There is a lot to take in here, but the critique is divided into sections...
Cullen Roche wrote:1. Description and Prescription
2. MMT Misunderstands Money, Leading to Incorrect Conclusions
3. MR disagrees with MMT’s stance on inflation
4. Current accounts are not a concern?
5. A state money system versus a market based money system.
6. Do Taxes “Drive Money”??
7. Horizontalism, Verticalism, Outside Money and Inside Money.
8. MR disagrees with MMT’s consolidated government view
9. Is the MMT Job Guarantee everything it’s cracked up to be?
10. What you consume or what you produce?
11. Does MMT Promote the Worst “Deadly Fraud”??
12. MMT is not Necessarily the Same Thing as Post-Keynesian Economics
13. MMT Often Misrepresents Wynne Godley’s SFB to Generate a Government Centric View of the World
14. MR is open to other schools of thought and policy options.
15. MR Seeks To Eliminate Politics From Economics
16. We explain how it works, YOU decide what to do with it….
Among the many differences...
Cullen Roche wrote:...This doesn’t mean MMT makes no important contributions or that the descriptive components are totally void of value. Quite the contrary. There are many lessons from the MMT framework that should be more widely embraced. For instance, an autonomous currency issuer cannot “run out of money”? that it can always procure. Banks are not reserve constrained. Deficit spending is not inherently bad. These might appear like opinions or concepts that are unique to MMT. They are simple realities that become obvious once one understands how a modern autonomous fiat currency issuer operates. MMT expands on these understandings (at times in exaggeration) in order to offer policy prescriptions to fulfill macroeconomic ideas of full employment and price stability. And in doing so MMT often blurs the lines between our operational reality and their progressive view of the world. MR does no such thing and instead fully separates the descriptive and prescriptive in order to offer the reader an understanding of the modern monetary system from which THEY can then offer policy ideas.
There are some parts of MMT that I find more appealing simply due to the fact that it (admittedly) oversimplified it and made things easier for me to hone with MR afterwards.
"Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."
Roche got burned when he debated the JG and he's a bit quick to jump on attackers. I think he eventually decided to split from MMT and subconsciously knows he has to draw a hard line, otherwise his departure would have been redundant. I really like some of the points he makes, but some of them are a little inconsistent at times.
I really think both MMT and MR need to realize that it's tough to really tell who's driving the bus sometimes. What the government could do, and what it does on a regular basis in its circle-jerk with the treasury and member banks, are two different things... so it's hard to say who's driving the bus if you've got three hands on the wheel, and the big tough guy lets the little guys do the steering... for now.
"Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."
