Mugabenomics in Theory
Because of a lot of its mathematical pretentions, economists, and macro-economists in particular, have obscured the fact that at base, theirs is a value-driven discipline. While a great deal of economics falls under behavioural science, the discipline as a whole is aimed, just like political science, at policy recommendation. What that means, is that economic theory, like political theory, is in great part an exercise in ethics, theorising about morality in government and commerce. It introduces a perverse moral perspective in which no duty matters, and no title has value.
Muddled Monetary Theory
Liberal economics argues that there are limits to what the state is morally entitled to do with regard to economic behaviour, and that intervention, beyond certain conservative parameters, is not only foolish but morally wrong. This is based on the notions of private property at the individual level, but the lessons of communism have been a rather aggressive demonstration of its generality in the macroscopic. Liberalism has been given a bad name, and has been replaced in the mainstream by egalitarianism. This is largely because of the discovery by American philosophers that they could justify communism without Marx by turning to John Rawls - a man who is classed as a liberal, but places the emphasis of his work on the justice of equality.
As a school of governance, liberal democracy has been consumed by the parasitic larvae of bureaucratic elitism and antidemocratic managerialism. These systems protect the interests of the college-educated elites, and insist that the warped values they acquire at their now-corrupt institutions are prerequisites for governing any large institution or being taken seriously in public. The rationale of this class, while it shares the vestiges of liberal values, has been increasingly shaped by post-Marxist and quasi-Rawlsian moral frameworks, and has come to see itself as the engineers of a coming paradise. Despite pretence to independence of thought, the trends of their research and opinions are mostly driven by international organisations and transnational capital.
The arrival of the Occupy movement, as stupid as it was, is generally held up as a divine exercise of the true voice of the people, an exercise in the sacred Luciferian rite of rebellion. The thinkers who found their hearts in the dirty neurotic encampments of shopworn hippy utopianism have become the scions of the grand vision borne by the antichristian syncretism born in the secret societies of the 18th centuries. Some of them are economists, some of them are even more dismal. But all are cynical crypto-communists who define their economic morality around a single principle - there can be no right to private property, and there can be no entitlement to the fulfilment of a contract, but you certainly have a right to a slice of another's labour. Though the moral framework has been inherited from Karl Marx, Marxist economic theories have been jettisoned in favour of Keynes and Kropotkin, a combination of state, anarchism and fiscal promiscuity.
The language and social theories set up to criticise "capitalism" was largely a three-card monty, hiding classic Marxist attitudes under new terms after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a tactic which can be seen in the writings of Marxists like David Harvey, Naomi Klein and others, who have popularised the term neoliberalism. Social Justice ideology has also helped, by synthesising an image of racism, capitalism and sexism together, thus poisoning every debate over the economy with the "women/blacks most affected" line. But while the criticisms raged on in the aftermath of the Credit Crunch, no solutions generally presented themselves aside from "bankers bad". Correct, but useless information.
Because the vast majority of left-wing political commentators are entirely ignorant of economics, they have been somewhat reluctant to push for real solutions since 1989 - their calls for more spending were easily dismissed - in the UK, the phrase "magic money tree" was used - in America, "balance the budget". New Labour went into neutral on the economy, and focused almost entirely on undoing traditional legal and cultural institutions. Those who asked for higher taxes were flashed the Laffer curve, and anyone who was still thick enough to call for nationalisation of industry could be dismissed by recalling recent Russian history.
And then in 2008, like a stoner noticing the furniture in the room for the first time, the notion slowly dawned on the left that the government actually prints money. The treasuries were pumping billions into the banks. For the left, this opened up an easy criticism - why not print money for citizens and let the banks go bust? Why not indeed. It would have been very popular, and may well have been very effective (for a short time). Clearly, Belgium and Iceland did not die with their financial institutions. Skin would have been drafted into the game (for some).
But political decisions do not exist in a vacuum, and this idea has been worked on and elaborated into a quiet consensus that there really are no rules, and that the state is a magician which can grant any wish, and only refuses to give us paradise because it wishes us to suffer. The observations which form the foundation of MMT are older than Keynesianism, even if Keynes has been used to justify it. Beardsly Ruml, an honorary chair at the New York Federal Reserve bank, and supporter of the Geneva Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation - the foundations of the modern neoliberal system. He called corporate tax evil. Other grandfathers include Georg Knapp, who argued that state control of currency gave it almost supernatural sovereignty. Keynes observed the productivity of WWI and Abba Lerner observed the miracle of WWII productivity, and saw the orthodoxy of prudent finance repudiated. But these men (perhaps not Keynes quite so much) thought rather simplistically about money supply - if unemployment is rising, print, if inflation rises, stop printing.
