The ¥ of Credit & Debt

Or wh¥ you should never speak of debt... without acknowledging the credit.

I have some things to say about this article from Money on the Left. One of which is that even MMT’ers can be dopey (came up in comments, not in the article by Beaman & Ferguson itself).

The main thing to release that is weighing on my mental balance today are; (1) why money is not evil, but we need to trace things to eradicate “evil”. (2) Why units of account are a decent good practical arrangement, not a degradation of human freedom, in fact the exact opposite. But you can kill a child with too much candy and sugar injections.

Debt is Not a Dirty Word, Hence Nor Is Credit

Debt is (or should be) easy to do in leftist politics, and so hence also should be Credit. Two sides of the same ledger. It is about justice. It is not about oppression and unjust indebtedness. Being clear about this is vital for leftist political power. But this goes beyond leftist politics, it is a universal politics for all people, and it concerns justice, not merely money per se. The monetary system is part of the justice system, and when it gets corrupted the two mingle in the most perverse ways (when one may literally purchase justice, or pay to suppress justice). We cannot afford to be naïve about this one way or the other.

Accounting is primitively (and hence naturally) about accounting for obligations, but especially when no trust can be established. We cannot live with all the goodies of modern society by simple barter exchange and potlach. So it is pretty damn important for raising human civilization beyond subsistence living, to have formal social units of account. It would be wonderful to be able to trust people, but there must be safeguards too. I’ve given my entire life savings away, and forgiven the debt. But before I forgave the credit I had extended to friends, I was in fact in credit, and they were in debt, both formally and informally. There was a transaction record of the account, and a moral account too. It matters not that I forgave the debt immediately. The records matter. It is 𖥐𖦪𖠢𖢧𖥣ꛘ𖥕ꚶ𖨚 to think otherwise.

If we advance civilization to a stage where we do not practically need a system of units of account, then wonderful, but we should still have the system of units of account, because people are not perfect. Sometimes an honest debt is forgotten, but has not been redeemed. So the need for formal records of a account is far from being fascistic, it is decent ordinary justice and kindness. Don’t let any ultralefties tell you otherwise, they'd be wrong.

Even in a family, you have debt & credit obligations, to your parents, and your parents towards you. The fact this is natural and not formalized on ledger books is beside the point. You do not need a ledger book when everyone gets along together and knows their obligations. These are not oppressive western systems or any other sort of postmodernist nonsense. If an obligation is forgotten, I think we can just say the debt has been forgiven, and hence the credit has also been redeemed.

Yes, it helps to use such formal accounting jargons, because the aim here is to point out that the governmental monetary systems should also be better structured to incorporate a moral element of justice, which presently under capitalistic system they are not... so much. I mean the justice inherent in systems of accounting is almost invisible, since from inception the governemtn is causing mass unemployment, and failing to use their monetary operations to reverse that imposition. A manifest injustice. So the monetary system is in our day and age, unjust from inception. The MMT point is that it does not have to be this way, but also, the monetary system can be an enormous force for good, precisely because it is a formal way to record obligations we have for looking after each other without getting our labour exploited. When the poor person in need of care cannot compensate me themselves, it is not a bad thing the State compensates me instead.

It is not greedy nor immoral to desire compensation for one’s labour. Because the nation-state or city or village is not a family we cannot just let people offering their labour be happy with the thought they helped someone in their family. I think the idea should be, yes, they should be happy to have been of service to someone in need but also not left starving themselves!, and thinking of other people as part of an abstract idea of a “human family” is a good thing (also fairly natural in my mind) but can become nerd-commie idiocy if taken to an extreme altruism without justice, or virtue hoarding (the flip side of that amoral coin). By “not left starving themselves” I mean of course in relative terms — not put at a disadvantage in terms of economic inequality to the grifters, free-riders, rentiers and the predators.

As for virtue hoarders, that's a whole other topic for another day, but even too distasteful for me to bother with. I’d just say, one should always have the freedom to redeem, and officially so, hence the need for systems of social units of account, and that gets rid of virtue hoarders.

Using the Monetary System for Good

Topic (1) then. Why we should want system of accounting. The answer, to paint a brad brush, is that we cannot blindly trust any old codger, and so we do need to have social records of account, as distasteful as you anarchists may think it is. It is distasteful to have to live in a “society” no? Wouldn't we all just like to live by our inner little 𝔡𝑜🆄𝐜𝙝𝚎𝖇𝙖ⓖ libertarian. Well that’s fine if you live in a small community where everyone knows everyone, and so there is practically no need for any ledger books. So no formal money. But the accounting records are still there, in your head, unless you are an LSD-doped-out hippie or a psychopath. The money is always in your head.

