I loved this reaction by Tom Butcher to my video transcript on the MMT economy. He said in a comment:
It strikes me that no-one spends any time worrying that they will run out of emails. I just type it in. The only concern is how much to write on what subject and where to send it for best effect. Same with Govt money. Just type it in. How much to create for which purpose and where to send it for best effect; .. ah, there's the rub!
That's it, in a nutshell. The issue is deciding what matters. That's where our politicians lack ability.
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Thank you, Richard.
Please, please, please use the one about peerages and knighthoods. The only limit are the scoundrels on whom to confer.
I will revisit it…
As a short
Actually, I think the email analogy is better, because it is a purely electronic ‘transaction’ (you could even stretch it to dual entries in sending and receiving accounts).
Whilst unlimited, people understand that peerages and knighthoods are ‘rare’ for most of the population.
Succinctly put for the economically and politically inarticulate like me!
Any chance of you producing a video/short on YT?
I couldn’t get to Cambridge but I’m looking forward to reading the PDFs.
KUTGW
It’s on my list now
Exactly. It is just an electric record. A changing number in a spreadsheet. Or a unit of account, like centimetre or inches.
In so far that the BoE and the Government can type figures into accounts to become money and policies and getting things done – yes – I would view that as totally correct.
This is quite a good analogy as at the extremes you can only run out of money when you run out of paper and ink and be able to afford the pay of the printing press operator. You could run out of emails but it’s not going to happen unless you run out of electron-volts, memory and telecomms engineers.
What we have already run out of though is a surplus of spending possibilities that should best be done by government.
Hi Richard,
Canon Peter Challen of the erstwhile CCMJ (the Christian Council for Monetary Justice now alas virtually defunct) at one of whose discussion get-togethers you and I first met, used to offer the CCMJ version of this, along the lines of governments (fiat currency ones, of course) claiming they’ve run out of money is like claiming you’ve run out of inches when trying to measure something!!
Agreed
Peter has got older, I fear. I still hear from him.