Money system reform to end poverty and honor productive work has been desired forever--or since money was discovered.
Money is something like a language: it motivates people to produce all that money can buy.
Money is something like a tool or weapon: it seduces people to want to trade for IT--instead of for other THINGS--as when we barter one thing for another.
Trading for money is possible for as long as it works. When it no longer works, people normally begin to trade for a better money that replaces the one that's busted.
The historical development of banking as a public utility--sometimes owned by government and sometimes by private firms--does not prevent a democracy from becoming an economic democracy.
In an economic democracy there is no poverty and there are no people looking for work. There are no wages below what we know is fair and attractive enough to recruit reasonable people like ourselves.
If we do not have an economic democracy it is because the voters are ignorant not because bankers exist. Money and banking are creatures of the law. Voters indirectly create the law. If the law is bad, the voters are bad or ignorant or both.The remedy for this is political action, academic research, and attention to detail by each of us who would leave the law for our children better than we found it.
The Web of Debt, as a book, quotes many authorities who blame bankers, politicians, academics, and 'money-masters', more than they blame the voters for the state of the law.
..... The matter remains unresolved--because money has a history of becoming a tool to corrupt a nation instead of fairly feeding it.
..... And if this is the likely fate of nations and people, blaming particular people for inherited nearly universal belief compounds ignorance with error and leaves us where we are.
If we want our government to match our money to our output and its purpose we must be willing to agree its purpose is benign--and it begins with universal economic security for individuals and nations.
..... The notion that supply creates monetized demand without laws to manage this effect, must be corrected with government supplied monetized demand.
..... To do this will require converting the Internal Revenue Code into the Internal Monetary Code: this will end taxes in favor of production--and savings of any money not ready to be spent.
Money is not created by fools out of thin air. It is created by goods available for sale. But often the money created to buy what we need is not enough. So more must be created. And when there is too much money created, compared to what is for sale, the excess money, must be saved.
If the computations necessary to run such a certain system seem overwhelming (in a nation with infinite computing power well within reach), and people are tempted to replace financial certainty it with uncertainty, they should be reminded of the crash of 2009 and how long it may take to recover economic security which we never had to surrender in the first place.
..... If government had loaned every individual enough to meet rational needs, the computations of such individual amounts would have been easy compared to the agony of refusing to do so.
The idea that government must borrow from the people and not lend to them is totally disproved today. It is time to read Functional Finance**--and throw contrary opinion in the trash.
Should we ever have full employment without full shelves, it will be time to improve our system of production. In the meantime, its time to end all chronic indebtedness in the wealthiest nation on earth.
=======================
** Functional Finance can be reduced to readable form in good time. Until then:
The Jerome Levy Economics Institute
Working Paper No. 272
Functional Finance and Full Employment:
Lessons from Abba Lerner for Today?
by Mathew Forstater
July 1999
[ LESSONS BELOW IN THIS VERSION ARE ABRIDGED TO ONE PARAGRAPH. ]
The Asian Crisis, with the fallout in Latin America and the transition economies; the Russian default; continuing troubles in Japan; weaknesses in the structure of the new European EMU; volatility on Wall Street; deflationary pressures in the global economy:
recent economic developments invite a reconsideration of some of our most deeply held beliefs concerning economic theory and public policy. Even within the hallowed halls of mainstream economics, voices of dissent can be heard. Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Jeffrey Sachs are among those whose recent proclamations indicate that we have entered a period in which orthodox views are being openly questioned, creating an atmosphere characterized by a crisis of confidence.
Such periods of impending crisis and open expressions of self-doubt, questioning our most deeply held beliefs about the way the world works, creates a climate in which the ideas of the great unorthodox thinkers of the past may be revisited. The work of those who in the past dedicated their lives to formulating solutions to the challenges of modern capitalist economies may contain lessons applicable to the contemporary situation. It is in this spirit that this paper revisits the early works of Abba Lerner, outlining fifteen such lessons regarding macroeconomic theory and policy, as fresh in the context of the current scene as they were some five decades ago when they were first formulated.
Lesson #1: Full employment, price stability, and a decent standard of living for all are fundamental macroeconomic goals, and it is the responsibility of the state to promote their attainment.
