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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: December 25th, 2023

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  • pearable@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlthe debt
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    3 months ago

    That sort of thing can happen in extreme situations. Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany are the most prominent examples. Both examples involved not having enough stuff. When there aren’t enough necessary goods to buy and people have plenty of money you’re going to get inflation. Using the right combo of subsidies, government run production, purchase quantity limits, reserves, vouchers, and price fixing you can ensure the supply is stable and eliminate inflation even if there’s lots of money.

    That’s true. That happens because people are stuck in the narrative of the government needing a balanced budget, just like a household. It also happens because the owners and the corpos use all their money and power to ensure workers pay taxes and thus decrease worker money and power.

    Yeah, if the population was educated on MMT the ability to bring corpos to heel would be significantly increased. People arguing for it are fundamentally arguing for a change in how we think about money.






  • I don’t think that’s how people work. An individual can decide to think critically, act selflessly, but when you’re talking about millions of people environment means so much more. A mass of people don’t just do anything. They are the result of their education, media, and religion. When all these things are shaped by people with all the money it’s no wonder that people are bigoted, short sighted, and disillusioned with politics. We live in an extremely sophisticated propaganda machine.

    As long as people are sufficiently comfortable, things will continue as they are. Enough people need to find their material reality shitty enough that they’re no longer willing to eat the shit we’ve been fed all this time. Things haven’t been this concentrated since before the great depression. If we see a similar economic collapse. This time a collapse in the ad/tech market or obscene capital financialization, and we’ll finally see a similar backlash against capital. We just need to make sure we finish the job and the owners can’t slowly claw back political power again.








  • I’m a big fan of the single wall stuff. It works pretty well for water carrying at least. For hot and cold stuff you could always add a cozy. Certainly not as effective but no lead!

    On the other hand, I dream of the day when I make my own wax lined leather bottle like the days of old




  • Country is a little vague so I’ll supliment state in it’s place. I’d argue there are communist societies but no communist states. “communist states” may be an oxymoron.

    A useful way to think about self described communist states is that they are attempting to build communism. Whether or not their strategies are effective is up for rigorous debate of course.

    Communist societies on the other hand have existed since the dawn of humanity. I read an interesting book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They cover a variety of indigenous groups’ economies and social structures. Some could be described as communism, others were as exploitative or worse than our current society. The San tribes are a modern example of an egalitarian society or maybe more accurately a group of egalitarian societies. I’m also interested in the Zapatistas and what the folks in Northern Syria are doing but I doubt they constitue communism.

    Anyway I’m no authority on these things but I hope you found the perspective interesting. The audiobook for the Dawn of Everything is fastinating and a local library might have a copy if you want to check it out.


  • Any society that is not communism is not free. If your continued existence is dependant on you working for a wage you are not free. Being “free” to sign a contract that removes your rights so you can work and thus eat is not freedom.

    A free society does not need to coerce you into doing things that are good for society. You do them because they are fun or fulfilling. In other words, the same reason people work on open source software.


  • I didn’t say they can’t, I said it was fraught. A better phrasing is “can cause issues a non-euro country does not have.” This quote explains what I mean:

    So, in the eurozone a national (federal) government cannot run out of money as long as:

    • tax revenues are high enough to bring the Treasury account back to zero or
    • bond revenues are high enough to bring the Treasury account back to zero or
    • tax and bond revenues together are high enough to bring the Treasury account back to zero.

    This means that a eurozone national government does not run out of money until it has exhausted its tax revenues and bond revenues

    The United States, Great Britain, Japan, and every other fiat currency country don’t have this problem. They are incapable of running out of money. They are capable of making so much money it is completely debased like Weighmar Germany or Zimbabwe. However, those cases are rare and extreme. As long as they ensure the supply of goods people want to buy us sufficient they can spend as much as they want. This enables them to pay off their debts on a whim (if they want to collapse the safest store for money that investors use to outweigh risks).

    Sources:

    The Deficit Myth I’d give you page numbers but I listened to the audiobook https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2022/number/2/article/modern-monetary-theory-the-right-compass-for-decision-making.html