Connecting the Dots – Deficit Reduction Is Now Only About Inflation, Not Insolvency

I agree the strategy will be to repeat the same lie over and over no matter how many times it gets debunked. That is the Washington way. The main object of deficit reduction is to extend the scope of the looting, especially with regard to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

...stuff, while often very well argued, and well intentioned, reads exactly like Glibertarian calls for the repeal of the 16th and 17th Amendments, like a newly minted syndicalist's calls for the immediate abolition of the state and the sui generis rebirth of a complete socialist order, like a conservatarian's demand for a 19th century application of the Constitution, or like Gold Standarders demand for the end to fiat currency and the fiat return to a metal standard.

Before I'm misread - I understand that you are arguing for an aggressive use of the fiat, but you don't seem to really get that the public doesn't care, and you cannot make them care.

This is futile agitation, because the state that actually exists is never, ever going to do what you want.

...wants to spend hours talking to me about Guild Wars and this new ranger build he's worked out, I don't feign interest. I am interested. Because I love him and he's so fucking beautiful it hurts me to realize that he's ever going to die.

But, I have no illusions that his fascination with a video game character will substantively change the world.

Because it won't. No matter how earnestly or honestly he tries to communicate the importance, right at this very moment, of this figment un-thing he's made, this little fraction of the total noos which he believe he controls all by himself, I know that his passion alone cannot move people to care.

Because this toy doesn't resonate. Its language is not the language of people in their everyday lives. It cannot move them, or us, because we have a shared knowledge, a common and sad recognition: a distraction is the admission of impotence. The obsession with a perfect game, or a fantasy world where the impossible hero has the one key which saves the kingdom? This is the admission of powerlessness.

Back when I was much, much younger, I had friends who were just as invested, just as passionate, just as fascinated with their Dungeons and Dragons characters. They longed for the end of the school day, or the absence of a parent in the house, to rush into contact with the suspended and unrealized worlds they'd spent hours imagining into a labile half-existence, fraught with imperfectability because they were precisely and utterly fictitious, always bordering as they were on a complete collapse, following the slightest interruption, perhaps from mom's return, or a phone call, the bark of the neighbor's dog, or the need to take a shit.

This is your MMT, as I read it.

That I understand it exactly as a tinkering with a character, or a map, or a dungeon from a role playing game does not mean I'm somehow committed to despair. I'm not. I just believe that a different set of paths to justice are more likely to become trails, and then roads, and perhaps even highways.

So, here we are:

You are role playing, in my humble opinion, from your own recognition of powerlessness and impotence. And I don't mean that as any sort of condemnation, or disapprobation.

I am without material substance. I'm ill, and poor, and because I decided to undertake the role of homemaker so my wife could return to the workforce, I'm a joke applicant now even at Wendy's. I kid you not when I tell you that one of the interviewers said to me, "Dude, you can't be a dude who stayed home to raise your kids for five years and expect to get a job. We have real men applying every day."

I understand powerlessness, and impotence.

I'm looking at your tinkering from the outside. And not with any hostility. It reminds me like nothing else as much as it reminds me of a teen aged, geeky dungeon master crafting the perfect Saturday night mission.

(I know you are not the only one, and I'm using the "you" in its plural form as well.)

But, there the lot of you are, with your maps and your graph paper and your manuals, and you really have built the best story, with the most fully developed narrative and characters imaginable. It's just that the guys on the football team, and the school principal, and the guidance counselor, and the mean office secretaries are not going to ever hand you access to the school's PA system, so you can tell all those kids sitting through home room about this best-est, totally most gnarly game ever.

And even if you did steal into the office, and risk detention or suspension in order to get your game notice out over morning announcements, anyone with a sober head and a kind heart could predict the outcome.

You are in for a long year of unremitting misery.

Which doesn't mean you shouldn't try. It's just that you don't really have a grasp of your own actual environment, at least as I see it.

And me - an anarchist - telling you this is some kind of irony, I know.

But, that's fundamentally also where we differ. I'm no stranger to utopia. I believe our reach must always exceed our grasps, or the stumbling forward into the future backwards that is such a salient feature of our too brief existences becomes a headlong pitch into the mud and the muck, with no real reason to get up again.

You've got to know your world well, you have to know how to hate it, in order to place a flower of hope in the vase of utopia. You've got to be honest about it. You have to be sober before and after your fancy, and your intoxication. If you're not, the drunkenness loses its charm, and becomes an uglier kind of fixation, and then - an addiction.

The state we have is not constituted to embrace or promote your form of Chartism. That state is a wholly owned tool of the capitalist over class. It is not run for the benefit of the proletariat. It only interfaces with that other perfect fiction, the middle class, to task the smallholders with hating on brown and/or poor people. You will never capture it and make it something it cannot be until you get rid of the over class which constitutes it.

And if you can actually get rid of that over class, there will be no efficient national state to capture in order to impose this perfect, fantasy fix.

...

...that getting the equivalent of a one hour sideshow (on a Sunday morning, during the worst hurricane in twenty years) in the Spectacle is a win, given the time and effort involved.

Lambert,

I won't propose to type for all anarchists, because we are too broad a social type to be represented by a single summation, or person, but you are summarizing quite neatly my own essential objection.

As I just wrote over my way:

"If I were proposing a method for using the fiat powers of the state to snap a corporate shackle or two, writing 50 trillion onto the books and daring the loyal opposition to flinch would be at the top of the list.

It just doesn't take into account the state we actually have.

Over the last month, Justin [of Americana and Shotwell] and I have been going back and forth about the benefits and drawbacks of opting out of the economic/cultural/electoral system. We've both been arguing our points by way of exaggeration, and admittedly so, in order to tease out the implications of focusing on the individuality and/or collectivity [of] disobedience.

As an illustration of the state's impact upon social relations, and priorities, and of the vulgar lie which pretends to narrate its alleged limitation in addressing poverty, liquidity, debt and even employment, MMT has a similar function, I agree. It exaggerates to draw certain propositions to the fore.

But, it still refuses to anticipate the likeliest of futures which would follow upon even a single act of seignorage, as best as I can read the theory, because its entire premise depends upon assuming two conditions which cannot be met.

First, that those drawn to rule a nation of 300 millions, and those equipped to gain office in the hierarchy of that power, can be persuaded to betray their own class interests, especially against the concentration of wealth which funded their rises to power.

And second, that those who might replace them in order to do the right thing are immune to the persuasions and inducements of the same concentrations of wealth, power and influence.

Put another way - allowing power to concentrate as an outgrowth of wealth's concentration can only result in the state we have."

*

Perhaps as importantly, the entire argument as it's so far been presented hinges upon convincing [as Arthur Silber says far better than I ever could] a mass murdering, child slaying, bankster adoring, woman hating, bus throwing, death state expanding, ally betraying monster to be trustworthy enough to ignore who he is and who he owes, for the whole thing to work, even for a season.

You sound old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, maybe even old enough to remember the fall of Jim Crow.

If we just keep chipping away, sooner or later we win.

by the way, I know what you mean about applying for jobs at Wendy, it is what Versialles has reduced us to. Lately Matt Stoller has been using the more ominous Wiemar metaphor.