Episode 35 – A Green New Tomorrow: A Survival Guide with Rohan Grey

When we talk about debt, it’s not just what someone owes, it’s also that someone has something owed to them. That’s the absurdity of the World Debt Clock. If the entire planet is in debt, who will we pay? Jupiter?

In the second half of our interview with Rohan Grey, he begins with the fact that all money is debt, but the cash in our pockets is not recorded as part of the national debt, which is concerned with debt instruments. He compares a $100 bill and a Treasury note to a checking account and a savings account. Only the latter pays interest.

When Rohan goes through the realities of this secondary market for government debt — wholly a creature of the Fed — it is clear that all worries are for naught. Most T bonds are rolled over, and if someone wants to cash out, there’s always someone else who wants them. If there arises a situation in which nobody wants to buy them, the central bank itself will do so.

The question of government debt comes up whenever there’s talk of the Green New Deal. Some have suggested it be financed by public banks, either because of political calculations or because those proposing it do not understand how money is created and believe we should take advantage of the huge pools of private wealth. Rohan points out the danger of both of those approaches. Lending rather than spending is a trap. If you need to be convinced of that, look no further than the student debt crisis. Rather than fund higher education, we said “let them eat loans!” As for the second option, well, the marrying of corporate financing and the public purpose is a good definition of fascism.

Asking the Green New Deal to give a return on the investment is entirely misguided. Do we ask school children to pay back the cost of their education by the time they turn 18? Do we insist that the military to turn a profit? When we try to turn public service into a revenue-generating endeavor, we distort the entire industry. Profit itself becomes the motive force, and the actual service takes a back seat.

Nowadays it’s impossible to have a conversation with a Modern Money Theorist without talking about the ubiquitous Yang gang and the UBI. Our objection can be summed up in the words of C. H. Douglas, an early creator of the UBI. His goal was to create “a democracy of consumers and an aristocracy of producers.” That says it all, doesn’t it? In their debate with Matt Bruenig in “In These Times,” Raul Carrillo and Rohan Grey expressed the demand for a world where the production process is as democratic and empowering for workers and average people as the consumption process.

Steve Grumbine often speaks of the job guarantee as a democracy enhancer. The community determines which work needs to be done. Democracy at the workplace is just as important as at the ballot box. Steve and Rohan talk about democratizing the fruits of intellectual labor as well as more traditional concepts of work. They address the hysteria about robots replacing all the workers. Certain jobs can be automated, however any job that requires human beings to interact with other human beings, by definition cannot be automated.

Some of our listeners may be surprised to learn that Rohan’s view of the job guarantee is significantly different from Warren Mosler’s. Tune in to find out how.

Rohan Grey is the founder and president of the Modern Money Network, a research scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and a J.S.D. candidate at Cornell Law School, where his research focuses on the law of money in the internet society.

inthesetimes.com/features/job-gua…-for-debate.html

modernmoneynetwork.org/

www.lawschool.cornell.edu/admissions/d…han-Grey.cfm

Macro N Cheese – Episode 35 
A Green New Tomorrow: A Survival Guide with Rohan Grey 
September 28, 2019 

Rohan Grey [intro/music] (00:00:04): 

Everybody’s worried about the Federal Reserve notes in your pocket being something the government owes, you know. “This month, fears have been stoked because the government issued a bunch of hundred dollar bills, which if people take to the bank will have to be paid for with two $50 bills!” 

Rohan Grey [intro/music] (00:00:23): 

There are certain universities where if you want to launch a new program or a new center the first question the university asks is, “how much revenue is it going to bring us.” That’s not the point of higher education. 

Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (00:00:41): 

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

Steve Grumbine (00:01:34): 

This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. This is Part Two of our talk with Rohan Grey. In this epic extension, we start with the national debt and we go into the machinations of a Green New Deal, and we end up with what a job guarantee looks like and how a democratized society looks in the future. We discussed public banking and there’s a host of other things in here that Rohan will dazzle you with.  

