Episode 207 – A Crypto, MMT Retrospective with Rohan Grey

Rohan Grey always uses cool cultural references. Six minutes into the episode he brings up Tintin. Later we hear about Wile E. Coyote, Star Trek, Teletubbies and Wagnerian opera. 

The Tintin tale concerns a treasure hunt that required Tintin to find three maps; only when they were overlaid could he see the location of the treasure. Rohan Grey relates this to the critical juncture of law, political economy, and technology. He reviews the relationship of all three throughout the history of money.  

Rohan and Steve also revisit the (relatively short) history of the MMT community – what they got right as well as missed opportunities. Brett Scott was at the first MMT conference talking about privacy and the war on cash. These issues are more vital today than they were then, yet have never become part of the MMT canon, which tends to stick to the original hits, like the Rolling Stones still performing “Satisfaction” half a century later.  

“If crypto, quote/unquote, wins the public consciousness, I think that’s a net loss for a lot of things MMT cares about. I’m anti crypto in that sense – as in capital C, crypto. What it stands for as a historical phenomenon right now is the empowerment of a group of people, the dominant strain of which is pro capitalist, pro massive wealth inequality, pro grift and fraud, pro right wing libertarian monetary theories, pro contempt of collective governance.” 

Rohan and Steve discuss how to organize around what is useful from the crypto space without defending it. The distrust of government is healthy – many are illegitimate and corrupt – but Rohan asks why the same critique isn’t applied to property rights. How can it be acceptable for Ted Turner to be a billionaire owning half of Montana? Why does the state become illegitimate only when it wants to tax him? Rohan suggests leaning into pockets of relevance. There’s value to be gained by understanding the opposition.   

Rohan asks our listeners to support #MintTheCoin and to check out the Freedom Box Foundation as well as the work being done with Creative Commons and copyleft.  

Rohan Grey is an Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, and the founder and president of the Modern Money Network. MintTheCoin.org 

@rohangrey on Twitter 

Macro N Cheese – Episode 207
A Crypto, MMT Retrospective with Rohan Grey
Jan 14, 2023

[00:00:03.730] – Rohan Grey [intro/music]

Moglen’s line, which was one of the things that inspired my PhD work, was what he called the internet society. And he said, we would do better if we understood the internet as less of a thing and more of a social condition. That condition is being attached to everybody all the time and being able to instantaneously communicate with very large numbers of people across the world not limited by geography.

[00:00:28.330] – Rohan Grey [intro/music]

So, the word “crypto” today, even though I think it is complicated, still empowers certain people over others. If crypto, quote unquote, wins the public consciousness, I think that’s a net loss for a lot of things MMT cares about.

[00:01:35.150] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.080] – Steve Grumbine

All right. It is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is my friend Rohan Grey. And let me just tell on myself before we get started. I’m kind of a little bit of an Oscillating machine. I get excited about the potential of organizing around crypto spaces, not investing, but the concept of blockchain and other things, the potential uses.

And then on the other hand, I get wrapped up in the fact that it’s typically right wing libertarian space and all the framing and everything else goes against nearly everything that I’ve been talking about. I’m in this weird purgatory of crypto. And so I’ve talked to Rohan, I’ve talked to Brett Scott and I’ve talked to several other people on here about the role of bitcoin in society.

And I’ve been watching Rohan talk about this for a while and he’s really taken a very nuanced approach and it was worth vetting, it was worth bringing to the table. And I need to get my head wrapped around this. I want to pick a lane and I want to go in the right direction. So that’s what I brought Rohan on here to talk about. And without further ado, let me say hello to my guest, Rohan, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:02:53.460] – Rohan Grey

Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s nice to be here. Happy New Year

[00:02:56.410] – Grumbine

To you as well, sir. This space is very challenging. It’s filled with contradictions and black holes and a lot of people with strong opinions for and against. And not all of them are educated and not all of them are correct. And I’m hoping that you can help me, as an MMT guy and a leftist, come up with a framework to help me understand how maybe our listeners might be able to see this space a little differently than either 100% for or 100% against.

[00:03:32.450] – Grey

Yeah, sure. Part of this and I think of this in part to do with different inspirations that I had. So I grew up my father was a lawyer, but he also was one of the first lawyers in Australia to use a personal computer. He was a scientist. Before that, he worked for the Department of Communications. One of his first jobs as a lawyer was a bureaucrat in the federal government helping design laws around cable television, telecommunications infrastructure and things.

It’s not like I have that in the blood, but I grew up hearing about that and thinking about that stuff. And I always cared about the internet and the future digital world, especially coming from a music background. And then growing up in the age of the iPod. Where, as a kid, you were imagining yourself with these libraries of thousands of thousands of songs that you would carry in your pocket and going, my god this is an entirely different kind of world from the world that pretty much everyone throughout humanity up until now has experienced music.

The idea that music was something you would make in live time with other people. Now the idea that music is something you could hold the entire library of humanity in your pocket. So technology was always interesting to me. And then, of course, when I got into the MMT stuff, I come to law school and had this law plus money framework, and that was already quite formidable compared to the colleagues of mine that hadn’t really bothered to understand money, because, of course, 90% of the law is money.

Is fighting over money, is defining it, is structuring it. But this professor of mine, Moglen, who was a computer programmer from the age of about 13, he clerked for Thurgood Marshall in the Supreme Court. He was a historian that taught English legal history and American legal history. So that when he was carrying about easily a thousand years of legal history in his head in more depth than most people carried the last 50, and simultaneously was working at the forefront of free software and laws around open source free software, licensing, things like that.

So nowadays, when I think about all this stuff, I try to put those together, and I think of it as almost like a tripod. The law, the political economy, and the technology all operating as forces that intertwine with each other. And I teach a class nowadays called More Money Technology, and one of the hard lessons I have to all my students is, well, it was hard enough learning how to understand the law. It’s sort of a year plus of painful socialization and inculturation and indoctrination and just a huge amount of elbow grease.

Just to get to the point where you’re conversant in esoteric legal conversations that if you aren’t trained as a lawyer, you might squint from the outside, but will be missing important subtext and context and all these different things. I said to them. So you did all that and then you heard about Grey’s classes and you heard about all this money stuff that he’s obsessed with.

And now I’m going to be really mean and say you have to learn a whole new third layer of lens, which is the technology lens. And it’s scary. It’s a lot it’s a lot of technical competency of putting three maps on top of each other and finding the line that gets drawn from the superimposition of all three. I don’t know if you ever read Tintin as a kid, but there’s one of the stories where they’re trying to search for treasure from a dead pirate called Red Rackham.

And they have to find these three different manuscripts, maps, and then they have to put them on top of each other and look at them through the light, and they see the pathway. That’s always how I think of this is that each one is a useful map on its own but together they provide a pretty rich perspective you don’t get otherwise.

So when I talk about this stuff, I try to situate it against the big history of technology. And when I say technology here, this could also be media studies and things like that. But going back to when we talk about modern money, Keynes talking about it in the last 4000 years. Well, the people who really tried to understand that transition, people like Michael Hudson and Denise Schmandt-Besserat and to an extent David Graeber, part of what they’re looking at is the transition from oral communities to communities based around writing.