Lesson #2: Policies should be judged on their ability to achieve the goals for which they are designed and not on any notion of whether they are "sound" or otherwise comply with the dogmas of traditional economics. This, of course, is Lerner's functional finance. The state has the ability to promote full employment and price stability and should use its powers to do so:
Lesson #3: "Money Is a Creature of the State": The ability of the government to conduct fiscal and monetary policy according to the principles of functional finance is made possible by the fact that "money is a creature of the state". The state has the power not only to tax, but to designate what will suffice to retire tax (and other) obligations, that is, what it will accept at its pay offices. By determining public receivability, the state can create a demand for otherwise worthless pieces of paper, leading to general acceptability. The state can issue this currency and use it to purchase goods and services from the private sector:
Lesson #4: Taxing is not a funding operation. Since money is a creature of the state and the government budget should be judged purely on its macroeconomic effects, decisions concerning taxation should be made only with regard to the economic effects in terms of the promotion of full employment, price stability, or other economic goals, and not ever "because the government needs to make money payments": "... taxes should never be imposed for the sake of the tax revenues".
Lesson #5: Government Borrowing is not a funding operation. Likewise, for the same reasons as taxation, Lerner argued that "borrowing" is not a funding operation. Since it is not a funding operation, it is questionable whether we should even use the term "borrowing." Perhaps it would be best to simply refer to bond sales. Thus Lerner argued that "the government should borrow only if…the effects" of borrowing are desired.
Lesson #6: The primary purpose of taxation is to influence the behavior of the public. If taxation is not a funding operation, then what is its purpose? The purpose of taxation, according to Lerner, is "its effect on the public of influencing their economic behavior".
Lesson #7: The primary purpose of government bond sales is to regulate the overnight interest rate.
Lesson #8: Bond sales logically follow from, rather than precede, government spending. Since government need not "borrow" to finance its expenditure, and instead bond sales are a means of managing bank reserves and hitting some target rate of interest, then it follows that, logically speaking, bond sales follow from rather than precede government spending:
Lesson #9: "Printing money" in and of itself has no impact on the economy whatsoever. For Lerner, there are six (or three pairs of) fiscal instruments of government: taxing and spending, buying and selling, and borrowing and lending. "Printing money" is not independent of these. Therefore, printing money, in and of itself, has no impact on the economy whatsoever. Suppose the government prints money and puts it in a rocket ship and blasts it to the moon. Will the printing of money have had any effect on the economy? Of course not:
Lesson #10: Without a full employment policy, society cannot benefit from labor-saving technological advance, that is, efficiency becomes inefficient. With a full employment policy, labor-saving technical advance becomes truly beneficial to society. Under conditions of continuous full employment, resources are scarce and so instituting a technical or organizational innovations that would free up some labor for other uses constitutes a welcome economizing of resources. But in an economy with persistent unemployment, what would have been efficient becomes inefficient:
Lesson #11: Without a full employment policy, a country must suffer over its trade balance. With a full employment policy, there is no need to worry about importing "too much" relative to exports. In the absence of full employment guaranteed by functional finance, a country must worry about rising unemployment stemming from an increase in the value of imports over the value of exports. Thus, an excess of imports over exports is considered an "unfavorable balance of trade" and the reverse is considered a "favorable balance of trade." But Lerner looks at foreign trade as "the means by which we obtain for our own use goods that are manufactured abroad":
Lesson #12: Attempts to argue that the deficit and debt are not really as big as they look, or that if we measure them differently or keep a capital account they are not really that bad, are counter-productive. For Lerner, "deficit doves," by trying to placate concerns about government budget deficits and the national debt, actually do harm to their own position as "proponents of organized prosperity":
Lesson #13: When there is unemployment, jobs and money, not resources and goods, are scarce.In a full employment economy, resources are scarce. Economizing is important, as resources can only be allocated to any use if they are removed from some other productive activity. In an economic system with unemployment, however, goods are not scarce, as more can be produced by employing the unemployed resources. But there are other kinds of scarcity in the economy suffering from unemployment: What is scarce is money. The lack of money to spend on the goods is what keeps the unemployed resources from producing more goods. Work, moreover, instead of being a curse, is desired more than anything else because the alternative is not the enjoyment of leisure but the suffering of unemployment and deprivation. Of course, if people could get income without having to work they would not object too much (although their self-respect in feeling they are useful members of society who are earning their income is too easily underestimated). But it is only by finding work that they can obtain the necessary income they need.