So without further ado, I bring you Part Two of my conversation with Rohan Grey. I’m looking at current events and I really didn’t want to go here, but I do want to bring this up to you. There was a headline on CNBC, and I’ll just read it to you to give you a good laugh. It says, “Real U.S. Debt Levels could be 2000% of the Economy, a Wall Street Report Suggests.”  

And the four key points that they bring about are: “Total U.S. debt, including all forms of government, state, local, financial and entitlement liabilities comes close to 2000% of GDP.” According to A.B. Bernstein. The next one was “The biggest potential load comes from entitlements, but is being pressured from rising levels of federal government debt as well. The warnings about the potential debt hazards come as the total federal debt outstanding has surged to 22.5 trillion,” and, the last one is, “A debt reform advocate says now is the time for the U.S. to tackle the issue before recession hits.”  

Rohan, with the legal constructs that you’ve turned out there, and have explained in some great detail with regard to the role of debt and the role of the state, et cetera, let’s get practical for a minute. This is what people are afraid of. As we try to do really bold, incredibly beautiful things, if you will, life-saving things, they’re held back by this fear of debt.  

What is the national debt and why is the fear of it so pervasive in our society? 

Rohan Grey (00:03:51): 

Yeah, so I’m reminded of this great meme or cartoon, and it’s just a picture of the solar system. And it says, “CNN says, the world is, you know, $200 billion in debt. Well, you know, who the the fuck do we owe, Jupiter?” (laughter) And the point of the joke is that the problem with talking about debt in isolation is that you’re never talking about the other side, which is to say, if you owe money to someone that means somebody has money owed to them.  

So the very first thing is to understand debt, or to understand the national debt, we need to think about it, not just in terms of what is owed by one entity, but what is due to another entity. That’s the first thing. So just to give a basic example, if 50% of all government debt, (it’s not 50%, but it’s a significant number), 50% of all government debt was owned by another branch of the government.  

If Treasury Department A owed Treasury Department B, would it make sense to talk about that as part of the overall amount of outstanding debt owed? No. You would cancel those two out and net them out. So then the question is, when do we stop netting? Right? This is the joke about Jupiter. When do we stop saying, okay, well, one person owes me then someone else is owed.  

Well, that depends on what question you’re trying to answer. If the question is, how much government debt is owed to the non-government sector? – that is another way of saying, that is, how many debt assets does the non-government sector own that are issued by the government? Stephanie Kelton has a great story about this exact thing, which she said she was in Congress when she was down there working for the Budget Committee under Senator Sanders as the Chief Economist for the Democrats.  

She would go to senators, Democrats and Republicans, and say to them, you know, “Would you like to get rid of the national debt?” “Oh yes. Oh yes.” they’d say, “Yes, it’s a huge problem. It’s burdening our grandchildren.” And then she’d say “interesting. And what do you think about the government securities market?” “Oh, well the government securities market’s great. It’s really important. It’s a great benchmark, safe instrument for savers, for pensioners, for hedge funds, for all kinds of investors.  

Love government debt. Can’t get enough government debt. We need the government securities market.” And then she’d sort of just stop and say, “You realize they’re the same thing, right? Because all government debt is held by somebody — all government debt that is issued to the non-government sector, I should say.  

because a lot of it is held by the Fed and that should just be canceled out for any real analysis — but the government debt that’s held by other people is, for them, their savings. Not just their savings, their investment savings. If you could hold a hundred dollar bill and put it under your mattress, or you could take a hundred dollars and put it in the savings account and have it earn 5% interest a year.  

From the perspective of a saver — unless you’re the kind of person that’s paranoid about putting money in banks, which is a fair paranoia – but if you’re just looking to maximize your return, you absolutely want to have the savings account where you’re earning interest, right? So that the idea that government debt is bad is looking at it, at best, from one side of the story.  

Now, the other thing to think about here — and this is the part where the kind of story I told at the beginning of our interview really hits the road — is that all money is debt. All money is debt. The reason it’s debt is because all money promises you when you hold it that you can use it to pay debts owed back to the government.  

