Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Politics, Power, and Economics: A Deep Dive with Steve Grumbine
Ever wondered why modern monetary theorists have been alarmingly silent on the debt ceiling controversy? Or why Democrats, who traditionally champion labor causes, seem to have neglected critical issues like the Supreme Court and the potential for a Federal Reserve Bank-induced recession? These are the pressing questions we tackle in our riveting discussion with the insightful Steve Grumbine, founder of Real Progressives and host of Macro and Cheese.
This episode is nothing short of a deep dive into the complex interplay of politics, power, and economics. We scrutinize the disturbing trend of weaponizing issues like student debt relief and Roe v. Wade for political gain, instead of providing substantial solutions. With Grumbine, we unravel the implications of attempting to implement systems like Medicare for All at a state level, without monetary sovereignty. We dissect Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), taxation and state credit, and debate the efficacies of building power outside the electoral process.
In the latter part of our discussion, we navigate towards the international implications of monetary sovereignty, the national debt, and the role of money. Grumbine helps us dissect the power dynamics of government procurement and the economic systems at play. As we round up, we explore the potential of building power outside the electoral process, the dangers of reformism, and debate on the need for political alliances and collaborations. This episode is a must-listen if you're keen on understanding the intricate dynamics between politics, power, and economics. Join us as we pull back the curtain on these compelling issues.
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Hello and welcome to Varm vlog. I am here with Steve Grumbine, founder of the real progressives, host over at macro in cheese and the roast scholar. So, and Today is an interesting day, these don't come out when I record them, so I'm just gonna timestamp this, because it'll probably be about a month in the future and maybe we'll know how bad this all turns out. Um, it got. It came out today that the Democrats are kind of pushed up against the wall on adding work requirements to food aid, which, in and of itself, would currently would not actually be that particular big of a deal If it wasn't also looking like we're about to enter a period of relatively high unemployment that seems to have been deliberately engineered by the Federal Reserve Bank. So then that relatively Anacorous work requirement is going to seem a lot more onerous at a time point when student loans kick back in, most of the COVID programs are gone away and the recession that we've seemingly stalled off because of political emergencies due to COVID hits.
Speaker 1:I have wondered why the modern monetary theorist policy world has kind of been Quiet on this To some degree. It's not. It is not that they are not fighting it. They are, but there's no unity about how to approach the Democratic Party on these matters, and I Think the Dems really kind of are Between a walk in a hard place for for reasons that are, if we're honest, their fault, but it's gonna be hard to deal with now and I'll finish. You know my setup.
Speaker 1:This is a very long setup and then I'll let you respond but it seems like because of a, the failure to really deal with the Supreme Court, thus making something, like you know, mint the coin that Rowan Gray says which may be Legal under the 14th Amendment, but since the courts, biden has not done anything to lessen the court's power to stop him and do it and doing these kinds of executive orders. It looks like that that they're not really taking that on as a possibility because they don't want to lose and the courts and have a showdown. Secondly, the Democrats didn't do anything about the debt ceiling in the first place and in fact, one of the weirdest things I remember, and the last two years, is they didn't even discuss getting rid of it in any of their reforms act. Do you remember them discussing getting rid of the debt ceiling in any of their reforms?
Speaker 1:No, not one time, not at all zero yeah no, and to me that's like we a poison pill we know exists, we know has been used on us many, many times. You know we're not gonna touch it when we have Congress and could theoretically Get that, but I guess they didn't want to look embarrassed because they wouldn't discipline Joe Manchin, our Kristen cinema. I don't know. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, I mean, you're presuming that their end goal is, in fact, to fix this and they, in their mind, they actually really see it as a problem. The reality is is that this has been going on since World War one. When it was happening in World War one, it was really intended to ensure that we made our payments on bills, that there wasn't delays and things like that. So they they put this thing in there at that point in time to ensure that we were constantly making sure we could ratchet up for the war effort. However, over the course of time, this has taken on a much more political and has become a tool, a wedge, okay, and when the Republicans are in power, they don't want to see the Democrats using it against them and vice versa, both ways. But it's typically, typically a Republican stronghold to Stand on these kinds of things and try to hijack the agenda. But I but I really do ask you the question if you understand From an MMT perspective because that's why you're talking to me if you understand that you understand the imposition of attacks Is the course of force that gives the currency its power, and if you think about this each step along the way, each of these types of Devices are used as a course of force and and they're used as a way of getting what they want. I don't believe in my heart of hearts that the Democrats really want to get rid of this at all.
Speaker 2:In fact, if you go back to the beginning of the Biden administration, coming fresh off a Trump, he could have stacked the courts. He could have undid just about everything that Trump had done during his time in there without any effort at all, had he just made a decision to do it. But he instead overtly made a decision not to do it. That this set the stage not only for these kind of debt limit crisis, but also the repeal of Roe v Wade many other things. And you say to yourself is that just a self-inflicted wound? Is the guy just a moron? He's been in power for 50 years. He's been doing austerity based politics and very much A bullweave all style politics since you know he first took office.
Speaker 2:This is nothing new if you followed the career of Joe Biden, but it does put people on the firing line, literally right there in the spotlight, when you ask well, why didn't you take extra effort to either? A push for minting the coin, which had no air cover whatsoever. The 14th amendment you would think that the Constitution Holds far more weight with the Supreme Court, or with anyone else for that matter, over some random law that was passed over a hundred years ago. Okay, so to me, once again, this is the parliamentarian jumping out of the shadows blocking another. You know obvious, common-sense law and you keep asking yourself why does this keep happening? And I genuinely believe, in the end of all ends, that their job is to protect capital. We have superimposed on these guys the idea that there, somehow or another supposed to be the champions For the working class, the champions for labor. Democrats haven't been the champions for labor in forever. I mean, we're talking about 1950s, I mean we're before that.
Speaker 1:So, and and we've talked about this off air that I think even when they were the champions for labor, they were so reluctantly, absolutely.
Speaker 2:You cannot look at these guys with a sober eye and really fall down and come to the conclusion that they're just so feckless and weak that they just can't overcome the power of the right wing, and they're just so overmatched, and blah blah. I believe it is intentional and when you think about this, they each use each other for cover and so it's a lefty one, and so it's a lefty. Watching the democrats preen about about the debt limit and stuff this, none of this stuff has to happen. Joe biden has made decisions repeatedly over and over through this process, to place Easy ant hills in front of him, to trip him up. Um, and so to me, I I don't believe they're. This is. I don't believe this is an error. I don't believe this is a mistake. I believe that this is intentional. Um, because the answers are right. There. I mean something as simple as eliminating student debt.
Speaker 2:The debt collective had literally done the legal eagle. Research had literally put together an executive order that was perfectly legal that biden could have used and stood on to eradicate it. Instead, he just took a little nibble and it made him look like he was a warrior. All of a sudden, now that's on the table to not only stop, but to put back on the the burden, the little teeny burden that was removed, to put it back on the backs Of the people that that received the slightest help. So again, I don't. I don't see an honest effort. I see we have to ask ourselves the motive why and when you serve capital, you need your labor force, you need your citizenry, pliable and imprecarity. And if you listen closely, they say it, they've said it the federal reserve board meetings, they've said it in congress, they've said it in hot mics. This is stuff that is Just a known. The point of this is to keep the working class in a position where it does what capital wants them to do. And here we are right.
