@GeofCox@climatejustice.social
2026-07-24 06:45 UTC
Replies (11)
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@8r3n7@mstdn.ca 2026-07-24 12:15
@GeofCox@climatejustice.social What’s frustrating is that both business and government go to great lengths to keep regular people in the dark about this. They promote erroneous and obsolete ideas about money and debt (and lots more besides), because keeping people ignorant and misinformed benefits those in power. The “classes” are rooted in different understandings of how the world works. Those with privilege—collectively, if not always individually—do what they can to preserve the difference, by putting obstacles in the way of everyone else.
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@markmason@mas.to 2026-07-24 07:28
@GeofCox@climatejustice.social I like the canal analogy. Money is the water in the canal. The government pumps it in at the top and it flows out as tax a the bottom. Controls are required to keep the canal from running dry or flooding. It becomes obvious that individuals taking water out of the canal and hoarding it is a bad thing. Giving more money to people who spend it is not.
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@wavesculptor@climatejustice.social 2026-07-24 07:33
@GeofCox@climatejustice.social That's one of the best concise interpretations I've read of MMT, particularly "when you pay tax, you're not funding anything - you're protecting the value of the other money you have" -- "you" and others with a lot more, that is.
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@dazinism@social.coop 2026-07-24 07:45
@GeofCox@climatejustice.social My understanding is that the government doesnt create money through spending. Its spending is funded via collecting taxes or by borrowing (via sale of government bonds which after a fixed term are repaid with interests - also should probably include finance made available via private public partnerships, although they are not very transparent and intentionally designed to keep the financing off government balance sheets). Banks are where money creation happens, which used to be constrained by fractional reserve requirements, which were effectively scrapped here in the UK and elsewhere.
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@riley@toot.cat 2026-07-24 08:27
@GeofCox@climatejustice.social There's a little bit of difference between bank-created money and government-created money. Banks use big wads of cash to warp the moneyspacetime, and pull money out of the future. Most governments don't need to. There's some exceptions, but most modern governments have access to higher-energy accelerators, so they warp the powerspace instead, which allows them to pull money directly out of the æther of the moneyspacetime. They can choose to pull money out of the future, like banks do, and oftentimes view this as the most convenient technique, but they don't have to. Inconveniently for them, both of these methods dilute the money's primary purpose, which is to run out, by making it so that money will take more time to run out. In order to make sure that money runs out fast enough, the two most preferred mechanisms are the orderly one — taxes —, or the spontaneous one — inflation. The catch is, it turns out that under some systems of government, the people who have lots of money can use money to bribe the people who control the accelerators to apply both selectively to the people who don't have any money. Nowadays, the people who don't have any money could also pull this trick — although this has not always been the case —, except they don't have any money to use as the bribes.
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@NicelyManifest@mastodon.social 2026-07-24 08:38
@GeofCox@climatejustice.social Excellent! Deeply frustrating and wrong that the media and politicians continuously talk incorrectly about tax. And added to that is that the notion of 'taxing' is negative. I prefer 'civilised Society contribution' to 'tax'.
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@xerge@mastodon.nl 2026-07-24 09:18
@GeofCox@climatejustice.social Akin to this is the idea that money is like the grease in a machine. All an economy is, is resources that move around to make society work and to create value. Things like labor and raw materials are what matters. Money is explicitly not one of those resources. All money does is make the machine work efficiently. Too much is bad. Too little is bad. Any one component getting all the grease is bad. It’s the government’s task to make sure the machine keeps working efficiently by balancing the supply of money and make sure no-one starts hoarding.
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@DziadekMick@mstdn.social 2026-07-24 10:02
@GeofCox@climatejustice.social For a smart bloke, that's a big bunch of stuff I never knew. Thanks. I knew the bank note promise. A guy used it at a charity bash. He asked us to think about money. Got us all to take a note out and read the "I promise..." He said he wasn't sure about this. So he undertook to take all our notes to the Bank of England the next day to check it out. Brilliant!
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@felichsdakatze@mastodon.social 2026-07-24 11:52
@GeofCox@climatejustice.social I'm not getting it. If a bank lends me money, that is creation of money. It didn't exist before, but now I have it because they believed I could pay it back, with interest. Paying back the loan, with interest, doesn't destroy anything. It just moves money from my hands back to the bank.
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@heygarrett@social.lol 2026-07-24 13:03
@GeofCox@climatejustice.social Any suggestions for further reading? Edit: Is this a good place to start? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory
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@Walrus@toot.wales 2026-07-25 14:32
@GeofCox@climatejustice.social True, that!