So in that sense, it’s like a ‘Get out of jail free’ card in Monopoly. Early on in the game, when you want to get out of jail, if you get put in there — because you want to buy those properties, you want to be going around the board — the “Get out of jail free” card is worth almost as much as the cost of just paying to get out of jail.  

If you have to pay $50 to get out of jail, the ‘get out of jail free’ card is probably worth $49 because now you’d want to save a bit of money. Otherwise you just pay the money but if it gets you out of jail, it’s worth real money. At the end of the game, if you don’t want to get out of jail, if you want to stay in jail — because the board is just the minefield of other people’s hotels and houses and things — then that “get out of jail free” card is worth nothing.  

You couldn’t pay someone to take it away from you. It’s just dead paper. So as long as people want to be able to pay their legal debts, then they’re going to want to hold those dollars. Which means the government is obligating any person that’s holding them, saying, “Okay, you hold this, you can get out of jail free.  

It’s your “get out of jail free” card. If I want to keep you in jail, I have to be able to make the price higher than you’ve got money to get out of jail free. Or to not let you pay. Otherwise as many dollars as you have, they’re ‘get out of jail free’ cards.” All right? So the “debt” debt is not debt in the way that you and I have debt, you know, where we owe something we don’t have.  

The debt is: the government is agreeing to let you off the hook for something. And if it wants to put you on the hook for something, then it has to go above and beyond whatever money you have. It owes you one “get out of jail free” for every dollar you can give it. And that’s a real bet for the government.  

So all money is debt. Then the question is, “what is the difference between cash in your pocket and the stuff that gets recorded in the national debt?” Because the coins in your pocket are not in the national debt. There’s not sort of sounding the alarm every day on Fox News saying “the amount of coins we’ve issued has grown by a hundred million this year.”  

Nobody’s worried about the federal reserve notes in your pocket being something the government owes, no? “This month fears have been stoked because the government issued a bunch of hundred dollar bills, which if people take to the bank will have to be paid for with two $50 bills!” No, of course not.  

That’s not how people talk. People only talk about it when the instrument is called a ‘debt instrument.’ What’s the difference between a three-month treasury bill, a one-year treasury note, a 30-year treasury bond, all of which we call quote unquote “debt” and a hundred dollar bill or a 25 cent coin?  

Well, the most obvious one is the former pays interest. So in that sense, we can think of one of them — the cash and the coins — like a checking account that doesn’t pay interest. Apparently checking accounts used to pay interest. I’ve never grown up in a world where that’s true. I’m a child of the Great Recession, but apparently that’s a thing that they, you know, I read it in history books.  

They used to pay interest on checking accounts as well, but certainly they at least pay interest on savings accounts. So that if the major difference between government debt and regular government cash is that one pays interest, then it’s like having a savings account versus a checking account. Now, if you couldn’t get your money out of a savings account, that might be a real problem — if you were locked in for six months or 12 months or something.  

So someone goes, okay, well, 30 year treasury bond, that’s a little bit different because you can’t turn that into cash. You know, you can’t pay your groceries with a 30 year treasury bond. Well, no, you’re right. I also can’t pay for a car with quarters, right? If I want to buy a car and I’ve got a mountain of quarters that I’ve been holding, what do I have to do?  

I have to go and turn them into a more useful form of money, the form of money that the person will accept. Now, if I’m in the financial markets, for example, and I want to buy a bunch of stocks, it might be far easier for me to buy them with bonds, by swapping the stocks for the bonds in a spot, than it is to buy them with quarters.  

But the crucial point here – and this is where the federal reserve comes back in – is that the federal reserve has created what they call a secondary market for government debt, which means the federal reserve says, I’ll buy the debt you want to sell. Anytime you want to turn your government bonds into cash so you can buy a car or your groceries, there’s always going to be someone that’s going to buy them.  

