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This critical response to @dlondonnyu's recent @DissentMag article not only mischaracterizes MMT. It also reifies the deep orthodox assumptions MMT exposes to be at once epistemologically nonsensical & politically reactionary. 1/ https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-mmt-trap-a-response-to-daniel-wortel-london
Bottom line: MMT rejects any approach to political economy that begins with a self-subsisting market where finite values must be recycled by private & public actors. It also rejects the notion that "money printing" is an exceptional & always-potentially inflationary excess. 2/
From an MMT perspective, such assumptions are flatly false. Money is routinely "printed" from nothing all the live long day. This occurs through federal appropriation & legally charted financial institutions. Money creation, then, is nothing like an exception; it's the rule. 3/
MMT also insists that markets, far from self-subsisting entities that governments may or may not tax, regulate, etc., are actually fully conditioned by government & law from start to finish. 4/
For these reasons, MMT concludes, money is irreducible to markets & neither money nor markets operate as physical or even quasi-physical systems, as Phillip Mirowski has also made abundantly clear. 5/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/more-heat-than-light/4CD2ADE8D5DE8665E43E2922D7E360B3
Because money truly is not a thing but rather a social relation [cough cough], it is *physically* impossible to recycle it. Credit always comes first, revenue second, & when one credits an account from previous revenues that action is no sense an act of material recycling. 6/
Orthodox assumptions have so thoroughly penetrated modern &, yes, most leftist language that it has become almost impossible to resist the lure of imagining balance sheets literally "redistributing" money, as if moving little private chits of value from here to there. 7/
In truth, however, such money physics are entirely bogus & they actively undermine left projects. 8/ https://splinternews.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-taxpayer-money-1819658902
Take the erroneous notion of the "price level," which the "printing press" is allegedly supposed to disturb. This entire framework naturalizes corporate control over the production process. 9/ https://moneyontheleft.org/2019/06/19/inflation-the-politics-of-pricing-with-nathan-tankus/
While endless money-printing for capitalists looks like a natural amount or "level," public money creation appears like a transgression against the natural order & value of things. Such thinking is endemic to patriarchy & white supremacy. 10/
http://theaporetic.com/history/greenbacks-negro-soldiers-and-the-obama-administration/
http://theaporetic.com/history/greenbacks-negro-soldiers-and-the-obama-administration/
At this point, no one should be able to get away w/ accusing the MMT community of not wanting to tax the rich. From the very beginning, prominent MMTers have argued: to tax the rich--tax them hard. But do so for political reasons, rather than for revenues we do not need. 11/
MMTes have also expressly argued that pegging left or progressive projects such as the Green New Deal to wealth or transaction taxes perversely incentivizes the very capitalist activity we want to shut down. 12/
There is nothing in MMT that offers an easy out or fix for political struggle. Literally no MMTer says this. It's a fantasy perpetuated by anti-MMT leftists projected onto a domain they do not adequately comprehend. 13/
In actuality, MMTers are out here screaming that political struggle is hard as hell, but that it has nothing to do with money recycling. 14/
This is not because we want to avoid taxing billionaires out of existence. It's because redistribution is never, ever how things really work. So, let's be realistic & get to fucking work. 15/end
