Monday, January 12, 2015

Randy Wray — Oh Me Oh My! MMT IS ABOUT!

Here’s an unintentionally hilarious piece by Tim Worstall at Forbes: 
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/01/12/watch-out-mmts-about-as-bernie-sanders-hires-stephanie-kelton/2/ 
Watch out, he warns, MMT has come to Washington! Our nation’s capital!
No doubt ruin and wastage will follow.
 
Why? Well. Nothing wrong with the theory of Modern Money Theory, he admits. 
“It’s not actually that I disagree very much with the economics that is being laid out in MMT: indeed, I’m terribly tempted to agree that they’re actually correct in much of what they say.”… 
And really nothing wrong with the policy, either. No, it is all politics. 
What he’s afraid of is that if politicians understood that they cannot run out of money, they’d spend like they cannot run out of money. 
And off we’d go to Weimar and Zimbabwe land. 
It is the same line that Paul Samuelson took, when he argued that the job of an economist is to lie. Or, better, to preach the old time religion and superstition. Put real fear into the politicians and the voters they represent. 
Government is just like a household, you know. Careful, Gov, you’ll run out of money. You’ll have to go hat-in-hand to Bond Vigilantes when you run out. Uncle Sam will have to go to the Salvation Army for a cup of soup. 
It is the same old fear mongering by someone who does not trust the democratic process and does not understand budgeting.…
Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Oh Me Oh My! MMT IS ABOUT!
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, University of Missouri at Kansas City

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I don't trust the democratic process either, for the simple reason that it doesn't exist. Our politicians are corporate bought and paid for; our "gov't" is an out of control police and security state. De facto they spend money without regard for limits when it is a question of bailing out banks or funding more military and militarization of police, but suddenly "run out" when it is a question of social security, infrastructure, and the like--namely the public purpose. So it won't make any difference. The powers that shouldn't be will not change their behavior, they will just have a futher rhetorical excuse to continue screwing the public in the interest of the .01%, and in expanding and strengthening the anglo-zionist empire. MMT requires decent and principled human beings to constitute a good, but we are not governed by decent and principled human beings, to put it mildly.