Lesson #14: Functional Finance is not a policy; it is a framework within which all sorts of policies may be conducted. There may be misconceptions that functional finance is equated with a particular policy, e.g., running a big deficit. Functional finance is rather a general approach within which a whole series of policies may be conducted. The actual policies which will be implemented will depend on the economic circumstances that exist at a particular time.
Lesson #15: To achieve full employment, government spending may have to include direct job creation. Traditional fiscal and monetary policies may be ineffective in achieving full employment. Direct job creation in the form of public works may be necessary in order to attain and maintain full employment and price stability.
Conclusion
The work of Abba Lerner on functional finance and full employment contains lessons as relevant today as when they were first put forward some five decades ago. At a time when orthodox theory and policy offers little in the way of either explanation of the causes of crisis or cures in the form of effective policy approaches, it would do well to revisit these ideas and the ideas of other great thinkers of the past. Their work is of more than antiquarian interest; they contain valuable lessons that can inform current analysis and formulation of approaches to macroeconomic policy.
Original of abovehttp://www.levy.org/pubs/wp272.pdf
==========================
The Ron Morrison article from Post-Autistic Economics Review, No. 39, October 2006 — ends with the following paragraph:
"Governments have issued debt-free finance for ages and spent it into circulation interest free. It can be done again, given the political will. The evolution of credit this past fifty years has expelled this source and replaced our means of exchange with private, interest bearing debt. If government can issue Notes and Bonds they can issue credit to finance the rebuilding of creaking national infrastructures. When government once again shares the money supply 50/50 with the banks we can reduce the tax burden and finance needed public services. Nowadays Wall Street and roads in London’s City are not paved with gold but with paper and computer chips. The money supply is all to do with business and maximising shareholder value — nothing to do with benefiting the community. It is the road out of a mixed economy into a frightening new world order where money buys power, both political and military. We need an alternative route. It's sign posted — Keynes Without Debt."
==============================
Academic references:
A.P. Lerner (1936) "Mr. Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money", International Labour Review, Vol. 34, p.435-54.
A.P. Lerner (1938) "Savings Equals Investment", Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 52, p.297-309.
A.P. Lerner (1938) "Alternative Formulations of the Rate of Interest", Economic Journal, Vol. 48, p.211-30.
A.P. Lerner (1939) "Saving and Investment: Definitions, assumptions, objectives", Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 53, p.611-19.
A.P. Lerner (1939) "The Relation of Wage Policies and Price Policies", American Economic Review, Vol. 89, p.
A.P. Lerner (1941) "The Economic Steering Wheel: the story of the people's new clothes", University Review, p.2-8.
A.P. Lerner (1943) "Functional Finance and the Federal Debt", Social Research, Vol. 10, p.38-51.
A.P. Lerner (1944) "Interest Theory: Supply and demand for loans or supply and demand for cash", Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol.26, p.88-91.
A.P. Lerner (1944) The Economics of Control: Principles of welfare economics. New York: Macmillan.
A.P. Lerner (1947) "Money as a Creature of the State", American Economic Review, Vol. 37 (2), p.312-7.
A.P. Lerner (1948) "The Burden of the National Debt", Income, Employment and Public Policy: Essays in honor of Alvin Hansen. New York:
A.P. Lerner (1949) "The Inflationary Process", Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 31, p.193-200.
A.P. Lerner (1951) The Economics of Employment. New York: McGraw-Hill.
A.P. Lerner (1952) "The Essential Properties of Interest and Money", Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 66, p.173-93.
A.P. Lerner (1953) "On the Marginal Efficiency of Capital and the Marginal Efficiency of Investment", Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 61, p.1-14.
A.P. Lerner (1973) "Money, Debt and Wealth", in W. Sellekaerts, editor, Econometrics and Economic Theory: Essays in honor of Jan Tinbergen. International Arts and Sciences.
