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Here is my poor attempt : Imagine I pluck a leaf off a tree and hand it to you and promise that I will do an hours farm labouring if you or anyone else comes b
by lifeisstillgood 5y ago
Here is my poor attempt :
Imagine I pluck a leaf off a tree and hand it to you and promise that I will do an hours farm labouring if you or anyone else comes back and give me that leaf. I now have a debt, and money is invented to tokenise that debt.
However there are only 24 hours in the day so my productive capacity is limited to (at best) 24 leaves per day. (And yes this leads into time issues - that 24 leaves could buy an hour next week - but should there be 24 leaves for every day I am able to work? or just recycle the same 24 ? This leads us into money velocity which impacts the overall productivity calculation at the end)
Now MMT says that as there is only one farm labourer and there is only 24 hours in the day you can only have 24 leaves in the monetary system - but if you have say, 18 leaves in the system it's fine to pluck another six off the trees - that will allow the plucker to purchase another six hours of my labour with no inflationary cost.
Of course I need to sleep, and it's hard to judge how productive I am etc etc. But the idea is an economy is a whole system and a fiat government is able to purchase up to the productive capacity of the system - which seems quite sensible ... if we know what the productive capacity is.
I may of course be wildly wrong and interested in other peoples views