The Public Hubble

Lunchtime listening this week, Brian Greene chatting with Adam Reiss on cosmology.

Hubble Telescope is in the Public Commons

At one point Riess mentions he decided to not rest on his laurels, and went back into research “using the Hubble telescope.”

I could not resist the urge to post a yt comment boosting MMT.

@55:00 as a macroeconomics justice advocate I have to boost this: Riess using the Hubble telescope. It’s a public resource, in the public commons. That’s the way to accelerate science, not commercialize and privatize. Point being, it is not tax-payer funded. It’s the other way around. When government spends it issues the currency by fiat (to NASA employees etc), that provides the funds for everyone else to pay their tax liabilities. I call it Modern${}^\ast$ Money Mechanics MMM (modern-money-mechanics, the framework I formerly know as MMT). If governments impose tax liabilities but then do not spend, no one can pay taxes without going into bank debt. Government spending fuels the monetary economy, not the “tax payer”.

I continued:

      “Tax payer funded” is a giant myth and a tragic one of epic proportions, the reason for so much needless neolib austerity policy. Read more here: for some MMM/MMT basics, you’ll understand more about public finance than an econ PhD.

Take Any Opportunity to Boost MMT

With such humility being displayed, I continued,…

      Citizens fund the government in real terms not monetary terms — exchanging goods or labour to the government in return for tax credits (aka. USD, yen, UKP, euro, peso, etc.). Tax liabilities imposed drive demand for the otherwise worthless currency, the tax return does not supply the government ab initio with their own currency, it had to be issued first by Treasury/CB or a chartered licensed bank as a credit to be redeemed with interest (licensed by the state, so an agent of the state, even if privately owned).

I went on…

      ${}^\ast$ “Modern” here is an inside joke — it means going back 6000 years to the first records of money of account i.e., cuneiform records in clay tablets of credits and debits. So MMM/MMT is “modern” in geological time scale terms.

That was all.

The cosmology is something I blog about more on T4GU .