Speaker 1:I mean, and unfortunately, um, what is taking the working class to even be in this position is basically, if we are quite honest, mass ss def, like Because this has been so successful for the past 30 years and it's been a bipartisan thing, and, um, I think you cannot Uh Deal with that. I know a lot of progressives who are, who are institutionalists, and my challenge to them has been increasingly Okay, you, you said that Biden did this compromise Student loan effort which, by the way, I'm I'm actually like, as I was actually credited over the entire time because it doesn't fix it permanently either. It is a one-time Relief. It's it's not even like a proper jubilee. It's it's, it's um crap, it's, it's a bad deal for a lot of people.
Speaker 1:But the other thing is, it seemed to me clearly implemented in a way that gave it time to be stopped. And what do I mean by that? Well, we can pull, like I know some of this is federal reserve. They also got congressional backing for this to to pull tons of money out of the air, which is, of course, how you make currencies. Pull it out of the air for for stabilizing mid-range banks. No questions asked, no political deliberations. It was done With help of congress, bipartisanly very quickly not Now. I realize you're not gonna get by bipartisan effort on student debt relief and if the republicans have their way, even current forms of relief like public service loan forgiveness and whatnot will be gone. Um, or uh, you know the income adjusted repayment forgiveness after 20 years, which still comes with a potentially massive tax burden? Um, none of that's on air, and there's also been no talking about like common sense reforms embedded by that. I mean, just let people declare bankruptcy on it.
Speaker 2:Bankruptcy screwed now too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know it's it's be, it's beginning is beginning worse and worse. Like, so you have these, these compromises that seem to be set up to fail, and I pointed, I pointed out the people, um, that the 2022 elections were going to teach democrats the wrong thing. And, and what do? What do I mean by that? I was like, well, they have no incentive to fix. Roe v Wade is because now they have the exact same cudgel that the republicans have had over their pro-life base the entire time, which is, which is, if it's federalized, then we can, we can motivate people to come out on the state level about it, but never actually do anything right. Um, and, in some ways, the supreme court, it's decision. It's bad for women, but it's ideal for both parties because it keeps the. It keeps this as a, as a motivator in particular areas where the other side is is strong. Um, and so I'm like, yeah, they have no political reason to do anything about that. And, and they've had a chance to multiple times, you could, oh, we couldn't done it in biden, yeah, but they could have done it when they had a super majority under obama.
Speaker 1:It was talked about at the time, they knew it was up. They didn't want to do it. Don't why to yourselves, people like similarly they knew the debt ceiling was a threat. It had been a threat in the 80s. They didn't want to get rid of it. You constantly feel like they're imposing their own handicaps on purpose and progressives eat it up. Oh, it's the auditor. Well, the Republicans. When they had a problem with the auditor, they fired them, which, yes, is democratic. It's shenanigans. But that is why the Republicans seem to get their agenda done, while Democrats somehow always seem to just stumble on every single block that they seem to put down themselves.
Speaker 2:Let me ask you a question. When you look at this stuff and you've been doing this a long time, okay, I do political talk show on Status Coup with Jordan Chariton, and over there they frequently talk about the political landscape and it seems like washrooms repeat every day just about. And there's been shows that we've done six months apart that could have been the same show six months prior, sometimes a year apart the same exact show seeing almost exactly the same things, and for some they never quite clue into this that it's the washrooms repeat cycle. Because you're asking someone that is intentionally not solving your problem. You're actually accepting their lie that the Republicans did it. Well, then it was Cinnamon Mansion and then it was the parliamentarian, and it's a rotating villain. Once it was Cory Booker and then it's Nancy Pelosi and their green dream or whatever. There's always someone there strategically out of the blue, right at the 11th hour, that blocks it. In fact, in the case of the public option, even with Medicare for All and things like that, obama, without any force, before it even became a debate, said yeah, I'm gonna take that off the table, and took the public option off the table.
Speaker 2:These are not. They're self-inflicted. If you believe in the goodness of the Democrats. If you think the Democrats are there to serve you, you're like, wow, how could they have done this? What a mistake. What are they thinking right? And if you're still holding onto that kind of childlike almost like doe-eyed belief that they're there to serve you, then this will always be this puzzling thing that happens repeatedly, like Lucy Yank in the football away.
Speaker 2:But if you get to a point where your cynicism matches the facts, it's really cynicism anymore. Isn't it just more like being an archeologist reviewing what's happening before you, watching the frozen caveman and it's primal state and seeing what it does? I mean, what we're watching here is a pattern. It's a pattern that should tell you that their interests are in fact not to serve the American people. It is. I genuinely be on the shadow of a doubt.
Speaker 2:Believe, as our friend Clara Matay says, that they serve the capital order and this is not some conspiracy drivel. This is evidenced by their behavior, evidenced by them, like you see the meme where the guy's riding the bicycle and he goes well, if only this would happen. And then he shoves a stick into the wheel and says, oh, the Republicans did it. This is I don't know how people can fall for it anymore, and it makes it very hard to take these things seriously because, ultimately, if in fact they are really being serious, we're really screwed. We're screwed worse than we would be if we just acknowledged that they're not really here to serve us. They're here to serve their donors, and I think that that's more of a fact-based assessment, at least from my vantage point.
Speaker 1:My argument is gonna be pretty much similar, with the caveat and it doesn't actually matter if they mean it or not, like, but I do think. I think people should really think about what they're saying when they're like. Oh well, this is just because what I get. I went on a rant today in public. I've given to doing that, although I've gotten better over the years, and the progressive response to me was interesting because it was basically well, your criticism and we know from our pragmatic blah blah, blah winning that if we do this, we can get people in places like Chicago or the squad to do X, and I'm like I wanna put this to you in forms of game theory. You're also telling me, however, we should never risk a democratic loss, ever, ever. Now I want you to understand that, if I take you sincerely, here's what you're saying that we should always empower the Joe Mansons and Chris and Cinnamon of the world knowingly, because they can't defect. But you can't. You have no place else to defect and you want us all to make sure we're in this party that we have no trading capacity for just from a electoral strategy. I'm not an electoralist either, but like just to.
Speaker 1:I've been trying to make this point literally for six years. Just look at what you're asking us to do. You're asking us to enter a party where we literally don't bring anything, but if we ask for too much or a liability, you're telling us to build like municipal socialism. But a lot of these people are nominally in MTAs and that, to me, is insane. Why is it insane? Because if you believe that currency sovereignty makes a lot of this possible, why in the blue fuck would you try to? Would you tell me that we're gonna implement things like Medicare for all on a city or state basis where you really do have to tax to pay for these things, because you don't have currency sovereignty?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't believe that any real, actual MM tiers are pushing for state by state Medicare. These are people that are misinformed. They haven't done the homework and the homework that they did do was self-reinforcing. They went to sources that would tell them what they wanted to hear. But as far as MMT goes and I wanna be clear MMT simply says that the currency, in the case of the United States, the US dollar, is a simple public monopoly, and right now we have witnessed the power of capital making decisions on the use and what we spend on using that dollar.