But there’s a number of other things that happen in that same period which includes the transition away from face to face societies – where most of your social relationships are people you know – towards large temple cities where you may be dealing with 50,000 people. And the presumption is you’re going to be interacting with people with whom you don’t actually have any personal bonds and as a result have to essentially rely on the social institutions to enforce norms and behavior and all that kind of thing.

And that is intimately connected to writing. That is intimately connected to a form of law that isn’t bound up in you knowing that person because they married your brother and that they stole one of your cows six years ago and blah, blah, blah, but is tied up in things written down on clay tablets and that kind of stuff. And scribes whose job it is to be a permanent bureaucracy for whatever monarch or public authority or tribal elders or whatever it is.

And that scribing authority includes both writing down the records of people who came with contract disputes but also writing down the crop yields and the interest earned on the stuff lent out to the merchants who trade with other cities, et cetera. So you can’t really tell a story of the origins of modern money without telling a story of the origins of writing and the difference between societies built around that form of social governance, technology versus others.

And there’s a whole bunch of developments over the next few thousands of years. But you can fast forward if you want to, up to the development of things like the telegraph, the building of wires that connect the Atlantic and the Pacific and then eventually the whole world. The transition from writing to the printing press, where now it’s not just being able to record ideas out there in a tangible, external, physical media, but you’re able to do it at scale.

The book being the first mass produced item in capitalism, the first idea of a commodity. It’s not individuals sitting there handwriting each letter. You write it once and you run it everywhere. And that leads to things like the Protestant Reformation, the breaking of intellectual hegemony by the church in Europe, and then you get to this world of the internet.

And Moglen’s line, which was one of the things that inspired my PhD work, was what he called the internet society. And he said we would do better if we understood the internet as less of a thing and more of a social condition. That condition is being attached to everybody all the time and being able to instantaneously communicate with very large numbers of people across the world not limited by geography and in that world, previous social dynamics and things just don’t function the same way.

There’s an asymptotic break, whatever you want to call it. There’s a difference between what came before and what came after because of that change in the social condition. And you can design a whole bunch of technologies. You can design good internet and bad internet and totalitarian internet and empowering internet and anticommercial internet and data mining internet, et cetera.

So within that social condition, there are a range of technologies, et cetera, that could be influencing how we live and act and all that. But we can understand some of these questions that we’re looking at with regards to money and digital currency and crypto and things in that trend, in that historical flow. And there’s politics. There’s left right stuff, there’s labor politics.

There’s all that kind of stuff happening simultaneously. But there is also this sense in which whatever may be similar about modern money today and in Babylon, there are also fundamental differences. And one of the most obvious fundamental differences is everybody in Babylon wasn’t also able to call my family in Australia.

And when we look at crypto, I think the way that I see it to an extent is that there was this process of digitization and global encompassing that begins in the 1800s and 1830s and 40s and 50s with the telegraph. And it expands in the 20th century through things like Western Union starting to offer the first credit cards, which offer a layer of payments, connectivity above individual banks, above the banking layer.

The earliest payments cards actually come out of companies offering charge cards, and that becoming a network of companies that then reattaches to the banking system later. Also things like databases. So banks go from being analog pen and paper institutions that use telegraph between them, like you and I might use a tin can with string and into something where the actual books of the bank themselves are digitized.

And then later on you get the hardware revolution where instead of large, massive databases stored a small number of institutions: universities, governments, and eventually banks. You have a system where there are first of all, point of sale devices in stores, and then later on cell phones in people’s pockets. So suddenly, if you’re trying to draw a picture of the network, it starts looking less like a pyramid, or at least parts of it start looking less like a pyramid and more like a network with connections going all over the place.

Now, there are still pyramidical aspects of that, and that’s very important when you start understanding things like mobile money in sub-Saharan Africa, in part basically replacing one network of settlement processes at banks with a different network of settlement processes at telecom companies. But there’s also that other thing. There’s also WiFi, there’s also the peer to peer network of TCP-IP.

There’s also the potential to build a system where any computers that are connected with any connectivity at all can function in all sorts of different arrangements. And importantly, in all of that, you’ve got the emergence of a new model, which is the client server model, which is the idea that I could have a box underground in Utah, somewhere dark and air conditioned and all that, and I could have a device in my hand and they have some relationship with each other.

My email, I experience it, the thing in my hand, but it connects to a box somewhere very far away. You have situations where that isn’t structured that way. And Hillary Clinton puts a box in her basement to run her email because she doesn’t trust the box underground in Utah. But that infrastructure. I was actually just doing some home renovation and we bought some really nice containers for a shampoo, and they were permanent containers, so I don’t have to look at annoying brand labels in my face every morning when I’m waking up.

But I have a four gallon of shampoo now in the basement. And that idea of you have a client in front of you, it’s very pretty and permanent and very personalized, and then you have the big industrial size slop in the basement that you fill it up with, that’s a very different thing than buying little shampoo bottles every week.

[00:14:19.620] – Grumbine

Right.

[00:14:20.160] – Grey

And that model for technology is also important. What does it mean that in the past, when we thought of having our own computer, we thought of it as the laptop in front of us. But in fact, maybe there is this distinction built in that that we haven’t really teased out with our personal computers, even though that’s obviously how a lot of the industrial strength architecture is running.

So all of that is just to sort of lay the scene that whatever problem we’re talking about, whatever historical moment we’re in, we can look at the technological layer for insight and to understand some of the dynamics that then will play out with other political and social questions. So crypto to me, is, in a sense, the finalization of that. Everybody’s got a device in their pocket.

Everybody can build software on top of that. Anyone can spin up a server. Anyone could do all this stuff in a way that is, to an extent, infrastructure neutral. You can do it on regular old boxes, you can do it through WiFi, you can do it in a little self contained network or whatever, and then show how it can be replicated upwards. In the past, you needed to be a bank.

In the past you need to have specialized point of sale devices. All that stuff has been swept away. The generic internet, the generic box is now the starting point of analysis. And the pond that we’re playing in is everyone. These are unique solutions to the problem. Zero is a unique solution relative to all the other numbers. The only way to win the Kobayashi Maru in Star Trek is not to play, that kind of thing.

So this is a difference, in my opinion, of we’ve been digitizing for a while, but we haven’t taken it seriously. We’ve been taking analog processes and carrying them into a digital world and waiting for that Wily Coyote moment where we realize we’ve walked off a cliff and need to look down and go, oh shit. And it doesn’t happen consciously, but I think that’s an extent to what crypto represented.

What was the defining catalyst moment for the emergence of quote unquote crypto? I would say, if you’re being honest, it’s 2008. People talk about Satoshi Nakamoto publishing the Bitcoin protocol, which is obviously critical, but there were, in fact, a number of developments that happened before that that didn’t spark an entire new movement and hype, et cetera, that were arguably just as important.

It’s like someone saying, well, the day we added the airbag to the car was the day that it took off. Yeah, but what about the day you added wheels? What about the day you added the engine? That seems a very particular moment to say that was when a car became a car. And I think if you’re being kind of more historically grounded, the obvious point is that it was the perfect storm.

