THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT.
Democracy – the People voting; your vote, my vote – has no point, unless the People — I, you, my People — are in firm grasp of How It All Works. America’s basic college education has not equipped our citizens with a firm grasp on “money,” truth be told, leaving intact whatever Grandpa told us about God, wimmern and dollars and cents while he was a-switchin’ us out on the back porch. I’ve been struggling for years to understand what this accountant lays plain in this post on Naked Capitalism. Richard Murphy gives a concise summary of basic money creation — in other words, How It All Works, and it’s nothing like Grandpa said. Ho ho ho! It’s not so dismal, after all! This reads as good news! Ho Ho Ho! Merry Christmas!
(Caution: this is a British perspective. But in the intro the blog-host Yves Smith reminds us that in America things are even easier: since 1973, we’ve arranged our dollar to be the world’s reserve currency. This gives us our own “Secret Santa.” But it shouldn’t be a secret from the People!)
Mr. Murphy’s primer deserves to be read widely, please distribute it, Patient Reader. We’ve got a conservative new administration coming in, and the Ghosts of Want and Hunger and Eviction, and Coronavirus and her coughing sister Medical Bankruptcy loose in the land. And nobody is working, but rents and real estate and tuition and the helium-filled cost of living up up up, and ZERO real relief….. Well.
The Wall Streeters in the Biden camp will be a constant nag for Austerity, clanking their chains around and moaning, moaning. This is where their grasping counsels lead…
But if you read the article, you and your dinner companions will know precisely why their eerie inhuman gold-bug voices are wrong, and POOF! they go, like Marley’s Ghost, no more than a bit of undigested potato. Tiny Tim needn’t die; he isn’t just ‘the surplus population.’ Tim can get his operation and join the healthy ranks of the fully employed!
And Murphy, cautious as accountants should be, just describes how easy money creation is NOW, under a central banking scheme 300 years old and 50 years obsolete! Imagine if we applied Modern Monetary Theory??? Imagine if we pursued Full Employment, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and the low carbon economy! We might just have a Merry Christmas, after all….
But you’ve got to read the article for that to happen. And why not look around the rest of Naked Capitalism? It’s the best no-bullshit economics site on the Web.
The Valley Village View 