Episode 292 – The Conflict of Class, Democracy & Universal Basic Services with 1Dime

[00:00:00] Steve Grumbine: Hi folks. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. You’re used to hearing me do the interview or leading the conversation on this podcast. But this week we’re bringing you my appearance on One Dime Radio. Tony, the host, had me on as a guest for two episodes of his show. He and I dove into many fundamental beliefs we share about politics, economics, and history.

I mean, it’s so rare to find a Marxist who understands MMT. It was a two-part series, but we’re combining it into a single episode for this podcast. I think it defines the journey we’ve been on at Real Progressives and, in large part, this podcast, Macro N Cheese. I hope you get something out of it. I sure enjoyed it.

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[00:01:30] Tony: So I recently did a podcast, two of them that were public anyway, on the American Revolution with the historian, James Vaughn. And some were very surprised by that because it seemed oddly sympathetic to the American Revolution. Which some people wouldn’t have expected to come out of this podcast, given that I’ve been super scathing in my critique of American democracy and the United States, in general.

But the way I view the American Revolution is I view it as a product of its time in its context, right? It’s a massive contradiction because on one hand, it’s one of the most radical events that ever happened. In its history, it was immensely radical for its time. But, paradoxically, because it was so radical in the sense that it was a full bourgeois revolution in which it was a full establishment of a Republic.

Whereas England was a compromise between feudal classes and the bourgeoisie between parliament and the monarchs and the aristocracy. But in the context, American Revolution was super radical. But that’s also Why it’s extremely contradictory. Because the bourgeoisie was really at the commanding heights of the revolution in the sense that they were able to essentially control how the system was designed.

They designed a system that was so perfectly suited for the interests of the property owning classes. That created a managed democracy in a way that was so perfectly managed. I believe it’s the most perfectly managed democracy in the sense that it has the best of both an authoritarian system, like, in this – It has a very strong presidency; who can veto and have very centralized authoritarian power while also having these checks and balances that prevent any faction of the capitalist class from dominating the others, which could destabilize the whole system.

And, also, that checks and balances, they just pretty much check against the working class. We can’t implement any policies because, Oh, healthcare? That would be unconstitutional. Oh, jobs guarantee? That’d be a infringement on the rights of employers. So that’s my angle of how I critique it rather than, I think, on the left there’s this kind of critique; which is the US was founded on slavery and all that. And it’s like, that’s true, but that’s not really unique to the US. I think genocide is, like, in the sense of manifest destiny. But that occurs a little bit later.

Uh, but that is something I think unique to the settler colonial countries, which is – makes them, kind of, more culpable than many other countries. The thing that I try to emphasize is that we shouldn’t abandon the hope of a democracy that the American Revolution unleashed. Because we always have to remember that, even though it ended up being controlled by the property owners,

and you really see that the property owners get their full victory when the constitution is established. When the constitution is created with the convention that happens after the Shays Rebellion, which is, sort of, this attempt for, like, farmers and various other groups are really destabilizing the order and threatening the dominant classes.

And so you have this kind of divide between the petty bourgeoisie, the artisan classes. Who, I would say, are still, even though like they might marginally own some property, they’re really within the dominated classes compared to the real property owners. So, In order to have a socialist radical politics succeed today, I believe that we can’t abandon that hope of democracy.

We have to abandon our faith in democracy. The idea that there is a democracy. That’s the kind of noble myth that enables the order. People, I don’t believe, in the United States are going to succeed by using communist iconography from the Soviet Union. They’re not going to succeed by saying also nothing was ever good about the American project.

A lot of the tools that the left has at its disposal, in which it could use, are already in the history of the United States. John Locke, who very much inspired the American Revolution, believed in the right to revolution. And he believed that, if a government was to be despotic against its people, that there was a right for the people to, essentially, change their government. And by force, if necessary. By revolution.

And Jefferson believed the same thing. In fact, Jefferson thought there should be a revolution, ideally, every 40 years. And I think that’s the great angle of critique is the fact that capitalism and the ruling class are undermining democracy. That what we really have is an unfinished revolution.

Today, I am here with Steve Grumbine, host of the Macro N Cheese podcast. Which is a podcast all about Modern Monetary Theory, known as MMT, as well as a wide variety of other topics. He’s been branching out into history and into other theories outside of Modern Monetary Theory, like Marxism.

It’s a wonderful podcast. I can’t recommend it enough. I’ve been on it twice. But it was an honor. And both of those were really fun. One thing I really like about Steve Grumbine is he’s the definition of what I would call a organic intellectual. Driven by pure curiosity. And someone who’s very practical.

And I really like people who are on, what I’m broadly calling, the non-dogmatic left. And people already know that I’m a proponent of MMT. What we’re going to discuss today is, more broadly, social democracy. We’re going to be doing a little series on this channel on ideological tendencies on the left. What’s good about them, what’s worth keeping, and flaws in their approach.

Social democracy is definitely worth talking about because, probably, that’s the sphere you’re most involved with in terms of who you’ve talked to. And, largely, MMTers, tend to be dominated by people who are, social democrats. Whether they’re on the more radical wing of the DSA, or whether they’re just Democrats who will be willing to work with the Biden government.

So the themes we’ll be talking about is UBS, Universal Basic Services, and why we believe it’s superior to universal basic income [UBI]. As well as the pitfalls of social democracy. Like electoralism, strategic approaches, and, why haven’t all social democrats embraced Modern Monetary Theory? But first I want to get into you, Steve. Why did you get into MMT?

What was your political journey like into getting into all of this? Because you didn’t study economics formally, like a lot of the MMTers, is it correct?

[00:07:16] Steve Grumbine: That’s correct. I mean, I have an MBA, Master of Business Administration. I have a Master of Science and Technology Management.

So I have had to be exposed to a lot of the classical economists. But it was told through the lens of the CFO [Chief Financial Officer], if you will, of United Airlines, and stuff like that, as your instructors. So you’re getting a heavy dose of capitalism mixed with a lot of incorrect things that you don’t know they’re incorrect.

Cause you’re paying a lot of money to learn this stuff from these professors, only to find out that, maybe they weren’t exactly on point. So it’s, been quite a journey. I started out on the far right, actually, as a Christian conservative. Grew up a Reagan Republican. And my trip to the Left has been nothing short of a long, long ride.

it’s, definitely, been a forward, leftward drift. And I would say I am significantly left of anything that would pass for Democrat in the United States. Bottom line is that I’m evidence-based. I’m information-based. My thoughts and opinions tend to gravitate toward where there is factual support for the ideas.

And an imagination-based approach to asking questions. Just why not? Why would this not work? Why would that work? So you could say I’m an explorer of sorts at this point. Because I’m not paid to do this. I mean, I, I do run two nonprofits that host the podcasts that I host.

But, quite frankly, those nonprofits, they’re not real big. I, they don’t pay a paycheck. So this is a matter of me truly trying to understand the world in which I live. And, as a father, trying to understand what a better society would look like. And that has taken me through Marx. That has taken me through MMT.

That has taken me through the Bernie Sanders movement. And it’s left me somewhat of a man without a country, if you will. It’s left me kind of left of the consensus left of most MMT ers. In fact, I find myself increasingly isolated from a lot of the MMTers because of that leftward drift. So it’s an interesting place to be. Lonely at times, but definitely going where the information takes me.

[00:09:31] Tony: And I, definitely, feel that. Um, not exactly having a ideological tendency to be able to neatly fit into, I find that myself, too, being very critical. A lot of tendencies on the Marxist Left. And part of why I even embrace Marxism to an extent was because of what I saw were the flaws of social democracy to not recognize class struggle.

And MMT is definitely just another layer on top of that. Because it’s something that not even all social democrats have accepted. But it’s growing rapidly. I find quite strange is the Democrats in the United States seem more quickly to embrace MMT than the social democratic party of my country in Canada, the New Democrat Party. The NDP.

Uh, they’re really backward. They’re really like the Stone Age when it comes to their economics. And they never get votes and they’re always wondering why. And it’s because they always talk about taxes and taxes. And it’s – people aren’t stupid. They know their taxes are going to go up if you have that understanding of economics and that you have to get what you’re going to spend from the taxpayer. So that’s probably the pill to swallow that is the hardest for people on all sides of the spectrum, but it’s growing rapidly.

And I think It’s quite enlightening and useful and essential, in my view. But you’ve spent much of your time talking about MMT. It’s probably the biggest topic on Macro N Cheese, its original theme. So I guess for the basic question, maybe like a reminder, because maybe not everyone is fully fueled on MMT.

Maybe people haven’t seen my other stuff or your stuff. Why MMT? Why should people, Left or Right, whatever, embrace MMT? Like, why is it true? And what was that awakening moment for you in which you’re like, It all makes sense. Because, yeah, I can remember when that was a case for me with MMT.

[00:11:16] Steve Grumbine: Well, just think about it like this.

I started out as a very, very Right wing, kind of a Christofascist of sorts. I mean, seriously, like, I mean, I have to embrace it and own it. Because without recognizing that starting point, all the other stuff I say just doesn’t really hold quite the weight that it does when you consider the ideological pivot that I took in my life.

And it’s significant. Because it fundamentally changes everything. But it still landed on MMT. I started MMT as a Republican – slash- becoming more of a libertarian, civil libertarian. Loosening some of my social concerns. Some of my social proclivities. Some of the things that I thought were just so very wrong-minded in many ways. But, regardless, that’s how I was raised and that was the environment in which I grew up in.

And we can say we don’t want to be our parents. But, you know, I grew up to, in many ways, embrace the beliefs of my parents. And I carried them forward as I went through school. MMT asked some stupid questions. Some questions that just seem so ridiculous that you’re like, why are you asking me that? Like little things like when people were putting the seeds out there into my brain, they were saying stuff like that.

Have you ever seen a dollar? Do you know what a dollar looks like? I’m like, yeah, duh. And I pull out a paper dollar, right? This is like the clumsy typical. That’s probably what most people would do is like, that’s a dollar, right? This piece of paper. And it was only when I realized that really a dollar is more of a unit of measure, okay?