Speaker 2:The creation of currency comes from an act of Congress writing a law. It doesn't just happen out of thin air. I mean it is thin air in the sense that it's from nothing and it's become something, but it's not from thin air in the sense that the power of law actually creates a series of instructions that then in turn could be fulfilled by the treasury. But the way we operate today, we use a central bank and those instructions are handed to the central bank, who then in turn makes deposits into the treasury's general account, which spending occurs. It's a lot of jargon, but the truth of the matter is that really does matter, that little teeny, step-by-step through the process really matters, because if you think that money is just printed out of the just printed we're just printing money you might be tempted, as many of our leftist friends are, to think that they're gonna debase a debase-less currency, a free-floating, meaning that it's not pegged to a commodity or anything like that Currency. And unfortunately, I hear a lot of good friends friends that should be allies that tend to fight with you instead trying to talk about oh, they're printing money, it's gonna debase the currency, and that is so entrenched in thinking that the prols do it to themselves. If you don't even require the big dogs of the state to crack down on them, they're too busy down here saying, oh, it's gonna debase the currency, we'll cause inflation and they literally lose their minds. So this is super important what you're saying and where you're headed here, because folks try to make quote unquote.
Speaker 2:Mmt say things that it doesn't say and they try and word it in ways that they think make sense. But isn't what MMT says either, and MMT is a view, it's a lens of how the system itself works. Yes, there are some prescriptive solutions that I would say are MMT informed, and I would say that there's literally one policy, and I wouldn't even necessarily call it a policy, I would call it the last piece of the puzzle in the federal job guarantee, which is something that allows, since the state creates unemployment by issuing the tax because you gotta do something to get the money, they say, hey, let's have the solution come from the state that created the problem and create a guaranteed public option for work that provides a base level, not only benefits package, but a base level in terms of compensation overall. So this provides that circuit, if you will. It completes me, it completes the circuit right. So that's literally the only policy prescription you could say that MMT throws out to the rest of it is merely looking at the conditions of what's happening and so go ahead.
Speaker 1:I would say. However, this is not to disagree with anything that you're saying. My issue with MMT-ers not MMT the theory it's two things. One is, most of them have a class collaboration as few of how money works, so that they really can't seem to understand why the capitalists and politicians adjacent to them, and even people in managerial positions and then fairly elite positions who might be wage earners and thus nominally workers, why they don't do this right. And at a certain point I do think that is also will for blindness, because it's clear to me why they don't do this because if you actually the jobs guarantee prescription is also the most radical thing that would happen, in so much that it would actually mean that workers refusing to work would be a real threat to capitalists, and they would have to make this and they would have to make serious concessions which would probably over the longterm in their ability to be capitalist.
Speaker 1:So that's my first critique of MMT-ers. This is not a critique of the theory. The second critique is there's and this is also not a critique of the theory, but there's a little bit of hedging your bets about what taxation is for. So taxation exists. It closes the currency circuit. Why do we care about state credit? Because we have to pay stuff to the state. Why is that? Well, ultimately it really comes down to them having guns. But beyond that it is productive. It is credit as well as debt, and why would you want to call the debt in All right?
Speaker 1:Well, mmt-ers admit, inflation can happen from an over, from a monitor supply, although it's rare, like every MMT-er I know is like oh, this is just never actually what generally happens. It can happen, but we have a very simple fix and this fix we actually got from Keynes. We taxed it away. Right, that's the other reason to tax. This is pretty clearly in. Christine Dawson is like the other reason why you tax is that it closes currency subject. If you actually do get things more overheated than your production capacity allows, you do need to eat some of that currency back and you will. What I find interesting right now, however, is like there's a whole lot of like we don't really have to tax the rich to do stuff, and I'm like, yeah, you're right, we don't have to tax the rich to do stuff. But you know why we tax the rich? Because otherwise they accumulate too much. God damn power.
Speaker 2:Why Too damn rich right?
Speaker 1:Like, because what the currency is representing in this sense is like debt and credit, which is a power relationship. All right. Now there are other complications about this and there are other kinds of money. Mmt deals with state currency. It deals with fiat currency. It deals with state theory of money. There are other forms of money. They happen in certain conditions but honestly, most of them are still dominant because of some debt and credit relationship that makes them viable.
Speaker 1:That's why gold was used. It was actually a way to pay tithes, like going way back, and I think that's a legitimate issue. What is maddening about progressives who kind of flirt with MMT but then freak out because they're like oh no, inflation's going up, or I'm like okay, but why is that Like? Why is inflation going up? We had a bottleneck. We had asset inflation. That was part of federal policy because we were willing to do that kind of quote. Mmt it's not MMT. It's also not. Not I mean either we, I mean these are descriptive things here. The government wanted to keep the markets floating and make sure the stock market didn't fall, so you create a bunch of assets for that through quantitative easing. That didn't have to be targeted just at.
Speaker 2:That's not MMT, by the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know. So, you know, I know.
Speaker 2:We would hate that. We don't, we don't, we're not fans of QE.
Speaker 1:No, no, I know that. Well, I'll get back into the debates about QE, but I know that most imitators aren't. That causes asset inflation, all right, and there's a couple of ways you can handle it. One is tax it back. Two is actually cut off the QE because the because you don't have the productive like, there's no productive capacity or actual wealth tied to that wealth. It's not really wealth. And this is where I'm like you do need to supplement modern monetary theory with other things, otherwise you can use it for all kinds of shenanigans, and by use it, I don't mean actually do. Policy informed by MMT, is that you can throw this out there to get people to think you're doing stuff you aren't doing. Like, oh, we don't have to control the rich to have social democracy? Yeah, you do, but not for the reason you think. It's, not because we need their money, right? Their money is not the issue. Their productive capacity and power is the issue.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're on the same page here. Let me jump in, because you've said a lot of things that I don't want them to get lost. They're, they're, they're points that need to be addressed First things first, I want to tackle the big one in the room, and that is not taxing the rich kind of thing. This is frequently brought up, because what MMT is actually saying, what MMT yours, the development team, in fact are actually saying there, is that the role of taxation is not a funding operation, first and foremost. Absolutely so. If we start there, your hard earned tax dollars never paid for any abortions or any bombs in Israel or Syria or any other thing that makes you get the ickies. None of your tax dollars, because your tax dollars are literally deleted. They've gone, they don't exist anymore. They literally served to purge reserves in the system and they're gone. They're never re spent. The velocity of a government spent Baller is one. It's spent one time by the government and that's it. It's never spent again and it's created when it's spent. That's where, that's when money is created, when it's spent into existence. Okay, so when you understand that, all right, if I've got somebody sitting here in the desert and they are going to die if I don't give them a glass of water, however, the jerk that drug them out to the desert to begin with is in a car 50 feet. That way, if I have a choice, I can either a drink the water and live, or B I can shoot the guy that drug me out to the desert and not make it to the water and die as well.
Speaker 2:So what MM Tears are saying is listen, let's go ahead and get people health care. Let's go ahead and get people their college burdens removed from them. Let's go ahead and ensure basic needs are met, a universal basic needs as opposed to a universal basic income. Let's ensure everybody has those things that could be inflated by the capitalist class. Let's guarantee the service so the inflation doesn't hurt them. So we're not talking about not taxing the rich. We're simply saying decouple the act of taxing for the act of spending. So in the case of spending on the people, let's spend on the people.
