Imagine you are alone on a desert island.
You have nothing.
You have a choice.
You can spend the day making money.
You could carve shells into coins. Print banknotes on leaves. Even declare yourself Governor of the Island Bank.
By sunset, you could be a billionaire.
Would you be any better off?
Of course not.
There is nobody to trade with.
No markets.
Therefore MMT is not the solution and neoliberalism is. Money doesn’t solve, markets do.
QED
Would you be any better off?
Heck yeah! Your hobby would have helped fight off the suicidal impulse.
Yet the potato would still send him a tax bill
You actually get richer by making useful stuff rather than printing banknotes, who knew?
What you should be doing is finding water, making containers to move and store water, locating a food source and building shelter. With luck you will be comfortable and survive thanks to these assets making you richer.
If Capt Potato was alone on a desert island, he might be happier, because he would no longer be surrounded by neoliberals.
The rest of us might be happier too.
He would still have conversations with imaginary people
Philosophers ask: Would he accept rescue by a neoliberal?
In the same situation, Spud would declare himself President for Life and issue a series of decrees to the crabs and palms, before keeling over from dehydration.,
I think hes spotted a flaw in crypto.
vast effort to make secure tokens of exchange.
Seeing as the penny has candidly dropped that what is in your best economic interests is context dependent, one wonders if any of the other positions will be rethought. Or perhaps a fat controller dropped on a desert island alone would continue playing fat controller, surviving for a shorter time than if one adapted to circumstances.
Bloody hell. I actually went & read his post. Unless I missed something, it’s seems to be resume of all the things that are blindingly obvious to everyone but him.
I wonder if he’s read it & understood it? Seems to be unlikely.
Pretentious twaddle isn’t it.
And the lay out.
Instead of sentences
He writes in lines.
As if that gives it gravitas
But.
It doesn’t.
Just makes him look more
Of a twat.
You forgot “fifty-seventhly”.
Oh. He does not understand what money is.
You could say the same for anything, really. I could spend all my time making cars and be in the same position. Money is just a good, same as any other. You make the goods that are useful to you.
‘Not really. Money is a token of value. It is part of a process, commerce, not a thing in itself. This is the thing he never gets. You can’t divorce the token of value from the underlying value it represents. Creating more tokens doesn’t create more value.
MMT’s just another word for redistibution of wealth. But at least with straight redistribution you choose who you’re redistributing from. With MMT everybody sees the value of their money decline. Rich & poor alike. Highly regressive. And it’s not a case of “if there is inflation it can be taxed back”. There is no if. It is intentional inflation from the moment the money’s created.
It is most significantly a redistribution from working class people with cash savings to property speculators who have borrowed millions to finance speculative developments. That is why the builder of “Centre Point” was a large donor to Harold Wilson’s Labour Party.
Inflation, more correctly called “debasement of the currency”, may be accidental but it is usually a deliberate decision to partially default on the debts of the state to the individual citizens. As such it is popular among green-eyed envious politicians because it seems to penalise those with savings and not spendthrifts. However that is over-simplistic: some have converted (all or part of) their savings into tangible assets whose value is unchanged and it is only those savings denominated in the debased currency that are debased. So those with modest savings (especially anyone with a non-index-linked pension) are the worst affected.
MMT is highly regressive because it does NOT affect rich and poor alike (if it did it would not, by definition, be regressive).
The soaring of house prices under Wilson and Blair was because they were thought to be the only safe place for savings (investments were taxed on imaginary gains when sold). Private-sector tenants suffered unfair discrimination (not as bad as the discrimination against landlords but still bad) under Labour – council house tenants had security and paid rents half the market rate so significantly lower than the cost of a mortgage.
The soaring of house prices under Wilson and Blair was because they were thought to be the only safe place for saving
Hallelujah. Finally someone recognises that. We’ve all got to live somewhere and your house is more difficult than most things for the government to steal. It’s also relatively spiv-proof, not unimportant after the various pensions mis-selling scandals, fund collapses, etc. etc. No wonder the Englishman’s home remains his castle.
And it’s the only way someone will lend you a large sum to speculate with, at a reasonable rate of interest.
And in no small part the change to credit availability under Maggie.
Back in the day mortgages were expensive and hard to get so house prices were low. With more money available in the credit market the cost of houses went up.
Another Blair/Brown gift to the nation is that we now have a comprehensive land register. It’s what powers things like zoopla.
I doubt we’re that far away from a sec of state being given power by parliament to order the land registry to overwrite the present record and put ownership of the housing stock in the sec of state’s name. I doubt it would be difficult to do. And I doubt that Brown at least did not foresee the possibility.
There would be complexities around foreign-owned assets. But it’s not as if foreign-owned assets have never before been pinched.
Always been my argument. Inflation. Artificially low interest rates. Both cause savings to lose value. But borrowers benefit. What it’s been. Still is. A continuing transfer of wealth from savers to borrowers. Government really hates the prudent.
Nah. The value of my savings has soared.
My house. Stocks. Stocks are hard assets, as companies have intrinsic value. Inflation has raised their value . . . okay, price, substantially.
So, yes, cash savings has been devalued. But other assets have increased. Only about 6% of my savings is in cash accounts.
That said, I’m still freaked by the escalation of gold price.
Always remember something. Assets are only worth what someone will pay for them. So when you want to liquidate your assets you better hope there’s money around to do that. Big bet on the future. Confident?
Yep. No worries, mate.
In fact, biggest threat to my liquidation is fooking income tax.
Not so. The Value of an asset does not change just because the price does. My wife says that we’ll leave this house feet first and no 1 son will have to sort it out: the price has allegedly quadrupled in the last 30 years although financially it is a drain: it still has value to us so I periodically pay £thousands for maintenance/improvements.
There is no selling price for my clothes and zilch for nearly everything else (all the running medals will have to go to a scrap metal merchant when I die but it would be rude to throw them away earlier). BUT I don’t and won’t need to liquidate assets: if I end up in a nursing home the NHS will pay for nursing care and my pension will cover the rest.
The only bit of my wealth where you are correct is my share portfolio which is now only a few % of the total because I have raided it periodically since I got married taking out rather more than the total I put in (including the cost of the shares I have kept).