Stephanie Kelton, of the Rockefeller-founded Progressive (that means socialist gradualism) New School for Social Research and hedge fund owner/manager Warren Mosler consolidated these views into the modern hocus pocus we know today, in 1998. Pay for everything with printed money, and when inflation gets too high, raise taxes, confiscate property. They doubled down on Keynesianism, which has often praised the Soviet Union, and believed its centrally controlled economy was bound to win out in the end. In addition, Mosler introduced draconian proposals for suffocating the economy to protect the environment, like luxury taxes, travel restrictions and fuel tariffs. Of course, this was for controlling the vast swathes of population below the glass ceiling of the global capital classes.
The key lesson they extracted from the interwar period was that unemployment led to ideological fanaticism, and thence the gas chamber. But unlike Lord Print-o's voodoo economic system, instead of trying to maximise labour, MMT types tend to believe that it is not idleness but material deprivation which drives people to extremism. As any scholar of terrorism and extremist ideology can tell you, this is bunk. It is uncertainty, loneliness, loss of purpose, idleness and humiliation which cause radicalisation. But Marxists, perfectionist liberals and old-fashioned anarchists alike believe that people are inherently good, smart and defined by the creative impulse, and that with enough leisure they will become productive all on their own.
Thus they justified Rawlsian egalitarianism by fiat and by force. But this is all academic, and anything with numbers is even too academic for most academics. For these ideas to leak out into the broader world, they first had to pass through the high priests of public morality, the humanities departments - historians, anthropologists, and philosophers. In other words, people who get Ted Talk bookings. What Blyth, Graeber and Bregman have argued, is that there exist no obligations. Obligation is always wrong, because man should always be free. And Piketty argued that private property is an antiquated spook.
Mark "Get out of my swamp!" Blyth
Professor Blyth has many layers. He presents a crotchety exterior, and playing on the trope of the curmudgeon with a heart of gold, admonishes the people for judging the poor and the financially incontinent. His political home is the swamp of welfare dependency, and while he doesn't appreciate meddling in his neck of the woods, he is happy to crusade for a swamp for all the little people of the world.
...owing to IMF imposed austerity programs, the government had to cut the monitoring program [which provided mosquito nets to fight malaria]. Ten thousand people died. I met young mothers grieving for lost children. One might think it would be hard to make a case that the loss of ten thousand human lives is really justified in order to ensure that Citibank wouldn't have to cut its losses on one irresponsible loan that wasn't particularly important to its balance sheet anyway. But here was a perfectly decent woman-one who worked for a charitable organization, no less-who took it as self-evident that it was. After all, they owed the money, and surely one has to pay one's debts.
The argument that is offered tugs at the heartstrings. But equally, the mosquito nets would not have been there in the first place without the loans. Suppose the loans were forgiven - suppose Madagascar just defaulted. You can do that, you know. But then nobody will lend money to you.
Blyth's biggest reason for his love of welfare and hatred of austerity has to do with his childhood. Raised by his grandmother and state supplements, he considers this essential to his social rise. But this isn't the only story out there. Back in the 90s, cousins of mine left for the United States, taken by their mother. Ending up destitute, she fell on the mercy of the church, who supported her through her financial hardship, and ensured that my cousins were well-fed. They are ardent Christians to this day. But this source of life is no longer available, under constant assault from competing sources of meaning and social dependence in the universities and political parties. We have been persuaded to prefer utopia to heaven.
Mark Blyth has epitomised this outlook. A wealth of intelligence, coupled with an understandable loyalty to welfare policy born from a childhood spent under the custodianship of his retired grandmother, Blyth has provided a moral argument why the injuction to work, to pay ones debts, to be self-reliant, is a cruel imposition by the tightfisted and callous misers of Protestant civilisation. Mark Blyth sums it up in subtle language, but with crude logic.
