The John Henry Show S1E001 – Modern Monetary Theory (Archive)

First episode of the new podcast.  Audio’s a bit clippy in spots, I’m not in the best possible environment; later eps should sound better.  These casts are archives of audio+video livestreams, most of which you can catch live at 8pm Eastern M-F at https://youtube.com/johnhenryus/live.

In this inaugural cast, we’re talking about “Modern Monetary Theory” and what it tells us about how our money works and why the general public needs to basically forget everything they think they know about economics at the national and international levels and start over from scratch.

Key concepts:

• Federal taxes don’t fund federal spending, or anything else.
• We don’t have to take from one thing to fund another
• We must tax the rich, but not to pay for things; taxing great wealth is a preventative measure to stop the democratic process from being subverted by the ownership class
• Stephanie Kelton and Bill Mitchell are your key figures in this concept
• I’m a messenger, not an economist.  If you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of it, start with those two websites above.
• Orthodox and heterodox economists hate MMT, but they can’t build a cogent argument against it.  They’ve spent petabytes trying, but they can’t.
• Fuck Paul Krugman.