Sunday, January 27, 2019

The New Economic Theory Behind the Entire Democrat Left Wing

There's a new theory behind the rantings of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Occasional Cortex and the leftward running Democratic presidential candidates.  Well, actually, it's not new.  And it kind of dignifies it to call it a "theory".  It's a particularly stupid idea, which is to say it's to do what they always do: just keep spending what you don't have.  They just gave it a name they can hide behind.

Hat tip to 357 Magnum for the link to an article on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).  "The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism - Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphics" at Wilder, Wealthy and Wise. I hope it's obvious that you don't do an article on economics explained by graphs printed over pictures of girls in bikinis without the required amount of goofing around and lots of snark. 
The main idea of MMT is that since government creates money there are exactly no limits to how much money government can create.  Back when money was backed by gold (say, with one ounce of gold being worth $20) there was a physical limit – by definition you couldn’t have more $20 gold coins than you had ounces of gold.  MMT says, “Hey, since Nixon took the world off of the gold standard, we’ve been making up this money stuff anyway.  So let’s go all in.”  This is not exactly like a drunken 21 year old with Mom and Dad’s credit card in Las Vegas.  Not exactly.  The credit card has a credit limit.

So, under MMT, there is no limit to how much money government can print.  The genius idea (from Bill Mitchell, an Australian economist who came up with the name “Modern Monetary Theory”, and whose dog’s name is “Dog” and daughter’s name is “Girl”, and whose pet name for his wife is “That Woman On The Couch”) is that there is also no limit to the amount of money that government can spend.  This is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s high school prom fantasy where Justin Bieber picks her up in a pink helicopter and makes her all warm in her special place.  Oh, and by special place I mean other people’s wallets:  this is a family-friendly blog, get your mind out of the gutter.  The implications are stunning.  “Why not just pay for everything?  The government can just print the money, right?”

We're not making this up.  She actually said this - and then she said the world was going to end in 12 years and we "just pay for" whatever it costs to meet the "Green New Deal" dream costs, too.

Getting back to the Modern Monetary Theorists, this is deep thought, folks.  Mitchell actually uses an example to try to correlate money created by QE to the number of points football teams can score in a game.
An analogy used on a website that promotes MMT is that football referees don’t have a limit to the number of points that can be awarded during a football game.  There’s no requirement that they come from somewhere, and giving someone else a point doesn’t take a point away from you.  Therefore points are infinite and don’t change the way the game is played.
How does this relate to money?  What?  Are you some kind of hater?  It's some sort of tortured, brain-dead, logic.

People don't have enough money?   Just add a zero to every printed bill and instantly people have ten times as much money!  Never mind consequences, there won't be any because they say there won't!  Dr. Mitchell thinks we can have all of this infinite money and low interest rates.  We just need high taxes to take the excess money out of circulation... so government can buy something or other.
You see, Marx’s theory (as well as MMT) both incorporate a fascinating idea – that the value of an item is based on the inputs that it takes to make the item.  So, from that standpoint, our armpit-hair artisan should be able to charge the cost of her Xir schooling (plus that summer in Europe with Marco!) and her Xir apartment and food cost for that armpit hair sculpture.  It is that valuable.

Real world economics that don’t result in economic collapse and the starvation of millions of people would disagree.  An armpit hair sculpture is worth only what someone is willing to pay for it, and not a penny more.  It’s a market, and it’s based on free exchange.  It’s that simple idea of the market setting the price that makes capitalist economies work.  And it’s the brutality of the market that ensures that armpit-hair artists have to have a real job actually producing things that people want.  Like coffee.
There has to be a balance between mocking this and emphasizing that people trying to run the entire country really believe this.  Don't think it's not popular to run on the idea of "infinite free stuff for everyone"?  Have you been watching lately?  As Wilder, Wealthy and Wise put it.
Ideas like MMT seem to be too good to be true because they are too good to be true.  They always end in failure, poverty, and human suffering.  Thankfully they can use that taxation sponge to soak up all the blood after the revolution.

(Another link from 357 Magnum - this time to CNSNews.com)


12 comments:

  1. AOC comes perilously close to the truth: the problem is not that there isn't enough money to buy stuff, the problem is that there isn't enough stuff for money to buy. Putting it another way, they can print infinite amounts of money, but they can't print stuff for the money to buy.

