MMT has emphasized that there is a close relation between sovereign power to issue a currency and its power to impose tax liabilities. For shorthand, we say “Taxes Drive Money”. I’ve dealt with that topic in the previous instalments of this series on MMT’s view of taxes.
We’ve also demonstrated (as if it needed demonstration!) that sovereign governments do not “need” tax revenue in order to spend. As Beardsley Ruml put it, once we abandoned gold, federal taxes became “obsolete” for revenue purposes. I’ll have more to say about good old Beardsley in the next instalment.
In today’s instalment I want to step back a bit to ask a more fundamental question: does the issuer of a money-denominated liability need to obtain some of those liabilities before spending or lending them?
In this instalment I will examine three analogous questions (each of which has the same answer):
1. Does the government need to receive tax revenue before it can spend?
2. Does the central bank need to receive reserve deposits before it can lend?
3. Do private banks need to receive demand deposits before they can lend?
If you’ve already answered “Of course not!”, you are probably up to speed on this topic. If you answered yes (to one or more), or if you haven’t a clue what the questions means, read on.
As we’ll see, these are reducible to the question: which comes first, Creation or Redemption?
First, an apology for delays in posting blogs and dealing with comments over the past couple of weeks. I’m in China for an extended stay and don’t always have access to the internet.
Second, an apology for the somewhat theoretical, academic–even esoteric?—exposition that follows. I’m going to assume that at least some readers are not familiar with the MMT literature on what we might call “the nature of money”. So let me begin with the familiar ground of orthodoxy.
The Nature of Money
What I’ve been trying to do in my own work on money (and interest rates) is to provide an alternative to the orthodox money supply and money demand approach. Recall that orthodoxy has a money supply that is fixed by the authorities and a money demand function that is determined by three presumed motives for holding money (Keynes’s transactions, precautionary, and speculative demands), with the intersection determining “the” interest rate, if you are a Keynesian-type, or “the” price level if you are a Monetarist-type.
Post Keynesians turned this on its head, making the money supply “horizontal” at “the” interest rate determined by the central bank. The central bank accommodates the bank demand for reserves, and banks accommodate the demand for loans. The money supply is “endogenous”, interest rates are “exogenous”.
While this is an improvement, it is not very satisfying. I won’t go into my critique of Horizontalism.[i] Instead, I want begin with the Institutionalist view that money is an institution; Dudley Dillard argued that it might be the most important institution in the capitalist economy. (See also my post some weeks ago on Fagg Foster’s views, which I will draw upon for a few paragraphs here.)
What is the nature of the institution that we call money? What do the things that many people call money have in common? Most economists identify money as something we use in exchange. That, too, might move our understanding forward a bit, but it simply tells us “money is what money does”. (Sort of like defining a human as something that watches TV, with occasional trips to the fridge.)
In The Treatise, Keynes began with the money of account, the unit in which we denominate debts and credits, and, yes, prices. He also says something about the nature of the money of account: following Knapp he argues that for the past 4000 years, at least, the money of account has been chosen by the state authorities. Units of measurement are necessarily social constructions. I can choose my own idiosyncratic measuring units for time, space, and value, but they must be socially sanctioned to become widely adopted.
So, one commonality is that all monies are measured in a money of account. All those things economists declare to be money are denominated in the money of account. But the nature of money must amount to more than that if money is an institution.
As mentioned, many economists identify money as that which is used to intermediate market exchange. But that seems to reduce money to a thing we agree to use to intermediate exchange in the institution that we call a market—rather than an institution in its own right.
What is the institutional nature of those money things? The most obvious shared characteristic of some of them is that they are evidence of debt: coins and treasury or central bank notes are government debts; bank notes or deposits are bank debts; and we can expand our definition of money things to include shares of money market mutual funds, and so on, which are also debts of their issuers.
If we go back through time, we find wooden tally sticks issued by European monarchs and others as evidence of debt (notches recorded money amounts). Clearly it does not matter what material substance is used to record the debt–the tally sticks are just tokens, records of the relation between creditor and debtor. The monarch promises to redeem his tally IOU, following prescriptions that govern redemption. A taxpayer cannot bring any notched hazelwood stick—the stock and stub must match exactly, tested by the exchequer or his representative.
Modern Money[ii]
What we have, then, is a socially created and generally accepted money of account, with debts that are denominated in that money of account. Within a modern nation, socially sanctioned money-denominated debts are typically denominated in the nation’s money of account. In the US it is the dollar. Some kinds of money-denominated debts “circulate”, used in exchange and other payments (ie paying down one’s own debts).
