Headline in my news feed this morning:
This Economic Theory Could Be Used To Pay For The Green New Deal
Wait... wait... don't tell me. It's "Modern" Monetary Theory, the wonderful notion that governments can simply pay for everything with unlimited fiat money.
Which is rooted in a failure to comprehend a simple fact: that money is not wealth. Money, to the extent that it's anything at all, is a portable and fungible way of representing wealth. (Failure to comprehend portability and fungibility is also distressingly common, and the lunatics running our major financial institutions seem bent on destroying those attributes.) While a government can print money, it can't print wealth, and money with no corresponding wealth for it to represent is not money at all.
Wherefore I refer to this dangerous idiocy as Carboniferous Monetary Theory. As the feller said:
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy
But you can't expect anyone who thinks the Green Leap Forward is a serious policy proposal to take any notice of the Copybook Headings.
Oh, and NPR editors: "Shined"? Really?
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