This will be a blog of sorts, so I don’t abuse Bob Murphy’s comment section so much.
Plenty of errors made by Austrians, particularly when they wander outside their economic realm of expertise.
Anyone welcome to add a brief (keep it focused) critique of recent statements by Austrians or Libertarians. I’ll have something to say regularly.
Should be good fodder for debate on this forum.
https://mises.org/library/book/anti-mmt-errors-modern-monetary-theory
“Modern monetary theory turns conventional public finance on its head. For a government such as the United States, MMT argues, spending does not depend on first raising revenue through taxation or borrowing. A monetary sovereign creates the dollars by spending and then those dollars disappear when taxed or are transformed into government bonds when the government runs a deficit. The government, therefore, is not financially constrained.”
It’s amazing that what to me is an obviously satanic agenda masquerading as a theory gets treated as a serious thing. But Mises.org has no tools or framework to point to the spiritual malice and obvious coordinated attack ongoing here. They’re an economics site, and only can reach into the economic rhetorical toolkit.
It has been an obvious truism since recorded history that the rulers or ruling class want to be able to direct the activities of other people. Printing money or monopolizing coinage is just one tool towards that end.
The shared pretense of there being any new ‘theory’ here is what I object to. And it’s what Murphy, Newman et al. are buttressing when they rebut it on its own terms.
I don’t think he understands the psychological play here. Bob Murphy and Mises.org have been tricked into validating a troll called MMT … by arguing against it.
The goal of academic study is not to be error-free or attain napoleonic certitude. The goal is to better understand or grasp the nature of the-world-as-it-is. “How things [in the broadest sense of things] hang together [in the broadest sense of hanging together].” (Forgot the citation.) At least, that was the goal of classical scholarship. But “the-world-as-it-is” is an obstacle for moralistic fallacies[1] like socialism, etc. With the advent of socialism as an insuperable social imperative (with the rise of modernism in the late-18th and early-19th century), facts and logic became movable obstacles which may be moved at will whenever required by the far more pressing and urgent requirement to achieve a socialistic Utopia. Mises devoted a chapter to this in Human Action, under the title The revolt against reason, which he described with the word polylogism.
For the Marxist, there are a thousand different logics, one logic for each kind of person or class in society. Everyone has their own logic, and so no one person gets to determine the final or ultimate truth or reality of things. Thus, facts are actually “facts” and logical arguments are actually “logical arguments”. They are neither special nor important nor deserving of any special recognition above any other sort of persuasive rhetoric, except insofar as they serve the goals of the revolution which goals, of course, are known only to the inner party or even exclusively known by Big Brother himself. And therein we meet the final contradiction of all variations of socialism/Marxism – the socialist Utopia of perfect uniformity is really just the apogee of universal enslavement to a single, solitary superman, that is, it is the ultimate wet-dream of every tyrant. This is why I describe Marxism/socialism as the economics of hell – it is fueled not by any noble or humanistic goal, it is fueled exclusively by envy and the false-hope of the masses of the envious that they might turn out to be clever enough to seize the throne and ascend to become Big Brother himself. Scorched-earth all-or-nothing-ism… “I will rule the world or we will all die by my trying.”
Of course, none of that is Austrian economics, it’s power-elite class analysis, I’ll come back to reply to the rest below…
[1] A moralistic fallacy – in the terminology I learned from Kanazawa & Miller’s excellent Why beautiful people have more daughters – is the inverse of a naturalistic fallacy. A naturalistic fallacy posits that, if something is “natural”, it is therefore permissible (ethical). This is the kind of ethical argument that a serial-killer might (for example) offer to explain why he “hunts people like a predator”, or whatever. A moralistic fallacy is the inverse of this – it is the fallacy of believing that if something is immoral, it must be false or, vice-versa, if it is moral, then it must be possible/achievable. Socialists/Marxists are invariably trapped in one form of moralistic fallacy or another.
I look at it like football. There are two general strategies to playing football, both valid: ground-game, and passing-game. The all-round best teams have a strong capability for both strategies, and are able to switch between them at a snap of the fingers. There is genuine value in the “ground game” of rebutting economic fallacies, in terms of economic science. That’s what MI’s focus has been and I fully support it. However, ground-game alone is not enough. That’s where the Gospel comes into the picture – we need air-support from above, and we need to contextualize the ground-game in terms of the kingdom of God. If we do not do this, we will eventually be overwhelmed by the opposition who is absolutely playing both levels at once – the demonic realm are waging a simultaneously earthly and heavenly war (Eph. 6:12, etc.) against the children of God. Until the advent of Clown World, the heavenly dimension of this war was not obvious. In my opinion, it is now relatively obvious… the headlines are too weird to be the fruit of merely human evil and you have to be a special kind of naive not to notice that something is amiss…
Naw, I disagree with this because you’re short-circuiting our team’s capacity to refute bad arguments on their own turf. Part of the reason that any bad argument is bad, is that it is self-refuting. Even if you don’t manually construct a contradiction from it, the fact remains that it is untrue and, thus, it is ultimately at war with reality itself and, thus, self-refuting. This is why I often prefer to debate atheists, Marxists, globalists, etc. on their own terms. The only people I will not extend this favor to are outright satanists – if you directly and openly profess that you are fighting for ultimate evil, then there is really nothing further to discuss. There is only power. So outright satanism loses by force. See Matthew 28:18, compare to Revelation 19:11ff and 20:10. But as long as my opponent has the good sense to at least keep up the pretense of being an upright citizen fighting for some definition of the Good, the True and the Beautiful (even if their definition is erroneous), we can have a civilized discussion. I will extend the olive branch of diplomacy to such opponents. But those who throw out all pretenses receive no such olive branch. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ or perish in the flames of hell, there is nothing else to be said to such people.
The problem with this approach is that it leaves no room for people to wake up from their slumber. When I was younger, I believed all kinds of economic fallacies that I had no idea were totally false; and I was raised conservative! Very few people in the US grow up in homes more conservative than mine was, well less than 1%; and yet I was still a clueless moron in respect to the real foundations of economic theory until I read Sowell’s Basic Economics which awakened me to dig further, whereupon I discovered Austrian economics. Reducing everything to a pulpit-pounding “convert or perish” formula has the net result of misrepresenting the cause of truth, beauty and goodness in the Gospel. Instead, like Paul, I am all things to all men, so that by any means I (that is, Christ in me) might save some. So, to anyone who is not self-avowedly playing for the dark side, I will extend the olive-branch of diplomatic, civilized discussion. I might not even change their mind but, in the process, I might change the minds of others who are listening. And that’s a win…
All good points well stated. TY.