A.P. Lerner and D.C. Colander (1980) MAP: A Market Anti-Inflation Plan. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Money is something like a language: it motivates people to produce all that money can buy.
Money is something like a tool or weapon: it seduces people to want to trade for IT--instead of for other THINGS--as when we barter one thing for another.
Trading for money is possible for as long as it works. When it no longer works, people normally begin to trade for a better money that replaces the one that's busted.
The historical development of banking as a public utility--sometimes owned by government and sometimes by private firms--does not prevent a democracy from becoming an economic democracy.
In an economic democracy there is no poverty and there are no people looking for work. There are no wages below what we know is fair and attractive enough to recruit reasonable people like ourselves.
If we do not have an economic democracy it is because the voters are ignorant not because bankers exist. Money and banking are creatures of the law. Voters indirectly create the law. If the law is bad, the voters are bad or ignorant or both.The remedy for this is political action, academic research, and attention to detail by each of us who would leave the law for our children better than we found it.
The Web of Debt, as a book, quotes many authorities who blame bankers, politicians, academics, and 'money-masters', more than they blame the voters for the state of the law.
..... The matter remains unresolved--because money has a history of becoming a tool to corrupt a nation instead of fairly feeding it.
..... And if this is the likely fate of nations and people, blaming particular people for inherited nearly universal belief compounds ignorance with error and leaves us where we are.
If we want our government to match our money to our output and its purpose we must be willing to agree its purpose is benign--and it begins with universal economic security for individuals and nations.
..... The notion that supply creates monetized demand without laws to manage this effect, must be corrected with government supplied monetized demand.
..... To do this will require converting the Internal Revenue Code into the Internal Monetary Code: this will end taxes in favor of production--and savings of any money not ready to be spent.
Money is not created by fools out of thin air. It is created by goods available for sale. But often the money created to buy what we need is not enough. So more must be created. And when there is too much money created, compared to what is for sale, the excess money, must be saved.
If the computations necessary to run such a certain system seem overwhelming (in a nation with infinite computing power well within reach), and people are tempted to replace financial certainty it with uncertainty, they should be reminded of the crash of 2009 and how long it may take to recover economic security which we never had to surrender in the first place.
..... If government had loaned every individual enough to meet rational needs, the computations of such individual amounts would have been easy compared to the agony of refusing to do so.
The idea that government must borrow from the people and not lend to them is totally disproved today. It is time to read Functional Finance**--and throw contrary opinion in the trash.
Should we ever have full employment without full shelves, it will be time to improve our system of production. In the meantime, its time to end all chronic indebtedness in the wealthiest nation on earth.
=======================
** Functional Finance can be reduced to readable form in good time. Until then:
The Jerome Levy Economics Institute
Working Paper No. 272
Functional Finance and Full Employment:
Lessons from Abba Lerner for Today?
by Mathew Forstater
July 1999
[ LESSONS BELOW IN THIS VERSION ARE ABRIDGED TO ONE PARAGRAPH. ]
The Asian Crisis, with the fallout in Latin America and the transition economies; the Russian default; continuing troubles in Japan; weaknesses in the structure of the new European EMU; volatility on Wall Street; deflationary pressures in the global economy:
recent economic developments invite a reconsideration of some of our most deeply held beliefs concerning economic theory and public policy. Even within the hallowed halls of mainstream economics, voices of dissent can be heard. Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Jeffrey Sachs are among those whose recent proclamations indicate that we have entered a period in which orthodox views are being openly questioned, creating an atmosphere characterized by a crisis of confidence.
Such periods of impending crisis and open expressions of self-doubt, questioning our most deeply held beliefs about the way the world works, creates a climate in which the ideas of the great unorthodox thinkers of the past may be revisited. The work of those who in the past dedicated their lives to formulating solutions to the challenges of modern capitalist economies may contain lessons applicable to the contemporary situation. It is in this spirit that this paper revisits the early works of Abba Lerner, outlining fifteen such lessons regarding macroeconomic theory and policy, as fresh in the context of the current scene as they were some five decades ago when they were first formulated.
Lesson #1: Full employment, price stability, and a decent standard of living for all are fundamental macroeconomic goals, and it is the responsibility of the state to promote their attainment.
