Mitchell’s laws: The more budgets are cut and taxes inceased, the weaker an economy becomes. To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments. Austerity = poverty and leads to civil disorder. Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
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Disclosure: While Monetary Sovereignty is based on facts, this specific post is based on opinion (mine), and much of it touches areas in which I’m not even close to being expert. So read at your own risk.
The March 31 issue of NewScientist Magazine contained an article titled, “Microbes race to throw away vital genes.” Here are excerpts:
Confronted by a deadly threat, most bacteria let someone else handle it.
According to the Black Queen hypothesis, evolution pushes microorganisms to lose essential functions when there is another species around to perform them.
For microorganisms, every ability is costly – carrying genes and making proteins uses up energy – so they benefit from losing genes if possible.
In evolution, if you don’t need it, don’t expend the energy to use it. And if you don’t need to use it, it will disappear. Because of our brains, we have adopted lifestyles that eliminate the need for previous attributes. Pound for pound, we have less muscle strength than other primates, our toes are shorter, and as for toenails – who needs ‘em? Living in shelters, we gave up on fur – our own, at least – and medicine has allowed slender-hipped women to have babies they can’t deliver naturally. Through the millennia, Our brains have changed our bodies.
The most recent invention of our brains, relevant to this discussion, is the Internet, whereby you can learn almost anything just by searching, not by thinking. When you want to know why, and when you want to know how, don’t figure it out. Just look on the Internet.
All those, who understand Monetary Sovereignty or MMT or any of the related concepts, wonder how it is possible for even modestly intelligent people not to understand the dead simple truth that a Monetarily Sovereign nation is sovereign over its own currency. It has the unlimited ability to create that currency, and never can run short of the currency needed to pay bills. No debt is unsustainable, even without taxes or borrowing.
This is basic stuff – yet millions of people don’t get it. Many reasons exist, but a newer one may be the Internet. The majority is becoming less and less accustomed to thinking and more and more accustomed to looking up what the minority thinks. Reference “federal debt” and “federal deficit” on the Internet and you will find thousands of articles urging they be reduced because they are “ticking time bombs” and “unsustainable” — completely untrue and utterly illogical.
Our brains devote specific areas to specific functions. Many observations exist regarding injury to one part of the brain, where people can’t perform certain tasks, but can do everything else. Injure Broca’s area, for instance, and you’ll lose the ability to speak. And it will be a specific loss. You may be able to say certain words, but no others.
The more accustomed we become to searching for answers on line, rather than developing the answers in our own minds, the less the logic sections of our brains will be used. And while “standing on the shoulders of giants” as Sir Isaac Newton claimed to do, may help us progress scientifically, if we repeatedly stand on shoulders, and especially the shoulders of pygmies, we may lose the special abilities that make us modern humans.
And it’s on the Internet, where pygmies live, for the Internet makes no distinction. All are welcome, the brilliant and the foolish. Facts and beliefs are equal.
Life cares only about survival and evolution cares only about procreation. So as long as we survive and procreate, without expending the effort of logic and creative thought, we will lose the ability to develop logical, creative thoughts.
Clearly, this is true for any individual. A person who never runs will lose the ability to run. A person who never does math will lose the ability to do math. Use it or lose it. But what about our children? If you never run or do math, will your children have a reduced ability to run or do math? Surprisingly, the answer is: Maybe.
Your children inherit your (and your partner’s) genes. Nothing you do during your lifetime, other than accidental permutation, changes your genes. So engaging in, or losing, a mental ability, should not affect your heirs. True? Well, not necessarily.
There is a biological study called epigenetics. It shows how not just genes, but the way genes are activated and inhibited, accounts for what we are. This explains how identical twins, having identical genes, still can be different in certain mental functions. These epigenetic differences can be passed down through generations, and some can become permanent features of a family line, and even of a species.
So bottom line, will the Internet make us stupid? There are reasons to believe that easy access to answers, including wrong answers, and the reduced need for logical analysis to develop correct answers, not only can affect us as individuals today, but actually can affect our heirs.
Over time, more and more people may rely on the work of fewer and fewer experts in a field. Not only will we benefit from the reduced need to conduct fundamental, creative thought, but the human species will suffer from decreased ability to conduct independent, creative thought. We could regress to the days when we split from the chimpanzees.