You had this big important fix of a problem that had been limiting the growth of the network. There were other problems in the past, but that was a big one. It happened right at a moment where this crisis had people hungry for alternatives to the traditional system. Trust in both governments and traditional banks was at a generational low.

And importantly, it was the first time that we’ve had a big seismic shift at that scale globally since the 30s. So of course, this is going to be a moment where almost like a form of social constipation, a lot of blockages that have been building up that needed a real shakeout to break through into the public consciousness. We’re going to use that crisis moment to do so.

So crypto, in a sense, is the point where the zit burst through the skin and can now be popped. But it was coming for a long time, in my opinion. The seeds and germs of it all go back to the 1830s and the fintech frontier has always been there. Colleagues of mine in UNSW in Hong Kong, Ross Buckley and Doug Arner, talk about the stages, the generations of fintech.

We use that word now to refer to PayPal, Venmo and things, but it applied just as much to credit cards and debit cards and internet money and telephone banking and all those things at different points. And I think one of the points about understanding the long history of technology is the people who are in charge of that stuff, going back to lawyers being one of the first technology brokers.

If you can read where no one else can read, you’re basically a magician. And any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And if you’re the one keeping the record of all the laws, even people like Blackstone and Bracket, people who’ve become famous in the legal world for writing legal treaties over development of English common law, what they’re doing is saying, well, I read all the laws.

You did it. And I did. I read literally every contract dispute that came through the British courts for 500 years. And when I say this principle is what they believe and say, that’s the line of best fit, I’m saying that with the authority of someone that’s read more than most people get to read. Now, you can disagree if you want to, but you and whose army? You and whose research?

So suddenly, even within the world of law, even in the world of common law, which is law made by the accretion of individual cases, by judges, the ability to build the treaties, the ability to create a new form of media, the compendia, turns these people into legal gods. And we’re still prodding them. And if they make a mistake or if they say something stupid or they didn’t have a good relationship with their daddies, and then that manifests in the way that they talk about constitutional law or something.

We’re all living in the shadow of that mistake because they’re the ones that master the technology to write the encyclopedia. And that goes back to people like Paul Samuelson in the econ world that MMTers will probably be familiar with that idea that you don’t care who writes the nation’s laws as long as you write their textbooks.

So when we think about crypto, what we’re talking about is a group of people that had sophisticated technological knowledge. They were looking there going, well, do I build a new internet? Do I build a new server? Do I build a new AI? Do I build whatever. Well, I’m going to be interested in money, and I’m pissed off at governments, I’m pissed off at regular banks, and I’m going to build this.

People like David Golumbia, who wrote a book about the history of bitcoin politics as right wing extremism, would say that a huge amount of the inspiration for those people was libertarian monetary audio. That the opposition in 2008. And you see this in early conversations around bitcoin forums and things, was about the idea that the reason we’re in that situation was because of fractional reserve banking.

That boogie man concept doesn’t mean much in today’s economy, and certainly doesn’t mean what most people think it means. But the idea is that we created basically soft, funny money and everything went to shit because we had too much collective governance and too much trust in social forms of credit. And what we need to do is get back to hard money. That’s a big part of it.

Then separately, there is this other lens, this other dimension of not wanting Big Brother to snoop on us, which can be civil libertarian can be we don’t want Palestinian activists and the NAACP and things to be surveilled by government, which really means Jay Edgar Hoover and the FBI and his anti-fascist campaign against antifascists and civil rights activists like MLK.

But it could also mean right wingers who think that the government’s taxation is inherently illegitimate, that they have a right to own their own property, and that if bitcoin allows them to do the equivalent of burying gold bars in the backyard, like half of Idaho, then that’s its benefit. So even within privacy, you have these different spins, some of which I think are more justifiable and noble than others.

My view, obviously, is that governments are often illegitimate, they’re often corrupt, et cetera, but that ultimately anyone that hates that stuff should be willing to apply that critique to property rights themselves. The idea that Ted Turner gets to be a billionaire owning half of Montana, and that that’s completely fine, but it’s only when the state wants to tax him that it’s some illegitimate authority I think is naive, fantastical right wing trash.

But the idea that it’s possible for governments to be dangerous, I think is one that some leftists don’t want to spend too much time with, even while other leftists are obviously well aware, particularly leftists of color and people. From marginalized communities that have to deal with the violence in the state on an ongoing basis, even as they’re simultaneously asking for things like healthcare and public education.

[00:22:31.330] – Grumbine

It’s quite clear to me that the interests of the individuals that find solace or hope in this space is quite honestly varied.

[00:22:42.910] – Grey

Yes.

[00:22:43.330] – Grumbine

It’s not a monolith, and approaching the subject from a monolithic perspective probably isn’t very useful.

[00:22:53.270] – Grey

No. In the same way as approaching MMT as a monolithic community isn’t going to be very useful. The same way as approaching the left as a monolithic community.

[00:23:02.570] – Grumbine

Exactly. And I think that the motivations behind each of these things is worth exploring a little bit. From my vantage point, I come in with a core ethos that says I am against privatization, period. And I would rather err on the side of no privatization and screw us with a few things that maybe could sneak through the door. That would be good.

Then allow mass privatization and allow all kinds of untold bad things to come through the door as we allow unelected oligarchs and others to have even more control of our lives. So for me, it’s challenging because I do find myself slipping into the always never kind of arrangements in my brain, and I know that that’s not necessarily productive.

And I’ve spoken to so many individuals, many people that you’re well aware of, like Brett Scott. How do you make sense of this as a public purpose framework? Is there a public purpose here or is this purely a it’s not perfect, it ain’t what we want it to be. Maybe there’s something to it, but stop hating on it because it’s more than nothing.

[00:24:14.210] – Grey

Yeah.

[00:24:15.060] – Grumbine

Is there a public purpose angle to this or is it just purely don’t hate that which you don’t understand?

[00:24:22.370] – Grey

It’s a great question. I think, first of all, it’s important. Even if the community is not monolithic, so are the themes and values behind the technologies, but then there are still particular phenomena we can look at. And I certainly don’t want to sound like I want to be a defender of crypto, because I think, just as we can say that MMT isn’t monolithic.

But at the same time, I don’t want to be in a room where eight out of ten people I find reactionary right wing assholes that’s a room calling itself MMT. I want to make sure there’s a bigger, better room full of non-assholes like that calling itself MMT that has a better claim to the title. So just because something can be pluralistic or can be contestable doesn’t mean the contest devolves to as well.

Everybody has a point. Everybody is equally valid. No, there’s still, in my opinion, directionality to what we’re trying to do, and there’s values, and people can be on the wrong side of history, and they can be on the wrong side of being a person who cares about justice and equity and inclusion and diversity and egalitarian governance.

So the word crypto today, even though I think it is complicated, still empowers certain people over others. If crypto, quote unquote, wins the public consciousness, I think that’s a net loss for a lot of things MMT cares about. I’m anti crypto in that sense. In capital C, Crypto, what it stands for as a historical phenomenon right now is the empowerment of a group of people, the dominant strain of which is pro capitalist, pro massive wealth inequality, pro grift and fraud, pro right wing libertarian monetary theories, pro contempt of collective governance.