Speaker 2:Then we want to have a tax debate, because since taxes aren't tied to programs, they're not tied to spending. Okay, we need to figure out what do we want? What kind of society do we want? Do we want the wealthy accumulating billions of dollars? If not, why not put 100% tax on anything over whatever limit society decides is the right thing? But that is not.
Speaker 2:Do not hijack my health care because you've got a fetish for taxing the rich. You're as complicit in my death as the rich are if you force feed that paradigm through the door. So I call that a murderer by proxy because people don't realize it. But it doesn't change the fact that someone died for your fetish to chase after the rich. Bite the rich. We have a real class war on our hands. Don't be a class trader and make someone at the bottom suffer without health care because you decide it's more important to fight a tax war with the rich. Two separate battles, not one. Two. Let's get health care, then let's go after and eat the rich. Eat them every bite, put a braised polento, whatever. Do the rich eating, but do that after you've give us health care and the.
Speaker 2:Frequently the line is that we can't handle Robin Hood politics while the earth burns. Let's do what we have to do while simultaneously taken down the bad guy. We're saying decouple them. That's all that's being said. It's not saying don't do it. It's saying don't hijack my health care because you've got a fetish that you've got to go after the rich. I get it, it's religion, but let's separate the two. There's no point you're not getting the rich to pay for health care because whatever you tax, whatever you think, you're funding something with you legitimize, and that means you need them forever. So if you want to pay for spending by a Wall Street speculation tax, that means you need Wall Street speculation to continue ad nauseam forever, because otherwise your program won't be funded anymore. If you're deciding to fund it on the backs of the rich, that means you need the rich to fund your program. Don't be a moron, don't tie the two together, and that's what we keep trying to say. That's the goal here. Right Is to decouple, to mentally decouple that the government, when it spends, the relationship with spending, has nothing to do with the point of the tax. Now let's get on the tax side.
Speaker 2:Interestingly, you said a few things that I think are really worth pointing out. When we talk about spending money into the economy or printing money or any of the other things that are said, we have two things we have a stock and we have a flow. There's something called stock flow, consistent modeling or sectoral balances, very, very empirical, true, like a scientific truth Like. There's a lot of things in economics that are foolhardy, this ain't one of them. This is one of the very few tried and true accounting identities. That is absolutely airtight. So once you understand stocks and flows, a stock is just a stack of money. A stack of money doesn't create inflation, it's a flow that does.
Speaker 2:And so if the government decides to pay let's say, I buy a pair of Levi's jeans today at $50 a pair. Of God, imagine that $50 or $100, whatever the heck they charge for a pair of Levi's jeans the government says, hey, we want to buy a million pairs of Levi's jeans for the government workforce. We're willing to pay $110 per pair. The government has now created, as the de facto price setter, the monopoly currency issue to set the price now at $110. And then it's going to get marked up through the retail world as our capitalist society does. That's one form of inflation the government choosing to pay higher prices.
Speaker 2:Another one that's very important is the bottlenecks. So if you have supply chain issues, it is possible that a company will say, hey, the cost of storing these goods at the port for an extra three weeks raises the price of everything, so we're going to put an extra 10% on top of this. That's possible. It doesn't have to be that way. Instead, the business could eat some of the loss there instead of passing it on to consumers. But it never does that because it's got a responsibility to its shareholders to maximize profits and maximize shareholder return.
Speaker 2:So what does it do? It drives it up. Whether or not there is a really bottleneck impacting them is another story, though, because we have this excuse inflation, excuse Flation, we'll call it right when the Fed and the Congress signal to industry hey, we're going to spend a lot of money, this might be inflationary. So what do they do? Businesses say I hear you boss right on it. They know that's a signal. They got that signal. When the Fed telegraphs we're going to raise interest rates up, all of a sudden some of the good boys of the network, like all the tech companies, say hey, we hear you loud and clear 10,000 layoffs on top. You got it, brother. And so they will go ahead and start laying people off.
Speaker 2:But again, each of these things are predicated on this concept of inflation and inflation control. Honest to God, it has nothing to do with government printing money or space. It's not the quantity of money that impacts any of this, it's where it's spent and where it flows. And so if you look at, let's say, I print print I hate that word, but let's say I print a trillion dollars and I give it to one guy, that one guy has a trillion dollars, it did not create inflation. He may buy a thing or two, or he might be a monopolist and buy up everything and raise the price. That may be what he does, but that in and of itself doesn't create inflation.
Speaker 2:What might create inflation, however, is taking that same trillion dollars and giving it to everyone. And now everyone has pent up demand inside them that they need. They got to get their teeth fixed, they got to get their electric bill paid, they got to get their car fixed, whatever. And now, all of a sudden, all these people that previously had aggregate demand in waiting, latent aggregate demand just waiting to be unleashed onto the economy and no production to back that up or not enough production to back that up. Now you've got a situation where you've got a supply issue. Now, all of a sudden, you've got demand pull inflation. There's times where it's cost push, where you might have something where petroleum, which is a universal product, that goes in plastics, it goes in glass, it goes in lubricants, it goes in every cooking spot. Everything I mean everything has got this stuff in it. If that goes up $2, now all of a sudden you've got something, a commodity that can raise prices up.
Speaker 2:But if you listen to scholars like Isabella Weber, her experience and her research shows that the vast majority of this inflation isn't really inflation at all, it's gouging, it's literal gouging. Excuse flation. Where they got the signals, all these institutionalized signals? They said we hear you loud and clear, set in dark, smoky room. So we're going to go for a 2.5% profit margin, desire to a 5% profit margin. And all of a sudden they made these choices and you can see the bottom line, the balance sheets of these corporations and the huge 900 to 1,000% profit insane during a pandemic.
Speaker 2:How is that even possible? It's only possible because in our society, this neoliberal world we're living in, there is a decided choice by people like Joe Biden to not really meaningfully regulate industry, to not regulate business, to allow the free hand have its way, and so this is just a course of doing business. So what do they do? Instead of disciplining the markets, they discipline labor with layoffs, mass layoffs, and that's where the partnership and part of Claremontay's trinity of austerity kicks in with the interest rate hikes. Now, interest rates going up hasn't stopped people from buying things, but it is a signal. It is a signal to industry that we're trying to get you to lay people off. And so your point of we're going to hit mass layoffs that's very real. But it's not something that has to happen because of interest rate hikes. Interest rate hikes would have to go so far through the roof so far through the roof that it would literally collapse the economy Instead.
Speaker 2:The unknown thing here about interest rate hikes is it actually creates inflation. Because what are you doing? This is all brand new money. When they decide to sell these treasuries, they know how much interest and they budget that and that money is ready for them. It's not something that just happens out of the blue. They know how much interest those things are, they're time box, they know what they're selling them for and they know how much it's going to yield at the end. So what do they do? They go ahead and they sell these bonds to people, and that interest income channel, even with the government not spending anything, is spending huge sums I mean trillions of dollars into the economy based on interest rate hikes, that's brand new money being spent all the way at the top of basic income for rich people.