Like an inch or a pound. And so this seemingly esoteric, simple, silly kind of awakening was the pivot point. It was a starting point anyway. It was like, okay, so in other words, it’s something else? It’s . . . And I started understanding credit. And I started understanding how people do exchange. And things like that.

And then, what really got to me. I think the thing that finally really pushed me over the edge was some of Randy Wray’s work. Randy Wray is one of the original developers of Modern Monetary Theory.

[00:13:25] Tony: L Randall Wray, Larry Randall Wray.

Yeah. Yes.

[00:13:28] Steve Grumbine: L. Randall “Randy” Wray. And I used to always call him L. Randall “Randy” Wray until he laughed at me in an interview one time and said, “just call me Randy.” It’s like, oh, hey, Randy, I’ll do that. But his writing name is L. Randall Wray. All his professional work shows up as L. Randall Wray. But he had written a primer on MMT in a bunch of blog posts. A series of blog posts on the publication, New Economic Perspectives.

I think it’s 53 blog posts. And of those 53, it takes you through step by step on so many of the questions people just toss at you about things they think they know about money. And he, he literally lays it out in very easy, understandable ways. And Warren Mosler, who was a hedge fund manager and millionaire.

And people are like, well, why would you, as a leftist, want to know anything about what a hedge fund millionaire says? It’s like, well, the guy knows what he’s talking about. Even if, even if you don’t like his political angle, or even if you don’t like the fact that he wants ran a bank or was a hedge fund man or whatever.

The point is he understands the way money, literally, works. And not just the way it works, but where it comes from. And I think that’s the most important lightbulb moment is: Where does money come from? What is the nature of money? And what are taxes really for? Those three things. Those three things really, really shook my belief system. Understanding number one, that currency, in terms of the US dollar as we know it, a fiat currency, meaning by decree is a creature of the state.

It’s a creature of the state, whether it’s the US dollar. Whether it is the Japanese yen. The Chinese yuan. The Canadian dollar. The Australian dollar. The [Mexican] peso. All these are issued by the government. They’re not issued by banks. Although banks have authority based on the government giving them agency to create their unit of account for loans and stuff like that.

The government creates its own money. And it was in that moment that I had that epiphany that said, well, wait a minute, hold on. If, if, if the government creates its own money, why the hell does it need my taxes? And that was a really big deal. Because, as a Right winger, you don’t want your hard-earned tax dollars going to somebody’s bad decisions, right?

You don’t want it going to their, ooh, icky things like gay, gay stuff. Or you don’t want it going to, I don’t know, somebody’s abortion. You think up the ick factor – whatever icky thing of the day that Republicans and Right wingers tend to get grossed-out by. They, they didn’t like that. So they didn’t want their hard earned tax dollar going to it. Paying for drugs, giving people drinks, whatever.

You know, buying them processed food on their food stamps. Whatever crazy weird thing that Right wingers don’t like it today. That was the thing. And coming from that side, and having to unplug from that. And realizing that there’s no money in the economy if the state doesn’t spend. And somebody will say, well, banks create money and 97 percent of the money in the economy is banks’.

You see, that’s a policy decision. Banks are lending to fill the gap that the federal government chooses not to fill with sovereign spending. So, when you take out a loan, you get money. That money. You use it. Do whatever. The bank, in turn, keeps your interest that you pay on the debt. But the rest of it wipes out and zeros out and I’m like, what do you mean zeros out?

And then it was, like, but your taxes do the same thing. When the government issues money out to you, that’s your asset. But that’s the government’s debt. And I’m like, well, wait a minute. So in other words, money is debt? And, and you’ll hear Warren Mosler say that the national debt, for example, is the sum total of every untaxed dollar in the economy.

And so it’s like, wait a, hold on. And then you’ll hear him say, but the dollar is just a tax credit. And you’re like, what does that mean? So in other words, it’s for redemption, not for spending. In other words, that’s the lure. That’s the hook. That’s the magnet that forces us to use the government’s money.

That’s why Bitcoin [any so-called cryptocurrency], and things like that, will never replace the dollar. Because as long as the state is able to enforce a tax, it’s got an obligation payable only in its tax. And so, this awakening right here. This stuff that I’m telling you about. Was things that made me say, holy crap. So all the fighting between Democrats and Republicans about paying for things, and raising taxes to pay for things, and wanting to cut taxes because we don’t want to pay for your bad decisions, and all this stuff.

It’s like a pitched battle. It’s fake. It’s fraudulent. It’s not real. It doesn’t exist. It’s a fight, but it’s a fight over nothing. It’s not real. And, when that hit me, and that was a big deal. Because, I mean, God, how many fights do you have with whatever parties, political parties, in your country and my country and other countries are all about not wanting your hard earned tax dollar to pay for someone else’s bad decision?

And then when you find out that that entire paradigm is wrong, Some changes come through. And then I would say the last really super big thing. Other than the fact that the, the currency is a simple public monopoly by the currency issuing government. The other thing is the difference between currency issuers and currency users.

And this light bulb moment is kind of game-set-and-match, right? If you understand that the currency issuing authority comes from law. It’s a creature of law, as Rohan Grey, who is another one of the leading second or third generation MMT, uh, scholars would tell you. Money being a creature of law means that the laws that surround money are created by your country. By the government. And the tax that it uses to incur an obligation that requires you to need that currency

is why you do things. It’s what creates markets. It’s what creates buyers and sellers of goods. As Mosler would say, as well. Understanding that, I said, well, wait a minute. Article one, section eight of the US constitution, and this is specific to the United States. It’s the same, ironically, around the globe. Different legal reasons, but fiat currency works the same. Period.

And so, with that in mind, I had to understand the difference between States, like, Maryland, or DC, Virginia. DC is not a state, but you get my point. These areas that are not currency issuers, they’re currency users. And then the federal government being the currency issuer. Well, what does that mean?

They’re not, like, just printing money. Which is what you hear everybody say. What are they doing? Printing money? It’s not printing money. What happens is the government pays its bills by an act of law. They pass a law. The law says who they’re paying and what the price terms are and so forth. Once that law is passed, Article one, Section eight of the United States Constitution says Congress, alone, has the power of the purse.

So Congress authorizes spending. The president signs it into law. The executive branch signs it into law. And then the Federal Reserve, with computers, keystrokes the amounts that the government said in their bill. Keystrokes those amounts into the government’s bank account. And then the government writes a check and sends it out to whoever. And in most cases, sadly, you see it’s the military. It’s a Northrop Grumman, Boeing. To Halliburton, to BlackRock, to whomever. And so that is how the government spends. And that money then, once it’s spent into those areas, trickles down in the form of salaries and other payments to other companies that springs their work and other contracting agencies, et cetera.

So that first dollar spent by the government is usually spent on government contracts. That was a big awakening, too. Having gone through business school, learning about contracts and hearing that the government takes out bonds to finance spending. Although that’s not really the case at all. The government, literally, does it by decree. By fiat. By law.

So, putting all that into perspective. If you stop, kind of like, okay, I’ve just been through a centrifuge. Personal centrifuge. All the parts are scrambled. I got to wait for it to come back together for me to make sense. So all the connecting synapses and all the thoughts that I had about all these other things had to reconnect because everything changed with that understanding.

And, I think, that, that’s what’s hard for most people. Because, you see, what I just said doesn’t neatly fit into a meme. It doesn’t neatly fit into a one page index card. Yes, you can say some quick things like, taxes don’t fund spending. But then you end up spending 10, 000 words trying to explain what “taxes don’t fund spending” means.

And they’re, like, what do you mean? Of course they do. Look. So it challenges everyone’s core understanding of what they think money is. It challenges everyone’s core understanding of where they think money comes from. And it challenges people to really think beyond austerity ideas. Ideas of reducing deficits and cutting spending. Because now you realize that that’s not really necessary.

That’s not really what you would want to do. And then you dig deeper. And you alluded to this, and this is, I’ll cut off here. You understand class. Once you integrate class into your MMT perspective, you start beginning to understand what are the implications of the state being the monopoly issuer of the currency.

And you say, well, we have a democracy. Well, do we? I don’t think so. Do we have the ability to affect the spending as voters? I don’t think so. I think that you see legalized bribery in the form of lobbying. And legalized bribery in terms of all these other aspects of the revolving door between industry and government.

You can say, wow, government’s captured. But if you understand capital and labor and the relations there within, you can start to begin to understand slightly different things. So Marxists and other socialists don’t need to be afraid of MMT because MMT is very neutral. It’s benign. But the way it’s leveraged in terms of the way the political economy of your government, of your nation, works is not benign.

That’s a very specific use case. It’s not MMT. It’s political economy. It’s the value system that it overlays the lens that is the operational reality that is MMT. It’s a lot of words right there. But if you understand, you stop saying, well, I see them using MMT for about . . . Well, you don’t use MMT. MMT is a description of the way a fiat currency works.

But how different might a fiat currency work if you, Tony, or myself, or some of your listeners were the ones in charge of making the decisions? That, that it was democratized. That people actually were able to say, Hey, we don’t value that. Or, Hey, we do value this. What if we were able to express our values through the money as the government spends it into existence?

Since we don’t really have that agency, and these are those moments where you’re like, wow, we can have a green new deal. And while we could do all these great things, we can have Universal Basic Services, which we’ll talk about. You realize, well, wait a minute, hold on. There’s this barrier between me and the ability to execute my class interests through this public money.

And it is public money. It’s not taxpayer dollars. How do you do that? If you have no means to affect that through electoral politics, which is what traditional Social Democrats and most MMTers, “We’ll just source the vote.’ This is where we depart because I don’t believe we have a democracy. And I believe that the placebo effect of voting “actually keeps us further from organizing to show dual power. To provide a socialist perspective. A people perspective. A labor first perspective.

