commentary by Roger Erickson currency operations, MMT,
Case in point:
Government Revenue Gains In Opening Up Drilling
What's wrong from the start here?
If fiat currency means "
taxes for revenue are obsolete" ...doesn't that also mean - quite formally - that both "revenue" and "debt" are obsolete & meaningless terms for a fiat currency issuer denominating anything in it's own, fiat currency?
And that it's distracting to even use such terms?
Instead, there are only optional
national objectives to sort through, and
inflation/
deflation as indicators in managing efficiency of the selection process. Actually, inflation & deflation targets set tolerance limits for any metric that tracks alignment to or focus on our national objectives.
Relative spending on stuff we "don't need" is formally overhead. Half of reducing overhead is actually exploring options well enough to perceive which are worthwhile in a real sense.
How do you get people to explore their options, group as well as personal? To start off, don't confuse them with obsolete terms that degrade situational awareness?
A friend says:
"there is a big hurdle to get over when the government itself does not understand this concept." Nor the electorate which that government replenishes itself from! Yet that hurdle can be overcome.
Are we beating our head against a wall, fighting upstream by telling too many people that they're wrong?
People never give up & just admit they're wrong. They move quickest when they have a better option to emulate, whether by accident or by observation.
So, why not start with local examples that people will want to emulate? Recruit small towns to expand local currencies, and generate more people intimately familiar with community currency. Then they'll know fiat currency without naming it.
There's a lesson in this for all of us, an under-appreciated implication of an old quote:
1) Gen. Patton:
"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."
2) Overlooked corollary: "Never tell people that they're wrong. Tell 'em what occurs in other instances, and let 'em amaze [or sometimes disappoint] you with the pace of their own re-evaluations."
These are both key lessons in optimal "shaping" vs costly manhandling of situations. The rate limiting variable is recruitment rate, NOT whether you're right. Destinations are easy to imagine, but it's the paths to them that count. "Shaping" means finding the shortest path to changing a situation. Shaping involves acknowledging a goal, and exploring paths to transition from one situation to preferred one.
How do we get people to explore their options? By exploring our own options for recruiting them. That's the best way to get people to join the exploration.
Increasing the generally welfare of the people is a goal. Agile fiscal policy is an interim goal. Achieving agile fiscal policy requires exploring methods - outside economics - for shaping our current situation.
