Modern Money Theory - the economics of tyranny

Giuseppe Volpi would have loved Modern Money Theory. I picture him in some dystopic alternative history clattering across Rome clutching the incontrovertible proof needed to justify the corporate state. It seems that a theory that places the state - in the form of the central bank - at the heart of the economy provides just the set of tools that Volpi needed to build a corporatist utopia. No need to worry about where the money would come from to drain marshes, ensure the trains run on time and build a military machine capable of conquering Abyssinia.

The idea that currency sovereignty provides government with the means to control the economy is, without doubt, the economics of tyranny. I know that MMT merely describes how things are rather than proposing a substantively alternative economic model. But there is no doubt that tyrants everywhere would love the ability to print whatever money is needed and use tax or borrowing to regulate how the economy responds to that new money.

And this is the problem. It isn't a matter of whether MMT works (in narrow economic terms) but the social consequences. As an approach to economic policy, MMT fails the 'dictator test' - would the policy tools help or hinder some future totalitarian leader. And there is no question at all that the model - however much it fits with the current structures of central banking and finance - would result in the obscene situation where people are taxed for reasons other than the raising of finance for government. It is the rebirth of what Finer called the "oikos" state, a polity of de facto slavery where all work is directed to the interests of the state and that state provides, according to some plan, for the needs of the people.

The advocates of MMT - good people in the main - do not appreciate that the tools they propose provide the tyrant with more control than is healthy (assuming we wish to be free). This is not to criticise a economic approach founded on the reality of our current international finance system but to question the premise - that this international finance system is desirable. Put more simply, do we wish to have a system that allows government total control - that facilitates tyranny? It seems so appealing right now - reject austerity and simply print enough money to do all those things government wishes to do. But where is the end of that?

I'm sure there are wiser heads who can have the argument about the economics of MMT but on the wider question - the matter of liberty - we should fear a system that hands to the tyrant those tools he needs for control.

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On being right-wing....

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It has been a funny experience watching and listening to all that American politics playing itself out on our media. And the thing that makes me scratch my head most is the automatic connection made between being “right-wing” and a set of ossified social opinions. Sometimes this is called “The Christian Right” or “Social Conservatism” and always is it characterised by opponents as “bigotry” or – by the more mild-mannered – “out-of-touch”.

Now I’m right-wing. At least if you define being right-wing as wanting a small government, as believing in self-reliance, personal responsibility and looking out for the neighbours. None of this is about god, gays or the production of babies. Yet these outlooks have become cemented into place as fixtures of being “right-wing” in America.

But I’m still right-wing. Not in some cuddly, metroliberal, noblesse oblige kind of way but red in tooth and claw, in-your-face right-wing. The sort that believes in that old Reagan dictum:

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help ...”

If we want change – and boy do we need it – then we have to dump the social conservatism, the judgemental moralising and the ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ attitude to women. And with that baggage goes the tutting, curtain-twitching, lip-pursed, “they shouldn’t be allowed to do that” approach to the neighbours. The speed at which social attitudes to homosexuality have changed should be the starting point for our understanding of how being 'right-wing' must change.

None of this is about the 'nasty party' tag the left - and our current Home Secretary - lumbered us with. Nor is it about some process of centrist triangulation - a sort of Blue-rinsed Blairite approach. Indeed that approach and the "always tack to the centre" attitude of the terminally ambitious in both main parties has been responsible for the managerialist, Whitehall-knows-best policy platform that dominates current agendas. And created the mess we're in.

Thirty years ago I concluded that being right-wing meant being against the establishment's viewpoint and position. Even back in the early 1980s under a Conservative government, the establishment was viscerally anti-enterprise and especially disliked people who drove vans and the reps in their Ford Sierras. The "business" voice was provided by the smoothly-attired, public school leaders of the big businesses rather than by the bloke with a garage on the corner.

And even then - and this still applies - business voices played second fiddle to the sounds of people who weren't trade. You know the sorts - lawyers, doctors, the occasional bishop, folk from the BBC. To this smooth bunch were added, for entertainment I suspect, a few luvvies (only the posh ones with RP accents who went to RADA) and the occasional writer or journalist.

And, for these people, being right wing was the worst sin. I recall being introduced to a senior chap from the TUC by a good friend (who was both a priest and a Liberal) with words like this:

"Ah, this is Simon. He's the presentable sort of Tory."

Now I knew what my friend meant - I wasn't about to call for the blacks to be sent home or for women to be stopped from working. The sort of positions that the sophisticated establishment folk believed (and still believe) are held by most (definitely unpresentable) Conservatives. It was OK for me to be let out in establishment circles - I wouldn't scare them.

Believing in free choice, free speech, free enterprise and free trade seems to me the only moral political position - all others involve preventing someone from doing something because you think you know better. And that free choice, free speech, free enterprise and free trade stuff - that's right-wing. That's what it's about. It's not about god. It's not about gays. And it's definitely not about babies.

And so long as a few so-called "conservatives" think its about god or gays or women having babies and doing the washing up then the establishment - the left-wing corporate state - will have us by the balls. Being right-wing is about believing in freedom. That's it really and trying to build a coalition between people who really want to be free and people who want to take away or prevent others having freedom is never going to work.

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