Instead of us organizing and educating. And each one teach one, each one reach one. We’re busy stumping for candidates that don’t even understand the stuff to begin with. And, more importantly, into a system that was created for the wealthy elite. The landowners, etc., and not the people. And I think that’s where I land here.

[00:25:59] Tony: That was very, very well put. You gave two good segues there that I want to get into. One being the angle of class, and perhaps that’s what we both might consider to be what is most lacking on the MMT front. The sort of class analysis, which, probably, was best articulated by a Marxist theory. As well as UBS and UBI.

First, I do want to say ideology. Because that is such a theme of what you’re saying, as well. And a big obstacle I find when explaining MMT to people is that people will say, well, if this was really true; what the MMTers are saying was indeed the fact; how come everybody doesn’t know this? Like, how come this isn’t common knowledge?

And what’s very interesting is in the history of the theory of ideology, Antonio Gramsci, who basically takes Marx’s idea of ideology, which is the ideas of the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. Gramsci’s definition of ideology is common sense. He uses the terms interchangeably. I find that fascinating because sometimes what is common sense is in fact, literally, folklore.

That’s not to say that common sense doesn’t have kernels of truth, it often does. But it’s always a non-contradictory truth. It’s a very linear one dimensional truth that leaves out all the contradictions in that ideology and all the other aspects of reality that don’t fit into the ruling class’s framework.

Into the dominant purveyors of ideology. And, certainly, MMT does not fit into the ruling class’s ideology. Some people will think it does just because the government prints a lot of money. And some people will say, well, they’re practicing MMT, aren’t they doing MMT? Even though Jerome Powell openly critiques MMT and all the people in power say they reject it; imagine that you tell people that this is how money works.

That money is really a unit of measurement. That you can’t run out of inches. It’s like saying you can’t run out of money is like running out of inches. If you tell people that, it really changes the perspective of what they can demand. And you’ve touched on a great point. Which is the MMTers will think, well, why don’t we just use democracy to advocate for the public purpose?

And someone like Warren Mosler, who is a fantastic explainer of MMT. Brilliant genius economically. Uh, but sometimes the way he talks about politicians and the fact that others don’t understand MMT. He seems to think that it just boils down to their ignorance and that they’re just stupid and aren’t making the right policies. But they, the ruling class, have a vested interest in not allowing people to know this, or at least, uh, obfuscating the reality is very inconvenient.

It’s inconvenient for the dominant sociopolitical order. It’s like destabilizing what Plato would call a noble lie. It could have cataclysmic consequences in empowering the dominated classes of society. So yeah, I think you touched on something very important there. Stephanie Kelton in her book, The Deficit Myth, mentions how she would try to persuade politicians that this was true.

And some politicians ended up, uh, at least on the Democrats, ended up accepting it. But they would say, no way my voters could ever, no way I could tell my voters this. I would lose support or I would lose donors. I would lose funding, et cetera. I would be seen as a crazy. It’s difficult because even when the people who know it’s true, don’t want to admit it’s true, you’re in a position,

well, how do you advocate for policies in a way that makes sense? That is sound? Because they’re then forced to say, well, it’s taxation. And they’ll say, well, where are you going to get the money from? It’s not the working class. So we’ll tax the rich. And it’s like, okay, fine. But, like the math doesn’t check out. In terms of, like, , if you tax the ruling class, you wouldn’t be able to fund all of these programs if that’s how you thought it worked,

right? So you can’t, like, fool people that way. So I find it, at this point, they should just expose the noble life for what it is. Before we get into UBS and UBI, I think the Marxist angle is great. Because I’ve been following your podcast for quite a while and you didn’t always have that angle. And very few MMTers do.

And to be fair, it’s not a problem really with MMT. In my view, it has to do with the fact that most people, in general, aren’t Marxists. Especially in the United States. Most definitely, extremely, they have a phobia of anything related to Marxism. Although, Bill Mitchell, one of the co founders of MMT, is a Marxist. And he’s been on your show.

One of a really great recent episode you did. Yeah. So when was that point when you finally did get introduced to Marxism? And, I mean, I don’t know how strongly you identify with a Marxist? I don’t think that dogmatic. Like dogmatic in terms of what kind, right?

[00:30:44] Steve Grumbine: I’m not dogmatic.

[00:30:46] Tony: The sectarian. I don’t care.

[00:30:48] Steve Grumbine: I laugh about that stuff. Because here’s the thing, right? It’s good to inform ourselves from history. History is very, very important. I have dug deeply into history going back to, probably, even before the fall of the Roman Empire. But my goal in going through history started originally, okay,

with understanding the arc of revolution. Okay? That was my primary purpose in going backwards. And starting to look at different revolutionary moments in time. And they’re not moments in time, at all, is what I found out, right? They’re not moments in time. They’re like a wave. And they start with certain things. Certain contradictions that are just minor league. Maybe, annoying to people.

And then they ramp up as the contradictions become more and more challenging to live with them. Then they become impossible to ignore. And then the people rise up. And you can see . . . Toussaint Louverture in Haiti is a prime example of this. This is the Obama of revolutionaries, okay? He is a non-revolutionary.

He’s a guy who saw himself as being one of the bourgeoisie. Wanted to be one of the, you know, ruling class. He wasn’t really about the people. And [Jean-Jacques] Dessalines, who was one of the African-Haitians, not one of the mulattoes or one of the other versions. If you’ve done any research on Haiti, there was a bunch of different sects by race and by nationality, et cetera, that kind of dominated the island. Even during that French occupancy when the French were the prime owners, if you will, of Haiti. And Toussaint sold out his top guys.

This Jean-Jacques Dessalines would have ran through a brick wall for Toussaint Louverture. But he found out that Louverture was nothing more than just a sellout. And so what did Jean-Jacques Dessalines do? He put old Toussaint back to France where he was put into a prison.

And the, I think the French Alps, and died in prison. Died very lonely. And Dessalines beheaded and killed all of the French and Spanish and British. He really ran a complete and utter annihilation of those who were against him. And he freed the island of Haiti. But it took 50, 60, 70 years. And the brutality that they suffered.

I mean, if you read C. L. R. James’ book about beyond the black Jacobins or The Black Jacobins, actually. And you realize that the brutality – that they didn’t treat them as humans. So all this stuff was going through my head as I learned about Haiti. As I learned about the French revolution. And understanding the difference between a working class revolution and a bourgeois revolution. And understanding the differences of what they were fighting for and what they were striving to accomplish.

And understanding that, for every revolutionary force, there’s a counter revolutionary force. The Royalists and the whole rise of Napoleon, even. I mean, that entire thing is very instructive in understanding these things don’t happen, number one, in a vacuum. Number two, they don’t happen in a very small period of time.

They happen in waves. And you see the gives and flows. The ebbs and flows as the counter revolution starts to try and take back power it once lost. And so a lot of the deaths and stuff that colored my mind about socialism: the brutal dictators of this – all the totalitarian that. And that was what I understood socialism to be, right?

That was all I knew. I was a Right-winger so everything was, it was either free stuff; they want free stuff. Or it was, they’re a brutal . . . The KGB and 1984 and Big Brother . . . And all this other stuff. I live in the United States and I’m telling you, that’s here right now. We’re living Big Brother and we’re watching the annihilation, fully funded by public money, of Gaza. The massacre of the Palestinian people. The genocide. Let’s call it what it is.

And you ask yourself, is this democracy? Is this, did I vote for this? Did we vote for this? Is this what you thought saving democracy looked like? And you just realize every step through these processes, there is a counter revolutionary force. There’s always something waiting to fill those power vacuums.

It’s never easy. It’s never clean. And so learning history. Learning about these different quests for liberation. Understanding, more importantly, like, what happened during not only the rise and fall of the, initial colonization of the United States and the, bourgeois. Let’s be fair. It wasn’t a working class group of people that came to the United States.

This was people with money that just didn’t want to pay the Crown. And watching them bring slaves. And watching them bring feudal servants, and so forth.

[00:35:42] Tony: I don’t know. What feudal servants?

[00:35:44] Steve Grumbine: I’m saying feudalism and servants and I’m just trying to blend.

There’s a bunch of different aspects, different cultures, different relationships that came through. You had slaves. You had blacks that didn’t speak English. You had blacks that did speak English. You had a whole host of folks that came together during Bacon’s Rebellion.

And this was the first time we got to see people of all walks, we’ll call them the working class for lack of a better term, uniting together to push back. And what did they do? They immediately made laws to cripple the slaves, quite frankly, that did speak English. They said, no, no, no, we can’t have that.

We need to have the slaves that don’t speak English. Because, if they speak English, then they can go ahead and work together. And they’ll think about how to get their liberation. We need people that are not intelligent. We’ll keep them stupid. We’ll keep them from learning how to read. We’ll keep them completely locked in only these things.

And then we can control them. But you watch the way that played out and they put that down, harsh. And they changed the rules and laws. And you watch when we, quote unquote, “freed” the slaves after the Civil War. Only to find out that we had, Hey, guess what? We’re going to have Reconstruction. And we’re going to have these new Jim Crow laws. And we’re going to have these vagrancy laws that are going to put these people back in jail.

So all the while through, if you had your eyes open, you’ve seen that we’ve not really had democracy in this country from day one. I mean, Howard Zinn’s great book, The People’s History of the US shows how, even then, they would have stores of grain. People will be starving in the streets, but stores of grain locked up. And they would send them off to war to fight in the Mexican-American war, knowing that when they went, they would probably die and they would never be able to collect on the food or the money that they were owed, or anything else.

So all these instances throughout history are there for us to look at and read. And, I think , probably the most important one, even though I’m sure there’s a million of them that somebody would say are important, is the Bolshevik Revolution. This did not happen in five minutes either. I mean, this went back to the 1800s.

You had Marx and Engels writing about this stuff. You had, later on, people like Lenin coming through the door writing about this stuff. And what you watch is, ultimately, the world in awe as the Bolsheviks took on their government. And their government was fatigued. Their soldiers were whupped from fighting World War One.

