Stuff Too Nasty for Twitter

Lately I’ve been becoming more resigned to the fact posts to Mastodon, Diaspora and Twitter are more about cheering the gang rather than getting people to think of updating their brain-based Bayesian filter .${}^\ast$

With this in mind, I’m going to post a few things here that I feel would just make enemies on social media, more than friends. Also, it’s light-hearted, and just to let off steam. Putting these posts on the github is a minimal act of sharing for those who care for a laugh. (All my laughs serve serious ends, I should add.)

${}^\ast$For the AI nerds, it is not the case our brains are Bayesian machines. Rather, a Bayesian update model captures some input–output behavioural aspects of animal brain cognition. Think of it being like how a Least Action Principle (so knowing future boundary conditions) is an effective description of physics, whereas the actual physics is Hamiltonian (infinitesimal local transformations). ((Or the other way around! ;-))

Libertarians and Socialists

New Definitions: A libertarian is someone who puts socialists in harms way to protect their freedoms.

A socialist is someone who gets libertarians to do all their hacking for them. Also, a socialist is someone who doesn’t understand anything about being sociable (though to be fair, that’s probably only the case under something like capitalism).

A capitalist is someone who doesn’t understand anything about markets and monopolies, but an awful lot about relative prices.

A neoliberal is someone who doesn’t understand anything about anything, except what’s in their current privatized thought.

A leftiepol is someone who recognizes unity is critical, and who denies it for themselves with other lefties in order to keep the actually unified right-wingers alive as the enemy.${}^\dagger$

${}^\dagger$This is also called the Reverse Robin Principle. See “The Reactionary Mind” by Cory Robin. (Conservatives always need something to complain about, and will invent it if lefties don’t give it to them.)

A right-wingnut is someone who utterly hates the idea of solidarity and unity but is utterly effective in being unified and 100% in solidarity with other wingnuts.

MMT and It’s Discontents

MMT is too useful to be used… (by idiots).${}^\ddagger$

${}^\ddagger$See the recent cringe-worthy interview Jon Stewart televised with Larry ’the dollar pervert’ Summers. Quotable: “Corporations don’t just suddenly become greedy, Jon.” — That was Summers’ brain melting when Stewart pointed out most of the recent CPI rise is from price gouging. (Not actually inflation, Mr Stewart, until wages get back up.)

MMT is in fact being used (by idiots). (This one is for the Austrians, just so they know what we know.)

Put the above together and we have MMT is too useful to be used by ‘X’, yet is used by ‘X’, and the result is endless wars, pointless state surveillance, mass involuntary unemployment, and a continual rise in the price level. All these things “MMT” gives you!

I realise this is terrible political framing. The reality is the MMT system currently in existence and used unwittingly by the idiots (neocons and neoliberals) to disproportionately enrich people who are already wealthy, is at least providing the poor with state welfare safety nets with little inflation pressure. The problem is, things could be so much better if the idiots understood the MMT system. I do believe not all the idiots want to be cruel. But that’s just my optimism shining through. Glass half full stuff.

The main point all the MMT activists are making is that it is only lack of political will that prevents an MMT system being run by kind and compassionate folks who will then know how to eliminate dire poverty and bring about full employment with price stability. (What everyone, not just women, at a minimum want.)

But wait… if people really do not want to work, how is this a good thing? I say, the more people working to produce output people want, and the more automation those past workers can build, then the less time any one person needs to work. Emphasis on “needs”.

Insane politics risks causing people to work more than everyone else needs (UBI shill idiots).

The other point is that for there to be the political will there seems to be a need for the knowledge of MMT. This is a hard truth, bitter to swallow. In the USA, and most other developed nations, you are not going to get leftist socialists in government on the short-term horizon. So you need to educate the idiot neoliberals.

A well-educated neoliberal is no longer a neoliberal.

A well-credentialed neoliberal is a dangerous beast to be confined to Zoom room cages.

For this, it is worth recognizing most neoliberals do not want to be neoliberals. They are neoliberals (austerity and privatization whores) because they are stupid and do not understand the monetary system is a simple public monopoly.