The best examples are currency (debt of treasury and central bank) and demand deposits (debt of banks). Why do we accept these in payment?
It has long been believed that we accept currency because it is either made of precious metal or redeemable for same—we accept it for its “thing-ness”. In truth, coined precious metal almost always circulated well beyond the value of embodied metal (at least domestically); and redeemability of currency for gold at a fixed rate has been the exception not the rule. Hence, most economists recognize that currency is today (and often was in the past) “fiat”.
Further, and importantly, law going back to Roman times has typically adopted a “nominalist” perspective: the legal value of coins was determined by nominal value. For example, if one deposited coins with a bank one could expect only to receive on withdrawal currency of the same nominal value.[iii] In other words, even if the currency consisted of stamped gold coins, they were still “fiat” in the sense that their legal value would be set nominally.[iv]
The argument of Adam Smith, Knapp, Innes, Keynes, Grierson, and Lerner is that currency will be accepted if there is an enforceable obligation to make payments to its issuer in that same currency.[v] Hence, MMT has adopted the phrase “taxes drive money” in the sense that the state can impose tax liabilities and issue the means of paying those liabilities in the form of its own liabilities.
Here there is an institution, or a set of institutions, that we can identify as “sovereignty”.[vi] As Keynes said, the sovereign has the power to declare what will be the unit of account—the Dollar, the Lira, the Pound, the Yen. The sovereign also has the power to impose fees, fines, and taxes, and to name what it will accept in payment. When the fees, fines, and taxes are paid, the currency is “redeemed”—accepted by the sovereign.
While sovereigns also sometimes agree to “redeem” their currency for precious metal or for foreign currency, that is not necessary. The agreement to “redeem” currency in payment of taxes, fees, tithes and fines is sufficient to “drive” the currency—that is to create a demand for it.[vii]
Note we also do not need an infinite regress argument. While it could be true that I am more willing to accept the state’s IOUs if I know I can dupe some dope, I will definitely accept it if I have a tax liability and know I must pay that liability with the state’s currency. This is the sense in which MMT claims “taxes are sufficient to create a demand for the currency”. It is not necessary for everyone to have such an obligation—so long as the tax base is broad, the currency will be widely accepted.
There are other reasons to accept a currency—maybe I can exchange it for gold or foreign currency, maybe I can hold it as a store of value. These supplement taxes—or, better, derive from the obligations that need to be settled using currency (such as taxes, fees, tithes, and fines).
The Fundamental “Law” of Credit: Redeemability
Innes posed a fundamental “law” of credit: the issuer of an IOU must accept it back for payment.
We can call this the principle of redeemability: the holder of an IOU can present it to the issuer for payment. Note that the holder need not be the person who originally received the IOU—it can be a third party. If that third party owes the issuer, the IOU can be returned to cancel the third party’s debt; indeed, the clearing cancels both debts (the issuer’s debt and the third party’s debt).
If one reasonably expects that she will need to make payments to some entity, she will want to obtain the IOUs of that entity. This goes part way to explaining why the IOUs of nonsovereign issuers can be widely accepted: as Minsky said, part of the reason that bank demand deposits are accepted is because we—at least, a lot of us—have liabilities to the banks, payable in bank deposits.
In modern banking systems that have a central bank to clear accounts among banks at par, one can deliver any bank’s deposit IOU to cancel a debt with any other bank.
Acceptability can be increased by promising to convert on demand one’s IOUs to more widely accepted IOUs. The most widely accepted IOUs within a society are those issued by the sovereign (or, at least, by some sovereign—perhaps by a foreign sovereign of a more economically important nation). In that case, the issuer must either hold or have easy access to the sovereign’s IOUs to ensure conversion. In the financial literature, this is called leveraging and while it sounds similar to the notion of a deposit multiplier there is no simple, fixed ratio of leverage.
Stephanie Bell/Kelton, Duncan Foley, and Minsky have all used the metaphor of a pyramid of liabilities, with those lower in the pyramid leveraging those higher in the pyramid, and with the sovereign’s liabilities at the apex. Monetary contracts for future delivery of “money” typically designate whose liabilities are acceptable, usually either commercial bank demand deposits or the sovereign’s liabilities. As the government’s backstop of chartered banks has increased, the need to use sovereign liabilities for settlement has been reduced to clearing among banks, to foreign exchanges, and to illegal activities.