    So, money isn't a problem. Unfortunately for Maduro and Alexandria of Color, that means printing money not only doesn't help, it hurts. The only thing that helps is increasing production, and that's the one thing socialism cannot do. Socialism surely does excel at decreasing production, so they do have that going for them.

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  2. People like the Bernster and Occasional-Cortex are symptoms....the disease being the voters stupid enough to buy their bullshiite and vote for them. These voters are evidence supporting my belief that society is comprised of TWO distinct species. Homo Sapiens and Homo Stupidicus.
    The two LOOK identical and it's almost impossible to tell one from the other....until Homo Stupidicus starts talking. Then it becomes very easy to tell one species from the other. The problem with this bifurcated evolution is we grant the same rights and privileges to Homo Stupidicus as to Homo Sapiens. And it didn't take long for the greedy Stupidicus to vote into power parasites that promised to ROB from Sapiens to support Stupidicus. Now Stupidicus is outbreeding Sapiens at an enormous pace all the while forcing Sapiens to do the heavy lifting of economic production, civil maintenance and all the other duties of a modern civilization. What can't continue won't. And as long as we give the idiots in society the same rights as the smart people without requiring they pull their weight the end is inevitable. We plugged up the filter in the gene pool a century or so ago and thwarted Darwin. The bill for that folly is now coming due.

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  3. Well, they're entirely correct that the government can print as much money as it feels like. In today's digital age, it's even super simple to just toss some zeros on the end of bank balances.
    Where their model breaks down is not accounting for money as a proxy for human labor and economic value. When you go to work you trade part of your life for that paycheck. No matter how hard you try, even if you "invent things that haven't even been invented yet", you can't print more hours in the day or work days in a career.
    Go ahead and print that money, though. Wouldn't want Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and the Wiemar Republic to be all alone in crippling hyperinflation followed by famine and war, now would we?

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  4. The 'chicken in every pot' campaigning that dolts like the Cortez woman and that Old Communist, Bernie, use does encourage the weak minded to vote for them. Cortez actually believes her own BS, which just goes to show you that anyone can be elected to Congress - just look at Rep. Hank Johnson D-GA.

    But I digress.

    Even Obama, who may have been the biggest crook in the White House since Warren Harding, had limits and those were set by bankers - who he made wealthier.

    There's a cynical calculus to getting elected. Barack, Bernie, etc. all promise people crap that they have no intention on delivering. Barack had supermajorities in BOTH houses of Congress for two years and they didn't deliver on anything except Obamacare (and they couldn't even get a website up and running for that). Most Democrats are grievance voters. Once you give them what they want, they're out. The DREAMERS only have value, for instance, while they're dreaming. Once they get what they want, they're just as likely to be Republican voters.

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  5. Why should the government be the only entity entitled to print money? We all have printers, why don't we all make some of our own? And not this bland money either, we can decorate it with smurfs and bright multicolored unicorns frolicking around a picture of Chuck Shumer in drag!

    Hell, why don't we skip the whole printing step and just take what we want? We're the ones with all the guns, right?

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  6. I carry in my wallet a one hundred trillion dollar note. Real currency, issued by the real government of a real nation. The guy at the coin shop gave it to me. Sometimes I show it to people. No one will make change for it though. This is one of the lessons with a short shelf life.

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    Replies
    1. Well, first you'd have to exchange it for the local currency, and the exchange rate really sucks.

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  7. 1) I added W,W,&W to my own blogroll a few weeks back. The guy's a scream, and sharp as a razor.
    You want to kill a few hours some bored day, start scrolling back in time on his blogposts. It's an Internet Black Hole worth the trouble.

    2) Avocado Obstreperous Colostomy is the face that launched a thousand memes. And worse, they're all things she actually said.

    Next, she's going to be voted Most Favorite Picture to print on range targets.

    What happens to her after that is a violation of federal law, and will probably get the U.S. Marshals investigating the incident. If they're still a thing after the mobs and guillotines and random streetlight lynchings. (The odds on that are 70/30 against them, BTW.)

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    Replies
    1. Avocado Obstreperous Colostomy
      I have to add that one to my collection.

      Previous latest was Alopecia Pistachio Kotex. After her prediction the world ends in 12 years unless we give her all the money we ever had, I kinda like the one-word name: Nostradumass.

      Delete
    2. Stealing that one right back.

      Delete
    3. There are people that deserve piling on . . . and she's a clear case!

      Delete