Most of the time, it’s going to be someone else who wants that bond because there’s more demand for these savings instruments, these investment instruments, than there is supply at the moment, and for a long time. Most of the time, if you need to immediately convert your bond into cash – you know, do the equivalent of transferring money from your savings account to your checking account – you say, “who wants to buy this bond?”  

Before that sentence is even out of your mouth, someone’s going to snap it up, right? But even if there wasn’t, even if everyone said “no, I’m sick of buying this stuff, I don’t know. You know, it’s all gonna collapse eventually – I’ve been listening to Peter Schiff and it’s all, you know, doom and gloom.”  

The central bank is going to step in and say, “no, no, no, I’ll buy, I’ll buy it.” Always “I’ll buy it.” And that’s exactly what it’ll do. That’s what it did in 2007, 2009, it bought up literally trillions of dollars of government bonds and just swapped it for cash. And from the point of view of the person in question, that was one asset on its balance sheet, it was swapped for another asset.  

They didn’t become millionaires overnight. They were already millionaires because when the time came to fill in their sort of federal tax filings and they had to list all of their wealth, one of the things they listed is “I own a million dollars in government bonds.” One of the movies that I love, if I had more time next semester, I would teach, is the movie “Panic Room” with Forrest Whitaker and Jodie Foster.  

That’s a movie about a guy that tries to rob Jodie Foster and her daughter. And they get stuck in a panic room. And it turns out that the thing that they’re trying to rob was in the panic room, unfortunately. So that’s where the movie takes place. But you know what the thing ends up being? A bunch of government bonds.  

They just look like big pieces of paper and they’re worth a million dollars apiece. Why? Because it’s a million dollars of a bond that earns them 5% interest every year. Or somebody bought it for $800,000, but it was worth a million, so it’s the equivalent of an interest rate. You know, you can either buy something for a certain price and it’ll pay you interest or you buy it for a discount, and then over time, then it becomes worth the equivalent of paying an interest, right? 

Steve Grumbine (00:14:28): 

It’s fascinating. 

Rohan Grey (00:14:28): 

So these bonds are worth a million dollars, right? And it’s a lot easier than carrying the big duffle suitcases you see in, you know, other movies, full of hundred dollar bills. It’s just these very nice genteel, you know, 10 sheets of paper. You could put them in an envelope and sort of walk down the street with them.  

I’m sure all the people who steal millions of dollars down on Wall Street, do exactly that. [laughter] Or at least they used to, it’s all digital now. But that’s the point, right? That these bonds, they were already value. And the act of turning them into cash is just closer to turning a hundred dollar bill into two $50 bills than it is turning your credit card debt into a positive balance or something.  

You know, it’s not like the government was in the minus position. The government issued it, people held it. And then when the time came to quote unquote, monetize it or redeem it, they just swapped out the debt instrument for cash. And one of the ways that we know this is true is that every month billions and billions and billions of dollars of government debt comes due.  

A lot of debt is held in three-month bonds. That means if you issue a billion dollars in April of debt, you have to pay it by July. But in July, the same people that bought the debt in April still want to hold debt. They don’t want cash. They’re not like, “Oh, great. I lent, I get my money back, I’m the hell out of this game.”  

No, of course not. They want to keep holding debt. So what do they do? They roll it over. They say, “Hey, I know it’s time to pay, but why don’t I give you another three months, why don’t I buy another three months of debt from you. Don’t worry about giving me the cash. I don’t want it. You keep the quote unquote cash.  

You know, you can give me another three month Treasury bill and then, you know, I’ll see you again another three months.” That’s how it works. It’s not to do with borrowing from grandchildren or anything else. 

Steve Grumbine (00:16:16): 

This is the most fascinating stuff to me. So I’m going to boil what you just said down for the public out there that’s worried, and they see these nasty headlines. Folks it’s much ado about nothing. It really is. I mean, this is just a normal function of a currency-issuing nation. There’s nothing here to be afraid of per se. 