In any event, whatever final payment courts of law enforce can be used as final payment. From Roman times, courts have interpreted money contracts in nominal terms requiring payment in “lawful money” which is always in the form of designated liabilities denominated in an identified money of account. That is to say, the contracts are not enforceable in terms of things if they are written in money terms.
Redemptionism or Creationism?
In the introduction we raised three analogous questions:
1. Does the government need to receive tax revenue before it can spend?
2. Does the central bank need to receive reserve deposits before it can lend?
3. Do private banks need to receive demand deposits before they can lend?
It should be clear that the answer to each is “No!”. Indeed, the logic must run from CREATION to REDEMPTION. One cannot redeem oneself from sin or debt unless that sin or debt has been created.
The King issues his tally stick or his stamped coin in payment. That puts him in the position of a sinful debtor. He redeems himself when he accepts back his own IOU.
The central bank issues its reserve deposit as its sinful debt—normally when it makes a loan to private banks, or when it purchases treasury debts in the open market. (These reserve deposits can always be exchange on demand for central bank notes—which keeps the central bank indebted.) The central bank redeems itself when it accepts its notes and reserve deposits in payment.
The private bank issues its demand deposit as its sinful debt—normally when it makes a loan to a private firm or household. The bank redeems itself when it accepts a check written on its demand deposit in payment.
Note that we’ve looked at two sides of one balance sheet (the “money issuer”) in each of these cases, but there is another sinful debtor in every case.
Before the sovereign can issue tallies or coins, he must put taxpayers in sinful debt by imposing a tax obligation payable in his tally stick or coin. This creates a demand for his tally or coin.
When the central bank lends reserves to a private bank, it puts that bank in sinful debt, crediting its account at the central bank with reserves, but the bank simultaneously issues a liability to the central bank.
When the private bank lends demand deposits to the borrower, it credits the deposit account but the borrower records a liability to the bank.
So each “redemption” simultaneously wipes out the sinful debt of both parties. The slate is wiped clean. Hallelujah!
You see, folks, it’s all debits and credits. Keystrokes. That record bonds of indebtedness, with both parties united in the awful sinfulness.
Until Redemption Day, when the IOUs find their ways back to the issuers.
Those who think a sovereign must first get tax revenue before spending;
Those who believe a central bank must first obtain reserves before lending them;
And those who believe a private bank must first obtain deposits before lending them
Have all confused Redemption with Creation.
Receipt of taxes, receipt of reserve deposits, and receipt of demand deposits are all Acts of Redemption.
Creation must precede Redemption.
NOTES
[i] This began with a review of Moore’s Horizontalists and Verticalists (1988)as well as my own book, Money and Credit (1990).
[ii] The term “modern money” comes from a quote of Keynes, who argued that the Chartalist or State Money approach—that provides the foundation for MMT—applies to the last 4000 years, “at least”. So, in short, MMT applies to the use of money since the rise of civilization.
[iii] In Roman law, an exception was made if one deposited coins for safe-keeping in a sealed sack; in that case, the bank must return the sack still sealed.
[iv] However, Gresham’s Law dynamics would not allow nominal value to fall much below the bullion value since coins would be taken out of circulation.
[v] See Wray 1998, 2004, and 2012.
[vi] Note that different forms of government have different forms of sovereignty, and sovereign power goes well beyond ability to choose a money of account and to impose and enforce obligations. While some critics have scapegoated MMT as applying only to dictatorships, it is obvious that all modern democracies have representative governments with vast sovereign powers, including these specific powers. In the case of the US, the Constitution specifically gives these powers to Congress.
[vii] MMT does not claim that taxes and other obligations are necessary to drive a currency. It is difficult to find exceptions—that is, cases in which currency (defined here as government-issued “current” IOUs) circulated without taxes, fees, fines, tithes, or tribute requiring its use in payment. If we broaden the definition of currency to include nongovernment-issued current means of payment, then Bitcoins might qualify as a counter-example.
We could probably get to full employment simply by eliminating payroll taxes and the federal income tax.
Not possible. Payroll taxes and the federal income tax are taxes paid by the middle class. The middle class has no spokesperson for them at all in government.
Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, John Conyers, Barbara Lee, Keith Ellison, Raúl Grijalva, Judy Chu, David Cicilline, Michael Honda, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Jan Schakowsky, Karen Bass, Xavier Becerra, Suzanne Bonamici, Corrine Brown, Michael Capuano, Andre Carson, Matt Cartwright, Donna Christensen, Yvette Clarke, and Joe Kennedy are spokespeople for the middle class. I probably missed some names.
You are right. I stand corrected. What I should have said is that the middle class has no spokespeople who have the power to put their desire of the middle class into action in government. You are correct that there are indeed spokespeople who are able to flap their jaws and talk endlessly about the forever unmet needs of the middle class. This recent study described below, that showed that the middle class has no influence on policy, has been cited in lots of news outlets lately.
New study finds US to be ruled by oligarchic elite: Political scientists show that average American has “near-zero” influence on policy outcomes
http://roarmag.org/2014/04/gilens-page-us-oligarchy-elite/
Jill:
Now that you have identified a problem what is your solution?
(This is the 2nd try for this post. I think my first attempt may have gotten lost due to a problem with my computer.)
Jerry, I am trying to write a book on the subject. But basically we have to look at how the austerity economics people have seized all the power in the U.S. government and we need strategize how to get it back from them for the people.
One big area of concern is media. We are immersed in Right Wing propaganda at all times— the tons of Libertarian Republican web sites that pop up all over the Net, the largest newspaper by circulation in the U.S.— which is the Murdoch-owned WSJ, Clear Channel radio, Faux News etc. The book Don’t Think of an Elephant detailed the construction of the Right Wing propaganda machine decades ago.
Right Wing media is ultra-focused on targeting large audiences and delivering their message and their talking points– so effectively that they are able to get huge numbers of voters to vote against their own best interests. Progressive media is very scattered and not focused on effectiveness of impact at all. Some of them seem to be primarily focused on making money, which has to be done somehow of course. But unlike Right Wing media, progressive media seems to frequently sacrifice its other goals in order to make money.
Of course, making a killing off of both corporate advertising and advocacy of corporate political interests certainly fits together easily, and that’s what Right Wing media does. So perhaps it requires no special effort on their par to do both. For progressive media, it would require a lot of effort to both make money AND to get their message across to a large audience, if they ever did it.
But Progressive media right now just preaches to a small choir. In order for progressive media to be effective, it would have to target a large audience, combat the propaganda, and give voice to a progressive vision for America’s future. Instead of doing that, I see PBS taking money– and orders– from Right Wingers. I see TV stations making the false equivalence error constantly, and progressive on line media putting out a lot of fluff articles and many political articles that are far from what would be the main talking points of the progressive movement, if we had them.
A big part of the problem is that those aforementioned spokespeople think we need to raise taxes on the rich in order to help the middle class. That we need the rich peoples money to just redistribute to the poor and middle class, so in essence they are a bigger part of THE problem.
People hear those folks talk and it all sounds good until they say “We need to tax corps and rich people” whereby over half the folks just turn around and say “Forget them, another tax and spender!”
Until we have enough people who can competently discuss money and finance in terms other than those that are dictated by the powerful interests (Its the powerful interests that love to make us little people have balanced budgets) we will never get anywhere.
Has anyone ever heard a politician or name economist forcefully make the argument that taxes drive money or that the US Govt has zero need to collect taxes before it spends?
That’s possible. It is also possible that, with notably higher income, the middle and lower classes would choose to dramatically increase their use of oil and other energy (such as by buying reasonably priced homes in distant exurbs), those energy prices would spike while supply would remain constrained, and the personal tax spending would be mostly replaced by higher energy spending and demand would be constrained well before full employment.
entreposto:
Excellent point. How would you guard against this problem.
How do you tell people not to do what they want to do? What about when what they want to do is actually the best thing for them to do? When what they want to do is nothing more than what those who are already rich do? It seems the only thing to do in that case is invest in alternatives and techniques that genuinely break the bottlenecks.
Infrastructure investment indeed: as the repeated discussions of the need of government involvement for getting to a zero-carbon infrastructure on NEP keep pointing out.
What is the differene between nature of the debt of the sovereign, versus nature of the debt of the non-sovereign?
And would you agree that the fundamental nature of all debts is to be a) debt of the debtor, and b) asset of the creditor? Because people seem to usually think about debts only as a, not recognicing the b, and that leads to lot of bad policy.