He has written a whistle-stop tour of the history of Liberal economics and called it Austerity. In reality, austerity was an unfortunate name given to the modest belt-tightening Europe (and less modestly, Greece) endured in the wake of the Credit Crunch. Blyth has stated in his book that austerity is based on several fictions. One is that the economy has to do with morality. The others are that saving is better than debt, debt ought to be repaid, and that there is a moral limit to how much the state may take form you and why. Anyone with a vague acquaintance with economic liberalism will recognise the misrepresentation he makes, but anyone acquainted with the public utterances of Mark Blyth might be a little confused by the punchline to the following passage:
For these theorists - [Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter] - the free market has a long-run evolutionary structure that government intervention can only harm. Siding firmly with the "can't live without it" school, the Austrians rejected the state as having any positive or necessary role in the economy. They also rejected the increasing mathematisation of economics that was underway at the time. Seeing the economy as evolutionary, disequilibrial, and driven by entrepreneurs acting in uncertainty, they preferred historically analysis to differential calculus. Given these choices, the Austrians found themselves increasingly out of step with the tenor of the times.
For example, during the 1920s, Mises and Hayek became embroiled in the so-called socialist calculation debates of the period, seeking to prove the impossibility of central planning. Mises argued that planning was literally impossible, a line that was hard to defend as anything other than ideological.
The central message of Mark Blyth's book is that central planning does not just solve some problems. It solves all of them. Any policy which imposes any principled limit on public debt, welfare, expenditure, regulation or public ownership of the economy, is called austerity, and austerity is always morally wrong, because somebody somewhere is relying on that welfare or employment to make ends meet or provide a future for their offspring.
This amounts to a moral argument that all governments must unconditionally increase expenditure and appropriation of the economy for perpetuity. Put this to Mark and I suspect he will think you're a lunatic - quite seriously, neither he nor any other sane writer would ever advocate for this in so many words. But people en masse aren't psychologically attuned to moderation, they gravitate to moral maxims as expressions of in-group morality and loyalty. And he uses the leverage of the fear of fascism and the threat of disapprobation for callousness, to motive agreement.
As a result, he has provided a rational ratchet which inches every economy deemed humane in his eyes ever-closer to full communism. Blyth has created a set of arguments that consider any sale of public assets, any restriction of money supply, and any reduction of the budget to be beyond the pale, and precursors to fascism (hence the title of his book Angrynomics). This is without a doubt, a moral argument, however much he has countersignalled against moral arguments by demonising the morality of paying ones debts.
The proof is in the pudding - Blyth dismisses flippant appeals to Venezuela (and admittedly, us righties can be very flippant). But in the process, he waves away Chavez as an insignificant phenomenon, and insinuates that Venezuela's policies had nothing to do with the debasement of property rights or the value of money. He goes a step further, pushing for printing money directly into the pockets of consumers - if you can print for bankers, why not print for the common man?
Blyth constantly uses resentment of the rich to lend emotional leverage to his arguments, but instead of pushing for a hard currency and restriction of credit, thus inhibiting fincorp from extracting, abstracting and hedging dodgy debts held by the broader population, he wants more "sensible regulation", as if it can be imposed in an atmosphere absent the lobbying and corrupt horse-trading that typifies politics.
Blyth writes as if policy is made in a vaccuum. Greece's orgy of easy credit was the result of competing politicians bidding up the bribes to the plebs, made possible because of the ECB's continentally distributed insurance of the Eurobond market, now running at negative interest by virtue of mandated bank purchases of government bonds. Just like Mugabe's Zimbabwe, no democratic system can survive the political destruction caused by any attempt to reign in destructive spending, not without substantial violent unrest.
He can bash trickle-down economics all he wants, but the truth of the matter is that his alternative is a race to the bottom. Even if the state finds itself in a tough spot, there is no excuse. Since every crash can be blamed on entities in the private sector, the correct punishment for companies taking advantage of their too-big-to-fail status is to nationalise them, and then print away the debt. And all of it fits into a trend which has become all too familiar in the post-Occupy world. Debt is tyranny, inequality is sin, hard work is for losers.
But the fact remains that the great engines of global finance are beyond the reach of the nations of the world, and can only be touched by America and China, neither of which have sufficient authentic economic nationalism to attempt to banish international finance from the halls of pwer.
"Facts? lol" - David Graeber
Empirically, the world described by each of these thinkers is rather inaccurate. To a large extent, they have retrofitted their facts to suit a moral conclusion they wish to justify. But these men are not driven by any sound moral compass. They are all driven by some variety of resentment, sometimes justified, but mostly not. In some cases, theirs is the fantasy of the guru, the saviour.