That is the dominant valency of a lot of that space. And I certainly am not interested in defending it or even saying, well, Sodom and Gamora have three good people, so we shouldn’t burn it down. No, maybe we should burn the bloody thing down, but we should also acknowledge that burning it down doesn’t mean saying, well, they invented writing and we didn’t.

So now we’re going to go back to being preliterate. So taking what we can out of crypto, understanding the parts of it where it’s actually important to understand it just positively before we get to applying our own normative principles to it and then we can work out what we actually think.

[00:26:36.590] – Grumbine

This brings up a point that I think is challenging because whenever you see something come from a right wing perspective, there’s a reflexive rejection of it sight unseen. And we saw this happen with deficit reduction because the right wing was always willing to cut taxes on the rich. And so the standard Democrat perspective was they want to blow up the deficit with tax cuts, so we’ve got to be the grown ups here and pay for everything by raising taxes.

[00:27:10.890] – Grey

Enemy of my enemy must be my friend.

[00:27:13.290] – Grumbine

Exactly. So take us through that because to me, the privatization angle here seems to be the primary focus. There’s the “I want to be one of the guys that gets to be the Bernie Madoff of this as opposed to the other way around where I’m one of his victims”.

[00:27:33.160] – Grey

Yeah, they’re the ones building the software. Right?

[00:27:36.210] – Grumbine

Exactly. How do you go from this privatization is my friend, to we don’t like this and we would like to make this work for all, so we’re not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Nazi Germany. There were so many inventions that came out of the most perverse, disgusting, psychopathic moment in history.

And yet at the same time, how do you process any tragic, horrible thing when you fundamentally have to reject it because it’s evil and wrong? And yet there’s something like maybe they found the cure for cancer inadvertently. How do you process these things?

[00:28:17.150] – Grey

Yeah. Coretta Scott King and the historian David Stein did a fantastic award-winning article on her advocacy for a job guarantee the line that he uses for that from her, which was that this nation has never honestly dealt with the question of a peacetime economy. And the point is that the only times that we fire up these large imaginaries, the idea that we can collectively come together, do something so much bigger than ourselves is when it’s fighting the Nazis, fighting the Commies, these existential threats.

And Money On The Left member Max Seijo would talk about this as well with his video essay on Inglorious Basterds that even today the things that inspire us at that big level are these fantasies of the past, these memories of when we fought the Big Bad. But the idea that the Big Bad is just the destruction of our planet or finally getting over racism and building a really rich, full employment, tight economy where we’re doing all sorts of amazing interventions to reduce the burden of labor because the labor market is so hot, et cetera, that’s hard for us to imagine.

We can imagine splitting the atom when it’s to kill Nazis, we can’t imagine splitting the atom when it’s to kill white supremacy. I think that is a challenge and that’s what you’re describing is that we do have these moments where we found more in ourselves, but unfortunately they’re usually in the shadow of horror and annihilation and genocide.

So with the crypto stuff, the way that I try to think of it is I try to start back to the actual problems that led to its existence. I think part of this is and I try to say this to law students and my teachers said it to me and I appreciate them try to bang it into my head as someone that has a lot of normative opinions and isn’t shy about sharing it.

That one of the popular misconceptions when you’re trying to tech up, when you try to become learned, is the first thing that you ask yourself when you read something is, did I like it? Was this like food? Was this a good experience of my taste buds? Did I get good feelings as I got to the end of this? And if I didn’t, it’s a bad thing.

Rather than like reading a really powerful piece by an absolutely terrible person that allows you to understand them better, understand the enemy better, understand the stakes, understand the dynamic better. I could get very excited by that. Not because I think that they’re good people who want to subscribe to their patreon – you know, fuck ’em.

But because that is writing that has made me smarter and made me understand what I’m trying to deal with. One of my professors, Moglen, used to say I’m enough of a Marxist that I care what capitalists think. I think that’s the point. Take your own learning, take your own edification seriously enough to get over those instinctual revulsions you have about where you’re getting it from.

Because part of the goal is that if you don’t read this stuff, it could have information that’s going to come back and bite you for not knowing. I certainly want to make sure I know what my opponent in the courtroom thinks and I certainly want to make sure I know how the judges on the bench who aren’t inclined to agree with me think.

And part of that means spending time in their world. So with crypto, going back to the early version of it, there was, I think, a healthy Sci-fi dystopic fear of totalitarian government. As I said, some of that is motivated by people who want to do terrible things with little children or avoid taxes or they’re looking to be outside of the spotlight because they want to fundamentally be the kind of person they know that society wouldn’t accept, could see them in the spotlight for very legitimate reasons.

But there’s also the other kind of people, right? There’s people that know that the internet is going to be a space where if there is an orthodoxy that gets enforced, it’s going to enforce that orthodoxy in every corner of the planet. And that if there is not space for people to be weird in the margins and in the denizens of reddit and things, that that’s going to be a massive loss in diversity.

And famously, Jeff Bezos, when he created Amazon, he started with the book. And you listen to these interviews with him and he says, why do I create a bookstore first? And the answer is because first of all, it’s a replicable media. You build infrastructure to read books around. Most books look kind of the same. They all ship the same.

You’re not dealing with on one hand, pencils, and on the other large industrial appliances. But also it’s a space where most places where we buy books, sell the kinds of books that fit within the bell curve. The stuff down near the edges is stuff that potentially 5 billion people are all interested in some weird kind of book, but not all the same weird kind of book.

So you need a way to get those long tail micro communities access to their big stuff and individual stores that all have to make compromises of what’s in front of you and never going to provide that. So that was his opening. Well, the internet is kind of like that too. There’s all these communities you’re interested in dressing up like a Teletubby while listening to Wagnerian opera.

Turns out there’s 100 people like that across the planet. She was one in a million. So there’s five more like her in New South Wales alone. But there’s 2000 of them across the whole planet. And the internet gives you a room where suddenly there’s 2000 of you in a room and you go, oh my God, I thought I was the only one.

So if you don’t have that space for diversity at the margins, you’re building a fundamentally different kind of internet that serves an almost culturally genocidal role rather than a flourishing of 1000 flowers and that kind of thing. So there was a valid concern about building an internet that was overly centralized and would empower orthodoxy, whatever the orthodoxy may be.

We haven’t got to that point yet scifi has to worry about. And then they realized at least a number of them, unfortunately, some of the more libertarian oriented ones, but they realized that money was going to play a big role of that. Joseph Sommer – who I wouldn’t call leftist, but I wouldn’t call necessarily libertarian either – Federal Reserve Bank lawyer, wrote an article in 1998 called Against Cyberlaw because there was a big debate at the time with people like Lawrence Lessig and things saying this new world of the internet is different.

Moglen saying this new world, the internet is different. And he said, “Is it really that different? We’ve had international networks for centuries. In fact, the most obvious example is banks”. So he said we could learn a lot from the banking system. It’s a private network system that settles across jurisdictions. Hawala systems of credit where you pay one person in one country and they have a colleague in another country that pays to your other person on the other side.

