You are militantly, vigorously stupid. Poor countries are poor because their governments are just not printing enough banknotes.

Bobby. wrote on Apr 4^th, 2022 at 3:25pm:



I worked it out -
it means the poster called  - thegreatdivide


I believe that money printing is dangerous.
It risks causing hyper-inflation
and destroying peoples savings.

thegreatdivide wrote on Apr 6^th, 2022 at 3:03pm:


I have given up on you, again.
You are self-contradictory, saying both that money is simply there for the printing and that it is a measure of actual economic output.

If my hourly work is worth $100 dollars, printing two $100 bills and giving me both for the same one hour work doesn't make me suddenly earn double. The output of my one hour is the same but now the value of one unit of money I get for it is halved because twice as much currency is in circulation even though there is no corresponding doubled economic output.

Either money IS a measure of economic goods and services PRODUCED or it is just printed at will 'ex nihilio', without reference to what is actually produced (your idiotic idea).

It's futile to debate a self-contradictory fool. You have the luxury or self- indulgence to talk paradoxical crap, I am not here to indulge you, only to point out your stupidity and your lack of even rudimentary grasp of what you are parroting.

The Economist:
“Speaking with MMT’s adherents is sometimes like watching a football match with friends who insist the ball remains stationary while every other element in the game, including the pitch and goalposts, moves around it.”

What is money?
At root, the problems with MMT lie with its (mis)understanding of what money is, and what role money plays under capitalism.

MMTers subscribe to a theory of money known as ‘chartalism’. This term was coined (no pun intended) by a German economist called Georg Friedrich Knapp, who put forward a hypothesis called ‘the state theory of money’.

In short, Knapp asserted that money originates with the state and its imposition of taxes upon a people. The state, according to chartalists, creates money - and then creates a demand for this particular currency by insisting on its use as a ‘means of payment’.

To truly understand the nature of money, however, we must turn to another 19th century German economist: Karl Marx.

In Capital, Marx noted that “the riddle presented by money is but the riddle presented by commodities”. In other words, to understand the role of money in society, we must first understand its real origins - those of commodity production and exchange.

Marx explained that money’s history is tied to the rise of the commodity: goods and services produced not for individual consumption, but for exchange. All commodities, Marx showed, have an exchange value. This is a relationship - a ratio - between commodities, expressing how much of one product would (on average) be exchanged for another.

Building on the ideas of his predecessors, such as David Ricardo, Marx outlined how the value of a commodity is dependent on the labour embodied within it. This labour consists both of the ‘dead labour’ contained within the raw materials, tools, etc. required for its production, and the ‘living labour’ labour added in the production process by the worker.

Marx called this total labour the ‘socially necessary labour time’: the time required for the production of a given commodity, based on the current level of technology and industry, etc. within society.

With this in mind, Marx explained in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy how money serves several functions:

As a unit of account, or measure of value. In money terms, this is represented by prices.
As a medium of exchange. In this role, money breaks up the circulation of commodities into two separate acts: an act of sale (C-M, a commodity exchanged for money); and an act of purchase (M-C, money exchanged for a different commodity).
As a store of value, allowing accumulated wealth to be maintained and preserved over time.
And as a means of payment, allowing debts (denominated in a certain currency) to be settled and taxes to be paid.
Money, therefore, plays a number of roles. Above all though, money is a representation of value: the ultimate expression of the generalisation of the law of value; the logical conclusion of the development of commodity production and exchange, which requires a universal yardstick – a standard measure – against which the value of all other commodities can be expressed.

And yet chartalism (and also MMT) offers no analysis of value, or of commodity production and exchange. As a result, it misses the essence of capitalism, and of money’s role within it.

Money arises historically, not by design, but as a result of the development of commodity production and exchange. It begins primarily as a ‘money commodity’, such as the precious metals, with a value of its own, but later develops to be a mere symbol of value. This is clear today, where money is predominantly not coins, but cash and credit; notes and numbers.
https://www.socialist.net/marxism-vs-modern-monetary-theory.htm

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But due to inflation it's the same as stealing money
from people with savings.

Frank wrote on Apr 6^th, 2022 at 6:05pm:
 

Correct, indeed many countries are already entering the era of the 'cashless society', involving merely the changing of digits in bank accounts on computers. 

MMT teaches the currency-issuing government, through its agencies (treasury and central bank)  can change those digits as desired;  limited by what is available for sale/purchase. 

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Which is what I intended to teach you with the points analogy, but failed miserably, obviously.

The 'value'  measured in money - and hence ability to purchase real resources -  is real, and cannot be created ex nihilo, but must be created by labour and production.  But the measure itself, ie, the unit of currency, is created ex nihilo.

Note: when the government had to lock down the non-essential economy in March 2020, it immediately began injecting $billions into the bank accounts of laid-off workers, ie $billions created ex nihilo, though we were told the government borrowed the money.....it didn't, it just booked $200 billion dollars debt, later much reduced as the virus turned out to be a squid (unfortunately: a decent virus would have forced the non-essential economy to  remain closed likely until more than several $trillions of  'debt' had been accumulated, forever unrepayable. 

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No, though I thought you understood that the term "printing money" meant issuing digital currency/money. 

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No I don't; education is public production, in fact the basis of all private production. Likewise public infrastructure, the basis of efficient private production.   

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The government doesn't earn, but public sector production (education, infrastructure) is the foundation of private sector production.

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The transfer of knowledge from teacher to student, and building the public infrastructure (roads, ports) is  the absolute necessity for making and distributing furniture. 

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(......)

Fascinating article:

https://ellenbrown.com/2022/04/05/the-coming-global-financial-revolution-russia-...

Russia is discovering (or is on the verge of discovering) that it does not need U.S. dollars as backing for the ruble’s exchange rate. Its central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and finance capital formation. The U.S. confiscations thus may finally lead Russia to end neoliberal monetary philosophy, as Sergei Glaziev has long been advocating in favor of MMT [Modern Monetary Theory]. …

What foreign countries have not done for themselves – replacing the IMF, World Bank and other arms of U.S. diplomacy – American politicians are forcing them to do. Instead of European, Near Eastern and Global South countries breaking away out of their own calculation of their long-term economic interests, America is driving them away, as it has done with Russia and China.