Mastodawn

A week or so ago, I made a statement along the lines of "I don't understand the arguments *against* the credit theory of money"

@KevinCarson1 here does a fantastic job of fleshing those out, on @C4SS

https://c4ss.org/content/61050

Capitalism in Inches and Pounds: A Parable

The argument that capitalists are needed to provide workers with means of production, and profit is their reward for doing so, is nonsense. All capitalists have are paper or digital claims on the right to allocate means of production or material resources. All of the actual material resources — means of production and raw materials...

Center for a Stateless Society

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Kevin Carson Mar 16

@neonsnake @C4SS Just today I had an "ancap" who goes by the name Hogeye Bill (who, I found out when I checked his feed, also turned out to be an Epstein defender dismissing Virginia Giuffre as a gold-digger) show up in my replies at Bluesky attempting to argue against the piece. He was so immersed in Austrian "money theory of credit" and "advance theory of capital" assumptions that he didn't even realize, after supposedly reading the piece, that I *didn't* agree with him that the capitalist performs a "necessary function" of "saving and building capital," and that it naturally "compounds".

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NeonSnake Mar 16

@KevinCarson1 @C4SS oooff at the Epstein thing.

It's one of those things that sort of intuitively makes "sense". You and I , after all, save money to afford stuff. Stands to reason that Pete The Peasant saved his money until he was able to purchase, like, half of Essex, right?

Which...fine?...I guess...until you know how it actually works.

If you still keep up the pretence of people squirreling away gold under the mattress after knowing how it works, then...hey, I've a bridge to sell you, I suppose.

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Kevin Carson 6d ago

@neonsnake @C4SS Shit, I read a college textbook on banking and finance that said banks "aggregated savings" to provide investment capital, and this was a fucking ECONOMIST pretending they don't just create money and credit.

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Corvid Crone 6d ago

@KevinCarson1 @neonsnake @C4SS

I just had a sudden memory of sitting in high school economics class thinking, "this...this just seems like a big scam..."

Took years to unlearn thinking I wasn't smart enough to understand economics.

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@CorvidCrone @KevinCarson1 @neonsnake @C4SS Also learning to write fiction appears to have been the best way to comprehend economics