u/100dalmations

At the risk of engaging in what some anthropologists call stageism (first there were small groups of hunter-gatherers, then barter, then money, then slavery, then feudalism, then mercantilism, then proto-capitalism, then capitalism, late-stage capitalism, then socialism, then communism or something else, etc...) I'm thinking of deep history, like corvee labor, early "lootable resources," the rise of the state, taxes etc. and how we go to something like MMT.

In the documentary, Finding the Money, there's an interesting section that describes how in medieval times (in Europe? was the same done in Africa, China, among the Incas, I wonder?) that the King would requires taxes that would lead to the creation of an IOU, that became a form of currency. Once this IOU (a wooden stick with carvings on it) was paid pack, it was destroyed, hence the idea of taxation leading to the permanent removal of currency.

Now, in Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, the Davids describe corvee labor, as labor required of residents say of a city to build its walls. They argue that it could be very egalitarian (manual laborers, farmers, royal administrators, and members of the royal family even, etc., all pulling up clay to the wall side by side), though there was evidence of rich elites being to pay something to get out of performing the labor. There there are accounts of taxation of agricultural resources namely grain (Luke Kemp's Goliath's Curse and James Scott's Against the Grain).

So I think my question is, how do we get to a point where we're no longer simply pooling resources not only to enrich an elite, but to engage in public works-- the city wall, or canal-- to something like MMT as shown in the above example of the medieval King in Europe, sticks as IOUs, etc.?

So I'm finishing up Kelton's book, found a number of her talks on Youtube, and am going through The MMT Podcast (Pino and Reilly's).

But one of many questions I have is the following: how did we get here, or how does any nation with a fiat currency get here. E.g., when the banking system in the US was set up (Alexander Hamilton?) and later the Federal Reserve (early 20th c.?), was MMT an accurate description of how US currency works? I was given to understand that once US currency stopped being pegged to a finite resource (like gold in the 1970s), it became a fiat currency. Yet it seems it was acting as a fiat currency way before that, say, during WWII.

And, just as importantly, why is it that politicians, economists, and journalists all seem to subscribe to the household budget analogy if in fact even central bankers will describe the system as MMTesque (there's a clip of Alan Greenspan explaining in Congressional testimony that the US would just pay any debt, or meet any debt obligation issued by Congress, basically implying that Feds would for all intents and purposes print the money needed). Is that how it's taught in college? (I only took micro in graduate school and the rest of my program, Engineering and Public Policy, just talked about modeling, tho' it should treat macro).

I recall ca. 15 years ago NPR's Planet Money podcast describing how large banks get funds from the Federal Reserve, and they described it as just adding zeroes on a computer screen. I think they were explaining QE or stimulus spending? And in their style of story telling it was about how crazy is it with a few keystrokes suddenly there's $10B extra in that bank. They never went any further with the implications of that, or how taxation is the opposite, the risks of inflation, etc. And this wasn't the 2018 story they did on MMT.

In some episodes of the MMT Podcast I’ve gotten fully ensconced in, there’s the idea that a fiat currency is like the points a referee awards to players of a game, in that there’s no shortage of points a referee can assign. They never run out of points.

Would another analogy be that the points reward certain types of behavior? Say the game is little league baseball, in which we reward the team with points for every homerun achieved.  You don’t get points hitting fouls, or for wacking the pitcher.  The game is based on a well defined set of goals that will cause players to behave in a certain way. So this is spending, correct?  The gov says, you get $X for putting solar on your roof.  You don’t get $ for putting outhouses on your roof.  We pay military contractors even more $ for making expensive hardware that blows things up.

And in the sports analogy, UBI would be, everyone gets points (lookin' at you, participation trophies!).  And if everyone gets points, you're not going to have an interesting ball game.

What would inflation be? If the teams need to use the points to buy something. Like, going to the snack shack for a hotdog. The referee says, when you're done with the game, you can redeem the points you earned for hotdogs. And what if the referee decides that you get points if you make a triple too. So now there are really lots of points, where a game might've been say 15-8, now it might be 30-20. And so players instead of using up to 23 points to get hotdogs, now have, in aggregate, 50 points. But shoot, the volunteers didn't make enough hot dogs. And thus prices rise, or some players don't get a chance to get a hot dog. Hm. Not sure about this.

What does unemployment look like? Referee says, sorry, we only have enough points to give out where there are 3 games playing. I know you guys in these other 2 teams want to play, but we can't give out any more points than what 3 games will use up.

Full employment: Hey- you wanna play baseball? Sign up here! And you don't run out of spaces, but no one else signs up.

Green New Deal, ie something the private sector wouldn't invest in of its own accord. Hey, some of you baseball players; want to try lacrosse?

I was stopped on the side of a city street, not entirely at the curb owing to some obstacles, to drop someone off. I was there for under 30 seconds, then pulled back into slow traffic when it seemed safe. Another car hit me. Lots of paint transfer (theirs, white), onto mine (red), on my driver side. They sustained some damage in the right-front bumper. This is the part that hit my car's driver side.

We exchanged info.

Their insurance called up for a statement.

I haven't called mine yet- was out of town. Also, I just had an accident last fall where I was deemed at fault, and I'm loath to have another thing on my record so soon. Our premiums went up. This is GEICO where we've been with for 30 years practically, with, up to now, just 2 claims.

Questions:

1. Was I at fault? or the other driver?

2. Should I call my insurance? I'm willing not to file claim for our car and just pay out of pocket. At first I thought I was at fault, but now I'm thinking maybe they were.

Thoughts?

I’m currently in the middle of Stephnlanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth and have heard her on a couple podcast etc.

I wonder if anyone can explain how the following fit together as they seem important:

governmental balance vs non govt.

money supply vs supply of desired goods and services

interest vs unemployment rate

Assuming this is a helpful framing, I feel restively clear on the 1st two, but not sure of the 3rd and how they all interact with one another.

One thing I wonder- when is deficit spending inflationary vs not? do we ever suffer from inflation from high levels military spending? i was raised to think we had inflation in the 1970s bc of spending for both Great Society programs and the Vietnam War. Is that true?

I shoot my kid's little league games with an Fujifilm 35mm/1.4 and a Vitrox 85/1.8 Mk II, and besides the perspective, it's hard not to notice the difference in image quality. I always shoot wide open and the subjects from the 35 always pop, sorta that 3-D quality. The Viltrox is fine- great photos, even to print, frame and give to parents/volunteer coaches. But is there a tele with the same quality as the 35mm/1.4 I wonder?

The 35mm could be my desert island lens- just love the image quality from it. It reminds me of the Hexar AF's 35/2 lens (which I've heard variously that it mimics a not uber modern Leica 35mm 'cron). I decided to go one lens only on a family trip to Mexico City and brought the 23/2 mainly for its FOV, but I sorta wish I'd brought the 35 instead.