I was just reading the Michael Roberts blog https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/06/16/the-deficit-myth/ and, oh dear, people are talking about money again. He was debunking the latest monetary/economic fad, called
done by Raccoon in T.O.
I was just reading the Michael Roberts blog https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/06/16/the-deficit-myth/ and, oh dear, people are talking about money again. He was debunking the latest monetary/economic fad, called
Hello Raccoon,
So just a couple of things on this.
I don’t think Marxist economists think that money only appeared with Capitalism. What they seem to think is that, with the advent of Capitalism – which for them is a system of economic production, where society is dominated by two classes (other classes can persist, too): waged workers who can sell their labour freely (i.e. they aren’t slaves or serfs), and capitalists, who purchase labour off the workers to produce goods for market, with the aim of making a profit – money takes on certain functions in the economy which it didn’t have before, relating to this way of producing goods. I don’t know if they are right, but that’s what they, charitably, think. It’s certainly what Marx thought.
I’ve not really read the MMT people, but I would say that they don’t think that all states are in a position to control their currency. States who are pegged to the currency of another state can’t, for instance. Now you can say that any state can simply state what the currency is going to be. But that isn’t to say they can control how the currency behaves – and if they can’t do that, the money (literally) may not be worth the paper it’s written on. If they are doing their job right, the only option may be to use a different currency – and even then, this may not help them, given the global situation their country is embedded within. I’m just raising all this to indicate that the MMT position can’t be as simple as you’re depicting, whether overall the theory is correct or incorrect.
Finally, I’m kind of unsatisfied by your final remark. I don’t really see the point in writing a post, then saying that you aren’t interested in whether you are ultimately right or wrong. How is this helpful to your readership? Wouldn’t it be better to lay out the basics, raise some issues you can think of, but then state you haven’t done enough work to be sure who is correct, and direct your readers to some further reading?