Speaker 2:So, interestingly enough, I think that the idea of stocks and flows is not understood. If I print $10 trillion and just have it sitting on my desk, tell me how that's inflationary. You can't. It's not doing anything. It's like a rock sitting there, a pet rock with some googly eyes on it. It doesn't do anything. It's only once you start spending it. And if there is a way for those things to be put on backward like, for example, christmas morning when you want to buy your Xbox and you're standing out at best buy it three o'clock in the morning, waiting to get the lottery ticket to buy two of them for your kids or whatever and you're sitting there and waiting, waiting, waiting. They purposely only manufacture this many. They purposely do that because there's a prestige in the four piece of marketing which part of this is positioning. Part of it is price, and that price component right there is a big deal to exclusivity. That's intentional. So anyway, I hope that answers some of the questions.
Speaker 1:There was a lot more there, but there's a lot there and there's there's actually. That clarifies where we agree but also places where we might not. One of the things that mark system more seemingly more obsessed with than most In mt years. There are exceptions for telco hoops. One of them is the fact that we do not view the overall economic system as a closed system within nation state. That money is a closed system within a nation state, but economics is not, and so how that complicates what you said is actually not clear to me.
Speaker 1:But, for example, I am on record as being as disagreeing when with Warren Mosler about government price agents. But they accept prices of other things. I also think well, governments are in competition with each other for prices. They are because they don't just buy stuff internally. Now larger states like the United States, china, the EU, etc. Really do have a whole lot of power over this, because there's not much. They do need things from outside, but there's not a lot. They need oil, although the United States doesn't really need oil, at least not right now. People might be what I'm like we're oil independent now. Ironically, we could be in energy independent at current right now. What drives our oil prices is our competition for capitalists and an international market. We don't have to do that.
Speaker 1:That's a choice, okay, so on that, that's a complication, all right, and that's something that I thought though, but I do think that if we limit what we're talking about here to what we know, the government controls. I don't disagree with you. For example, we all know I think we all saw this and didn't realize we saw it why do teenagers now come in $15 an hour? I'm going to put a little asterisk in that because a lot of people who don't understand economics go oh, my God, they're making $15 an hour and I'm at like $4.50. And I'm like yeah, but that $4.50 have more purchasing power than the $15 an hour does after the last two years.
Speaker 1:Okay, so what we've seen is oh, the workers are getting too powerful. I Know you and I agree on this. I think the Fed completely knows it's not what it's doing, is not gonna do shit about inflation. I think they've even, I think drone powers even kind of set as much like. Like. Oh, yeah, we need to, we need to control the. We need to have higher unemployment to have a soft landing, control inflation.
Speaker 1:Asterisk subnote something in the bottom. But we know that at most, at absolute most, only 1% caused by labor cost, and that is. I don't even believe that like, but that's, that's the most they got. It's the most they could do at the, at the time where those Rises were the most real. But we do know what caused them. All right, mmpers are right about this. What caused them? The government finally said fine, we're not paying anyone less than 15 bucks an hour, and we're and the government in the United States is the largest employer, if so, fact though, it has monopsony pricing power over labor, like and if you, if you don't have a lot of excess workers, and we don't Are, we didn't. They're trying to create it now, but I don't. I still don't know. Now We'll get back to this.
Speaker 1:This is, this is one of the contradictions of their current policy that I think they know, but I have no idea how they're gonna deal with it's on one hand, they know they need to reshore things and build up an industrial capacity within the country and, on the other hand, they want to weaken the working class and have higher unemployment. And I don't know how you do both. I have no idea how you do both, even with, like, you know all these signals. I am not being a conspiracy theorist here, but I do think the fact that chat GPT got developed at a certain got got pushed out at a certain time, that also Corresponded with a bunch of signals to the tech companies hey, your dad's getting more expensive, so maybe you know, get rid of some people Is that gonna actually save you money? No, study after study shows it actually cost you more to get rid of these people. But we're gonna. But it does get rewarded in the stock market perversely.
Speaker 1:Financialization right and since you know technically, legally, you don't have any legal Requirements to to stakeholders, but you do to shareholders. So Firing people, even it's gonna cost your money, is gonna mean you meet your fiduciary Responsibility to your shareholders. And, by the way, since most of you are paid in stocks, it's not gonna hurt you either. It's only gonna hurt your viability of your long-term business. Oh, we have this technology been kind of fiddling around with for the past decade. Let's accelerate it really fast because it'll automate a whole lot of shit.
Speaker 1:I wonder why that happened. Oh, no, like and you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist no, there's all this signaling going on this chat GPT gonna fix the economy. No, I'm not an idiot, but in nor do I think. I don't think there was a single like. No one called Like Bill Gates on the phone and said hey, bill, get Chad GPT ready, it's time. That's not how this works, but it is not a surprise to me at all that you got all these signals it. You know this way that people have been getting out of the working class into Well, getting out of the working poor or working or working precarious, depending on where you're at into, like, the working upper middle. Let's get rid of that. Yep. Why I want to? I?
Speaker 2:want to take you back to something important you said. I don't want it to get lost as we we move to another subject, because this is super important. Look, mmt does not see itself as a closed system. It does not see itself just in a nationalist form. It has very clear international implications all the way across. What it's saying is is that those you can impose a tax on, payable only in your currency. Within that space you can purchase things that are for sale within your currency. That's all it says. It doesn't say that you're entitled to any import you want, at whatever price you want. What it says is is that whatever is available for purchase in US dollars, the country can afford. Period. That's number one.
Speaker 2:Number two only go back to the idea of the government setting prices. Government doesn't just buy stuff at the store. They don't just walk into giant and buy some shrimp and some mushrooms. No, government puts out RFPs, requests for proposals, request for quotes, request for information, and they have a huge board of tons and tons and tons of these initiatives that companies come and bid on. Okay, the government can tell you, we'll do a cost plus, we'll do a, just a fixed cost. We'll do all these different types of contracting and that contracting is how the money gets into the economy. It's not that the government just prints it off and says, well, we're not going to do that. It's not that the government just prints it off and says, well, we got 50 bucks in the till, come on out here and make me a Sammich. You know it doesn't work that way. What ends up happening is is that the government will put out an RFP. It will say, hey, we need at least three quotes. That's called the federal acquisition requirements act, the FAR, and that three quotes you must get. And they also have some rules about 8a small disadvantaged businesses that have to be able to compete for certain stuff too. So they have 8a set of sides for that. Each of these things allows them to determine price based on the Quotes that come in, and they have to pick, by law, the lowest price, unless they go out there and they say we've got something for a Soul source and there's got to be a ridiculously good excuse for a soul source contract that says they have some unique product that can't be purchased anywhere else. There's no compete whatever.
Speaker 2:Now the next part of this is super important and it goes to the international Element which I'm dude. I'm with you on this, except I want to help you see how mmt is with you as well within this space. If you look, fadal Kaboob is my favorite of the folks when it comes to talking about this stuff, and he will talk about how monetary sovereignty is not something you just have. It's something you have to earn and within that space, you have to have certain aspects of it. There's like a you climb the ladder to full sovereignty. Okay, if you don't have energy sovereignty and you're dependent on external Energy, you are now going to be. You have an external constraint on your ability to function, so you've got to operate within that, that confined area, or you have to have the ability to produce it yourself or have an alternative.