They had lost millions of men and women. And it was horrible. And they didn’t have the stomach for war. I don’t want to say it was a completely bloodless revolution. But in many ways, it wasn’t the kind of revolution that we think about. It wasn’t that whole bloody massacre. There was some killing, but it wasn’t like what you would think.

And the world took notice. And my favorite author out there right now, at least book wise, is Clara Mattei. She wrote this book called The Capital Order. And she explained that the world hyper-overreacted to what they saw with the Bolshevik revolution. And capital saying, Oh no, we can’t have this. And all the economists rallied around to really codify and create austerity.

So all these conditions have been going on for a long time. And there’s been a war against working class for a long time. I mean, I live in Pennsylvania. And in Pennsylvania is where the first police officers really came into play. They were frickin’ hired by the coal companies to make the coal miners go back to work.

And what did they do? They opened fire and killed tons of Pennsylvanians that worked in the mines out here. It’s not far from where I actually live. So you can see, from day one, the clash between capital and labor. You can see the class interests, from day one, eradicating, annihilating, genociding the Native Americans, that really are native to this nation that I live in, but you can see it around the world.

And if you take notice, you can see where the power relationships are. The power dynamics are. Who’s in control. Whose class interests are involved. And I think that if you allow that to inform yourself of the state – the state today has the power to send billions of dollars of military gear to Ukraine and to Israel, all at the same time, without raising taxes, one penny, by the way. Not a single tax increase to pay for any of that while simultaneously telling every citizen in the United States, we can’t afford to wipe out your student debt.

We can’t provide you with Medicare. We can’t provide you with, uh, high speed rail. We can’t provide you with universal child care. We can’t provide you with a Federal Job Guarantee. We can’t provide you with a cost of living increase for Social Security; on and on and on. So the contradictions of a nation that can create currency and can spend it into existence; but it only has it for the war machine and things that serve capital and not for we, the people.

And have convinced us all that it’s wanting free stuff. And that you’re a moocher, and all these other derogatory things that keep us trapped in that mindset. I think that’s why MMT is so difficult for people to really get their head around. Not to mention all the lies that they’ve been told by classical economists. Like people like Milton Friedman, and others, who have made us believe that inflation is always, and at all times, a monetary phenomenon.

Whenever the government spends money, it creates inflation because they think of inflation as inflating the money supply. Because they still believe that we’re on a commodity money, like gold. And even if we were on a gold standard, it still wouldn’t apply. But this is stuff that informs the Left, too. Because if you read Marx and Capital, you understand that Marx wrote from a position of commodity money.

I know that there’s some mentions in Volume Three of fiat-type arrangements. He didn’t understand money. Marx didn’t understand money. And so, for me, a lot of this push into this class analysis and into blending MMT with more of a socialist perspective and, really, understanding the class antagonisms and understanding our own class interests.

It’s really created quite a, an interesting set of dynamics in terms of who’s on your side; who listens; who’s willing to listen. Who doesn’t just automatically say, Oh, you just want to save capitalism. Which is a lie, of course. But they can’t help themselves. It really produces a whole new set of friends and allies and detractors. People that without listening to what you’re having to say, without reading a single thing, they fall back to that hard ideology.

That very, very rote, dogmatic, thus sayeth the Marx. And it’s an impenetrable bubble at this point in time. I’m hoping that between your work and others work, and ,hopefully, in some small way, our work is able to bridge that gap and close some of the loops on that. So that we can all, at least, understand the way currency works so that we can, in fact, Inform each other.

If nothing else, even if we don’t believe that we can ever do any nice thing with knowledge of MMT. At least understand what they are doing to us in real terms. And really understand the class interests of the capital class and what they’re doing to us. And explain it to people in a way that, hopefully, radicalizes them and makes them more aware and open to change. And that’s, kind of where I land on that one.

[00:43:23] Tony: Yeah, so you mentioned a lot of interesting things there. And I would like to respond to one of those things, even though I think it is a bit off topic. But you have been focusing a lot on that in your podcast series. You have done multiple interesting episodes on revolutions, like the Chinese Revolution, Russian Revolution, Haitian Revolution with Pascal Robert.

Those were my favorite episodes. Very fascinating event. But about American Revolution. So I recently did a podcast, two of them that were public, anyway, on the American revolution with the historian James Vaughn. And some were very surprised by that. Because that one, it seemed oddly sympathetic to the American Revolution. Which some people wouldn’t have expected to come out of this podcast, given that I’ve been super scathing in my critique of American democracy and the United States, in general.

But the way I view the American Revolution is, I view it as a product of its time in its context, right? And in that, context, it’s a massive contradiction. Because, on one hand, it’s one of the most radical events that ever happened. In its history, it was immensely radical for its time. But, paradoxically, because it was so radical in the sense that it was a full bourgeois revolution, in which it was a full establishment of a Republic. Whereas England was a compromise between feudal classes and the bourgeoisie. Between parliament and the monarchs and the aristocracy.

But in the context, American Revolution was super radical, but that’s also why it’s extremely contradictory. Because the bourgeoisie was really at the commanding heights of the revolution in the sense that they were able to essentially control how the system was designed. They designed a system that was so perfectly suited for the interests of the property owning classes.

That created a managed democracy in a way that was so perfectly managed. I believe it’s the most perfectly managed democracy in the sense that it has the best of both an authoritarian system, like, in this has a very strong presidency who can veto and have very centralized authoritarian power. While, also, having these checks and balances that prevent any faction of the capitalist class from dominating the others, which could destabilize the whole system. And, also, that checks and balances, they just pretty much check against the working class.

We can’t implement any policies because Oh, healthcare? That would be unconstitutional. Oh, jobs guarantee? That’d be a infringement on the rights of employers. But you name it. It’s such a system that’s good at controlling people. So that’s my angle of how I critique it rather than, I think on the Left, there’s this kind of critique, which is

the U. S. was founded on slavery, and all that. And it’s like, that’s true, but that’s not really unique to the U. S. I think genocide is, like, in the sense of manifest destiny. But that occurs a little bit later. But that is something, I think, unique to the settler colonial countries. Which makes them, kind of, more culpable than many other countries.

But that’s my angle of critique, just to be clear. But I think the thing that I try to emphasize is that we shouldn’t abandon the hope of a democracy that the American Revolution unleashed. Because we always have to remember that, even though it ended up being controlled by the property owners.

And you really see that the property owners get their full victory when the Constitution is established. When the constitution is created with the convention that happens after the Shay’s Rebellion. Which is sort of [an] attempt where farmers and various other groups are really destabilizing the order and threatening the dominant classes.

And so you have this kind of divide between the petty artisan, the petty bourgeoisie, the artisan classes. Who, I would say, are still, even though like they might marginally own some property, they’re really within the dominated classes compared to the real property owners and the real capitalists. So with that, you had the end of what was radical about the American system.

And there, really, had a lot of radical things going for it. I mean, back when there was all these different states having their constitutions, they had all these different experiments in democracy. Certain states didn’t even have a Supreme court. They didn’t have a Senate. It was just a legislature elected by the people and you didn’t have this president central figure who could just veto the power of the Congress.

You really had a flourishing experimentation of democratic experiments that , over time, just got a certain sense of counter-revolution. I do agree that that happened. The issue is it’s still an establishment of a bourgeois republic. That’s how I view the American revolution essentially.

And in order to have a socialist radical politics succeed today, I believe that we can’t abandon that hope of democracy. We have to abandon our faith in the idea that there is a democracy. That’s the kind of noble myth that enables the order. I don’t believe the United States is going to succeed by using communist iconography from the Soviet Union.

They’re not going to succeed by saying also nothing was ever good about the American project. A lot of the tools that the left has at its disposal in which it could use are already in the history of the United States. Whether we can doubt the sincerity of the people who espouse that rhetoric is, you know, up for debate. Or freedom for who? Democracy for who? That’s all fair questions.

But John Locke, who very much inspired the American Revolution, believed in the right to revolution. And he believed that if a government was to be despotic against his people, that there was a right for the people to, essentially, change their government. And by force, if necessary, by revolution. And Jefferson believed the same thing.

In fact, Jefferson thought there should be a revolution, ideally, every 40 years. That’s something we forget. Like, Jefferson is a contradictory figure. A guy was not so good on the whole slavery thing. He showed signs of racism, at least more than the other founders did. The founders, surprisingly, it’s actually quite a nuance, their racial views.

But Jefferson really is the democratic guy. I mean, and there’s a reason why the French revolution are so inspired by him. They literally use his language and everything. I mean, come on, like what greater tool is that for radical than that, right? The legacy of democracy. And I think that’s the great angle of critique is the fact that capitalism and the ruling class are undermining democracy.

And that what we really have is an unfinished revolution. The dominated classes, we didn’t see it. Right? We didn’t see it, but we should demand it. Right? Rather than saying, Oh, that hope was bullshit. Right. That’s kind of my angle, just to clarify it. Unless even a response to what you were saying, but also to the audience, cause I got a lot of mixed feedback on my last two podcasts on the American revolution.

[00:49:38] Steve Grumbine: Yeah, let me just say this. What I’m trying to say, the point of me going through the arc of revolution and breaking out those different things, is to, kind of, show where we are right now. Okay. We’re watching police and there’s a reason for this.

Cause we’re going to talk about UBS. Okay. We’re going to talk about Universal Basic Services and the need for Universal Basic Services. And I don’t want it to come out of left field when I say, to your point, here’s this aspirational goal. Here is this ideal that services radical democracy. That services a working class revival. Here’s the fulfillment of all these promises that we could do. And set that right here.

And then we have people. And I would go so far as to say, the vast majority of people, don’t have any of that. Even if they can go to play a game of Jeopardy. Or Wheel of Fortune. Or something like that, where they can call out these factoids. Just a bunch of facts. They haven’t integrated them. They haven’t pulled them together to see how these things play into their aspiration for a Green New Deal; high speed rail; any of these things, right?

