To start with, individuals do not print their own currencies. People always jump in immediately to say you can't inflate your way out of debt/look at Argentina/

To start with, individuals do not print their own currencies. People always jump in immediately to say you can't inflate your way out of debt/look at Argentina/etc., but that's missing the point, I'm not saying that. The point is a sovereign currency issuer has a fundamentally different relationship to money than mere people. They can certainly still get themselves in trouble through mismanagement, no doubt, but there are a lot of levers they have that are unavailable to normal folks. Like some other major differences: not too many people have massive standing armies or hundreds of millions of tax payers, or control over a substantial fraction of global financial flows. Again, not saying eleventy-trillion in debt is not a problem, or that all's well, or anything else like that. I am saying that comparing private finance to sovereign finance is a category error, and things will make much more sense to you if you understand why.