The biggest threat to our prosperity, to your pension and to the prospects of your children and grandchildren is in all likelihood something that you’ve never heard of. Yet Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which ironically is neither modern nor a monetary theory, has been setting alight debate on the Left and looks set to form a substantial role in Labour’s interventionist power grab over the economy.
MMT is utopian in the extreme. It provides justification for policies like Jeremy Corbyn’s “People’s Quantitative Easing”, which would require the Bank of England to print money to fund infrastructure and apprenticeships. An important basis of the “Green New Deal” being demanded by socialists in the American Democrat party, MMT has also been used to justify the Bank of England channelling billions into green investment – that is, to use the capacity of the bank to create cash for explicitly ideological investment purposes. American proponents of the idea say that in this way they could slash greenhouse emissions, create cushy taxpayer-funded jobs and offer free healthcare for all without bothering about who would pick up the bill. They claim that since the US government is the issuer of the nation’s currency, it cannot go bankrupt, but instead just keep creating and printing money.
For the adherents of MMT, all public expenditure can thus be financed by public debt – because the bonds of the government are as good as the money that the sovereign state issues. Public debt is no problem because it has its balance in financial wealth in the private sector.
Read more from Dr. Mueller on MMT with his new paper from the Adam Smith Institute, “The Magic Money Tree: The Case Against Modern Monetary Theory”
Unsurprisingly, the idea has found a receptive audience among the Corbynistas that head up the Labour Party. If there is no fiscal restraint for public spending, opposition to huge public expenditure programmes loses its legitimacy and projects like free university for all, renationalisation of services and a comprehensive upgrading of the country’s infrastructure can be launched with gusto. MMT provides the sales pitch for the agenda of socialists who hope scarcity can be abolished with the right policy.
You can see why the Left likes it. Instead of having to think like a household, needing income before it can spend and having to balance its books, they get to say that they can spend with impunity. In their dreams, government spends without hitting your savings, creating income and activity in the private sector instead. A Labour government could spend and have huge deficits without destroying private investment – and could then walk away from the huge piles of public debt they’ve put on the shoulders of future generations. Their argument, though, is that government could always be free of any fiscal restraint because it can always create as much money as is needed.
The problem is, this is all theoretical nonsense. The inflationary consequences of substantially increasing government spending are an economic reality. Promising to spend wisely assumes a knowledge of the economy that we all know politicians don’t have – let alone the current Marxist front bench.
Devotees of MMT assume a one-sector economy with an unlimited supply of capital whose only constraint is labour. Such a view of the modern economy is wholly unrealistic. The real capitalist economy is the one we all live in, where entrepreneurs must incessantly arrange and rearrange to make a profit, and provide goods and services we actually want.
In purely academic terms, the belief that you can spend and spend without any consequence would deserve no further analysis. As a political contrivance, with far-Left populism on the rise in Britain and the USA, MMT is presently one of the most dangerous economic ideas out there, and should consequently attract our utmost attention.
The lessons of history are clear: endless spending brought down the Spanish Empire with the inflow of gold and silver from the American colonies. The massive expansion of the money supply during and after the First World War led to the German hyperinflation that wiped out its middle class.
As John Maynard Keynes rightly observed, inflation brings all the dark forces in a society to work. Modern Monetary Theory qualifies as the financial equivalent to weapons of mass destruction. Politicians who believe in liberty must speak out against something that so threatens our way of life.