And they don’t understand how it couldn’t be. And so they keep going back to the well because they refuse to accept that they don’t live in a democracy. They refuse to accept the class-based understanding of who does control the levers of power and who they listen to and whose interests they serve. It sounds like a conspiracy.

It sounds like you’re talking about the Creature from Jekyll Isle. Or sounds like you’re coming up with some Rothschilds. Or some weird, the bloodline thing. I mean, people just can’t quite deal with reality as it stands. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t all these evil plots from wealthy people or whatever.

Maybe these things are happening in plain sight? But, really, just keeping it a hundred percent. In between the lines, momentarily. The idea that the things we think we have; the ability to go and vote; it’s a placebo effect within this space right now. Within the current iteration machination of the United States and, in many cases, around the world because Europe is a vassal of the United States, let’s be fair. We’re not dealing with the disintegration of empire, contrary to everyone’s desires and hopes and dreams, and so forth. We’re watching empire on display right now.

We’re watching who it serves. And we’re watching if you pay any attention to the fight for de- growth and understanding the role of the IMF, World Bank, WTO, et cetera, and the global South. And the way trade is made up. And why they exported jobs away; why they exported production away; and why supply chains crumble; and things like that. And why there’s inflation. All these things go into Hey, you know what? I think we need to have Universal Basic Services. Which, I think, is the most superior, uh, approach to delivering a society

we’d want to live in, right? A society that the Left , as a whole, would embrace, at some level. I mean, obviously we’re not talking about a complete and utter. we own all the means of production. There is no more capital. There is no country. There is no money. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about the next meaningful, pragmatic, logical step.

And I hate the word pragmatism. Because that’s not really what I’m trying to say here. It’s just saying within reach. Within the, acceptable language that people even hear. That, I mean, you can’t even get them to hear. Like you were saying, things like communist talking points, and using these communist terms and phrases, and using communist imagery, and things like that.

it isn’t the win many think it is because it really just stops it dead in its tracks. They don’t hear anything after that. But I think it’s important to understand that what we’re going through right here, right now, as we begin to talk about UBS is that the system is not set up to give us Universal Basic Services.

The power dynamics are not set up to give us Universal Basic Services. The electoral process that we would hope to get elected representatives to vote for this is not there for us, either. And the capture and the enclosure of all these institutions. The corruption of these institutions. The, the veneer of democracy that we hold on to for dear life. It’s a facade. It’s manufacturing consent.

And so, to me, I want to level set for people that I’m not Pollyanna. That I don’t have rose colored glasses on. That I’m not sitting here just saying, let’s just get a few more progressives in office and, damn, we got UBS right there. No problem at all. I want to make clear people understand what they have to do to get, if this sounds good, if UBS sounds good to you.

You must, soberly, consider the world you live in and understand your agency to affect and make that come to be. And, at this point in time, I believe we are somewhere near less than zero through the electoral path. Anyway, that’s my take. That’s where I was coming from.

[00:55:28] Tony: Right. And I think your position, just to be clear, you’re not saying that, Oh, just like revolution now, like it’s just somehow going to happen out of nowhere.

But, rather, that we should be honest with ourselves. Or elucidate the real obstacles to electoralism that exist. Rather than thinking that one, the ruling class is going to allow democratic socialist forces to play the game fairly, right? Like, of course not. Common sense. And I think some people who are from, like, upper managerial backgrounds. Cushy jobs. They don’t really see that. Because, while they’re not part of the upper classes per se, like the real elites,

they don’t have their face getting stomped by the boot of the ruling class. They’re like in between. They’re still sitting in first class. They’re not quite experiencing the disillusionment that so many people feel intuitively, right? Why I think so many people don’t vote. Not out of pure ignorance. Not out of the fact that they’re stupid, per se. Or that they just don’t know better.

I think a lot of them intuitively really sense, and to a large extent correct, that there isn’t a difference. Like, it’s not going to make a big difference. Like, they might make a small difference here and there. But what does it do for me, right? What does it do for me? I think people really understand that.

The other big thing that I found interesting about MMT, right. And this is, sort of, going to be our segue into UBS and UBI, is those who believe that you can just, okay, elect candidates and implement these policies, like UBS or UBI, to fit the public purpose; to benefit the general interests of society; right?

I find it interesting because they’ll say, well, Marxism is too radical. I’m not going to embrace that. That’s kind of extreme. I’m more pragmatic. Do you implement a policy like a Job Guarantee, for example, that would give, guarantee, everyone work? Which would automatically increase the bargaining power of the working class so that they can more easily leave their job and go to another job if that job was treating them poorly.

That would decrease the power of the capitalists dramatically. So would UBI even, right? Even UBI is a much less radical power. UBI, I believe, is a more capitalist policy. But I think there’s a reason powers haven’t implemented it. Like in Canada, there was actually a big moved by some faction of the Liberal Party to implement UBI to turn the temporary income into a permanent one. And it got quickly shut down.

The Canadian Small Business Association actually was the loudest lobby against it. The conservative party were hard against it. And even the liberal party ended up just abandoning it, totally. And because these policies are declarations of class warfare in some form, even if it’s not an extreme form, they are.

So the ruling class is going to see it that way. It’s like people who tell me, oh, Marx, yeah, that’s too much. What about Henry George? What about we have a Georgism? A land value tax where we, basically, tax the wealthiest property out of existence. I’m like, that’s class warfare. Like, at that point, just be a Marxist. Like, I don’t get it.

And, uh, yeah, so that’s like how I feel about the MMTers. That’s where some people who might see UBS as a light reform, mean, what is Universal Basic Services exactly? And why is it better than a universal basic income? Because a lot of people who are new don’t, haven’t, explored MMT too much. They just heard about it.

They tend to just assume that MMTers are proponents of UBI. They think that, well, if you think the government can’t run on money, that they’ll just give everyone money. Right? That’s like common sense. But all the MMTers I know are proponents of like a Job Guarantee or something closer to Universal Basic Services.

They, kind of, tend to differ. But none of them, from what I’ve seen, really are, like, big UBI proponents. So I’d like you to lay out the cases to what UBS is and why is it better than UBI.

[00:59:14] Steve Grumbine: Sure. So UBI stands for universal, or unconditional, basic income, right? And so this is what people hang on to because it’s easy. It fits on a meme, right? You can put it on a meme and people are like, well, yeah, give me a thousand dollars a month.

No problem. That sounds great. Give me, I mean, I’d like to have a thousand dollars extra a month in my pocket. Who wouldn’t, right? But the point of a UBI is, I’m providing you with a tax credit. Remember when I described what money is, as a creature of the state? That the dollar is a tax credit that the US government uses so that it can ask for those taxes back.

You have to do something to get the tax. The engine of the economy is not the money that they collect, but the obligation that you do. So, by them giving you just money, just giving you random money, it fundamentally violates the whole purpose of the tax credit, right? The tax credit is a coercive force intended to allow the government to provision itself, quite frankly.

And back in the day, the King would come to some dude sitting on the side of the road and say, Hey, yo, I’d like you to build me an aqueduct. And the guy was like, I’m good, man. I, think I’m going to keep plucking potatoes and maybe go fishing. Spend some time with my kids. Whatever. And the King’s like, ah, good point.

And the King’s like, well, how about I put a tax on your house? Um, would you do it then? And it’s like, Oh, where am I going to get that, the thing to pay the tax? And he’s like, ah, good point. He goes, these gold coins with my little face on it here. You can get 10 of those by building me an aqueduct and that’ll cover the tax on your house.

They called it a hut tax. And Matt Forstater wrote some great papers on this. You can look it up. It was in Africa, in particular, is one of the ways that they did it; but everywhere. This has, kind of, been the way that the sovereign, uh, kings and monarchies and so forth. They would spend their coins or gold coins into existence and people didn’t have any need for the gold coin with the king’s face on it. So they institute a tax and the king would get his money back. But it would allow them to do whatever it was that the king wanted them to do.

And so, in the case of the UBI, you’re giving people money, but there’s a whole bunch of other things that are going on there, right? So businesses . . . primary driver of all businesses is to maximize shareholder value. To limit wages and to limit expenses, in general, and provide the most return on investment to shareholders.

And so, with that in mind. When they know that you get a bump in pay, and we could see this in spades during the pandemic. We had our supply chains crash around us. We had, ultimately, people were given money to stay home. To not go back to work. To avoid being super spreaders, or whatever was the motivation.

And, ultimately, businesses saw that people had money. And they knew they had additional money because they weren’t driving on the roads. They weren’t having to go into the office. They weren’t having to do whatever.

And so businesses – and Isabella Weber, who’s an economist, I strongly recommend reading her work on inflation – documented extensively that most of the inflation we experienced, save for some minor spikes from supply chains breaking down and fuel cost increases, etc. What she ended up saying was, is that most of this was what they call sellers inflation, AKA greedflation, which was corporations arbitrarily raising prices.

And some of them had eight, nine hundred percent profit. That’s ridiculous. That’s insane. But they could do it. And this is what generated most of the inflation. So, hypothetically, everybody gets an extra thousand dollars a month. What does the capitalist do? What does the business center do? They know that there’s a certain amount of fluff floating out there in the world. And so they raise prices until they can soak up that extra. That surplus, if you will. Surplus in people’s bank accounts. They try and maximize the amount of that disposable income coming back to their coffers.

So without having a price anchor, something to lay prices down to maintain that. And the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate, full employment and price stability. They try to manage that through interest rates, and so forth. So now all of a sudden you’ve set in a new thing. So, in order for the Federal Reserve to maintain price stability, they have one tool in their mind. That’s raise interest rates. Because that’s the only tool they really have, is to raise interest rates.

So they raise interest rates. And what does that do? That raises the cost of credit. Which, by extension, is inflationary. And so then, what happens? People that have money get additional money through the interest income channel. So the rich become richer as a result of this massive transference. This all informs us what a UBI looks like.