Hep: Remember the Bell/Kelton debt pyramid: the sovereign’s is usually at the top. And yes, by definition, the debt must be on 2 balance sheets: debt of issuer and asset of creditor. People imagine that sovereign’s debt (currency) is only an asset of holder, but that is wrong. Currency is not a “thing” it is a debt so must be on 2 balance sheets. Real assets, not financial assets, can be on just one balance sheet. All of this is explained in detail in the Modern Money Primer!
(Posted on behalf of Randy Wray)
coins and treasury or central bank notes are government debts….And yes, by definition, the debt must be on 2 balance sheets: debt of issuer and asset of creditor.
Splendid, Dr. Wray. As this is true by definition, can you show us any US balance sheet in which outstanding coins are counted as “debt” or “liability.” This is easy for outstanding T-Bills; liabilities of USG. Easy for outstanding Reserve Notes; liabilities of Federal Reserve Banks (many of which will be found to be assets of USG.)
I believe you will not be able to produce the equivalent accounting for coins. Not you, not any of your fine surrogates. Coins are sovereign assets. Assets to anyone who lawfully possesses them. They are nobody’s promise to pay; they are that which was promised.
Well consider if the government decided to start stamping $60,000 coins and using them to pay for 1 year of military service. Would anyone accept that in payment because they want a small mostly-copper circular object? Or because the government backs up that object’s nominal stamped value, so the coin itself represents the government’s promise to pay exactly $60,000 worth of tax relief forever into the foreseeable future?
So coins have nominal value at whatever the government decides, and can be turned back in to the government to cancel outstanding debts (tax burden). I’m unsure of whether they have the right accounting in the books as you’re asking, but that walks talks & smells like a duck (financial assets rather than ‘real’ assets).
The balance sheets list coins in a very low profile way. The nation really has two separate and distinct monetary systems working at the same time; coins and paper currency. The government takes/is given full seigniorage on all coins which is negative for pennies and nickles but positive for the rest. Dollar coins are a good deal for the government. Paper currency is printed very efficiently by the BEP, producing a 100$ bill for just 9.7 cents leaving a seiniorage of 99.903 on each one they produce for new circulation. There are fairy tales about where that seigniorage goes but the figure does show very well the low cost of money to a sovereign insurer of currency. The big issue is do the banks issue the money and take the seigniorage. BEP sells the currency to the Fed for the cost of printing.
EconCCX, under current account rules, coins are treated as equity according to this IMF paper “Money is therefore properly treated as government equity rather than government debt, which is exactly how treasury coin is currently treated under U.S. accounting conventions (Benes and Kumhof 2012, 6).”
Now coins also contain a promise, that of being accepted in payment by the government. That is the only redemption clause they contain but it makes the government liable, i.e. it must fulfill that promise. There is not need to have a conversion clause (promise to deliver something else) to create a liability.
Thanks Gus, Charles and Eric. Some interesting seat-of-the-pants accounting, but no supporting evidence for Dr. Wray’s definitional claim.
In the debt pyramid each level of liabilities is cleared with liabilities from higher level, except for one and that is the government level of liabilities. But what does it all mean? I wish MMT would be more clear about this because if you can not understand the difference, you really can not understand reality. One the face of it, there are two varieties of liabilities, and lumping them all tohether as merely “liabilities” is not very helpful.
Almost sounds like a religious sermon, “Creation or Redemption!”
Good economics article though. I saw a talk by Stephanie Kelton (video posted to Youtube) where she discussed essentially the same thing. It’s surprising how many people believe the government can’t spend money unless it taxes us first. 🙂
I wanted to make a comment regarding your June 6 article “The Reactionary University Critiqued by a Reactionary who Ignores Reactionary Economists”
The comment section there looks to be closed. Since my comment applies to numerous articles on economics here, I’ll make it below this article instead.
The austerity economics camp gets its followers well before these students arrive at college. Although it’s unfortunate that few universities have heterodox economics departments, there is a far larger influence on students’ thinking that occurs when they are younger and more vulnerable. See the wikipedia entry for Atlas Shrugged, the section entitled Praise, criticism, influence, and renewed popularity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged
“Over the years, Atlas Shrugged has attracted an energetic and committed fan base. Each year the Ayn Rand Institute donates 400,000 copies of works by Ayn Rand, including Atlas Shrugged, to high school students.[10] According to a 1991 survey done for the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, Atlas Shrugged was situated between the Bible and M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled as the book that made the most difference in the lives of 5,000 Book-of-the-Month club members surveyed, with a “large gap existing between the #1 book and the rest of the list”.[52] Modern Library’s 1998 nonscientific online poll of the 100 best novels of the 20th century[53][54] found Atlas rated #1 although it was not included on the list chosen by the Modern Library board of authors and scholars.[55]”
The effect of this would be hard to underestimate. 400,000 young people per year are introduced to austerity economics and the concept of extreme unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, at a time when they are too inexperienced to evaluate it, at a time when they haven’t learned any other theory of economics yet. This is done through probably the only novel that they are allowed and encouraged to read during high school that contains sex scenes. And the way they are introduced to these concepts is to set them as the highest potential of human beings possible.
