Making It Easier to Understand MMT (0)

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This is not really a post, it turns out no more worth than a note that is not really fit for publishing. But I am in brainstorming mode, trying to come up with a plan how to explain MMT in a way that is as easy to grasp as possible.

The below degenerated into a piece of moping that takes me off the itinerary that I had originally in mind — identifying topics that should be explained transparently to readers before elucidating MMT itself so that they will be able to benefit from a context within which the new look at economics will appear more immediately intelligible ...

... than if you ... well, read the sketch: 

Planted on the path to understanding MMT are a number of mines of opacity or counter-intuitivity. For sometimes celebrities of the school like Warren Mosler like to amuse themselves by shocking people with special gimmicks of opacity or counter-intuitivity. 

[From here on I am getting lost in reconstructing my problems in understanding points (1) and (2). Move on nothing much to see.]

Thus Mosler claims that (1) by imposing taxes on the people, government creates unemployment in the first place, or that (2) exports are costs and nothing but costs and imports are benefits and nothing but benefits. 

I think these games of cryptic "explanation" are counter-productive. 

Ad 1: If I am forced to pay taxes in the government's currency but cannot find work by which to earn government currency, then I am unemployed, argues Mosler. I am in need of employment of a certain kind (government currency earning employment) and cannot get it, therefore I am unemployed. So by imposing taxes and demanding government currency for the settlement of tax liabilities, government creates (the possibility) of unemployment in the sense of a person not being able to find work that is remunerated in terms of government currency.  What he is trying to say is that government manages to get its currency accepted by forcing people to pay taxes in that currency, thus creating the need for people to get jobs remunerated in government currency; this in turn enables government to make people work for it (or other institutions seeking government currency to pay their tax obligations). A terribly roundabout way of getting a point across. 

Ad 2: Even worse is Mosler's caper of insisting that exports are costs, while imports are benefits. Exports, he argues, require severance from/loss of real goods, when by contrast imports provide real goods. However, it is silly to look at two concepts as mutually unrelated categories when understanding the phenomenon that these categories are used to describe depends on the interaction between them. It is the interaction of exporting and importing that provides benefits that you cannot see when you narrowly insist on the contrast between the resource-releasing nature of exports and the resource-receiving nature of imports. By releasing real goods of a certain kind I may be able to receive goods of a kind that I value more highly; without this release the receipt could not be effected. So exports put me in a position to realise value enhancement in my portfolio of real goods, not to mention other benefits gained from exporting. Of course, if I am able to receive all foreign goods that there are without the need to export, one may say I am enjoying only benefits and do not incur any costs in terms of real goods, but its that really true, considering costs such as violence and exploitation (which are the precondition for unconditional acquisition) and lack of incentives to become internationally competitive?