So if we look at UBI in a, kind of, modern sense. We already, kind of, have one in the United States – talking purely of the US – I’m sure Canada has something similar to this – in Social Security. They’ve convinced us that we’re paying into Social Security. That it’s our money coming back to us. Which is not true. As much as a fun, exciting story that may feel to tell our kids, it’s not real. It was a lie that FDR told to get everyone to believe that they had skin in the game to create this. But, ultimately, Social Security is a de facto UBI. The difference is a BI because it’s conditional. It’s conditional based on certain requirements that you meet. Whether it be age, survivor benefits, disability, a host of things. Social Security plays into that.

So we, kind of, already have a lot of those, quote unquote, “conditions” that people, typically, well, what if I’m disabled? Well, there’s Social Security there. It’s not enough. Yeah. Well, that is a problem. The reason it’s not going up is because they’ve convinced you that it’s your tax dollar paying for UBI, paying for your Social Security, et cetera.

And so, naturally, they’re trying to find ways to get more tax dollars from the rich to pay for the stuff. And it’s just not so. But it’s all part of the lie. It’s all part of the monetary lie that we’ve grown to believe. And it’s, also, in part, why folks that are capitalists like UBI a lot. Because Milton Friedman’s kind of belief system said the only problem with capitalism was we need more of it.

And so by helicopter money – dropping money on people – they’re going to spend that money. So that is going to be one person spending is another person’s income. So they figured, Hey, this is a great way to grease up the skids for capitalism. But it doesn’t take into account gig workers. Working for pennies on the dollar and being subsidized with their UBI. Instead of letting companies off the hook for not paying a fair living wage and skimming all that off for corporate bonuses, stock buybacks, you name it.

An MMT’er would probably tell you, point blank, that we want to make sure that they’re paying a living wage. That they’re paying a wage commensurate. And so this is why they would bring a Job Guarantee as opposed to a UBI. Because a Job Guarantee does something that UBI could never do. And that is monopolize hours. You can only be in one place at the one time. So if I’m working 40 hours a week at my Job Guarantee job, you can’t subsidize a shit wage over there at Walmart, by a year [of] UBI. Ultimately, the UBI would allow them to have that free extra money and work and stuff. And so they assume that everybody will have more money. So they just jack prices up.

There is no price anchor. Job Guarantee, which would be part of UBS, which would be part of that structural eco-socialist worldview, is that it does provide a price anchor. It’s the job anchor. It’s the job standard. The employment standard, if you will. We’re de facto, kind of, pegging the currency. And I don’t really like that. But, in effect, it is a peg of sorts to labor.

We’re saying a unit of labor, now this should appeal to Marxists in many ways, is that we’re now defining what a unit of labor is. We’re defining for all what that minimum, I don’t even want to call it wage, because it’s more than that. It’s a benefit package. The universal benefit package. The base case for all employment. And, by doing that, now all of a sudden all those companies have to meet or beat the Job Guarantee wage.

Which is not make-work. It’s not dig a hole, fill a hole. It’s not working for the man kind of thing. It’s, literally, socially valuable work that we, the people in our local communities would decide. We decide what we want to compensate. Do we want to have people play chess with people in elderly homes? Do we want to have people teach guitar lessons in the community?

Do we want to have them teach swim lessons? Whatever. Bottom line is, is that anything that we want done can be funded in full by the federal government. Paid for and administered at the local government. Giving rise to local democracy. And I call it a democracy enhancer, right? But without these sorts of things. If you just go with the UBI. You have no tether to anything. You’re not guaranteed anything extra. In fact, you could find yourself even in worse shape because of price hikes and the inflationary pressures to come from that seller’s inflation that I described Isabella Weber doing her work on.

So this all backs us up to UBS. UBS – we’re providing Universal Basic Services. And this is part of that eco-socialist framework that people like Jason Hickel have written extensively on. If you really want to learn about the Universal Basic Services, guys like Jason Hickel provide a very, very great framework for what sustainability looks like and what these kinds of public purpose type jobs . . . Green, uh, mind you . . .

The Job Guarantee is not a green job. A Job Guarantee is just a base case for all employment. As opposed to an unemployed buffer stock of labor, you’re providing an employed buffer stock of labor for the work that needs to be done by the state. When you think about it, so much of the waste and the climate crisis that we’re facing right now comes from all this competition and advertising and layers upon layers of capitalism. All these different services picked apart and skimmed off of. I mean, even payment systems, for crying out loud. Things like PayPal and all this stuff. These middlemen that have layered in all the way across.

Universal Basic Services eliminates a lot of that. For example, we have no healthcare in the United States. It’s trashed, horrible. And there’s a hundred layers of denial services stacked on top of your insurance. There’s a hundred ways that they a la carte you to the point of bankruptcy.

So, the United States doesn’t have any of these things. So it’s hard for people to get their head wrapped around, they think, oh, you’re just going to become dependent on the government. Well, you already are dependent on the government.

The government has created the rules, the regulations, the markets, and all the things in the government that regulates the whole enchilada. You’re already dependent on what they’ve put together. If they make a change to it, your life will change because you will ultimately be a part of this system. It’s just inevitable. It is part of a larger machine that you can’t really escape. There’s not really the prairie anymore. There’s no unexplored areas other than maybe the Marianas Trench.

So, ultimately, you’ve got to have services to be able to survive in this country. And the UBS would do is provide those services to you at no or low cost.

And the no cost version, for, for the sake of this conversation, allows that the government would create these things. Create high speed rail. Create mass transit. Create sustainable green cities. Create renewable energy, and so forth. Create the very conditions by which we could live without ever getting a bill to see, Hey, I got to pay for this thing.

So in many ways it takes money out of the equation. Literally, the government makes payments to those entities, those people that are providing the services. But you, the person, are not required to pay it. The government’s paying it directly. So you don’t see that cost.

The good news about that is the government can pay any price it needs to pay. And it can also set the price as the monopoly issuer of the currency. On the flip side though, if you were to try and do these things with UBI, what you would be stuck with is you have to negotiate on your own; you have to find the services on your own; you have to pay for the services. And if you run out of cash from your UBI, you’re shit out of luck. Okay.

With the other side, the government is creating the industries. It is, literally, funding those industries. It’s funding the people working in those industries and ensuring that everyone has access. And so availability of services, quality of services, the inflation-proofing of services, you name it, all comes with this UBS approach. We’re not talking about burlap clothing and gray and drab and no color and life is boring. We’re talking about, literally, providing premium living conditions for all. Providing home/housing for all. Providing internet. Making things. Reclaiming the privatization. And reclaiming them and becoming more nationalized and becoming Universal National Services for all. Part of the public commons.

I think it’s a fantastic, holistic approach to things. And I think, quite frankly, it’s perfectly fit for Marxists and other socialists of different ilk to, kind of, get behind it and embrace in this struggle for all of our lives. And I think UBS meets that need head on. I love the fact that we don’t see the cost increases as people.

We, as people, get those services regardless. And the government, itself, controls the negotiating between the deliverers of those services because it controls the laws. It controls all the rest of the parameters and regulatory bodies that service those industries. So, to me, that’s the step forward.

[01:14:06] Tony: So I have two questions. One is just a very practical one of clarification. Being, what exactly would a UBS include? Would it include housing as well as a Job Guarantee? Would it include even food? Because I know China, for example, had the iron rice bowl program, which eventually got removed. But, yeah, the iron rice bowl program, which was like a kind of guaranteed right to food.

I really doubt that would probably be necessary in, like, First World countries that have like such abundance. But you never know. So what would be included in UBS in your view? Because would the right to affordable housing be included there? Cause that would be a very big one, for sure.

And I think that’s the one that you would start getting into the territory of basically socialism at that point.

[01:14:50] Steve Grumbine: Yes.

[01:14:51] Tony: Yeah.

[01:14:51] Steve Grumbine:  It really comes down to what do we want, right? Like, I don’t want to be at the mercy of a capitalist for a universal basic need, right?

A universal basic need I don’t want to be at the mercy of a capitalist for. I don’t want to be at the mercy of someone whose primary purpose is to maximize shareholder value. I don’t want to be at the mercy of supply and demand based on some cost benefit model that some company puts out there for their return on investment.

My father died of a very unique disease called progressive supranuclear palsy. It’s got such a tiny footprint of people that will die from it or, or ever have it, that [it] will never be profitable to cure. It’ll never be profitable to solve. And so they won’t. Not unless we fully invest R&D at a national level. Make patents and protections, and things like that, a thing of the past. And really make them part of the public purpose. The public commons.

So the things that you and I would want in there, I think, it’s as important that we, as people discuss those things. I mean, I can come up with, I mean, Jason Hickel looked at it. I believe its double mission of eco socialism and Universal Basic Services is one of those key cogs.

And the power of decommodifying, I think, is what he calls Universal Public Services. The Power of Decommodifying Survival. This came out in August, 2004. I’ll give it to you and you can put it in the show notes if you like. Ultimately, I believe that you’re talking about the right to a job. You’re talking about the Internet communications. But because we want to try to survive, it does no good if we have all these fancy big words and all these great ideas, and stuff like that,

if the planet gets rid of us. Because we’ve taken such poor care of our world that we are no longer able to live here, right? Cause we’re dead. I think that it’s important that we do things in a sustainable, responsible way. And I believe that this is all open for debate. I mean, healthcare, certainly. Education, absolutely. Clothing, absolutely. Housing, for sure. There should be no such thing as homelessness.

There’s no need for homelessness. I mean, we’ve got room for that. But that comes back to our class interests. And whose class interest is it that some might be homeless while others live in absolute opulence?

And, I think, you understand that the way that the rich judge themselves is by the person right below them. By how much they’ve acquired and where they fit in the pecking order and so forth. And you see the very rich, what did they miss? They miss the ability to be gods. They want to be in control.

