With talk of Universal Basic Income appearing to gain steam these days, one of the main objections is the sheer cost of the program. But one advocate of UBI claims to have the answer, and it lies in marrying UBI with its obvious philosophical twin: Modern Monetary Theory. In doing so, he manages to lay bare the utter nihilism behind both theories.
Okay, so you want to start your own country and create your own currency? Congratulations! What’s step one? …. Step one therefore is to create money out of nothing. Choose whatever you want. Want to use shells? Okay. Want to carve notches on rocks or sticks? Okay. Want to use dollar bills? Okay. Want to use ones and zeroes? Okay. Whatever you do, get that stuff to your people. After your people have money, tax some of it back. Don’t tax all of it back. That would leave nothing for them to use on goods and services in the private sector. Tax some percentage of it back. Congrats! You just ran a “deficit”, began your “national debt”, and gave your money value by requiring that people pay their taxes in your currency.
Critical to the success of the great Cloward and Pivening.
Oh, it’s coming. Your typical Canadian – “What??!!??…money for doin’ nuttin’?? Where do I sign up???”
Money for nothin’
And your chicks for free…
*government supplied chicks may have previously been dudes
Some conditions may apply. Check your outstanding court orders.
Moron Money Theory is one of the reasons that we have had so much inflation since 2020…
Taxes don’t destroy money. They tranfer the economic action to the government. The important idea is that taxes restrain inflation. Since, we will never have deflation, more taxes are needed infinitely to cover the endless inflation.
Zimbabwe is poor because it is not taxed enough to control inflation.
What an absurd argument. Please tell me you’re being ironic.
IMO, if you follow MMT guy’s approach, you end up with infinite taxes and subsidies. My counter is Zimbabwe’s current economy is a wreck because they didn’t tax enough to restrain inflation.
These people are lunatics and are deadly serious . There is no buy gold and land solution to this.
The Social Credit movement was a big threat to the banking industry and their paid critics and established political opponents dismissed the theory claiming it as a “funny money” scheme.
Well something very funny has happened to our currency! It’s lost it value. And we have un-payable debt.
The very same thing they claimed would happen with “Social Credit”.
Abraham Lincoln was more scared of the bankers than the armies of the south. So he came up with a financial solution to fund the war. He paid the price.
“As interest in the economics of Social Credit grows, it is important to provide people with accurate and comprehensive summaries of C.H. Douglas’ analysis and remedial proposals. In what follows, I will outline in seven points the salient features of the Social Credit approach to economic questions.
1. “The economy exists to provide people, as efficiently as possible, with the goods and services that they need to survive and flourish. That is, production exists for the sake of consumption, not for the sake of money-making, employment, satisfying the creative impulse, or ‘moral’ discipline (considered as ends in themselves). It most certainly does not exist for the sake of centralizing wealth and power in the hands of an oligarchic elite.”
https://www.socred.org/s-c-action/social-credit-views/the-economics-of-social-credit-in-summary/social-credit-explained-in-7-points
My grandfather up and left Alberta then, and moved to the USA when “funny $$” was introduced. He had also escaped the 1929 crash by selling all holdings upon learning that a taxi driver was buying stocks on spec. He decided that the market was clearly overheated. Smart guy!
His estate was worth 8.5 million in today’s dollars.
It never was “introduced” so he must have left for other reasons.
The next waffle leftist lunacy to be inflicted on us by the defacto NDP PM as Junior Justin plays provincial premier.
In the interests of “fairness” of course, and why should we complain about happens to the “ultra wealthy?”
That we know of course is yet another lie by omission, aka disinformation detected by eight out of ten Canadians.
The .13% is for incomes over $500,000, not capital gains, like Mom-and-Pop rentals funding their “pension plan.”
It could be a good idea to, in the interests of “fairness,” cut those “ultra wealthy” fat cat civil servant pensions.
That would be a much better “fair share” for the fools who put us into an inflationary bubble, to foot the bill.
What is funny to me is the very first sentence “If there’s one thing most people don’t seem to understand about how money works” is written by someone who has no clue how money works.
What we have witnessed during the pandemic was a massive increase in dollar printing by almost all countries. If you printed more than the US (e.g. Turkey) your inflation is now much worse. If you printed less (e.g. Switzerland) you have lower inflation. If you printed about the same (e.g. Canada) you have similar inflation compared to the US. But inflation is proportional to the amount of dollar printing and Modern Monetary Theory only works (according to its experts) if you don’t print so much money as to cause inflation.
But America has created its own problem. Due to the massive devaluation of the dollar (relative to goods, not other currencies and caused by a massive increase in the money supply) a large number of countries have started trading in their own currency. Eventually the USD will collapse because they believe they can print an infinite amount of money, being the world’s currency and other countries will no longer hold their currency.
But other than that, yes, you can print an infinite amount of money and build bridges using rocks carved with notches and sell your bread for sea shells.
For those confused by all this, boil it down to the basics.
Money is simply a token used to represent a fixed amount of wealth. Period.
Through creating more tokens (dollars, pounds, lira, pesos, etc.) the same amount of assets are now associated with more tokens.
Creating or removing tokens from circulation has NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on the underlying value of the assets.
Inflation is caused by creating more tokens. It doesn’t matter what someone names the process of creating tokens. Whether it is creating derivatives, printing money, quantitative easing, or anything else. By creating more tokens, the token is now worth less. Therefore it takes more tokens (dollars) to buy groceries, gas, etc.
The people who print money (central banks) fully know this, but pretend inflation is a mystery that they have to keep in check through financial wizardry.
Money printing is a scam and the people involved are liars and criminals. Period.
And taxing capital gains (asset appreciation largely caused by devaluation of currency caused by printing money) is taking advantage of the ignorance of people to this scam.
“Inflation is caused by printing more tokens”. Exactly.
“ Creating or removing tokens from circulation has NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on the underlying value of the assets.”
Perhaps not. But it does cause stagnation. Or interest in borrowing and buying diminishes and can bring transactions to a halt.
Do you see that as a bad thing?
What is the harm to the citizens of a nation in some not being as inclined to borrow money, if the cost of some of them borrowing essentially steals from all of their purchasing power as well as their savings?
I’d see that as a net good.
The absurdity of this guy’s mentality is really breathtaking… government deciding if people “have enough food to eat,” “does everyone have a house yet,” and “are enough people driving EVs”? Is an unmitigated disaster unfolding before our eyes. It’s these kinds of idiots who are advising our stupid politicians and enabling them to make these horrible policy announcements on what seems to now be a weekly or even daily basis.