Rohan Grey (00:16:38): 

Yeah. An easy way to think about this is, every time someone says “the amount of debt outstanding,” just replace it with “the amount of interest-earning money, outstanding.” Just, just replace those words in your head and see what the sentence sounds like. That’s it. 

Steve Grumbine (00:16:53): 

I’m trying to roll this together because I’m seeing a bigger picture. Obviously we’re very concerned with the Green New Deal and obviously people that are not well versed in these subjects, that have gone to typical university, people like myself who learned orthodox economics and learned a lot of, dare I say, fairy tale stories about what economics is and what the dollar story is – this is all still very terrifying.  

And so when you talk about this massive infusion of cash into the equation, this massive fiscal space the Green New Deal would present, and then you hear the fear of 2000% debt to GDP, and it really can sap the energy out of life-saving policy space. And I think one of the concerns I have – and this stays back into this legal realm – is the rise of the left version, where they’re pushing public banking, not so much that public banks are good or bad, so much as they’re using it to try to quote unquote fund a Green New Deal.  

And I think there’s a fundamental lack of understanding about what this actually entails and what that actual financing is. It sounds to me like this needs some real discussion around it. Can you tackle public banking? 

Rohan Grey (00:18:21): 

Yeah, sure. So basically I think there’s two different motivations here. One, I think is understandable, but ultimately misguided. And that is the idea that some people know very well, that the government can create money, that the limit to that power is real resource capacity and inflation. It’s not whether someone can find the money from somewhere else.  

They know that money is sui generis — it comes from itself. It’s the blood of the population. It’s within all of us, you know, as I said earlier. But they’re afraid of making that argument publicly. So they think it’s an easier sell, because there are examples in history of investment banks and everybody understands banks, and whatever else.  

It’s an easiest sell to make the case for public banking than it is to make the case for public spending. So just like we talked about earlier with Germany or with the banks in the 19th century, they couldn’t win the argument directly in Germany, can’t win the argument for more public spending because of legal constraints with the Eurozone.  

Or in the 19th century, they couldn’t win it with the constitution. And today they think they can’t win it in the court of public opinion because they think that the left will be laughed out of the room. If they say that we can create money, the right will call them, you know, crazy money-spending socialists – as if they don’t already do that.  

And so they think that the way to kind of get their cake and avoid any flack for it is to promote a public bank, which will issue the money through the banking system in the way that the banks did in the 19th century — the States couldn’t print their own currency, but they could create a bank that could print banknotes, right?  

That’s the kind of logic brought to the 21st century context. And they think it’s going to save them political capital. They think it’s a sort of political shortcut and that they think that it’s near enough, it’s good enough. That the differences between public banking and public spending is so little…  

It’s not really going to blow anything up if we do it through a public bank. And if it does start to cause problems, we can fudge it on the backend and we can do some creative accounting on that side. Now I understand this motivation. I understand, especially if you’re in government, how you might be very leery of a lot of political capital spent on this question when it’s hard enough, just to get people to care about the issues you want to spend on.  

But from our point of view, and based on a historical reading of the 20th century, this is a loser. It doesn’t work in the long run. You end up losing even more political capital by endorsing and reifying these myths, and it ends up hurting you in the long run. And secondly, it isn’t “near enough is good enough.”  

There are real problems with a model based around lending rather than around spending. And if you think they’re the same, you only need to look as far as the student debt crisis that we’re in right now, because for a lot of people: “well, we’ll just give them student loans, right? Let them eat loans,” [laughter] rather than “we’re going to fund free higher education.”  

And we’re dealing with the problems there right now. So we don’t want a world where the Green New Deal is going to be funded by loans. Because first of all, the first question everyone’s going to ask is, “well, can the investment pay for itself?” Well, what if it can’t, what if it’s not designed to pay for itself?  

You know, you don’t only give public education to children if you think that kids are going to pay you back by the time they turn 18 — you invest in it because it’s a public good, right? You don’t want the military to turn a profit. You want the military to be invested in – or maybe you don’t want to be investing in it at all – but you know, it’s not supposed to be a profit-making enterprise and neither is public education.  

