Daily Archives: June 17, 2014

Tax Bads, Not Goods

By L. Randall Wray

This is another instalment in the series on the MMT view of taxes. I’m back from China, participating in the annual Hyman P. Minsky Summer Seminar at the Levy Economics Institute. Yesterday my colleague, Mat Forstater, gave a talk on the job guarantee and “green jobs”. Along the way he made two particularly insightful comments on MMT and taxes that I’ll use to introduce this instalment.

First, he discussed the MMT view of “modern money”—that is to say, the money that has existed “for the past 4000 years, at least, as Keynes put it in his Treatise on Money. The money of account is chosen by the sovereign and used to denominate debts, prices, and other nominal values. It is the Dollar in the US.

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Gary Becker Treatment of Women who Work for Pay as “Deviants”

By William K. Black

This is the second article in my five-part series on Gary Becker as an exemplar of the book we are writing about why economics is the only field in which one can receive the top award for proving wrong, anti-social, and intellectually dishonest.  In keeping with that triple failure the Swedish Central Bank prize in economics is frequently awarded in the year in which the recipients’ failures and intellectual dishonesty has become so obvious that only the most dogmatic of theoclassical central bankers could pretend not to recognize reality.  Becker’s award exemplifies this unintentional exercise in self-parody.

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