So there’s not actually any settlement going on between the two countries banking systems. It’s just these networks of peer credit on either side that mimic the idea of settling across jurisdictions. He said, we’ve got all this stuff and we’ve had it working for a long time. In fact, some of the earliest internet law come out of the law of the telegraph and the wire transfer.

And how much of the internet law is really new or how much of it is really just taking stuff that we’ve narrowly limited to dollars and cents and numbers that applying to the full richness of human language and creative expression and things and then working out? What happens when you take a black and white movie and turn it multicolor. But one of the lines he said in that point was, most of the internet is commercial; commerce relies on money.

So you want to control the internet, you control it through the money. And I think that’s true today as was then. If you control the payments layers, you are controlling the direction of the internet. We’re seeing that today with things like streaming services. We’re seeing that with Netflix. We’re seeing that with YouTube now being so infested with ads, it’s basically unviewable.

We’re seeing that with things like Digital Rights Management, where the act of needing to extract money from people who, God forbid, may not be paying the copyright masters who rule our lives means that we now have to build back doors into computer chips that we sell to people where, even if you don’t want it to, the computer will shut down or the car will shut down unless it gets approval from the people that sold you the box.

So the money layer of what these guys are trying to fix is anti totalitarianism. And also building a egalitarian internet infrastructure is very important. And from a legal point of view, part of that comes in as anonymity. If you don’t have anonymity in payments, you lose something fundamental relative to a world where cash was always an option you lose it in terms of people’s sense of identity.

You lose it in terms of that slight chill that people feel in the back of their neck where they just don’t say that joke or they don’t ask that question or they don’t buy that weird sex toy they were going to buy or they don’t donate to that radical political group because they’re afraid that that might come out in some list of donations and then their boss is going to fire them or they’re going to get called in front of some House Un-American Affairs Committee and be forced to explain why they’re supporting critical race theory in Florida or whatever it is.

And that kind of concern, I think, was a real concern and remains a real concern. And all we need to do is look around at people like Elizabeth Warren who proposed a bill the other day saying crypto is bad, therefore we should preemptively criminalize anonymity in payments to see that the left and the progressives or whatever you want to call them haven’t got their shit sorted on this.

They’re still so interested in going after bad guys that they’re engaging in a form of kind of carceral feminist monetary economics. Because there are bad guys, we have to rush into the arms at the police state, and our new best friends are the CIA and the NSA and the Fincen cops and the Interpol and people that in the past you call them pigs and tell them to go fuck themselves before you would give up your friends.

Now you’re giving them up because your friends didn’t pay taxes. Therefore, privacy is dead. So I think of privacy is very different from privatization. I think of building an egalitarian internet that promotes the freedom of individuals rather than the totalitarian power of orthodox government is also very different from being a libertarian monetary person.

And then the other big angle, I would say, is just simply inclusion and access. We have had a century plus of time to work out how to stop dealing with homelessness, and we still have people that are homeless. That’s a failure of something fundamental in our vision of what we’re doing with public housing. And we have had over a century and a half to work out what we actually mean by publicly chartered banks serving public purpose.

And we still have millions of people that don’t have a bank account and they don’t get it because they don’t have a home address or because they’re undocumented or because of whatever reason. And so starting from those two problems and then trying to work out what the hell crypto is doing, I think gets you to a different point.

Have we solved that problem? No. Have we gotten to a world where we respect privacy such that the transition to a digitally native monetary regime which is finally happening in the last big transition? We’ve had previous ramp ups with different technologies, but this is really the one where everything is everything all the time, everywhere at once kind of thing? No.

So until those problems are resolved, whatever other bullshit and reactionary ideology and stuff crypto wants to smuggle in, they’re going to be smuggling it in around those two kernels of truth. We haven’t got universal access and we haven’t created a monetary payments regime that empowers individuals. And I don’t think that handing it over to private actors, handing it over to libertarian hard money systems, handing it over to people who believe that capitalism and markets are great and billionaires are great and all that stuff is the right way to do things.

But the problem is real. The problem that they’re identifying is real. And in the absence of a better solution, people who are sick of the problem are going to turn to them and I think we need to validate that as the starting point of the analysis. And then we can say these guys are hacks and poses and all that stuff corrupt.

But on the other side of recognizing that the status quo is indefensible and that in the absence of trying to fix the status quo, anyone that puts up even plausible from a distance, if you squint attempt to challenge the status quo is gonna have some degree of moral high ground.

[00:40:19.670] – Intermission

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin and Instagram.

[00:41:10.470] – Grumbine

It feels like there is a segment of society that is geared to naturally, reflexively defend the status quo, the establishment and narratives that if you had a moment of honesty and you could withdraw some of your natural proclivities you would know are just false on their face, almost impossible to think someone could believe. And yet they believe these things.

And so as I look at the narratives surrounding everything from war to conspiracies and redacted documents, people have a natural proclivity to either a fall right into the establishment or b completely reject it. I’m curious how a person might look at this space objectively and take what you’ve been talking about and provide themselves with a framework for analyzing how this should fit into their own world.

To me, I think what you end up with is a lot of group think. Once somebody with some platform or some prestige makes a statement, there’s a large contingency of people, without having any kind of deeper understanding, just fall in line with that statement. How would you proffer up to a person seeking information, trying to better understand the world around them, especially in the space? How would you position it to them to walk through that so that they can come to a more informed position?

[00:42:45.650] – Grey

Yeah, I think, almost like with an undergraduate seminar, the minute you can posit that kind of binary, we’ve already gone past it conceptually in our head, which is a nice thing. The minute you can say the choices are to accept it or to reject it, the people who just want to defend the status quo, they get boring real quick, because who on the left wants to call themselves a defender of the banking system?

Nobody, really. But the people that are problematic, I think, are the ones that don’t even consider themselves doing that. They think of themselves as just being unconvinced about the merits of crypto. It’s a big meh to them. They just go back to their life beforehand, not necessarily defending the existing status quo banking system, but their theory of change remains in the status quo dynamic.

It was out before they heard about crypto. Oh, I’ve heard about crypto, and that’s all well and good. I’m not putting any of my colleagues a lot of us have done a lot of change. But we had Brett Scott at the first MMT conference. He was talking about cash and privacy. If you had to write a list of the defining features of MMT today, you could go back and look at Randy’s talks at previous MMT conferences, and he’d say, well, there was stock-flow consistent modeling, there was Minsky’s instability hypothesis, there was job guarantee, there was this, that was that.

I think you could make a good case that Fred Lee’s micro pricing theory is now more prominent than it was ten years ago. And you should probably point to certain people who’d be responsible for Zdravka Todorova, Tae-Hee Jo, Nathan Tankus, Mitch Green, people who were taking the Fred Lee element and trying to make sure that it got its prominence.

And especially today, when we’re talking about inflation and pricing and things like that. Obviously. Everybody was at UMKC. Randy, Stephanie, Scott, Matthew and stuff. They all worked with Fred. But Fred was taking his own time to integrate his stuff into the MMT canon. In software circles, if you’re part of the free software community developing the most widely used base version of the Linux canoe operating system called Debian, what you’re always trying to do with your random little pieces of software is get it integrated into the main Debian package so that it gets maintained by central command.

