>No, governments (unless Zimbabwean) don’t get to print money.
Well, this is patently false on its head. The Treasury Department and Federal Reserve certainly print money.
>They get to borrow money, and pay back previous loans with newly borrowed money.
What? Money has to come from somewhere - you can't borrow a thing that has to be produced if no one can produce it. When you hear comments like "The world economy grew 3.1% in 2018" that's measuring monetary output - for it to grow new money plainly has to be created
You don't physically print much money these days, but what the US Federal Reserve, and other similar central banking systems in other countries do, is draft new liquefiable accounts (US Treasuries are a popular one and in line with the current discussion) that then adds them to existing reserves that the other banks have with the Fed - if the Fed buys a bond from a bank, it just credits the payment to the reserves that bank has at the Fed - it does not debit an equal amount from elsewhere. Then the banks themselves continue to print money - they only need to keep 10% of their deposits in reserve and can lend out the other 90%, of which ends up in other banks as deposits, which then only need to get 10% of that value, and can lend out the rest, etc. So if the Federal Reserve creates $100B in new assets and loans them out, the nominal monetary increase in the economy could be as high as $1T.
One of the fundamental pillars of the modern world economy is the fact that both central reserve banks and regular banks can print money. Without this the world economy looks almost entirely different.