MMT: New Theory, Old Illusion
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They are just placing Marx as a reformer of capitalism
A comrade has drawn attention to this blistering attack on MMT in the Jacobin magazine. Some extracts:
“its main selling point is that governments need not tax or borrow in order to spend — they can just create money out of thin air. A few computer keystrokes and everyone gets health insurance, student debt disappears, and we can save the climate too, without all that messy class conflict. That’s a bit of a caricature, but as we’ll see, not an outlandish one.”
“You might be wondering where income earned on the job fits into all of this, but the world of production doesn’t play a large role in the theory.”
“MMTers show a strange lack of interest in the specificity of capitalism — how production and distribution are organized, how demand for credit arises in the course of commerce, how people earn their living and under what conditions.”
“It would be sad to see the socialist left, which looks stronger than it has in decades, fall for this snake oil. It’s a phantasm, a late-imperial fever dream, not a serious economic policy.”
The trouble is that the author’s alternative is the failed reformist policy of taxing the rich to provide better services for the poor. But at least he’s not a monetary crank like them.
The debate keeps bubbling and now includes how to finance the Green New Deal
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