And one of the things MMT does, which I think is important in this whole UBS conversation, is it says, we don’t need your money, rich people. We don’t need your money at all to do these things. We’re going to do them. And we’re going to do them with or without you. And on the backside, not tied to this, we’re going to do it without you thing. We’re going to tax the hell out of you. Because you’re too damn rich and you’re buying up our democracies. And you’re not actually contributing, but you’re actually contributing in the wrong way to the carbon footprint to destroying society.

And we’re going to fix that, too. But I think the point of this is that an MMT lens allows us to understand that the state, as long as there are real resources available; as long as there is labor that can be contributed; as long as there are goods and services and production ready; we can achieve whatever we want to achieve.

It’s not an issue of where do we find the money. And there’s a documentary out now that talks about finding the money. But I would strongly say that it doesn’t matter where the money comes from because we, literally, create the money. We don’t print it. We spend it into existence, like I said in the beginning. But we have unlimited amount of money.

It’s just like we have unlimited inches and pounds in the world. So we have unlimited money as well. Unlimited ability to measure credit relationships. Unlimited ability to put these tokens out just like air miles, or whatever. With air miles. They can rent a million air miles, but if they only have 30 seats to distribute, that’s going to be a real problem. Guess what? It’s going to cost a lot of air miles to land one of those seats. And it’s going to drive up scarcity and costs, and, and so forth.

So within a Universal Basic Services approach, we just need to make sure whatever we’re saying – like, for example, in the United States there’s a big push for Medicare for All. Which would probably be considered one of these Universal Basic Services. Even though I don’t like it, I’d rather have just a national health service and be done with it.

But in that case, though. If you give everyone, suddenly you give everyone access to health care on demand. Whatever you need. However you need it. You sure as hell better have put together the plan to make sure you have the resources. Do you have enough doctors? Do you have enough nurses? Do you have enough phlebotomists? Do you have enough gurneys and, whatever? All the different aspects. Do you have enough clinics to provide services? How do people get their service?

Do you have enough of whatever it is? And it might not be something you can just flip your finger. You might take 10 years to hire and train enough people to do this thing. So you’ve got to have a long view on how to implement it. And have a long view on how you transition to it. And most of the bills you see. Most of the, quote unquote, “policy space” you see out there never takes into consideration what it will take to acquire and to build out the structure. The infrastructure. The ability to provide these services.

And so, what ends up happening? They’re mostly starved out by underfunding. They are completely not considered on how to staff and how to build the real resources. So, invariably, you get poor service. And so, people see these poor services. And, in their head, they say, why the hell would I want government anything? It’s crap. They do horrible work. But that’s by design. They want it to be starved. They want it to be like, there you go, you wanted government in it and look at government screwing it up again.

But, in reality, it’s a function of austerity. It’s a function of saying we don’t have the money. It’s a function of saying we can’t do those things. And we can. And we can do them very well. And we can do them, not just very well, but we can do them better than what the capitalist system does. We can take whatever we want, however we want to design it. And we can make those universal services as good as we want. As good as we can dream. It will never be an issue of we can’t find the money.

Except, in this current environment, where we don’t have agency in the political system to make those things happen. So, to me, the radical moment here is to realize what could happen right here, right now. And then to ask that question. That burning question that we all should be asking ourselves. Why isn’t it happening?

Why aren’t we doing that? Why aren’t people considering that? Why would our government tell us we don’t have the money? Obama, the people’s guy. Obama came out and told everybody that we’re out of money. That, what do you want us to do, take out a credit card from the people’s Republic of China? That’d be immoral, right?

Just sound exactly like a Reagan guy. Exactly like a Right-Winger in the United States. No difference at all, except better bedside manners. Two sides of the same capitalist class interest. So when we get to these questions of UBS, it’s not an issue of whether they’re great ideas. It’s how do we get there?

And that’s when we start butting heads, because you’ve got the people that really believe in this electoral system. And I believe their children-mindedness – the naivite that allows them to believe that capital will relinquish control. And that’s what it is. By making us strive. By making us need. That allows the capitalist system to continue to push us to do things that it wants us to do.

And they’re not going to relinquish that control without a real fight. And are people ready for that fight? Whatever form that comes in? I don’t think so. I think people think they can just go to a ballot box, click vote, and if it doesn’t happen, they give up on everything. And I think that that’s part of the problem.

And that’s part of why I feel it’s important to bust the bubble of electoralism. Because this very concept of UBS will never be possible until we get through that process of recognizing the limits of this, what I consider to be, placebo, oligarch-Olympics voting. I really believe that we need to stare that demon in the eye and say, my God, my kids could have nice things.

I wouldn’t be paying $1,000 a month for student debt. Why am I doing this? What in the world’s wrong with the system? And you realize, ultimately, it’s a class war. We have class war on our hands, whether you signed up for it or not. And I think that that’s the real wake-up call that people need to have

[01:24:09] Tony: Hear. Hear. Very eloquently put. One objection people give to the Job Guarantee, more specifically, in contrast to the Universal Basic Income. People will say, well, I just want to be alone with my art. I want to do art. I want to do some non-conventional career. I don’t want to, like, I want to be post-work.

So there’s these whole post-work crowd. Now, I will say, I was a more sympathetic to this crowd before. Well, I would say I’m still sympathetic to this crowd now, but I used to be fully on that side. Which is, well, I still think everyone should work less. But, I think the idea of people who are opposed to work would be, well, what’s, the window for people who have career paths that aren’t really tied up in a traditional career?

Is there room for people who want to write books for a living? Or, I don’t know, make art, or whatever? That’s what they would say. What, what is their place in this Job Guarantee?

[01:25:04] Steve Grumbine: That’s the point. It could do all of those things. It can, literally, I mean, we could theoretically. It’s all theory, right? Every bit of what we’re saying is practical. We could do it, but it’s theoretical in that we’re not doing it, right? So if you think about the opportunity for even paying a caregiver to stay home with a loved one or a relative.

What would prevent us? That’s beneficial to society. It’s a benefit to work within your community in whatever fashion. If you want to be an artist, we need to value art again. We need to value the arts, in general. We need to value music. These are things that produce socially beneficial value for all of us.

Even if it’s, ironically, just them. Even if that’s their job. Ultimately, it benefits all of society. And if it’s not your cup of tea, it’s okay. Cause it’s somebody else’s cup of tea. So, to me, I think that all of these ideas of artists and musicians and I’m disabled, or whatever. The post-work-mindedness.

You’re still dealing with a very different situation where you are able to achieve the things that you want through a Job Guarantee that would be federally funded, locally administered. And in whatever fashion that that shows up, right? I . . . One of the things that I find interesting is that when you look at work, in general. There’s nothing stopping an artist from selling their art and making money.

There’s nothing preventing that, at all. And most of the UBI schemes that you see out there are like a thousand bucks a month. Even if it was two-thousand bucks a month. That still wouldn’t be enough to really make a dent when you understand the way that capital operates and absorbs up all that extra, uh, money. It knows.

They, literally, have AI out there, to this day, that can crawl around, find out what the average disposable income is, and adjust their prices for them automatically. I was just reading this the other day, software packages that companies deploy that automatically adjust their price points based on criteria that they give.

And so, people need to understand that, even with a Job Guarantee, there’s nothing preventing you from being an artist and selling your art, or doing whatever. What we’re talking about here is in the absence of a job. And let’s be fair. Most people, when they go to jail – God, I’d love to get rid of cops.

I’d love to get rid of jails. I would love to move to a totally different abolitionist perspective of society and, providing for the social needs of all people, right? But, within that space right here, right now, people are released from jail and they have a work requirement. And a lot of jobs won’t hire you if you have a record. But a Job Guarantee immediately allows for the reintegration of felons and, other people that have been imprisoned rightly or wrongly or, whatever.

And again, I come on the abolition side, so it’s hard to talk about like, hey. But it’s important to understand that these are tools of capital to penalize these people. To bring about these kind of – good people, bad people, you win, you lose, meritocracy kind of thing. And by eliminating that through a federal Job Guarantee, the people that want a job can have a job. And the people that don’t want a job can go be an artist, if you want to do that on your own. Or, in some communities they may say, Hey, we want people that want to be artists to be able to work on their art. And we will pay them to either teach classes on art and do their art or, whatever.

The idea is to contribute to the local community. The people. In which we all ride on the roads, we all contribute to society in some way, shape or form. So the idea of . . . part of our stuff is to help one another through these kinds of arrangements.

And I understand the anarchist perspective. And I understand that there’s some groups out there, like, just want to eliminate the state altogether. And I’m not here to debate those kind of claims. I’m here just to simply state that we do have nation states. We do have a currency-issuing federal government. We do have these situations in place. And I don’t see, and maybe you see something different, but even with the encampments at these universities, and so forth. I don’t see anyone but the very, very far-right-wing have an appetite for any kind of revolution.

So the idea here is, is that they stare that devil in the eye. The right-wing is very much ready for a revolution. They’re armed to the gills. They have their own modus operandi for what they’re fighting for. And the Left really doesn’t have that right now. In fact, vast majority of the Left of the people I was talking about – I even see people that claim to be Marxists sheep-herding people into Joe Biden.

And I’m thinking to myself, “Genocide Joe.” The guy who is literally funding the annihilation of the Palestinian people. You, as a Marxist, are telling me that I have to eat a lump of coal and vote for Joe Biden. I’m thinking to myself, Oh, it just doesn’t, it just doesn’t work for me. It just doesn’t make any sense. Because the difference . . . I think of it like this, and maybe this is a little bit of a tangent, but I believe that it all ties together in terms of rightsizing our ability to have UBS and things like that.

When you consider the fact that the average person goes back to sleep when a Democrat’s in office. The average leftist. The average left of center, or what I’ll call a normie, goes back to sleep when a Democrat’s in office. They stop fighting. But the minute someone like a Trump gets into office, whether you believe he was elected or whether you believe he was anointed and selected. Or however the capital order operates above and beyond the electorate. Okay.

Regardless. The point is, is that you ended up still, once again, getting a president in power with less than 25 percent of the people that would have fought Trump, fighting against Biden and his genocidal proclivities. Trump were to be in there, you would see a huge amount of marginal centrist moderate Democrats coming out of the woodwork. Obsessed with fighting against Donald Trump.