So getting your little idea into the main MMT package. So, well, would we honestly say to ourselves that most MMT is considered Brett Scott’s concerns about the “war on cash” to be a core MMT integrated point? Or do we all just say, “well, that’s interesting. Nice!” And then just went back to MMT 1.0 as what it was.

The people that call themselves the founders of MMT, have they really absorbed what Brett Scott is saying into their worldview and given it the mind share that it may be worth? Or are they still repeating the hits like The Rolling Stone still playing “Satisfaction” at every concert. So what does it mean to take these things seriously and integrate them into your worldview?

To synthesize and grow beyond what you were beforehand, to make MMT a dynamic thing that is evolving with the problems that are coming up? And I think that’s the real challenge is that it’s way easier to look at crypto and say, “Meh, right wing libertarians, it’s bad. I don’t need to grow”, than to say, “this is the future.”

Not necessarily this technology is the future, not necessarily these assholes are the smart people of the future. But this is where the conversation is going. This is where even the stuff that I care about is going through this stuff. I need to understand this stuff because this is where society is moving.

Just like if you were somebody that had understood MMT and there’d been some sort of pythagorean cult of MMT for 5000 years going back to ancient Babylon, and then somebody comes along and says, I’ve invented electricity, or I’ve discovered electricity and I’m building telegraph wires, and you’re like, “yeah, who cares? Our cult is going to keep doing what we’ve been doing for 5000 years.”

Well, sorry, you missed the boat on that one. You wouldn’t understand 95% of what we’re talking about today when it comes to monetary issues if you didn’t understand the fact that we’re going to be digitizing for the next 200 years. So I think that’s the big challenge. It’s not outright rejection. It’s not you either have to be with your pro crypto hat or your anti crypto hat. It’s what the hell is this world we’re in now? What does it mean to be an MMTer in this kind of economy?

[00:47:01.190] – Grumbine

Yes, and let’s tackle that. I know that you’re one person, but you’re one person with a very well understood view from both angles. What does an MMT perspective look like as these technological and legal changes occur?

[00:47:19.730] – Grey

Well, I think part of it is one of the skills of MMT is that it takes seriously the experience and insight of technical experts. So what was one of the first things that brought MMT together? It was the fact that Warren Mosler was a banker and he could take a lot of these heterodox post Keynesian and Marxian ideas that others had been working on in their own spaces and put it through this clarifying crucible of practical experience and the need to actually make bets that are going to win you money rather than lose you money.

And I think that emphasis on what he calls himself as an operations guy is really valuable. It’s critical. It gave an edge to these guys. You go watch Randy have a friendly debate with Marc Lavoie, and even Marc has to admit that it was the banker that taught him how banking worked after him being a banking scholar for 20 years.

Well, there’s also the IT department, there’s also the law department. It took me a while to convince the MMTers that the law department was an operations guy too, that should be taken seriously. Not that anybody was anti-us at any point. I felt very welcomed by a lot of the MMTers early on. But there was also that sense of, well, this is your lane and we’ve got our lane.

And it’s like, well, I had to learn all the MMT stuff. I think it actually does require these multiple competencies. This gets us back to where I began. It’s not just political economy, it’s law, political economy, and then it’s technology. And of course it’s other things; it’s understanding intersectional analysis and sociology, all that kind of stuff.

But as far as at least I think power disciplines, the ones dealing with the thing that allows people to become overlords. It is that intersection of understanding the money, understanding the law, and understanding the technology. And one of the MMTers that was on this stuff, who when you listen to a lot of the other MMTers say, well, he’s always one of those people with the biggest historically contextualized understanding was Jan Kregel.

When I got into digital currency, it was Jan Kregel who’s now gone his own way and decided that he doesn’t like the MMT community stuff, which is an unfortunate dynamic, but he was working on digital currency stuff with people at the UN. He was interested in that intersection between digital currency and narrow banking, and this idea of the Chicago plan, full reserve banking, all this stuff.

And even that issue MMT is saying, well, full reserve banking is dumb and it doesn’t work. I agree. At the same time, we’ve seen the rise of E-money operators providing narrow banking-like payment services. That’s not instead of banking, banking still exists. All the stuff about bank loans, bank deposits is still happening. But there is this other actor now called the payments bank, emoney operators, Venmo, PayPal, Wirecard, mobile money.

And we didn’t really provide a very strong analysis of that because every time someone asked us about it, we said, well, it’s not going to replace banking. Okay, you’re right. What about what it is doing? It’s not doing that other thing. What is it doing? So understanding operations, I think is really important. Understanding, I think, not to be opportunistic, but to lean into pockets of relevance.

Because part of the challenge in a world like this is that we are dealing with a huge amount of media saturation and an attention economy where the hardest thing is actually just getting fucking heard, getting your ideas to be one that gets talked about for five minutes in the ADHD collective conversation of the human race.

The Green New Deal breaks through for a hot minute, the global financial crisis. Black Lives Matter, Occupy, these breakthrough for a minute. You’ve briefly got 5 seconds on the top of the huge human pile to shout something and see if it makes a difference. And then someone drags you back down into the market. So what are you trying to do in these moments and where are those moments coming?

Well, one place that they’re coming is understanding these technologies, understanding that where the next big flashpoint is going to be. If you have something to say about Amazon and Spotify and Google and Facebook, people are going to want to hear it because that’s occupying a lot of people’s minds right now.

If you have something to say about crypto, whether it’s positive, negative, or just redirecting their attention to something more constructive, that also addresses the same underlying things that cause crypto to come up in the first place, that’s important. So I think MMT did an excellent job of being in the right place at the right time in 2008 and it did an amazing job of continuing to hammer on some of the issues that remained important all the way through to 2020 when we needed to pass the next big multi trillion dollar spending package.

And suddenly all that groundwork that was laid suddenly just was activated. And we’re seeing that today now with the next one, which is I think the debt ceiling shut down and the trillion-dollar coin is going to come back into vogue. However much people laughed at it in 2011, however much people were tired and sick of hearing of it, in 2020, I think they’re going to be maybe even more tired and sick of hearing about the bloody debt ceiling this year.

And that coin is just still there just this uncomfortable law sitting on the books just showing people the ridiculousness of this whole charade. And my new jokey line is that the debt ceiling beatings will continue until coin minting levels improve coin level morale. So we’re going to keep doing this until we fix something, right?

That’s the Marxian “contradiction driving history” part of it all, but there’s a bunch of other ones like that. Until we actually deal with the fact that millions of people are kicked out of the banking system, until we deal with the fact that the supposed progressives are sounding like cops and spooks now. We’re going to keep having Crypto sitting there as his uncomfortable reminder that we actually claim to care about things like individual freedom and rights and the ability to dissent against autocratic governments.

And that we actually do care about things like universal public services but that a bank account doesn’t actually provide the full range of public services and never kept like saying the way to deal with unemployment is just to teach everybody to code or something. Well, just give them a bank account. Oh well, thank you. That’s amazing. Didn’t think of that.