David Graeber, the anarchist who doesn't like being called an anarchist. The author of the heavily padded essay Bullshit Jobs, and the saliva-soaked leftist wankpad Debt: the First 5000 Years. What makes Graeber interesting is the sheer unrelenting waves of impossibly inaccurate horseshit which comprise his works. Still by far my favourite internet beef was the one between him and Brad deLong, where David Graeber's book was shredded in detail on and off over the course of three years: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Some of these posts contain links to other factual debunks, enough to throw every single claim made in the book under fractal skeptic suspicion.
The first effort of Graeber is to demonstrate that throughout history, the traditional authorities and lay beliefs have created a tyranny of debt by equating it with sin. Sins may incur a debt, but incurring debt is not a sin. The sin is in not paying your debt - the sin of false promises. The sin of exploiting the desperate with exorbitant lending practices is called usury, and much like prostitution, a contract that would be immoral to enforce is one that is immoral to enter into. Graeber &co, however, only place the blame on the one side of the equation, and wish to create an environment in which credit is easy, but defaulting is free of cost - frequent debt jubilees.
"Freedom," in the Bible, as in Mesopotamia, came to refer above all to release from the effects of debt. Over time, the history of the Jewish people itself came to be interpreted in this light: the liberation from bondage in Egypt was God's first, paradigmatic act of redemption; the historical tribulations of the Jews (defeat, conquest, exile) were seen as misfortunes that would eventually lead to a final redemption with the coming of the Messiah-though this could only be accomplished, prophets such as Jeremiah warned them, after the Jewish people truly repented of their sins (carrying each other off into bondage, whoring after false gods, the violation of commandments). In this light, the adoption of the term by Christians is hardly surprising. Redemption was a release from one's burden of sin and guilt, and the end of history would be that moment when all slates are wiped clean and all debts finally lifted when a great blast from angelic trumpets will announce the final Jubilee.
No, it isn't. It's a day of judgment, when all accounts will be balanced, and those found wanting will have to atone. But what is more peculiar to notice is how these hardcore antichristian atheists are attempting to use Christian theology (twisted though it may be beyond all recognition) as a source of moral justification for their case. "Christ, whom I don't believe in, justifies anything I want, so get with the program".
What makes these fellows so difficult to parse in ordinary secular terms, is that while they claim to be anarchists, they insist on state control of almost everything. Graeber's constant railing at "capitalism" creates a problem tackled elsewhere. Because it is a negative definition, anti-capitalism necessarily describes everything that has not yet come to pass - capitalism describing everything that exists already - private property rights and relatively free trade. By attacking these, you insist that some central agency should be making all the decisions of the material realm for everyone else.
Bullshit jobs? Not when The People are in charge. Then we will have everything organised sensibly.
Cherry Pick-ety
Almost all of the problems with political philosophers comes in when they start to envy power. Envy leads to resentment, resentment leads to hatred, and hatred leads to the dark side.
Modern inequality also exhibits a range of discriminatory practices based on status, race, and religion, practices pursued with a violence that the meritocratic fairy tale utterly fails to acknowledge. In these respects, modern society can be as brutal as the premodern societies from which it likes to distinguish itself. Consider, for example, the discrimination faced by the homeless, immigrants, and people of color. Think, too, of the many migrants who have drowned while trying to cross the Mediterranean. Without a credible new universalistic and egalitarian narrative, it is all too likely that the challenges of rising inequality, immigration, and climate change will precipitate a retreat into identitarian* nationalist politics based on fears of a “great replacement” of one population by another. - Piketty, Capital and Ideology, p. 2
Criticisms of modern capitalism bear a large number of similarities, all of which are obviously false. Piketty manages to be guilty of every clichée - like Foucault, Piketty tries to claim that modern society is just as violent as any other period of history. This is obviously not true. While violence has been increasing somewhat since 1950-ish, it had been declining everywhere in the West since the end of the Black Death, and with it, an increased formalisation of increasingly complex and increasingly voluntary social relations, which created the delicate systems of law, security, social trust and normative protocols of business which allow for capitalism, science and culture.
On the theoretical front, Piketty's worldview is simple enough - equality bad, make it go away. Any cost is worth bearing to cut the tall trees. In service of this, he coins the term "propertarianism" - that is, he tells the story that property is a time-bound fiction invented by the capitalists and the bourgeoisie to protect their ill-gotten gains. This is Marxism 101. But he doesn't advocate for workers owning the means of production, nor does he advocate for democratisation, at least not as his main thesis. He is not attempting to rid the world of alienation, only inequality. This is not Marx, but Hegel. Well, less Hegel, and more Rawlsian liberalism.
