Quake3World

anyone familiar with it?

quick intro of the basic principle behind it: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/lee-car ... 52090.html

[youtube]XpXvfWPbkUM[/youtube]

apologies for shit audio

Taxing but interesting and I never thought of it like that. Where did you find this lecture seremtan?.... I do like the analogy of the man with the big stick being the taxman. (7.08)

Quite interesting. All these fucking decimal points being moved around on a computer making money out of nothing. No mention in the article how printing money affects your currency on the global market. Good stuff though.

never heard of it, nice intro video

Uh, not exactly a huge eye-opener this?
What I do wonder though, is when he says there's governments that can produce their own money, I'm feeling like he's leaving out something very important. Like shaft said, printing money (introducing more money) into the system will cause inflation. This means the government can't just endlessly print money. If a government works so that they print their own money and spend that, wouldn't that mean that taxes paid by the tax payer have to effectively be destroyed to prevent a big flood of new money into the market?

uh, did you even read/watch any of that?

first off, MMT doesn't describe what governments *could* do, it describes what they *actually* do but keep quiet about. if they *didn't* keep quiet about it, the entire public debate around taxation and spending would be radically changed. for one thing, we wouldn't have idiot members of the public going "hurr durr my taxes pay for that". also, it would impossible to argue for austerity cuts during a recession since, if you understand MMT, that's exactly the moment when fiscal policy needs to be expansive not contracting

secondly, the issue of inflation is actually covered in both the article and video. the entire purpose of taxation is to keep a lid on inflation. this is why periods of high inflation (e.g. UK in early 1970s) were also periods of high taxes, and conversely the squashing of inflation through crushing organise labour (among other things) led to a period of tax cutting (UK from 1980s onward)

also, taxes *are* destroyed. that's the point