Just think about the likely impact of that, for a moment.
I’d argue that the sex scenes might not even be the strongest draw. Trying to understand Atlas Shrugged’s appeal, I forced myself to read it and I have to say that the emotional manipulation is top-notch – the heroes are perfect good guys, and their foils perfectly disgusting (even physically). Especially to a teenager that has the impression that society is trying to hold him down, this must be terrible appealing.
What I find extremely surprising, however, is the selective interpretation: anyone who reads Atlas Shrugged should be extremely predisposed to do away with lobbying, and typically also in favor of very harsh inheritance taxes. But somehow, this always seems to fall by the wayside.
Finally, to return to the sex scenes, I fear that the worst effect of Atlas Shrugged is not even the creation of laissez-faire zealots but the explicit repudiation of empathy. Sex is supposed to be best for the heroine if it is bordering on non-consensual, family ties don’t extend beyond material provision, partners are evaluated purely on their “abilities” and the smarter, stronger, more efficient is the better choice, breaking a woman’s arm for trying to teach her child to share is considered just punishment. I believe that the laissez-faire focus is just a side-effect of convincing people that sociopathy is a way of life.
Big Red– am glad to meet over the Internet someone else who is aware of the very strong and very destructive appeal of Atlas Shrugged. Although I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that “the laissez-faire focus is just a side-effect of convincing people that sociopathy is a way of life” you make a very important point that it encourages people to be psychopaths. The combination of the 2 tendencies is what is destroying the U.S. today. And that’s very difficult to turn around.
What we have today are a large number of people controlling our economy and politics who are both Ayn Rand style laissez-faire economics believers AND corrupt con artists. The austerity economics policies are bad enough on their own. Add the con artistry to that and it’s incredibly destructive.
In politics, one can make a good case for the argument that the particular ideology of politicians is far less impactful than their level of corruption. If a certain ideology encourages sociopathy and thus corruption, then its destructiveness knows no bounds.
I’ve actually made a couple of videos about these subjects. I am just at the very beginning or learning how to do You Tube videos, and I probably need to find a class on how to do them, but I think I made my basic points in them. Here they are.
The Problem with Ayn Rand
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTXmfvgiK9E
Going to Extremes
“Atlas Shrugged” satirized the weakly developed images many wannabes carry around in their minds of the various types of elite they worship. Unfortunately, that it is satire, is the point lost on many young readers who have not yet fully developed critical thinking skills.
As a philosopher, Rand did not have to accept the validity of such a well defined belief system before she could study it or write about it. Her brilliance was in recognizing a system of thinking that exists and to make the world aware of it’s nature.
Well, according to what I’ve ever read about her, she adopted “objectivism” as her philosophy, the mode of thinking her superhumans have. Readers should be forgiven if they don’t see that this is yet another step in brilliant “satire”.
Foreman: By Jove, you’ve got it! Virtually all of our terms having to do with money come from religion, reflecting money’s origins in the temples. (Money did not spring out of the minds of Robinson and Crusoe.)
Jill: Excellent point, altho I guess you are replying to some other author. Just imagine if we could get Warren Mosler’s little book into the hands of 400,000 eager young people every year–with a recommendation by their teachers to read the book.
Reactionaries/Regressives are made, not born and the forces pushing Rand as well as Friedman down the throats of young people have deep pockets.
What is the title of the book by Mosler? I’m interested to read it, especially if it is a candidate for counteracting the huge effect of Rand’s books on inexperienced adolescents and the adults they grow into.
No kidding that the Kochs and Libertarianism’s other champions have deep pockets. Their pockets are practically bottomless.
The 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy. Details are available here on the Bookstore Page. http://neweconomicperspectives.org/bookstore.
His Soft Currency Economics is useful as well.
Devin