((At least that’s my working thesis. Innocent until proven frauds. But like twitter buddy CarlitosMMT, I think there is a non-relativistic time clock running down on this: the longer MMT awareness invades public thought, the less tenable it is to maintain mere ignorance.))

(((Why are the neoliberals stupid? Probably because they were educated at the Harvard-Yale-Oxford-Cambridge circuit of jellyfish hive minds. This might apply only for economics courses, for other courses I can’t say for sure. In other words, if their degree was related to economics, their parents paid for a certificate, rather than them earning one. And even if they earned one, it was by following a fraudulent textbook.)))

From the “Could Not Be” $\rightarrow$ “Should Not Be” Department

MMT gives you the “why it could not be” reason.

Sustainable (and justly distributed) real resource limits. That’s it.

You (anti-moralist) say, “Whose justice?” I say, “F off.” We get the justice we are prepared to fight for — it’s never been any other way.

The most effective way to fight for more justice is through the power of the spiritual and moral compass. People can be shamed into being more kind faster than at the point of a gun. And afterwards there is no bitter taste in such shame, in fact there is an enlightenment of the soul. Pointy weapons work far too locally, and when pointed in another direction cease having an effect, maybe even having the opposite effect.

Expertisisms

The cost of being a genuine expert is that you can no longer do full irony.

The cost (to others) of being a credentialed expert is that some might take you seriously. (The jury is out on whether it is also a cost to the expert, it is if they have a moral conscience.)

The cost of not being a credentialed expert is being out of a job you might be fully competent at fulfilling.

Moochers and Smoochers

The most regressive thing you hear in macroeconomics is the idea social welfare recipients are somehow “moochers”. Feeding off the tax-payer. The exact opposite is the case in an MMT analysis.

Welfare recipients are paying the price (lost wages) for “fighting inflation.” However, it’s worse. Consider the case of a parent who retires from work to care for a disabled child, giving the child a decent life. In this case the parent is (in cool terms) a service provider, and supporting the rest of society by spending all their income.

The welfare recipients are (one of) the providers of currency to the other tax payers.

You simply cannot say the tax-payer is funding the welfare recipients. I know some MMT aware types claim the government uses the budget to make it seem as though the tax-payer is funding the welfare payments. After-all, that’s the social discourse even on soi dissant “progressive” shows like The Majority Report. But this is not the fault of those living on social welfare. You blame the government in this case for not comprehending MMT. So there are still no such things as welfare moochers. It’s an inapplicable notion.

But are there any actual moochers?

What about bullsh$\ast$t job employees? What about people who already have money who earn interest-income in proportion to how much money they already have? What about investors who invest in anything that moves without regard to the ecological consequences (so purely for a financial return)?

There are no tax-payer dollars

Money does not come from tax-payers, it passes through them. Like hot curry.

Like Thai chilli paste when inflation is high. But that’s only in nominal terms. It’s what you get with the chilli that matters.

All Economics Reduces to Physics?

(I am only joking. But seriously.)

Physics (our accounting for physical reality, not the noumena themselves${}^\sharp$) can always be formulated as an energy minimization principle. Energy is the cost of doing physics (moving about).

What is economics but behaviour seeking to minimize some generalized “cost” function?

OK, but life is much more than this, because out-of-equilibrium events happen all over the place, fluctuations where a system (especially a subjectively conscious system) will seek to actively increase it’s cost function to reduce that of others. Altruism. Cooperation. Kindness. Forgiveness.

The latter fluctuations, which can occur all over the show, are what orthodox economics ignores. This is why orthodox economics is not only stupid, it’s a hazard to human life. Most economists need to be locked up in cages in zoo’s.

There are also local minima where economic agents minimise their costs at the expense of others, resulting in global minimum cost being inaccessible — because the local minima are not the least cost. For example, greed, avarice, vice, exploitation, all lower costs for some, but massively increase costs for many others, and are not necessarily global optimums even for the local greedy agents.

${}^\sharp$The physical noumena obey laws we might be fortunate to discover, but no scientist has any idea how or why physical matter obeys the laws we observe.