Piketty has a worldview which is entirely justified by what he can find on the record, and cannot see life any way but like a state - that which is invisible to the national revenue service is invisible to him also. He conflates distinctions which would make his crude egalitarian absolutism difficult to sustain. His failure to distinguish between different forms of wealth and capital, or between wealth and capital to begin with, makes his book come across like crude sophistry at the best of times. His books are essentially a redressing of layman's understanding of Marxism - rich people have too much stuff, and that equality arises from a redistribution of property. The belief that property and contracts are important at all is, to him, no more than a self-serving elitist superstructure preserving the ill-gotten gains of a parasitic overclass. It's drivel. And by investigating the art of the book I actually know something about, I check in on his comments about South Africa.
His analysis of the inequalities in South Africa takes no note of the fact that (proportionally) almost no black people pay taxes (aside from VAT), and that most black businesses are unregistered - the "informal sector". The tax base of South Africa is no more than 5% of the population. The entire suburb of Soweto has famously gone without paying for water, electricity or council tax since the end of apartheid, and is no longer poor, but festooned with mansions and upscale bars and restaurants. Politicians and ANC councillors largely do not use their own bank accounts, and instead simply raid the public finances to subsidise lifestyles lavish beyond the wildest dreams of the richest white South Africans. The culture of non-payment of taxes obscures a second underground economy and an invisible middle class which shows up very clearly in the quality-of-life indexes.
Piketty somehow imagines that handing illiterate peasants wodges of cash obtained by liquidating the private sector and depriving people of their inheritance would have automatically resulted in some happy situation. This is too stupid to bother debunking, but it does illustrate where the man's head is at. One of the most revealing facts about Piketty's recent book, is that while he insinuates that the evils of the South African economy would be solved by confiscating whites' property and liquifying it to pay for welfare loans, he makes absolutely no mention of the actual situation created in neighbouring Zimbabwe when that was actually tried.
Rutger "yeah, man" Bregman
Welcome to the the Cheech and Chong School of Economic policy (what even is money, maan?) and International relations (like, what even is a border, dude?).
Each time Rutger Bregman assaults us with his Rousseauian onanism, he lights the world of popular political commentary on fire. By stripping William Golding's book down to its most cartoonish interpretation, he has got every half-wit, left and right, bickering about the merits of Rousseau vs Hobbes, and made six small Catholic boys into a proof that mankind can totally handle communism. The story he tells is true and heartwarming, and wonderfully written; everyone should read it for the testament it offers to the human spirit. But it is his grand ideological strategy I detest, to which his rose-tinted panegyric to the human heart is but a siren song.
By the way, Ben Sixsmith came out with a really excellent refutation of Bregman's Rousseauian propaganda pocketbook, Humankind. You should read it.
T. Greer, someone smarter than me has crafted a response on twitter which cuts straight through the grease, and I will quote it here because it is, by my estimation, correct, and follows a similar thread to that which Solzhenitsyn famously tugged on - the line of good and evil runs through every human heart:
Golding wants to figure out why the bad parts in society inevitably seem to overwhelm the good. Why does democracy fail, what gives the power-hungry their chance, why can't goodness and civility long persist? Golding believes that they *don't* long persist--but can you blame him?
The man who wrote LotF lived in an empire that was collapsing and in a society threatened by the spectre of atomic war. He wrote less than thirty years out from WWI, twenty years from the fall of Europe to Communism and Fascism, and less ten years out of World War II. He fought in that last war and was permanently scarred by it. If I am a Brit in mid 1950s I would probably conclude that norms, order, goodness, *civilization* is always doomed to fall apart as well. It would have been the totality of my own life experience. But why?
That is what LotF is meant to answer. Golding is not trying to play this Rosseau-v-Hobbes game of bringing humanity back to the state of nature and see what they look like. His children are not living in a natural state: they are self conscious heirs to an entire civilization, and they realize quite early on that they live on the razor's edge of life and death. So they create rules and orders to keep their society running. A little democracy that honors natural goodness and leadership. A little democracy that does not last. And that is what people don't seem to get about this book. It isn't a parable about what happens when you taken men out of society--it is a parable about how men act *in society.*
Why do we have Hitlers and Mussolinis and Lenins and civil wars and world wars and great terrors? You can answer that question with economic statistics and long chains of historical causation or with the intellectual genealogy of the anti-liberal political philosophy.... Or maybe there is something more fundamental at work. Maybe there is something about fear, or the power-lust, or cruelty that transcends any individual political program or historical moment. Maybe there is something that holds together tyrannies the world over. Golding thinks there is. His little parable--one of the most carefully and artfully constructed in English literature--is an attempt to get at what those things may be.