What about people that are rural? What about people dealing with a power outage? What about people that don’t trust banks but still need to use money? There’s all these use cases that that is just a glib flippant and dismissive response to. And as long as you keep being glib, flippant and dismissive about really important social issues, you’re creating a tension in your own worldview that’s going to keep being exploited.

And I think MMT is good at usually not doing that. So we need to lean into that technology too. But it’s really hard. It’s hard because what does it mean to have a good vision of the internet? If you want a good vision of using money on the internet, you need a good vision of the internet first. So what does that look like?

We talk about a job guarantee, we talk about reforming the budget process. Well, what’s reforming paying on the internet? What does that look like? I got thoughts about that. I’ve been writing them for years. I’ve been working on a new project now to try to think about how we can put a public router in everybody’s home and what would be on that box.

I work with people at the Freedom Box Foundation to think about all the different technological services we use on a daily basis and how much of them we actually need to put in some server underground in Utah and how much we can put them at home and what good data management practice looks like. So if you lose all your data in your home box, it doesn’t get lost forever.

But it’s scary to think the fact that we’ve only just ticked up on learning all the economics, now you got to learn all the law and now you’re to learn computers as well? My God, how are we going to get things done? So I get that it’s hard. But I think part of leaning into what makes MMT good and effective and powerful is that it was answering questions people needed to have answered.

And it wasn’t afraid to shy away from the technical details and the complexity of institutional reality. And that it was offering the simplest, direct solution to simple, direct problems. There’s unemployment? Fix it. There’s lack of access to payments? Fix it. That we don’t have privacy in digital space? Fix it.

[00:55:19.030] – Grumbine

What do you think is the primary reason for the lack of acceptance of MMT insights amongst the elite, the power brokers and the people that are actually in the halls of power today? What do you suppose is the rationale for basically mocking the whole thing?

[00:55:44.190] – Grey

Well, I think when you say accept the insights, I don’t know. I always understand that there are analytical aspects of MMT. Stephanie’s blog is called The Lens. Bill talks about it being a lens. Right. I think there is use in making that point. I think there is a limit to keeping up the fiction that that’s the primary point. I don’t think that that’s the primary point.

I think the primary point is to enact political change and always has been. And because that’s the primary point, you’re not trying to educate people, you are trying to get them to do things you want them to do. It’s different. When I try to educate people, I am trying to empower them to be a better version of themselves.

When I’m trying to force political change on a political operative, I’m trying to get them to do something I want them to do. Maybe I can educate them, but maybe I can’t. And I still need to get it done. That’s power. I don’t actually have the time to wait to educate everybody on the terms that they might feel comfortable with.

If I need a result on a vote that’s happening in the next hour, I need to make sure that whatever way I get that done, I get that done, that’s result oriented politicking. So I think the thing is with MMT is we were trying to force and still are a serious political change on a group of people that don’t necessarily want it. A lot of these people didn’t get into Congress to solve unemployment.

They went to Congress because they wanted some validation from their mothers or something. They went to Congress because they wanted to be able to commit crimes in Florida and get away with it. They got into Congress because it was that they finally looked at the failure of their life as an artist or whatever the hell it is. There’s all sorts of reasons why people become politicians. T

hey have an endless need for validation and people telling them how amazing they are that have nothing to do with actually solving these problems. And we have to take those people who come together in a room, everyone from the Kirsten Sinemas of the world through the Chuck Schumers of the world and craft them into something that sings and dances the way that we want it to.

And that’s not easy and that comes with all sorts of challenges. So I think what MMT was trying to do was to force them all to adopt a really big political shift that’s been really hard to do for centuries and decades. And we succeeded in some parts and people resented that we succeeded over their resistance and they said as long as you are riding the winds of history here, as long as you’re finding those pockets where opportunity meets inevitability, then we don’t have the power to stop you from forcing this to happen.

Stephanie Kelton walked into rooms where Austan Goolsby and Jason Furman and Larry Summers would have loved to not be in that room at all. But they couldn’t do that, so they had to tolerate it. But they sat there and bided their time and the minute that they thought that the winds changed. The minute they thought that the balance shifted the minute — like with Keynes in the 30s or like with the Keynesian movement in the 60s and 70s — you start to lose the thing that made you invulnerable, which was that you are answering the really big problems better than everybody else was, they’re going to do what they want to do in the first place.

Which is take you out, which is put six knives in your ribs and leave you bleeding on the Senate floor. And so I think that’s what happened. I think part of this is there’s a lot of people that never wanted to hear it. We forced some of them to hear it, and once they stopped having to hear it, they went back to hating it, or at least not putting any more energy into it than they absolutely had to for their own purposes.

And so it’s easy to say, as people did in the internet movement in the 90s, well, I think these free software guys that were talking a lot about freedom when they were building open source software, I think they were right. But it sounds too commie for us and we’re trying to run a business. So instead of being free software advocates, we’re going to rebrand as open source.

We’re going to take the parts that we like of this movement and we’re going to neutralize all the parts that we don’t. Oh, you’re doing this because you care about freedom? We’re doing this because we think it makes slightly better software for a company that’s going to improve its bottom line. While we’re aligned, then who cares? What’s the difference? We’ll just tell everyone.

These are basically just two ways of saying the same thing. And if your problem is that at a certain point in the future we’re going to forget that there was freedom at all involved and we’re going to just make shitty compromises with shitty people along the way that actually undermined the integrity of the project. Well, we never told you we were into your project, did we?

And so I worry about that with MMT. Can we spend more money without running out? Well, yes, but Dick Cheney knew that in the 80s. So MMT won in the sense that we helped some of the leftists get over that stuff, but there was no point where we actually won with all of Congress singing the hymn of a job guarantee.

Even Pavlina was saying in the moment, well, we’re spending all this money, but we’re spending it in the context of an emergency relief proposal. The minute the dust all settles, we’re going to go back to the same old BS. And we have. So understanding what our wins are and what our wins aren’t, I think is pretty important. And what did we do? Well, we got way closer to people’s ears than we did before.

We showed people who are leftists that we’re out here. And then the enemies on our side are people like Doug and Matt Bruenig, people going out telling all the rest of the left not to listen to us. And one of the reasons people do listen to us is because we keep making them smarter. So I got a lot of the left still listen to me because I’m talking about stuff that they’re trying to understand right now.

I can keep litigating about Doug and Bruenig and I do. But also people are going to form their opinions on that stuff, and some of those opinions are going to suck because they’re going to be bringing in their own baggage to that conversation. But if I can keep them on the rolodex, if I can keep them reading what we’re talking about, then over time they’ll be like, Well, I didn’t really agree with them on that, but Goddam they’ve got a lot to offer on this other stuff, so maybe I need to go back and revisit that.

[01:01:31.130] – Grumbine

It’s just like the tide has left and we’re waiting for another high tide moment.

[01:01:36.910] – Grey

Yes.

[01:01:37.550] – Grumbine

Because it feels like MMT got gut punched. We did have an answer, but it wasn’t heard. The inflation narrative. We saw companies gouging, I never saw price controls have a serious hearing. I never saw a serious hearing about any of them. It was always going to solve it with interest rates, attacking labor. I never saw a serious conversation on inflation on the broader stage.