Today, we see the vast majority of the human race not understanding the simple facts and logic of Monetary Sovereignty, even when it is explained to them. I doubt epigenetics is the cause, for there are many reasons why people cannot or will not understand the clear and the obvious.
But the rise of the Internet and succeeding, similar, questionable information sources, bodes ill for the long-term future of human thought.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
http://www.rodgermitchell.com
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No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia. Two key equations in economics:
Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption + Net exports
#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 
I learned about MMT on the internet. 🙂
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I’ve had arguments on Monetary Sovereignty with people who have a more detailed understanding of the banking system than I do. The fact that the Federal Reserve is not explicitly a government agency, and that it sells T-securities for the same amount of dollars as are created (“borrowed”) by the Treasury, leads these people to believe that government money creation in fact creates a debt that at some point will have to be repaid (“all money is debt” being another common refrain). In the U.S. at least what ought to be an obvious process of federal government spending creating dollars is actually rather obscure. So I don’t think the internet is solely to blame for the lack of understanding.
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Keep talking to these people. If their common refrain is “all money is debt”, then they are almost there at MMT or Monetary Sovereignty. Government spending / money creation certainly does create a debt, which does get repaid. While “goverment borrowing” certainly does not!
These things are absolutely correct, but it they disagree with MS/MMT they are not reasoning correctly from them. They don’t understand what the Treasury & Fed are doing. They aren’t doing the accounting right. Or they are making wild & incorrect leaps of logic, to arrive at conclusions that sound like they follow, but are non sequiturs.
If they think their correct slogans mean government budgets must be balanced, or that taxes pay for government spending, they are out of their mind. Apply the same logic to a bank, banking system, or big corporation, and they would see the flaws. From what I can gather, they seem to think that the least constrained actor in the economy, the Federal Government, is more constrained than a two-bit bank. And if the government doesn’t want to wreck the economy, as usual, the genuine constraints usually operate the other way on it. It’s constrained to be as profligate as the private sector is tight-fisted.
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in macro terms, federal debt doesn’t get paid. however, in real terms, it does. the interest payments are real and so is the principle when the actual bond matures. the practical concern is that real savings is being diverted into unnecessary government finance, that government controls more of the economy, and the rich collects the interest, which means the rich are going to lobby for more wasteful deficit spending because tribute payments from the working class is more fun than investing in real capital, which in real terms means that the rich control the government and whether you’re homeless or not.
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but if it wasnt for the internet i would never have learned of mmt, or this site, or new economic perspectives, or mike norman economics, or crooks and liars, i have tried to turn my conservative republican boss onto mmt, i made a copy of the 7 deadly innocent frauds and gave it to him, he read parts, i send him emails of articles, you can lead a horse to water but you cant make him drink. thanks to raygun, some people think that government is always the problem and never the solution, basically brainwashed. it seems no amount of facts will sway some people, it makes no sense. unfortunatly it screws the rest of us.
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Do you really think the median human was more logical in their reasoning in past eras? I see what you’re saying, that the internet obviates much more than in the past the need to derive things from first principles – when knowledge was scattered and many people needed to independently develop redundant insights to progress – but I would make two points in response:
1. the vastness of the knowledge that has now been generated over the scope of history (and the increasing rate at which it is being developed) is such that it’s impossible for a person to think their own thoughts from the ground up if they seek to gain mastery of more than one or two disciplines (it would take many lifetimes just to get to where we are now).
2. the internet is a tool, an amplifying device that exacerbates the underlying personalities of those who use it. Those who seek emotional validation will find it in spades via ideologically like-minded media, yet those who seek a better understanding of how things probably are and the tools to further refine their predictions will find no past era more amenable to research. The ability to connect with experts in every imaginable field need not be a negative; it is an opportunity to engage in self-reflection via confronting one’s premises and questioning when and how they differ from the findings of those who have experience studying the same.
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I agree with both your points.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
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I agree with everyone who says the Internet has positive attributes. You are, after all, reading this on the Internet.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
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The human race was already stupid, the internet is just acts as a bullhorn. I think the issue lays more with the echo chamber effect, which may be exacerbating the polarization issues that seem to be getting worse over the past few years.
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I don’t know, Rodger. By that logic, we shouldn’t have writing because it stunts our memory.
It all depends on people. As long as there is laziness, confirmation bias, and the rest of it, there will be those that peddle misinformation for gain (many times knowingly).
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