Those same people are not fighting against Joe Biden, who is doing the very same things. If you look at what happened in East Palestine, Ohio. The train derailment of Norfolk Southern. And you look at the hands-off approach and the laissez faire approach to dealing with that horrible, horrible disaster. The federal government could have made every last one of those people whole. Could have bought every one of their homes. Moved them away like it was a mini-Chernobyl. Given them healthcare for life and not even flinched. Not even thought about it.

But instead, they leave it in the hands of capital to deal with and lawyers and stuff like that. And so these people are sitting there, pissing blood, literally. Literally, like, all kinds of skin rash diseases and lung issues and respiratory issues, and so forth. And no help coming in sight. And that’s a Democrat in office. President, Congress at the time. And the anointed people of the different institutions, like Pete Buttigieg of the transportation secretary. And they did absolutely nothing for those people.

So if Trump were to have done that, every last one of those Democrats would have been in the street, ready to fight. They would have been taken to the street, et cetera. So you have to ask yourself in the end. When you have two parties that behave in the same manner with just slightly different bedside manners, and you know that the only path forward is to fight. Would you rather be in power with somebody who you’re letting do the things Trump would do? Would you rather be out of power where you, at least, see everybody willing to fight like hell to stop them?

And at this point in time, I think that I would rather not be guilty of supporting genocide. And would rather fight against genocide, even if Trump were to do the same thing. That plays right into all the other things we’re talking about.

[01:33:40] Tony: Yeah. Very contemporary and very necessary. The last thing I wanted to ask is a question that I think is a fair objection to MMT. MMT theorists, like Randall Wray, have, and all of them, but Randall Wray, in my mind, comes up as the one who has a good objection to this; and his work, Modern Money Theory. Which is that wouldn’t giving everyone jobs, a Job Guarantee, also lead to inflation? Because, of course, the MMTers say that UBI – what’s the point? Because people can just jack up prices, right?

And well, a Job Guarantee. There’s been people who oppose this idea who are mainly on the neoclassical end, who will say, won’t that lead to a wage price spiral? They’ll say that. Or they’ll say that the cost of employers having to raise the cost of production, wages in other words, would mean that they would just have to raise prices in order to meet profit margins.

To what extent is this true and, if it is true, how would it be prevented?

[01:34:43] Steve Grumbine: So first things first. The Job Guarantee produces a nominal price anchor, right? And so it sets the wage. It’s like a minimum wage. But it’s a minimum benefits package. Including the wage and healthcare and all the other things that come with it.

So the Job Guarantee, by extension, creates stability by setting that price. It’s also largely considered to be a temporary thing. People roll on to the Job Guarantee when there’s layoffs and unemployment. People roll back to private sector employment.

I, personally, want to get rid of that private sector employment. I want to create a commons. And I want to nationalize. I do recognize that there are multiple ways of skinning that cat, so to speak. I hate to use that term, but you get the point. I believe that there’s a modicum of room to go with non needs-based capitalism living on. It’s not my preference. I’d like to eradicate it, but I know that there’s only so much; there’s only so much realm of possibility we have without really being crazy and off the . . . And I say crazy. I don’t mean, like, I think it’s a bad idea. I mean crazy in terms of our ability to do it. To, to do . . . right . . . To achieve it at this point, I think would require something most people aren’t willing to accept.

[01:36:01] Tony: Even, like, your position, right, on, um, the commons and nationalization doesn’t seem to be what Pavlina Tcherneva’s position is. Her book, The [Case For A] Job Guarantee – she’s also an MMTer, for those who don’t know – she doesn’t see the Job Guarantee as something that replaces the private sector, but something that kind of fills the gaps of the private sector. And, in doing so, could even help the private sector.

Of course, it’ll hurt employees. And this is where we’d probably both be critical of her approach. That it doesn’t really account for the class warfare that this would require to even make possible. But yeah, I’ve, the way I’ve heard the Job Guarantee articulated, it’s more so just trying to fill the gaps of private sector employment rather than replacing it.

So maybe it’s clear to differentiate your position from that of the dominant MMT view. Because then people might think that is the dominant MMT view.

[01:36:52] Steve Grumbine: Well, so Job Guarantee is the base. It’s the minimum. It is the lowest point, right? This is the wage floor. It used to be called like the employer of last resort. Things like that. So the idea of, Warren Mosler would call this a transition job, okay? Others include a lot of other career-minded stuff into a Job Guarantee, which is not what a Job Guarantee is. Okay.

Job Guarantee is, literally, there to catch people from falling through the cracks. To make sure that, when there’s the ebbs and flows of the business cycle, as they lay people off, people don’t go into complete destitution. They have healthcare, they have dental care, they have a wage coming in. A living wage.

So this is the ability to walk away from a really bad job, immediately, and walk right into a living wage with benefits. That’s what a Job Guarantee is. However, structuring that Job Guarantee, Pavlina talks about the non profit model. She talks about several other ways. And I’ve talked to different people, like Bill Mitchell has a different potential view. Fadhel Kaboub has a different view. My former cohost, Ellis Winningham, and I have a different view. Ultimately, they have a Job Guarantee site out there that describes like a model for how you might institute this.

I will admit that the vast majority of MMTers are probably more Dem-Soc type folks. And that they leave a lot of room available for private sector. Okay. MMT is the underlying operational truths. Let’s not make MMT the theory of everything. MMT is the operational truth. We learned how a fiat currency works. That’s it.

Once we start laying over our political values, the political economy on top of that, that’s no longer MMT. That’s, that’s left the MMT train. And is now political economy. And I think that this is the fundamental differences that the Job Guarantee is like the lone policy proposal that MMT is, kind of, built on. But it’s core MMT.

And the reason for that, if you think about it, going back to my story of the king issuing the tax to the guy that has to pay it in the coin. The idea here is the MMTers are saying, Hey, we’ve created this problem by instituting a tax, which is what drives the currency. Now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to fulfill that promise and complete the loop by providing a way to make sure that, at all times, you’re able to produce something to create money to pay that tax.

So the Job Guarantee is, kind of, like completing the circuit. It’s not the be all end all. What many of us would say though, is, is that we can nationalize employment as a whole. We could, in effect, create a situation where these things are owned by the people, as opposed to owned by some rich dude. Okay.

And we could, literally, create that public space through public employment. And that would mean that guilds and other type of work. High danger type work. Work that requires special knowledge to achieve. Things like that. There are career pathing that could occur in this case. Okay. Obviously that’s not the zero money in the economy, we’re all equal, we all get the same, whatever.

This is really more of a pragmatic view of the Job Guarantee sets the base, sets the bottom. Right? So I want to be clear that it’s not solving all employment. The Job Guarantee is meant to be the base case. The lowest form. The employer of last resort. There’s a natural tendency for private sector to lay people off. To fight wages. To cut wages. To cut employees. To look for efficiency and put robotics in. And do things to replace labor and offshore, and so forth.

The Job Guarantee provides a stop-gap to fill that void, but that can be permanent wage there. It’s like, if all you need is whatever the living wage is, then that’s going to work. Now that said, I do believe that there is a way of making this a multi tiered system. Where people can progress and they can have new things and it can be done.

But that is exceeding the Job Guarantee narrative. I want to be clear on that. That I’m starting to get into my model. The way I’d like to see society is not based on some rich guy holding your entire family and life in his fist. And if he doesn’t like you that day, he can fire you. And now your world is in complete free fall while he makes more money because he cut an employee off and now he’s got more money coming in.

But I do believe that there is a lot more openness to standard private sector employment with many. I wouldn’t say all because each – this is the thing about MMT – it is not political in any way, shape, or form. Though many of the people that are MMT economists would fall into that democratic socialist framework.

It happens to be. That’s a happenstance. Because, like you said, Bill Mitchell would call himself a Michal Kalecki socialist, he was a Marxist. He learned Marx first. He went through all that first and he incorporated that into his writing. And Bill Mitchell took the Job Guarantee from folks like Michal Kalecki, who was a Polish economist and a socialist who came up with the concept of a Job Guarantee.

So I think that that right there shows that there’s a wide range of political ideologies from MMTers. They’re not in lockstep. The only thing that many of us agree on is the operational realities of the way the banking system works in the way that currency is created. Once you get past that, what you would do with it . . . there’s a lot of differing opinions at that point.

You, you cease to have that common thread and MMT, kind of, provides that base. If we could all agree that this is how the system works, then when the different factions get together they would have an honest discussion. Because there wouldn’t be any lies about affordability or where the money’s coming from.

We’d all know that. And then it would be like, wow, you want people to starve. You really are kind of an asshole, aren’t you? You know what I mean? So it reveals the heart. It reveals your intent. And that’s the value overlay over the operational system of MMT.

[01:43:20] Tony: Thanks for being on here. That was phenomenal. Yeah. You really unloaded on this one. You really unloaded the clip.

[01:43:28] Steve Grumbine: I’m sorry about that, man.

[01:43:29] Tony: No, no, that’s great. You’re spittin’ facts. I think the audience would get a lot of value of it. If you did, definitely leave a comment and a five star rating of the One Dime radio podcast, if you like these podcasts. And do not forget to check out Macro N Cheese, if you haven’t already, been following them. Because it’s such a good podcast. It’s phenomenal. I’ve gotten a lot out of it myself. I’ve been introduced to all kinds of authors, namely a lot of the MMT authors. So definitely check that out. It’s been wonderful with you, my friend. Yeah. Happy to have more conversations and more collaborations in the future.

And, hopefully, we both get some big patrons, eventually, where we can fund bigger projects with our educational resources that we’re building.

[01:44:13] Steve Grumbine: You got it, man. Look, man, it was great to be on. Thank you so much for the time.

[01:44:17] Tony: Take care.

[01:44:18] Steve Grumbine: All right, man. For Macro N Cheese. We are out of here.