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Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

I see this as another, albeit slightly subtler, way of trying to rationalize a command economy. It's one where the government has unilateral authority to marshal all of a society's resources. Do we really want, say, Trump to be able to print as much money as he wants to fund his wall?

I'm not sure whether the fact that the government's method of doing so and the unchecked nature of this power is obscured by currently makes this better or worse than straightforward proposals for command economies.

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I’m starting to think that a command economy is actually the default state. Democracy and free market only work when people have tons of money, like they did after WW2 (or when Rome and Greece were at the height of their conquests).

With wealth returning to the countries it was taken from, the western world is finally returning the place it always should have been.

Except that wealth isn't returning to those it was taken from. It's being hoarded by a small group of oligarchs.

Quite the opposite. Only around the modern era (20th century and onwards) have had the ability to take total or near total command of the economy. Throughout the majority of history, states have only been able to tax and mobilize single digit percentages of the society's GDP. Historical estimates are rough, but good enough to appreciate the stark disparity between modern governments that often mobilize 25-50% of the society's GDP.

It couldn't be further from the case that command economies are the default state. They're a relatively possibility in the scope of human civilization.

Not an economist or a socialist but your question:

It's one where the government has unilateral authority to marshal all of a society's resources. Do we really want, say, Trump to be able to print as much money as he wants to fund his wall?

assumes that government would be a single person deciding. If power were sufficiently spread out it seems to me that having government allocate resources doesn't have to be worse than the current system.

The problem with the government allocating resources is that it cannot do so efficiently

Sounds like we need better governments.

We'll just put AI in charge. What could go wrong?

At this point, only eight people have more than half of the world's net worth. Can these eight people allocate resources more efficiently than the government could?

Yes, if power were spread out then it wouldn't be an issue. But the whole premise of MMT is to give the government a means of consuming more resources with the actual cost being obfuscated. Taxes are a very transparent way of understanding the cost of government. You can see the money coming out of your pocket at the end of the year. MMT is a means of obfuscating that cost. The average voter doesn't have as good as sense of what printing a trillion dollars does to inflation. Effectively every MMT proponent assumes that MMT will give the government greater ability to consume resources. Think about all the promises MMT proponents usually try to make: universal healthcare, a government provided job for every person that wants one.

If a government merely taxes really high, either directly or through money printing, it merely does things in the positive sense. You can still improve your lot, it's just harder than it normally would be. You can even still become rich.

In a true command economy absolutely everything is determined by the government's "no", to everything. And the disappointing BIG main reason for "no" is because no bureaucrat is ever going to risk his/her position for either your fate, or your idea. Money printing does not come with any "no".

In a capitalist, even highly taxed and money printing economy, whatever you want to do, if you can do it while being sufficiently positive for the economy, you are allowed to do it (within reason).

In a true command economy, you can do nothing. You can't change jobs. You can't move. You can't start a business. You can't educate yourself. You can't help anyone with anything (even trivial things are a risk). You can't ... EVERYTHING is determined by the absolute contempt and incredible jealousy of everyone. You literally carry an old ladies' bag up a staircase ... you've just made enemies of every old lady on the block, one of which has a son who runs the town's transport department and you lose your driver's license.

There are a lot of ex-Soviets running around everywhere. Find one and talk to them.

Money printing is in effect a regressive tax. Inflation is effectively a flat tax, it wipes out X% of people's savings regardless of whether they are in the bottom 10% of the income distribution or to 10%.

In fact, it might even behave like an inverse tax, since the wealthy will be the first to move their savings out of dollars while most everyday people will be stuck with their savings becoming worthless.

> There are a lot of ex-Soviets running around everywhere. Find one and talk to them.

I have spoken to many people who used to be in state run economies (USSR, Cuba). Effectively all of them are skeptical of schemes like MMT that function to give the government more power without public knowledge or consent.

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