Punked Plutocrat Power Plays

Published on 2023-02-16

Contents

The Hard Problem of MMT

It’s about time I start writing more about the Hard Problem of MMT. This is the problem of getting nations that have MMT currency systems to actually (a) acknowledge this, and (b) use this knowledge to implement the MMT Base Case, meaning,

Permanent Zero Interest Rate Policy
National Job Guarantee
Pension Payments Made When Due (scrap the phony Trust Funds)
Narrow Banking proposals

It goes without saying that anyone dimly aware of MMT will run this base case, if in power. They might even run a periodic Debt Jubilee, or equivalently relax some punitive aspects of bankruptcy law. Whether they be capitalist, socialist, autocracy, communist or anarchist societies (and most are mixed — let’s be honest all are mixed societies) they will run these three policies, all they need is a smidgeon of populism (meaning a bit of vainglory desire to be wildly popular without lies and deception, by being a genuine character). And let’s face it, pretty much every politician has such vainglory. There is no other option absent stupidity.

As I often say, only half-joking, the only political ideology incompatible with MMT is neoliberalism. If we fudge a bit I can make the case this is no joke.

It’s a huge f-ing problem because while knowing almost all nations (even the EU in a way) run an MMT system (non-convertible fiat currencies driven by taxation) the influential academics, the prominent industrialists, the more dangerous lobbyists, the dumb-dumb lefties, the right-wingnuts, almost all the politicians, the permanent civil service, almost to a person, do not understand this. Even if they understand the system they seem to in their actions and speech not understand the implications.

Thus education is the first element of the Hard MMT Problem. Without knowledge, there is no power leveraging that knowledge. So this is one theme I will write about. It seems a simple problem to solve, but once you understand academic paradigms in a largely non-scientific profession like economics (dearth of good data for testing rival theories) you’ll see education is indeed a hard component of the The Hard MMT Problem. I will try not to belabour this point, but once you get the gist of it I encourage you to go out into the world and try teaching people MMT. That’ll be sufficient empirical proof it falls under the Hard Problem.

Rough notes

The Educational Hard Problem is greatly aided and mitigated by the fact once you grok MMT there is no going back to false knowledge. So there is a ratchet effect. This is always powerful in slowly driving a paradigm change.
The language framing HP — a tough one. Even good MMT’ers capitulate to standard language framing, unconsciously perhaps. It takes a fair bit of will power and tolerance of people staring weirdly at you to overcome.
The Inertia HP — pretty darn tough. “I’m doing good, leave things alone.”
The Seizing Government Seats HP — this may come last, but I suspect I might end up concluding this is an easy problem, or only moderately hard. The principle behind this being politicians are sheep, they are followers not leaders. So putting MMT aware politicians into government depends on the educational HP. Once the Education HP is solved, it should be (this is the question) easy to first locally nominate good people, then get them elected. What workers anywhere is not perpetually freaked out by the threat of being unemployed?

Supplemental Notes

These scrap notes are important for later, but I’ll give away a sneak peek.

The Seizing Government HP has a very interesting Lemma, which is that you really must (I say “must” but I’d be ok with “should”) adopt a non-partisan local political nomination strategy. If your country has a partisan party system this is tough, but you can always try getting an MMT candidate on all the party ballots. The beauty of MMT is that this should be relatively easy, conditional upon the Educational HP being largely solved.
Why an MMT candidate? Having the MMT base case comprehension is important, maybe not always the most important tool in a political candidate’s arsenal (campaign backing, charisma, savvy , genuineness all help too) but at the national level MMT is critical. You can elect the nicest people, but they’ll give you back needless crippling austerity if they cannot grok MMT.

Let the political parties battle out the culture wars. As long as they all acknowledge MMT were going to all be better off regardless. I mean, for heavens sake, give the fascism a rest will you right-wingers! Give the violent militancy pretensions a rest tankies! Some culture war issues are just fake issues, pretensions of knaves and fools.

Punking the Plutocrats

There is a common thread to all the above Hard Problems, which is the weaving needed to overcome the power of the present day powers. The oligarchs and plutocrats.

General popular public opinion is in our favour here, and that’s the leverage, this and of course the knowledge of MMT. But there is a third more invisible lever we probably have to pull, which is spirituality, or in the common parlance: morality and ethics, or in even less pretentious parlance — basic human dignity and decency. But all these are the same in my eyes. (There is a time and a place for being pedantic, but this ain’t it.)

When I say “we probably have to pull” I mean I know I have to pull on that lever, it’s the most powerful lever, and I hope others recognize this too.

Levers of Power

Plutocrats and oligarchs certainly exercise temporal institutional power, and financial power. But this is not the most powerful force in society, not even in a monetary production system.

Money can’t do squat without labour and machines to produce the output, wherever they happen to reside, domestic or on foreign shores. This means labour really has the upper hand. The problem is in generating the consciousness of this power, the solidarity and unity. There almost is none!
This power is all nascent and latent, it used to exist to some degree during the golden age of the labour movement, but neoliberal psychology has deeply suppressed worker cooperatives and unions.

Unions of course, after initial fantastic gains, proved eventually to have diminishing returns on activism and so became largely ineffective because they were eventually dominated by class traitors and corruption at the top level. So if we are going to go back to a union movement to spur MMT and spiritual economics we’d better be careful.

To my mind a few basic principles should be adopted:

Unions cannot be plural. It works better if there is only one union, fighting for all workers, not just sector-by-sector (which often pits worker against worker).
The wage demand has to be a demand for freedom from wage slavery too! Not just higher wages. This implies a job guarantee has to be the principle demand: make the bosses fight for workers.
Workplace democracy: this means the demand has to also be for collective worker ownership in the private sector. There’s no need to have state ownership (centrally planned socialism) but there is a need for more worker autonomy, hence workplace democracy. People need a say in their workplace, we know this from basic psychology, Maslow’s hierarchy and all that, “the happy worker is the more productive one” is the (exaggerated but spiritually correct) meme.
Lower the work week. Removing bullsh*t jobs can be done by heating up the monetary economy simultaneous with cooling down the real energy use economy. “Cool output, hot wages.”

