, it is amazingly working in japan, against all economist predicitions (even mine lol), and they're not exactly staunch leftists. Don't underestimate the bipartisan consensus for borrowing to supply the MIC, printing more money is simply gonna lower a bit the interests the US pays, that's it, otherwise it is jst political power and potentialities
as far as I can tell it's when liberals realize that money and the rules around it are bullshit WITHOUT an understanding of class power and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
I think it's like the financial equivalent of putting flowers in gun barrels or telling the US empire that they can forge their swords into ploughshares.
They're aware that they can use their monetary tools differently, but that goes against the class interests of the bourgeois dictatorship and will never happen without a proletarian dictatorship, and at that point monetary theory doesn't really matter as much as just using labor armies and marshalling productive forces into developing civilian infrastructure and decommodifying markets.
Matt went on a cursed MMT podcast a while ago but I don't remember what they talked about
This is the worst podcast ever lol
One of the hosts, read to die instantly:
Maxx nails it 👇 I know it is weird to hear that money of all things is queer, because we largely associate it with capitalism and commodification.
From our perspective, participation in governance (including monetary governance) mediates individuated wills from the start...
https://twitter.com/agoingaccount/status/1341815617003925504
This is what happens when stupid people bake their brains with continental philosophy for too long.
Don't put this on continental philosophy :foucault-shining:
Continental philosophy is the best but some peoples brains just get melted by it and they either turn into this shit, or one of the Nick Land / Bataille type of bloggers.
Some people's big takeaway from continental philosophy is that they can just write an incomprehensible salad of smart sounding words and be the next Derrida.
Also, Nick Land, ugh. I remember in the aughts when it seemed like everyone was influenced by him into writing the most incomprehensible, yet vaguely apocalyptic shit. Glad all that seems to have gone straight down the memory hole
Yeah there's any annoying tendency for some people to just info dump the handful of things from Kant/Hegel/Deleuze/etc. they've read into only barely related discussions. Serious thinkers can actually synthesize new thought that doesn't require the reader have an undergraduate level education to know the context of.
Glad all that seems to have gone straight down the memory hole
Yeah turning into a turboracist tends to do that. Even ones I see reference him, typically talking about "hyperstition" which is a legit cool concept, omit his name if at all possible.
Oh I thought you meant Matt Bruenig. I'll give it a listen but I feel skeptical that Matt Christman can hold his own. Thanks!
it is useful to claw back monetary power back from technocrats, but the more important thing money wise would be to abolish debt and mmt won't do it, same with moving the money powers not just in creation but in distribution and use also to the government. Inflation (monetary wise) is bullshit though, otherwise we would have had huge inflation since 2008 not just now, so on that front they're okay, their solutions are just lacking
iirc the core of MMT revolves around controlling inflation by convincing people to buy bonds or just not spend money.