Speaker 2:The other thing is is that, when it comes to food sovereignty, you look at places like Zimbabwe that folks constantly throw at mmt is like they think they found something, and mmt will tell you flat out Maghabi went ahead, took the farmland away from the colonizers, gave it to the warriors there's warriors were not skilled farmers and, to take it a step further, the colonizers also took a match and threw it behind them and set the thing On fire, so it brought down huge amounts of production. What did we talk about hyperinflation? We talked about shortages, right? Well, they lost their food sovereignty. So places like that that don't have energy sovereignty, don't have food sovereignty, they're going to have a very tough time with monetary sovereignty, because if you don't have that kind of sovereignty either, you also probably don't have value added production to go with it. So you're going to be highly dependent on imports and you are going to be the tail wagging the dog, and this or the dogs could be wagging the tail, or whatever the saying goes.
Speaker 2:So I think it's super important to understand this is the reason why the imf exists. The imf comes in and preys on these poor small countries that haven't reached the kind of monetary sovereignty the food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, value added production sovereignty that that a country really genuinely needs to be able to take full advantage Of a free-floating fiat currency. It's not just having a military, although that certainly provides the us With a lot of benefits. If you will, I call them ill-gotten benefits, but you get my point. I think that when you look at this a country that has Trade set up with different individuals that are Mutualistic and mutually beneficial I think that that is not a typically a capitalist system, that is not a system that follows capitalist rules. And so within this and we're pretty much global capitalism here Right, we're not dealing with a socialist world, we're dealing with a capitalist globe, a neoliberal era that has really, really created some of the most deformed Reactions, if you will, to stimuli within this space you can imagine.
Speaker 2:More people are hurting than ever. You've got people that are literally starving. There's massive amount of food over here Just going to waste, being thrown out, and there's people over here whose bellies are so bloated they don't have any food. Why? Because of patent laws and a whole host of other things in terms of, you know, a, mine, my intellectual property, my Production, my, my, my, instead of a cooperative Environment that is political, that is not monetary, that is not a monetary. Political that is not monetary, that is not a monetary phenomenon, that is not an MMT Phenomenon.
Speaker 2:That is where politics and power, which is where I would say Marxist Layer over the economic system. This is how you understand that and where capitalists say, hey, not my problem, I'm here to make a buck, I'm here to make money, whatever. And so the two are oil and water. They don't work together. They don't work well together. But you kind of, if you, if you break out your lens and you put it on a spectrum, you can see where this stuff kind of glides across. You have aspects, traits of similar aspects of capitalism in china, for example, rise of the digital entrepreneur, dr Lin Zhang with this great book called the labor of reinvention, where she points out the digital divide and how these digital entrepreneurs are rising up in china, and millionaires and billionaires Coming out of this pseudo capitalist china, state driven capitalist china. So these are all political overlays over top of the MMT Framework, because even though china may use some rules and some different heavy-handed approaches to manipulating or or Stabilizing its currency, it doesn't change the fact that it's still got a central bank, it still issues currency when it spends, it still does all the basic traits of MMT in china, same thing in japan, same thing in australia, same thing in the uk, same thing in canada.
Speaker 2:And so it really comes down to being able to analyze that country and analyze its situation. Does it have Energy sovereignty? Doesn't have food sovereignty? Does it have value added production? You look at someone like venezuela and they've got crude, massive crude. Well, guess what? Saudi Arabia has massive crude in spades. What do they do to a country like Venezuela? They drop the bottom out of crude, because the real story is Venezuela doesn't have refined oil, they don't sell refined fuel, fuel products, so that's the place to compete at. But they're at crude, everybody's got crude, and they can literally bankrupt that nation because they were a single export type Model and it killed them.
Speaker 2:Yeah these are the international implications. And Then when you think about if I do business, if I'm china and I do business with the united states, if I'm selling goods and services into the us, I'm receiving us dollars. What do I do with us dollars? It's not the currency I use back home. Maybe I keep some for petroleum purchases or whatever, or maybe I keep them to facilitate transactions with the us, but otherwise, what do I do with them so that china will then in turn buy bonds and stuff like that, because why not earn some interest on their money? That's just sitting there at the fed. They're not going to do anything with it back home.
Speaker 2:This is all about what's in it for me, what's in it for me and if your currency, if you're not interested in saving In us dollars, then maybe you'll go out there on the forex market and trade your currency in for a currency you want to save in. But it's really not a matter at all, by the way, of Whether or not you know they. They want to do business with us. Really, in the end, they're going to get us dollars and if we do business with china, we're going to get one or rem, nibi or whatever remini I can never say that word, but you get my point. You're going to get their currency. And then what are you going to do with that? Well, it's going to facilitate your transactions with china. It's the same way with japan and so forth. That's where the reserve currency stuff kicks in and people don't really understand it.
Speaker 2:That's more than clear, typically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was going to say your description of this is actually a point of agreement, as a forex is really important, but it's not important for the ways that you think, um. It's important because it facilitates trade between current companies, are? It facilitates savings, because you what else you're going to do with another country's Currency? Because what it? You know you might not need it, so earn some interest, trade that for real goods later, because what you're actually interested in and people need to understand this Know what actually gives a shit about money. Like, everyone cares about money, but it's what money can do, like Um, and so I mean that's like a base. You're like, oh, of course it's obvious, yeah, it's obvious until Until you guys talk about, like, balance budgets and shit, because that's not obvious at all. When you guys talk about that, oh, people really care about money. No, like, that's not what's going on there. Like, honestly, if any government With the capacity of our government ran a balanced budget, they are shrinking their economy significantly. Yeah, um, and what is happening that?
Speaker 2:think about what they're doing with that. Right, let's look just real quickly, because we're in this debt ceiling fight and we're got always talking about reducing the national debt and all this stuff. What is the national debt? The United States, and in particular in the US. We can talk about other countries, but let's stay with the US because it's easy In the US.
Speaker 2:The US has a statutory law. It's a rule, basically that you have to sell treasuries when you deficit spend. But it doesn't fund. The treasuries are not a funding operation. Okay, it's because we have a quote, unquote positive interest rate that we're trying to defend.
Speaker 2:Okay, and people like a safe place to store their money, and so bonds, treasury bonds, are like the safest bet in the world. Government always pays its bills until it doesn't. It's that ceiling fight. That's where some of these conversations are coming around, because the result of the US not continuing to make its payments would be catastrophic. It would be a huge deal because you would notice social security payments that you think you put your money into it. It's sitting there in a piggy bank. You'd think, hey, my money is there, I paid into it. No, that your fika dollars were deleted, just like your tax dollars were deleted. Treasury is the one that sends your social security payments out. So if they default on the deck, guess what? You're not getting your social security check, government agencies, the people working not getting their paychecks all these different aspects of the government shut down if they don't make those payments.
Speaker 2:And it's not just that. It has a cataclysmic effect around the world where people are depending on I know it's bastardized, it's like parasitic, but in places where military bases are around the world, those GIs and the rest of them are using their dollars. They're using their dollar diplomacy abroad, spending their sperm into the economy and creating new money babies all over the place. And that's literally how that money kind of matriculates through the economy. And if they're not spending, one person spending is always another person's income. If they're not spending, those areas go belly up too.
Speaker 2:This is a really tragic and big deal, but the debt is nothing more than the sum total of every untaxed dollar in existence. And so when you look at this, you say, well, what's that all about? It's the treasuries they've sold. And the treasuries they've sold. How did you buy a treasury? How does anyone buy a treasury? How does China buy treasuries? They don't buy treasuries with Chinese Yuan. They buy treasuries with their US dollars. Nobody buys it. And who creates US dollars? Us government. Article 1, section 8 of your US Constitution. Okay, so in the end, this whole debt thing is a lie. It's a big, ginormous lie. It's actually the national assets, because the currency creator created a bunch of tax credits and they're dispersed around. It's not debt like any of us know it today.