On the first principle, a very recent classic case of dysfunction is in the airline industry, where one airline offers their workers sweet deals which undermine union efforts for wage bargaining at a competitor airline. The COVID lockdown effects on travel and hospitality brought such dysfunction and schisms to light, but it’s always been present in unions that are not truly unions. A union has to be a worker’s union, not a mere unionized workplace, not even a trade union, (the airline case) so has to be all workers everywhere.

The old model of unions bought too heavily into neoclassical economics myths. It was all about competition for wages from “loanable funds” which automatically pits worker against worker, a great win for the capitalist class. Damaging for output for all in society. Even the upper class Tories lose when worker competition for wages drives up prices if blue-blood government is not supporting the rentiers through Treasury bond issue!

On the 4th point: over-heating the real economy would not necessarily be a problem, except that today it is! We’re exceeding planetary boundaries in some sectors, while under-utilizing others. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics framework is the appropriate lens for dealing with the real resource economics. The monetary economy side however has infinite room for inflation — on floating exchange rates of course. Boosting inflation at full employment is healthy: the bosses will have to compete for workers. This is the proper way to turn the labour market into a fairer game.

Beyond this of course, there is a human rights case for de-commodifying labour completely. I’m not sure yet how to get there politically, but I suspect civil societies will get there, I just cannot see when. It’s a spiritual problem, not material. People need to be able to stop succumbing to fake moral panic when they see workers become stronger. Every worker earning income is sales for the other firm. You’re only going to honestly see this is a panic if you’re a rentier or a viscous employer, in which case good riddance to you!

While political time horizon is hard to see, the spiritual dynamic is pretty clear. Useful work is a service to humanity. Most people appreciate this is not slavery, but cooperation and altruism. Most people also recognize if given the chance people will work hard to help each other. We can continue for now with monetized labour, but in a spiritual civilization you can clearly see the wage form could become simply unnecessary. (By “spiritual civilization” I do _not mean disembodied beings, I mean honest, kind, just, wise and trustworthy people in your societies.) We are a terribly long way away from such mass spiritual social conscience. So I am not sure if this s worth writing too much about for now, but maybe another day.

The great thing about spiritual society is that these attributes work in aid of each other, not in competition. A wise person, for instance, will always be inclined to be more honest and trustworthy, and same in the other direction — when you are honest you also become wiser (e.g., although you might start as a collaborative learner you will eventually learn things fully internalized for yourself, not from received blind ideology). When you are trustworthy you might also be trusting yourself more, which redounds to confidence and humility, you also know better what you do not know, and so are always prepared to learn more.

MMT and the Spiritual

Let me re-emphasise that I always use a populist conception of spiritual — kindness, compassion, honesty, trustworthiness. Abstract virtues in other words, not metaphysical states of being. (The abstract virtues are metaphysical, but we’re seeing them manifested in physical creatures).

I’ve always seen MMT as a critical inseparable component of Spiritual Economics. Why?

It is because MMT is the only truly honest framework for macroeconomics. If you disagree then by all means let me know (please donate so I can justify listening to your arguments.)

Honesty is the key spiritual virtue here. It’s another question whether you can trust or find kindness and compassion in MMT, since MMT is a framework for analysis I argue you cannot find these spiritual qualities, however, they are latent because when real people implement just policies by employing their knowledge of MMT then you get the greater gamut of spiritual qualities manifested in material relations.

((Even a dumb Marxist can understand this in terms pf their jargon of base structure and superstructure. Superstructure is mostly abstract. Hence in the superstructure you can recognize spiritual virtues or the lack of them.))

The point is, MMT arose from an honest look at macroeconomics. Whoever formulated the core MMT ideas and framework may or may not have been an honest or scrupulous person, but the result of their endeavour is pure honesty. They did the hard work for us. It then becomes a matter of spiritual principle within each of us to recognize the validity of MMT, so we ourselves become honest in at least this lens or framework.

I do of course realize the pedants will claim one can legitimately honestly not believe MMT is an accurate framework. Then you’re simply unwise, but that is another spiritual quality, so if you desire wisdom, you’ll eventually get to honesty and then eventually accept the core principles of MMT.

If the political economy radically changes and MMT becomes inapplicable, then it’s incumbent upon us to then honestly recognize MMT is no longer the applicable framework for analysis. So I never say MMT per se is spiritual economics. It is spiritual economics via honesty in the context of a currency monopoly.

Transcending Divides

Here is a corollary which greatly aids economic justice activism: it is that honesty transcends political ideological divides (or most of them!). You do not have to convince a right-winger to become a bleeding heart in order for them to realize a Job Guarantee is a superior automatic stabiliser.

You certainly never need to convince a leftie that giving workers a public option, so they can quit sh$\ast$tty jobs, is good for them, regardless of the counter-cyclical stability properties.

((If you run into a leftie or anarchist who just hates money altogether, then you’ve got an “in” for discussing David Graeber’s work, and the fact social relations cannot escape credit and debt obligations in one form or another, even if you do not call the records of obligations “money”.))

Now if you fail to see how spiritual economics, aided and abetted by MMT, can punk the Plutocrats, I do not know what more to tell you? Do you need a recipe for it?

You start with yourself, learn, be honest, seek wisdom, don’t “go it alone”. Then you broaden your sphere of activists and learners. Each one teach one.

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Periphery Nations	TOC	Discounting