Comment on Bill Mitchell on ‘Invoking neoliberal framing and language is a failing progressive strategy (British Labour)’*
Blog-Reference and Blog-Reference
Bill Mitchell claims to be a Progressive. In this capacity he fights British Labour: “I have never supported so-called ‘progressive’ parties that choose, for ‘political’ purposes, to lie to the electorates by adopting neoliberal framing and language as a way of minimising any difficulties that might arise, initially, from the dissonance that accompanies exposure to the truth, after years of believing in lies.”
At some point, Bill Mitchell tells the world, he has realized that British Labour plays a con game: “Over the years it’s been clear to me that we live in a fictional world when it comes to economic matters. … Which tells you that he [Paul Mason] either doesn’t understand what MMT is about (ignorance) or deliberately deceives his audience (fraud).”
To make the matter short here, it is Bill Mitchell and his MMTers who are the fraudsters.#1, #2
Proper economic analysis shows beyond any doubt that the MMT policy of deficit-spending/money-creation is to the advantage of the Oligarchy and to the disadvantage of WeThePeople. The macroeconomic Profit Law entails Public Deficit = Private Profit and this entails that financial wealth is roughly equal to the public debt. In the fictional world of economics, the fictional Progressives are the real agenda pushers/useful idiots of the Oligarchy.
This should be pretty obvious, Bill Mitchell argues vehemently against budget-balancing and taxing the rich and tells Labour that they are stuck in neoliberal thinking.
• “This is the classic ‘soft’ mainstream macroeconomics that assumes the government is financially constrained and is thus not dissimilar to a household. It is ‘soft’ because, unlike the hard mainstream positions, it allows for deficits (‘funded’ by debt) to occur in a non-government downturn but proposes them to be offset by surpluses in an upturn, irrespective of the overall saving position of the non-government sector.”#3
• “The incomes of the rich are therefore essential to provide the capacity for the government to fund the provision of services to health care and welfare.”
• None of this framing or language is what I would call ‘progressive’.
According to MMT, budget-balancing is unexcusable but taxing the rich is of the devil: “It is false to claim that it is virtuous to ‘tax the rich’ in order to fund essential health and welfare services. This is one of the worst frames that the progressives now deploy.”
Obviously, the whole MMT thing is a shell game with the word progressive.#4
Political take-away for British Labour: MMT is bad science, MMT is bad policy, MMTers are bad people. Bill Mitchell’s MMT teachings for British Labour are a gaslighting exercise.
Egmont Kakarot-Handtke
* Billy Blog
#1 For the full-spectrum refutation of MMT see cross-references MMT
#2 MMT Progressives: The knife in the back of WeThePeople
#3 Exploding the Household Fallacy
#4 Mr. Wray goes to Washington
Related 'The sectoral balances obfuscation: stupidity or corruption?' and 'A beginner’s guide to MMT' and 'How Bill Mitchell stalks Jeremy Corbyn'.
