MMT is just a social democratic fantasy based on a false notion of how money actually works, and jumping onto this Magical Money Theory will only hurt the left
Money is the universal equivalence for all commodities, as Marx spells out in Das Kapital. There is nothing magical about it, anything can be used for money in practice, but people tend to choose to base money around something with a relatively stable value- like Gold or Silver, or, in the modern era, the USD. If people did MMT magic with the USD, then other nations will simply abandon it in favor of whatever seems more stable, so the usual MMT argument that we can fuck with the USD however we like and not run any risk since it is the world reserve currency is silly.
Why do you keep saying “magic”?
It literally just describes the fiat money system
If people did MMT magic with the USD
But this is the point
It’s not IF
Whenever the sovereign spends money is created
You literally wouldn’t be able to use any kind of fiat currency if it wasn’t spent into existence before
This is especially clear during deficit spending. The monetary sovereign literally creates money out of nowhere.
If you think this is magic, then how do you think you type your comments? There is no storage of alphanumerical characters I draw from to write this comment. It simply comes from “nowhere” when I hit a key.
out of curiosity since I don’t really follow this debate too closely. Who do you think is right about how money actually works?
The traditional account of money is generally more correct than that MMT nonsense.
And they are wrong about MMT. What do you know, Marxist economists can be wrong about Marx and about economics as well. As to people who predicted the Great Financial Crisis, a lot of people get credit for it- the vehemently anti-MMT Anwar Shaikh, who I think is probably closer to Marx than either of these folks, also predicted the GFC, so did a bunch of Austrian Loons.