Speaker 1:So this is why the go ahead. No, I agree with you, but this is why, like capitalist, flirt with gold standard ship, but they never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever ever will actually do that. No, because? Because it would be hyper deflationary to the point that it would hurt them immediately.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, it would crush them. I try and explain to people. The gold standard is I have a pizza pie right in my pizza pie. I've got my eight slices, but somebody says, hey, we're going to print more money against the pizza pie. So now we got to cut it into 16 slices. So now your slice of pizza went from this to this. That's all the gold standard is is really giving you a one for one, and it was arbitrary as hell. It wasn't like some real thing, it was just yeah, let's go ahead and make it according to this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that'll work, that's all. Gold have value anyway. Curious fantasy, I mean. That's that's. That's a key point. So, yes, you'll hear capital to afford with the gold standard or whatever, but they'll never do it because it would be insane. And even when they did it and one of the things I've learned and this has been based off of them in tea based monetary scholarship they were always fudging it anyway. But I mean, that's the thing, it was always being fudge and that's part of why they just dropped it. Now, if you want to go back to pure commodity money, you're insane. There's a reason why if you like, this is not something I've gotten from M and T years. I haven't got it from M and T inspired scholarship.
Speaker 1:When you see actual commodity back money, gold standard money is not actually commodity money. So people use that commodity monies. When you're trading in an actual commodity, like we're trading in literal gold, our literal oil, our, whatever the problem with that is one, if it's a commodity you need, you have to use it. That's a problem. It's like literally, you're eating your money. And two, and almost every area this, the dependence on these kinds of monetary forms have been either because of two things One, there's a government whose taxation and it's a big government, say China, is in silver or something, so that's what you've got to use. Way downstream from you or two, you have social breakdown and there really isn't anyone who can impose a state. So commodities actually, because you start trading for them for what they're actually worth, which is use values, which is a disaster. I'm not going to lie Like if you're in that situation. Things have already gotten really bad.
Speaker 2:Soliciting your problems at that point.
Speaker 1:Right. So these are things that you kind of have to get around, marxist. I think one of the issues with Marxism and I'm going to give you a chance to respond to this and one of the reasons why Marxism and MTAs have been sometimes frenemies and sometimes outright enemies, is Marxists are unclear about whether or not we just want to get rid of money entirely, and so I think that leads and I say that, and the reason why I think that matters is it means we don't study it Really. We don't Like, if you go look at like like there Marx studied money to some degree. He gets some things wrong actually, and he accepts a lot of stuff from English political economists that wasn't factually accurate but was commonly believed, and even chartilists did this, like NAP accepted barter theory. It took Innis to get beyond that, and this is why, like I was going to say when we were talking about Cateube because Cateube actually fixed a problem in MMT, because it really kind of was a problem, and neo chartilism was like, how do we deal with the international currency? So for anything? Because it doesn't seem like everybody has it and why, like, let's go okay.
Speaker 1:Well, what is the basis of an economy? The basis of economy is the production, and this is where Marxist and inventors actually agree. We like yeah, of course, the basis of economy is the stuff you can make. It's not about the money. The money is a mediator, it's a way to store value, it's a way to get taxable receipts and it ultimately and Marxism is a fetish, but we don't study it, like and that's been a problem.
Speaker 1:Conversely, as you know, my crypt of critique is a lot of the MMT years and I'm not putting you on the spot here. I think this is the political like. There are political divisions between Marxist, of which there are way more than there are in MMT side. I think the political division and MMT years really is what do you think the class dynamics of this ultimately are going to be? I think you're right In a certain sense. Trying to tax this back before you do it is actually like making yourself dependent on this, and this is why this is why this is my theory of why social democracy failed. It seriously is social democracy makes. It is trying to wipe out capitalism, while also being completely dependent on capitalist production for its understanding of wherever seats happen, which puts it in an impossible position. Like what?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like okay, so we want to get rid of capitalism, but we need to capitalist tax receipts to do this thing, to mandate production Shit, and I'm being quite serious about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm with you.
Speaker 1:And, unfortunately, in America. Personally, like Bernie Sanders, you're Bernie Sanders backer. I was. I played with Bernie Sanders like this, for those of you listening I made rapid M and this. I didn't know how to deal with him. I thought his existence was a good thing, but I was worried, and one of the things that worried me is I was like Dude sounds like he believes four different economic theories simultaneously.
Speaker 2:He has no economic theory. That's the problem.
Speaker 1:It's this weird populism stuff, and I'm not. The reason why I tend to be skeptical of populist is not because, like things, being popular is bad. It's because, like, there's usually not an attempt to systemically understand things or, if there is, it tends to be like follow the money, bad people do bad stuff. And I'm like, yeah, but no, like it's more complicated than that. And yeah, you're right, bernie Sanders was like sometimes MMT, other times we have to tax ricks. Sometimes we're Marxist, sometimes we're not, and I'm like I hope you know, I'm brother.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I hope you don't actually try to rule this way and I realized part of what it was Was okay. All this stuff seemed impossible for so long. You know, we have bought into the like what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism, whatever, and we just didn't believe in other work, particularly after the Soviet Union fell apart. Like there's like okay, there's no real threat. Like we have to accept this and make it more humane because that, like the left of when, when you and I were both, what people don't know about us is are knowing about you, as you and I share a trait we're both right wingers on point of life. But the left at the time period when we were both right wingers, was a left. That was really. It really was just about making capitalism have a human face. Like that was what it wanted, and I've never thought that was possible, like, but I did kind of believe at some point that maybe capitalism wasn't always evil and that was my mistake, you know.
Speaker 1:I think, oh, national communities can probably control it and make it work for them. They can't. And so I kind of you, mm, tears along the spectrum. Do you think that you can have the system pretty much the way it is now. But we just, you know, stop this. Or do you think the capitalist?
Speaker 1:The moment you give people health insurance, the moment you give people because we can, we know you can't. Like on health insurance, that's the most ridiculous one. We absolutely know you can, because that's one thing where all the other capitalist powers have conceded already. Yep, like it doesn't even make a socialist economy. Hell, it actually made Canada more industrially attractive than the United States. And the odds, because the companies didn't have to pay for insurance. Yeah, that demand, but so they go. Why don't we get it? I'm like, well, because medical debt is a way to discipline the working class and it makes a lot of people rich. Like that's why we don't get it. Like it's not. It's like that's not even about what would be good for like corporate well in productive corporations. That's literally about financial assets. That's what. That is All right. When you understand that it, you should do the back all the way back to beginning. You should be much more angry with the Democrats, and that's kind of how I'm now, like judging where MMT years are. How much are they done with the Democrats? Bullshit.
Speaker 2:So let's, let's talk about that. And this I have to jump when I'm done with this line here. This is super important. So there is a lot of social Democrats out there, people that think that, you know, keynes is wonderful. They think that FDR is a paragon of righteousness. There's a lot of things out there that are targets. They know that they didn't do it perfectly, so they'd like to fix the things they got wrong, but they want to basically build on those building blocks. And so you know, for me, that's where I started.