[01:02:07.680] – Grey

Yeah, whatever we managed to do with sending that one missile down to the death star, whatever that looked like when it came to deficits, whatever it looked like when it came to see these other things, it didn’t happen with that. And we have to work out, we have to do that postmortem and understand. And I’m trying to make sure that we do have one for crypto, for fintech, for digital currency, the kinds of things that half of the Treasury Department, half of the Federal Reserve is spending half of their mental energy on today.

I’m trying to make sure that we have got one ready for that. Not just me, my colleagues and everyone. We’re working together. It’s a team effort. But to your point, Isabella Weber was talking about price controls last year, and Stephanie and Pavlina and others were supporting her. But was there the sense in which the MMT cannon got updated? I didn’t see that in the Mosler white paper.

So what is the sense in which individuals within the MMT community will go, well, I care about this, I worked on this. Yeah, but whatever that magic was that brought everybody together under this common framework that had us sing from enough of a common hymn book to not be individual fingers, but to be the strength of a closed fist, it didn’t happen with those next things. Right?

The sophomore album was a lot harder than the freshman album. Sure. And I think that’s one of the challenges with all this crypto stuff is do you really just want to sit there and say, there’s nothing to see here? Do you really want to miss a chance to get on another wave? Is that really smart or is that actually the opposite of smart? And I had this problem. I’m not trying to air laundry.

But when we release some of these bills, the response from colleagues of ours was, I don’t see there’s any value here. Well, go back to school and think harder and get back to us. If you think we’re really that dumb, fine. But if you think we’re really that dumb, then what are you doing with this movement? The price controls thing. The other one was the credit controls.

If it’s not interest rates, but we still want to mess with private financial investment conditions, what do we do with that? Well, you can find it. You can find blogs that Bill has written. You can find it in Randy and Minsky. You can find it in Stephanie’s book, you can find it in Dirk Bezemer and people over in the UK talking about credit controls.

But whatever the magic was of that early 2011 2012 blogosphere that allowed us to just be on message relentlessly about the core MMT ideas, whatever it was that was allowed us to shove stock-flow consistent modeling and job guarantee and double entry accounting and loans create deposits and all these things into a package. We did not update the package and send out the revised version.

And I think it is a problem. There was a moment when we had the conference in New York and we tried to bring in more explicit political actors and we said, MMT needs to be less white and less male and needs to talk about intersectional stuff. And there was a lot of pushback saying, this isn’t MMT, this is too political. MMT is just descriptive.

And it was like, well, all right, you can choose to close that door and suddenly everyone is going to go, well, so MMT is for right wing Japanese politicians? Okay, cool. That’s it. That’s the energy. Fine. Well, guess we’re not going to have the youth particularly interested anymore. And that’s what happened. So I think we do need to be honest about why we were so successful in some ways and think about what that replication looks like.

And part of that means about living in the future and what is technology but trying to understand the future that we’re all about to live in? The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

[01:05:42.170] – Grumbine

Right on.

[01:05:42.810] – Grey

And the crypto guys were understanding the stuff in the 80s. Crypto guys were telling you that there was going to be a moment like Bitcoin coming up in 2008, in the 80s. Why were the MMT is not aware of that? They should have been. And if they were, we’d probably still be on top of certain conversations that we are not on top of anymore.

That’s my goal with all of this. I don’t want to be surprised. MMT did an amazing, fantastic job of helping me never be surprised by capitalism again. But the big arc of history is not just about capitalism. And I think there are other dynamics that we have left on the table that we need to drastically get up to speed on.

[01:06:20.730] – Grumbine

Well, Rohan, this was very powerful for me. I really appreciate that post mortem breakdown with looking back and also helping gauge looking forward as well. Why don’t you let everyone know where we might find some more of your work, what you’re currently working on, and then we’ll close it up.

[01:06:38.830] – Grey

You can just find me on the internet. Twitter is usually the easiest place. Mastodon. For those who have been following all of this. Look at getting your own server. Look at what that looks like. Look at what it means to be on Mastodon versus Twitter. If you have heard of Mastodon, but you haven’t heard of the underlying open protocol called Activity pub, time to learn about what that is.

Because when we’re looking at designing a digital currency, it’s probably going to look more like the Activity Pub layer than even the Mastodon layer than certainly the Twitter layer. So find me there. Look up the Freedom Box foundation that I work with. Look up some of the people working on Creative Commons and “Copyleft” licensing are the implications there.

But always feel free to send me an email if you’re interested. This is just as hard as all the MMT stuff. And one of the things that I have been greatly, deeply appreciative of the MMT community over the years is that just human beings try to do the right work and they put themselves accessible on the other side of emails and things. So keep doing that. Anyone that wants to work on this stuff, feel free to reach out.

[01:07:39.200] – Grumbine

Awesome. Well, with that, Rohan, thank you so much for joining me once again, we got to do it sooner than this. My name is Steve Grumbine, my guest, Rohan Gray, and this is Macro N Cheese. And Happy New Year to all, we are out of here!

[01:07:59.690] – End credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.

Eben Moglen  https://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/eben-moglen

Brett Scott  https://brettscott.substack.com/p/cloudmoney-cash-cards-crypto-war-for-wallets

Thurgood Marshall  https://www.oyez.org/justices/thurgood_marshall

Michael Hudson https://www.levyinstitute.org/scholars/michael-hudson &  https://michael-hudson.com/

Denise Schmandt-Besserat  https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/

David Graeber  https://davidgraeber.org/

Satoshi Nakamoto  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

Ross Buckley  https://www.edx.org/bio/ross-buckley

Doug Arner  https://www.law.hku.hk/academic_staff/professor-douglas-w-arner/

Blackstone and Bracket  https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14009/196491

Paul Samuelson  https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/samuelson.htm

David Golumbia  https://english.vcu.edu/people/faculty/golumbia.html

Fred Lee  https://www.postkeynesian.net/downloads/working-papers/PKWP1504.pdf

Zdravka Todorova  https://www.ztodorova.net/

Tae-Hee Jo  https://economics.buffalostate.edu/faculty/tae-hee-jo

Nathan Tankus  https://daily.jstor.org/daily-author/nathan-tankus/

Mitch Green Episode 37 – Organizing, Democracy, and Modern Monetary Theory with Mitch Green

Marc Lavoie  https://marc-lavoie.com/

Jan Kregel https://www.levyinstitute.org/scholars/jan-kregel 

Dirk Bezemer  https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/experts/dbezemer 

Articles, events, and ideas mentioned in the episode 

Max Seijo

https://moneyontheleft.org/2022/01/17/introduction-to-theory-karl-marx-value-price-and-profit/   

https://mronline.org/2018/06/17/confronting-cinemas-fascist-unconscious-with-maxximilian-seijo/

Coretta Scott King, David Stein, job guarantee 

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/david-stein-why-coretta-scott-king-fought-job-guarantee/

Hawala system  

MMT vs Austrian debate w/ Marc Lavoie and Warren Mosler

Freedom Box Foundation  https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/nyregion/16about.html 

Copyleft licensing   

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