Reducing this novel to "all humans are evil once you take civilization away" doesn't just over-simplify Golding's message; it fundamentally misunderstands Goldin's entire project. That is all.
While Golding's point, according to Greer, is that the struggle between good and evil is eternal and ever-present, equally in civilised as in "innocent" conditions, Bregman insinuates that pessimists and skeptics are just misanthropists, and that misanthropy is next door to nazism.
I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.
Bregman is one of the greatest propagandists of our age. It hardly matters what the facts are, because very few readers will engage on that level, and it isn't the level on which Bregman's thesis operates. He's fully aware that a single instance of six boys living on an island for 15 months without killing each other says nothing about human nature, because he isn't stupid - he knows his favourite anecdotes are ridiculously small samples of human behaviour, far too small to draw lasting conclusions from. Hence his backup argument that "things thought impossible before are possible now, therefore nothing is impossible".
But he is very aware of the symbolic narrative value of his vignettes, and so is the Guardian. It is a fully Rousseauian narrative, even if the reality of the case can be explained otherwise. His thesis that people are good, except for a few bad apples we can easily identify, and quietly get rid of, is the basis upon which he justifies an MMT/UBI/open borders path to global fully automated luxury anarcho-communism, where any natives who might object to having their property dispersed are instantly outnumbered by a newly imported majority.
He advocates a public relations strategy of being kind and listening to racists (by which he means anyone opposed to open borders), so that they can be pacified into acquiescence by Jedi mind tricks. Of course, he believes in the same approach for ISIS, so lord knows whether he gives a damn about any sort of political violence. After all, it is fairly obvious that no population has the capacity to resist their government anymore. Every slogan Bregman utters demands the total sacrifice of all autonomy to the state. "Binmen should earn more than bankers" "24 hour workweek" "Capitalism will always create bullshit jobs" "moderates are the real fringe" "poverty isn't a lack of character, it's a lack of cash" "billionaires should stop talking philanthropy and start talking tax".
He describes his project, in part, as appropriating conservative rhetoric about common sense and efficiency to sell left wing utopian ideology. This is propaganda, pure and simple, and will bypass the rational part of the audience's brain. Almost all discussion of his notion of human nature piece in the public sphere so far has been a Rousseau/Hobbes dichotomy, which plays into the narrative Bregman constructs here.
He naturally uses all of these arguments from human nature and the morality of trust and optimism to promote what is in fact an extraordinarily radical program, as the Dutch title of his book Utopia for Realists attests - "gratis geld voor iedereen" - free money for everyone. But as we have already outlined in this series, taxation through inflation is a vertical transfer of wealth, into finance and the stock market from the middle classes. The UBI cake he promises the chattering classes if they grab the bullhorn and fight through the institutions to justify MMT, is a lie. It will never come, not without special controls on spending.
Even if it did come, it would mean rampant inflation, of the most unprecedented and extraordinary kind. Nobody would ever be able to turn the taps off, because people would be dependent on the cash for their livelihoods, and would be voting in the elections. As more money was printed and more consumption ensued, the fiat economy would overheat. Hoarding and panic-buying would commence, and the eternal present would become a narrower sliver of time by the day until all semblance of balance, stability and normality evaporated in the heat of human anger and despair.
The truth of it all is that while Rutger Bregman is hailed as the rockstar anti-establishmentarian de luxe, he is in fact, merely an instrument of finance. In a famous blowout with Tucker Carlson, he accused Carlson of being the stooge of capital, otherwise he would never have got an audience. He gives the game away. Why do you think he got his famous audience with the WEF in Davos? Do you think he snuck in past the security fences and masqueraded under a false name to whip away the emerald curtain?
As all of these powerful men and women behind MMT know, you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and Bregman has smeared his political program with so much honey it threatens to send the reader into diabetic shock. Like Rousseau before him, he tells a beautiful and emotive tale of the nobility of the human spirit freed from the cruel constraints of society. But as much as you sweeten the meat, there is still blood inside.
There is no simple answer to the nature of humankind. We are free, but limited, kind, but cruel, wild, yet easily tamed. Every man who has sought to nail human nature to a post in the past has lived to see it raised, fly-blown and foetid, over a field of blood.
Who knows, maybe Rutger will live to see his god in the flesh. He certainly has met with its earthly representatives.