Speaker 2:You know, I started from a position of Bernie says let's be fair, if you're looking to electoral politics, we have not had a meaningful left wing person sans anyone other than Bernie Sanders ever. I mean like like well, going back to Wallace, maybe I mean like we're talking about a long, long time. Okay, now, that's not to say Bernie is a Marxist. You know, messiah, he's not somebody that we should put up there as leftist or Marxist. Maybe Bernie is basically capitulated and has become part of the machine, part of the Borg, if you will, but in reality it's. The system itself is not geared for big wins, for big changes. It's got checkpoints every step along the way to ensure it stays pretty much largely unchanged. Okay, so that said so much of what I want to do, and I've been finding myself.
Speaker 2:Because I did not support Joe Biden, I didn't vote for Trump, I went, you know, the green route, but regardless, I chose not to support Joe Biden when, oh my God, it's the worst, most important election ever. You'll get Trump if you don't support Biden. Blah, blah, blah. Well, I remember Joe Biden, I know who you are and I didn't fall for the bait. And I haven't been disappointed that I didn't vote for him. Still, I mean, I'm still very glad I did not vote for him.
Speaker 2:But there are people out there that can say harm reduction. They keep pointing to harm reduction and they keep looking at Democrats as harm reduction. And at the local level, you can certainly make a strong case. As you watch the school fight and the attacks on LGBTQ and stuff, you're watching huge amounts of very, very horrible scapegoating already really ramping up in the US right now. The rise of unfettered, just pure hate is at a really at a very, very high level right now, and this is why Republicans and the magas and all the other pseudo-populous fascists look like you know, oh my God, they've got to strangle.
Speaker 2:But the reality is that there's only one reason why that kind of thinking even matters, and that's because if you make austerity the rule of the land, you can make it so that immigrants coming to your country are taking your lunch, you're stealing your women, you're stealing your jobs, you're stealing your weed, you're stealing whatever. And then these poor people are committing crimes. Oh no, we can't let these criminals into the country. These are all self-fulfilling prophecies, right? And then you got the Christian right trying to seize on its moment and it's say, hey, these trans people, man, oh my God, they're a cancer, we can't have that. And they know that if they micro slice this enough, quickly enough that the left will do what the left always does, and that's hey, we'll micro slice with it and we'll splinter into a million factions and we'll be feckless and useless and unable to fight back again. So this is not an accident, not at all.
Speaker 2:But to me, marxists need to work with MM Tears and they need to find the MM Tears that are willing to go down Marxist Lane, and they need to find people that are willing to look at the power dynamics and really have a hard look at that and recognize that maybe our salvation lies outside of the electoral process. Maybe it looks at building parallel institutions. Maybe it looks at building real, honesty-guided networks. Maybe it becomes about becoming ungovernable. Maybe it becomes about direct action. Maybe it becomes about something other than just casting your vote on election day and walking away and going and watching some binge flicks on Netflix. I mean, really it comes down to participation and being part of the society and unfortunately for Marxists, regardless of what they want or like, we do live in this shitty capitalist helltopia and within that space, we do have money and the capitalist class understands money inside now and people say follow the money. Well, if you follow the money, you go right to MMT, you don't turn left, you don't turn right, you're right at MMT and MMT will give you the institutional knowledge you need to fight back against that capitalist class and the lies they tell.
Speaker 2:Because where we're at right now, we don't have enough people to fill a thimble up. We don't have enough people out there that are aware of how the monetary system works, and for the Marxists that are interested in this stuff, there's not nearly enough of them. So they sit there and talk about some future state that may or may not ever come to be in our lifetimes, maybe 10 generations away. We don't have the numbers. Lenin would tell you. We don't have the numbers, there's not the numbers. We don't have the numbers and we don't have the organizational capacity and we don't have the ability to make change at the polls.
Speaker 2:So we've got to do something, and the way to do that, in my opinion anyway, is to educate what I call normies, or people that are on the edge, that are Marxist friendly or that are Marxist adjacent, that if they understood, the monetary system would become radicalized overnight and the things that Marxists talk about would become much more relevant to their lives and all of a sudden they'd be willing to consider looking at it a different way. But you've got to help them see what's happening, because right now it makes all the sense in the world. If you think your government doesn't have money because you don't have any money. If you think the government has to borrow from banks because you have to borrow from banks, if you think the government has to do all these things because you have to do all these things, you're missing the plot. The government which should be or could be we, the people. It's not we, the people, by any stretch of the imagination. It's they, the capitalist, but we, the people.
Speaker 2:If we were to be in control, the money system would function very differently. It may be the same exact processes. Maybe we eliminate the financial incentive through financialization. Maybe we find different ways of regulating credit. Maybe we do things in a more democratic fashion. Maybe we put our own stamp on it, because we can't look backward to go forward.
Speaker 2:We have to understand that the material conditions of tomorrow are going to be different than the material conditions of Eugene V Debs and so forth. We need to be able to plan and understand what tomorrow brings. Part of that is the scientific model that Mark supposedly deployed. That would be, understand how the system works. You can't defeat a system you don't understand. You need to understand the way the monetary system works. It may not be a matter of destroying the monetary system because you still got a function within the global state. If you think of it like that, you just simply learn how the system works, find ways of taking power. This sounds so easy, right? We need to organize outside of the establishment, outside of the electoral process, and we need to be able to develop some power. We have no power right now. We just yell and scream on cameras and microphones and we get nowhere. We need to teach each other.
Speaker 2:I think that there's a little reconciliation that has to occur with the real material conditions where we are today our relative power, our ability to affect change. We can't do it this way. We're not going to be able to vote our way to heaven. We have to do something different. I think people are terrified of what that something different might be. They go la, la, la la, not listening. They just keep trudging through life one foot in front of the other like an automaton. I think that, barn, I appreciate you giving me this vine.
Speaker 2:My stated purpose, both in my media work on macro and cheese, the podcast and the Rogue Scholar, is literally to bring the adjacent groups together, to bring Marxist into the fold, because I consider myself to be a Marxist, although I consider myself to be an MMT-informed Marxist. I would call that a little different and I would say that not all MMT-ers are voting for Joe Biden and ready to sing the praises of Biden. Some of us are out here. We feel like we have no country, we have no representation, we have no meaningful way to execute our ideas or get them out there, and if we got together, collaborated, we could find power. We could find real power to affect change. At least that's my hope. I just hope that we don't do it before, we don't wait too long.
Speaker 1:I am very afraid that we have accidentally enabled a Vyma Republic and we're about to get whatever comes after that, so we both need to go. So I'm going to let us wrap up here. I wanted to say that also, don't think that I think it's only MMT-ers who are stupid fucking reformists, because, honestly, there's probably as many or more Marxists right now who have carried order for the Biden administration in ways that I personally consider betrayal or even worse, or at least as bad. They've started carrying water for right wingers because they're frustrated and they're oh, tailing the Democrats and work, let's tail the other team. That's a disaster. We've actually done that before. It doesn't work. It does not work. It goes real well. They usually put you in the camps, dude. But anyway, thank you so much for coming on and we will probably be collaborating more in the future, so people have this look forward to.
Speaker 2:Awesome man.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me on there. I'll talk to you later, buddy, bye-bye.
Speaker 2:YouTube