Ironically money is one way to do so — to catch the cheats — otherwise why would all the boy scouts and do-gooders be shouting out “follow the money.” There’s two sides to that, one the obvious (people with loads of money are almost de facto guilty of some crime or another); the other of which almost everyone ignores is that the state system of accounts is a way to catch the bad guys. If you are in the state system of accounts. If you are off-shore in some Bahama or Swiss or Cayman bank, or crypto, then you should practicality be arrested without further fuss. Guilty not before being proven innocent, but guilty at face value. “Look, my hand is in the cookie jar, what are you suckers gonna do about it!”

We cannot just get along in healthy civilization with a rigid parity exchange for every social transaction, that’s a neoclassical and classical economics fantasy and an insanity. Some exchanges will be highly unjust, and will need to be forgiven. Some tax credits will have been gained unjustly, and will need to be appropriated — and not to “fund the government,” (an inapplicable concept) but just to defund the parasites. Sorry if that hurts your feelings Mr & Mrs Billioniare.

But in the meantime, even before such rebalancing policy, the government can still always fully employ anyone willing to work for public purpose, and can always fully support people who cannot or should not be working but who need the government scorepoints.

Hey, I realize these two policy sets are intertwined — since inequality elimination policy is intimately coupled to full employment, via a moral politics. But progress in both directions is possible without total lock-step crippling.

Good Praxis?

(Question mark since who the ꖾꗍꝆꝆ am I to know. Part of me is, "Nothin’s worked so far,” doomer, but obviously heaps of people got to MMT of their own free will and curiosity[1] and have become radicalized without one jot of ink spilled by yours truly and other dirtbags. So there is abundance of hope for future progressive politics.)

Never be a Varoufakis or a Michael Hudson. It is easy to never speak of Debt without also speaking of Credit. It only takes a few extra neural firings. But I “get it” that many people are too lazy to think before they speak. Varoufakis and Hudson in particular are almost devolving into LLM’s. AlternativeTo? In recent times I have found Yeva Nersisyan and Aaron Good to be two people with far more relevant things to say, who say them in less obscure or agenda-ridden ways. And of course the ever reliable Grumbine and Co. at RealProgressives. Never Let a Serious Brain Deficiency Go Unridiculed.

Every time you want to say the D-word, then just slow your speech down and also say the C-word. This will not only make your statement more accurate and more credible, it is likely going to make you change your brain & mind through some sort of neurological feedback thing, whatever they call it, NLP or something, or just ordinary Sapir-Whorf effect.

“The government debt is ballooning, which means private savings are ballooning, so these are ostensibly good balloons to have.” Only took a few extra breathes. Not an ordeal of Crossfit lip-flapping training. The CrossFit talk masochism comes in when you have to expend one more sentence to add the reality that these balloons are entirely ꕒꗍꖀ𐝥ꗍꘝꕯꖡ radioactive scum-filled balloons for a reason entirely unrelated to the accounting numbers, namely whose bank accounts these party balloons are floating around inside — the top Ten Percenters, aristocrats and kleptocratic plutocrats. The government debt is not bad, since it is someone’s tax credits, it is the maldistribution that is bad, a complementary different thing to the raw numbers on the ledgers. There’s an equal number of positive numbers as negative. Focus on who holds the tax credits, and did they ever justify holding them?

Goes under the heading — a few chocolate easter eggs are a pleasant little indulgent thing, but not if one fat kid grabs them all.

But at least we can inspect those ledgers! It's baffles me why so many leftists think it is beneath them to put in the effort to understand these ledgers, because it is a highly socialist system. It’s practically communist.

The rabid anti-communists are those JEE types who cannot make do with Parliamentary or Congress appropriation spending, but instead need to grab “tax dollars” off the tax-payers through selling drugs, gambling, prostitution and of course blackmail extortion. That deep state-within-the-state-within-the-state are the ones who are “tax payer funded” — because they cannot win government spending appropriations — the Parliamentary staff, politicians, contractors, and ordinary civil servants are funding the tax payers, not the other way around.

This reminds me of a point Christian Parenti made recently, which runs counter to some of my writing. I prefer, “We do not live in a democracy and never have,” but Parenti advised, “No, we do have elements of democracy, but they are pitiful.” I think that is a fair nuance to use. I will try to be more careful in the future when I rant about our lack of democracy. You should be as careful when using the word debt, never say it without talking about the equal credit. The two are inescapable in any decent society where people understand their social obligations towards one another.

[1] The fact this happens means some politicians and civil servants can get to MMT as well, since they’re not entirely Neolib Mutants, not yet anyway. Bare shreds of working class consciousness still exist among the well-credentialed professional managerial class. The other point here is that good peoople, once they discover MMT, become better people. ꕒꗞꖹꖀꖾꗍꕗꗇꗱs who come to understand MMT become merely better informed douchebags, but they are irrelevant, since their pro-capitalist boosting just got neutered. Forgive me a few sweeping generalizations here, yo.