The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy
By Stephanie Kelton
New York, 2020
325 pages

Stephanie Kelton’s new book has attracted much attention, and Bob Murphy and Jeff Deist have already reviewed it, with devastating results. Why another review? The policies proposed in the book are so pernicious that further exposure of what she has in store for us is needed, and I have some new points to offer for your consideration. Besides, there are few things I enjoy more than writing a critical review.

Julian Assange’s heroic but tragic life is coming to a head in the next weeks. A British court shall soon rule whether Assange, ostensibly a publisher and journalist, shall be extradited to the United States to be charged with espionage.

A mantra popularized by Bernie Sanders and like-minded progressives declares “billionaires should not exist.”

The statement serves as both a declaration of the “immorality” of wealth inequality as well as a justification for steep confiscatory taxes on wealth favored by the likes of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that police throughout the Western world will not hesitate to forcefully impose arbitrary and absurd government regulations.

In a recent interview Black Lives Matter (BLM) organizer Ariel Atkins argued that lootings are reparations for African Americans. Atkins denounced the suggestion that anything can be gained from peaceful protests. “Winning has come through revolts, winning has come through riots, ‘’ she said.

In the New York Times on September 8, 2020, Paul Krugman wrote that

The CARES Act, enacted in March, gave the unemployed an extra $600 a week in benefits. This supplement played a crucial role in limiting extreme hardship; poverty may even have gone down.

[John Kay and Mervyn King
Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making beyond the Numbers
Norton, 2020. xvi + 528 pages]

Kay and King are not Austrians, but in this important book, they lend aid and comfort to several key points of Austrian economics. Kay teaches economics at Oxford, and King, who was formerly governor of the Bank of England, teaches at NYU. (King in an earlier book, The End of Alchemy, that I had occasion to review warns against the dangers of fractional reserve banking in a way that will delight admirers of Murray Rothbard.)

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch its currency….Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer way of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.