Lesson #2: Policies should be judged on their ability to achieve the goals for which they are designed and not on any notion of whether they are "sound" or otherwise comply with the dogmas of traditional economics. This, of course, is Lerner's functional finance. The state has the ability to promote full employment and price stability and should use its powers to do so:
Lesson #3: "Money Is a Creature of the State": The ability of the government to conduct fiscal and monetary policy according to the principles of functional finance is made possible by the fact that "money is a creature of the state". The state has the power not only to tax, but to designate what will suffice to retire tax (and other) obligations, that is, what it will accept at its pay offices. By determining public receivability, the state can create a demand for otherwise worthless pieces of paper, leading to general acceptability. The state can issue this currency and use it to purchase goods and services from the private sector:
Lesson #4: Taxing is not a funding operation. Since money is a creature of the state and the government budget should be judged purely on its macroeconomic effects, decisions concerning taxation should be made only with regard to the economic effects in terms of the promotion of full employment, price stability, or other economic goals, and not ever "because the government needs to make money payments": "... taxes should never be imposed for the sake of the tax revenues".
Lesson #5: Government Borrowing is not a funding operation. Likewise, for the same reasons as taxation, Lerner argued that "borrowing" is not a funding operation. Since it is not a funding operation, it is questionable whether we should even use the term "borrowing." Perhaps it would be best to simply refer to bond sales. Thus Lerner argued that "the government should borrow only if…the effects" of borrowing are desired.
Lesson #6: The primary purpose of taxation is to influence the behavior of the public. If taxation is not a funding operation, then what is its purpose? The purpose of taxation, according to Lerner, is "its effect on the public of influencing their economic behavior".
Lesson #7: The primary purpose of government bond sales is to regulate the overnight interest rate.
Lesson #8: Bond sales logically follow from, rather than precede, government spending. Since government need not "borrow" to finance its expenditure, and instead bond sales are a means of managing bank reserves and hitting some target rate of interest, then it follows that, logically speaking, bond sales follow from rather than precede government spending:
Lesson #9: "Printing money" in and of itself has no impact on the economy whatsoever. For Lerner, there are six (or three pairs of) fiscal instruments of government: taxing and spending, buying and selling, and borrowing and lending. "Printing money" is not independent of these. Therefore, printing money, in and of itself, has no impact on the economy whatsoever. Suppose the government prints money and puts it in a rocket ship and blasts it to the moon. Will the printing of money have had any effect on the economy? Of course not:
Lesson #10: Without a full employment policy, society cannot benefit from labor-saving technological advance, that is, efficiency becomes inefficient. With a full employment policy, labor-saving technical advance becomes truly beneficial to society. Under conditions of continuous full employment, resources are scarce and so instituting a technical or organizational innovations that would free up some labor for other uses constitutes a welcome economizing of resources. But in an economy with persistent unemployment, what would have been efficient becomes inefficient:
Lesson #11: Without a full employment policy, a country must suffer over its trade balance. With a full employment policy, there is no need to worry about importing "too much" relative to exports. In the absence of full employment guaranteed by functional finance, a country must worry about rising unemployment stemming from an increase in the value of imports over the value of exports. Thus, an excess of imports over exports is considered an "unfavorable balance of trade" and the reverse is considered a "favorable balance of trade." But Lerner looks at foreign trade as "the means by which we obtain for our own use goods that are manufactured abroad":
Lesson #12: Attempts to argue that the deficit and debt are not really as big as they look, or that if we measure them differently or keep a capital account they are not really that bad, are counter-productive. For Lerner, "deficit doves," by trying to placate concerns about government budget deficits and the national debt, actually do harm to their own position as "proponents of organized prosperity":
Lesson #13: When there is unemployment, jobs and money, not resources and goods, are scarce.In a full employment economy, resources are scarce. Economizing is important, as resources can only be allocated to any use if they are removed from some other productive activity. In an economic system with unemployment, however, goods are not scarce, as more can be produced by employing the unemployed resources. But there are other kinds of scarcity in the economy suffering from unemployment: What is scarce is money. The lack of money to spend on the goods is what keeps the unemployed resources from producing more goods. Work, moreover, instead of being a curse, is desired more than anything else because the alternative is not the enjoyment of leisure but the suffering of unemployment and deprivation. Of course, if people could get income without having to work they would not object too much (although their self-respect in feeling they are useful members of society who are earning their income is too easily underestimated). But it is only by finding work that they can obtain the necessary income they need.
