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Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/12/2018 in all areas

  1. First of all, thanks for exposing the libertarian community to MMT, understanding how money works has been a blind spot for freedom-loving people - especially when it comes to government money. I enjoyed your Mosler interview - I did not know how government currency is issued (spent into existence and taxed out of it), I only knew about credit money creation. Also the part how taxation (alongside with laws requiring people to accept legal tender) creates the demand for currency blew my mind - so simple yet so counterintuitive. That said, here's my critique of your latest video about MMT - it's mostly just practical critique. In the beginning Nima explains how the government causes the problem of unemployment: Since everyone has to get tax tokens but getting a job is punished by taxation, private sector cannot offer as many jobs as without this intervention. As a solution he offers a Federal job guarantee program. i) At 13 minutes he points out how the program "should not compete with private sector jobs". This is impossible. Since you get the resources to pay for these jobs by spending tax tokens into existence and robbing everyone else by inflation (which might just be lower deflation (well, since we don't have a free currency system, we don't know how inflationary the free system would be - maybe rate of inflation would be naturally something as high as 5 %)), you already compete with everyone else who is forced to use your money system. ii) At 14 mins: "These would be jobs where you have to show up etc." Government employees have all the economic incentives to work as little as possible and get paid as much as possible - getting fired would be nearly impossible if government actually guarantees a job. There's no way of making this happen unless you start using direct force. How else will these workers show up when there's a federal job guarantee? iii) At 16 mins: "It would be important to pay less for these jobs than in the private sector in order not to compete with the private sector": Wishful thinking. All the practical evidence points in the other direction. iv) 22 mins: Local government jobs paid by issuing tax tokens will supposedly create so much more new money, that net private savings go up and private sector starts hiring new people, thus balancing the new money creation to private sector's needs. Not necessarily - people tend to take mortgages and perhaps even take a loan to buy a sail boat once their income increases. This creates a massive amount of credit money, which might more make up for the decrease in government money creation. v) 25 mins: "How can giving people gov jobs be worse than paying them for not doing anything?" Easily, make them work for harmful projects like building roads to nowhere (Japan), go to war or build 10's of GW's of wind power (Germany). vi) 26 mins: Nima explains how this program will not cause inflation as long as you have underutilized capacity. Technically this would be correct, if increase in money supply (let's assume for simplicity that v(money) = constant) matches increases in production then no inflation would happen. But the most important component of that underutilized capacity is the human mind. For example, in programming, one talented developer can be 10^6 more valuable than an average one. And a bad developer is harming more than helping, perhaps only top 5-10 % of people can even work in the field. This is true even for other fields too, with different numeric values (which I just guesstimated). Given that 16 % of population has an IQ of 85 or lower (sd = 15) in the Western countries, even having a cleaning job might be challenging for these people. If they get guaranteed government jobs, it'll take more resources to support them at their jobs than they will ever create -> more tax tokens are used, but overall resources diminish or at best maybe stay the same -> more inflation. So why not concentrate on cutting taxes to the abs. minimum while simultaneously not bothering about the deficits and supporting crypto developers by spreading general knowledge about MMT to them? It's only a matter of time when cryptos take over the monetary system, so if they don't figure their system - well government just might "help" them... and take over some coins in the process.
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  2. The irritating thing watching this outrageous debacle is that Brittany and co, and many others aren't "right-wing," they're thinking individuals with opinions. They aren't anti-Muslim, racist or anti anything else remotely detrimental to anyone. They want to understand the truth of matters. They're truth tellers, imperfect true, but that's life. Brittany & co, and most definitely Stefan Molyneux make brilliant observations about the human condition. Right and Left are largely irrelevant but the truth is not. Meanwhile, UK mainsteam-media panders, lies and patronizes. I've even noticed I'm often better informed than many Brit MPs who seem lost in the swamps of the BBC and Channel 4, which obviously reiterate CNN's and some other US networks mind-numbing bs. The argument for me is getting to the truth about what's actually going on. That's all I ask of news. Restricting and imprisoning of Brittany & co has equivalents to Soviet and Maoist oppression, for which even the Russians and Chinese have contempt. Always, always, those who imprison truth tellers of any kind are remembered by history with contempt. Shame on those in the British Government who instigated this outrage against good, honest people.
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