Lesson #14: Functional Finance is not a policy; it is a framework within which all sorts of policies may be conducted. There may be misconceptions that functional finance is equated with a particular policy, e.g., running a big deficit. Functional finance is rather a general approach within which a whole series of policies may be conducted. The actual policies which will be implemented will depend on the economic circumstances that exist at a particular time.
Lesson #15: To achieve full employment, government spending may have to include direct job creation. Traditional fiscal and monetary policies may be ineffective in achieving full employment. Direct job creation in the form of public works may be necessary in order to attain and maintain full employment and price stability.
Conclusion
The work of Abba Lerner on functional finance and full employment contains lessons as relevant today as when they were first put forward some five decades ago. At a time when orthodox theory and policy offers little in the way of either explanation of the causes of crisis or cures in the form of effective policy approaches, it would do well to revisit these ideas and the ideas of other great thinkers of the past. Their work is of more than antiquarian interest; they contain valuable lessons that can inform current analysis and formulation of approaches to macroeconomic policy.
Original of abovehttp://www.levy.org/pubs/wp272.pdf
==========================
The Ron Morrison article from Post-Autistic Economics Review, No. 39, October 2006 — ends with the following paragraph:
"Governments have issued debt-free finance for ages and spent it into circulation interest free. It can be done again, given the political will. The evolution of credit this past fifty years has expelled this source and replaced our means of exchange with private, interest bearing debt. If government can issue Notes and Bonds they can issue credit to finance the rebuilding of creaking national infrastructures. When government once again shares the money supply 50/50 with the banks we can reduce the tax burden and finance needed public services. Nowadays Wall Street and roads in London’s City are not paved with gold but with paper and computer chips. The money supply is all to do with business and maximising shareholder value — nothing to do with benefiting the community. It is the road out of a mixed economy into a frightening new world order where money buys power, both political and military. We need an alternative route. It's sign posted — Keynes Without Debt."
==============================
Academic references:
A.P. Lerner (1936) "Mr. Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money", International Labour Review, Vol. 34, p.435-54.
A.P. Lerner (1938) "Savings Equals Investment", Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 52, p.297-309.
A.P. Lerner (1938) "Alternative Formulations of the Rate of Interest", Economic Journal, Vol. 48, p.211-30.
A.P. Lerner (1939) "Saving and Investment: Definitions, assumptions, objectives", Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 53, p.611-19.
A.P. Lerner (1939) "The Relation of Wage Policies and Price Policies", American Economic Review, Vol. 89, p.
A.P. Lerner (1941) "The Economic Steering Wheel: the story of the people's new clothes", University Review, p.2-8.
A.P. Lerner (1943) "Functional Finance and the Federal Debt", Social Research, Vol. 10, p.38-51.
A.P. Lerner (1944) "Interest Theory: Supply and demand for loans or supply and demand for cash", Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol.26, p.88-91.
A.P. Lerner (1944) The Economics of Control: Principles of welfare economics. New York: Macmillan.
A.P. Lerner (1947) "Money as a Creature of the State", American Economic Review, Vol. 37 (2), p.312-7.
A.P. Lerner (1948) "The Burden of the National Debt", Income, Employment and Public Policy: Essays in honor of Alvin Hansen. New York:
A.P. Lerner (1949) "The Inflationary Process", Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 31, p.193-200.
A.P. Lerner (1951) The Economics of Employment. New York: McGraw-Hill.
A.P. Lerner (1952) "The Essential Properties of Interest and Money", Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 66, p.173-93.
A.P. Lerner (1953) "On the Marginal Efficiency of Capital and the Marginal Efficiency of Investment", Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 61, p.1-14.
A.P. Lerner (1973) "Money, Debt and Wealth", in W. Sellekaerts, editor, Econometrics and Economic Theory: Essays in honor of Jan Tinbergen. International Arts and Sciences.
A.P. Lerner and D.C. Colander (1980) MAP: A Market Anti-Inflation Plan. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
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