And when you try to turn things that should not be profit-seeking or not be revenue-generating into revenue-generating, it distorts the entire industry. It turns it into something that it isn’t, and it puts that profit or that revenue-generation, or that recompensation agenda above the actual service that should be delivered.  

And I’ll just give you a personal example because this is relevant to my life. My father is a barrister in Australia. He’s a lawyer. He represents workers who get injured in the federal government, who have federal government health insurance with the government’s healthcare insurance company called Comcare.  

We already have public healthcare provision, but people usually get healthcare insurance on top. And if you’re a federal government employee, you work for the post office or something, you have this health insurance. Thanks to decades of neoliberal economics, including on the left in Australia, Comcare’s leading figures believe or have convinced themselves that their primary goal is to minimize the money that Comcare costs the government.  

They come and give speeches every year saying we’ve saved $200 million this year, or we reduced our outlays by this amount. And that’s just another way of saying “we didn’t pay people, the healthcare that they needed.” And the reason for that is because they’ve convinced themselves that the best thing they can possibly do is keep their budget in order, not pay for the healthcare that injured people who deserve it actually need.  

So the whole industry has just been completely walked away from what it was actually set up to do, into a bean counting exercise. And this happens across every agency and every government in the whole world when the overriding goal is not to deliver the services, but to sort of keep your bottom line in the black or earn a profit for the rest of government.  

It happens in universities. There are certain universities where if you want to launch a new program or a new center, the first question the university asks is how much revenue is it going to bring us? That’s not the point of higher education, right? And if it’s worth doing it should be worth doing and we can make the money to make it worth doing.  

If this social benefit is worth it, then that is the money. That is the value that’s been created. The second idea, the second big kind of group of people are the people that believe that either the ability to create money exists, but it’s very small. You know, there’s only a little bit of that power.  

If you try to use that power a lot, it’s like trying to, you know, keep yourself up all night with caffeine tablets. Eventually you’re going to come crashing down. That’s going to be even worse and you’re gonna wish you didn’t do it, right? You can’t substitute for good old fashioned sleep. You can’t substitute for good old fashioned revenue, right?  

This isn’t sort of what… Timmy Geithner, what did he call it? It was like, um, feeding the economy, a sugar. It’s kind of fake. It’s fake stimulus beyond just a little bit, right? So they think that it’s a kind of gimmick and that in the real world, in the world of real policymaking, to quote a famous, you know, leftist, Doug Henwood, you gotta pay for shit, that’s the idea.  

And so the reason they’re attracted to public banks is because in their mind, they don’t understand that most banking involves creating new money. They think that at some level – either at the really basic level of literally “you give me your money and I lend it out,” or at some sort of fractional reserve banking where it’s basically that story, but through a funhouse mirror or something – that the point of banks is to lend out other people’s money.  

And so the point of public banking is to quote unquote, harness the power of private capital. We have all this private capital out there. You know, Apple is sitting on $60 billion it doesn’t know what to do with, and all these hedge funds are desperately seeking investments that they can put these big piles of money into use.  

And you go, “well, you know what? Big pile of money meet big pile of public investment needs.” It’s a marriage born in, well, I dunno, fascism really; the marrying of corporate investment with public purpose is historically one of the definitions of fascism, at least economically. But in their mind, what this does is, it’s a way of kind of getting private investment capital on board with public spending goals.  

And it’s almost a kind of bribe really. It’s a way of saying, look, we’ll give you a slice of the pie if you don’t scream bloody murder and get in our way. And you see this with, you know, not to sort of point fingers, but you see this with the way that Elizabeth Warren talks about the Green New Deal.  

“We’re going to invest and it’s going to be great for American businesses.” And the reason that that framing is a way of saying, “look, I’ll make sure the private sector gets their cut. If you don’t consider me a threat, I’ll give you a cut of the pie.” And to me, it’s ultimately – and I’m not saying this is about Elizabeth Warren in general – but I think that that framework is ultimately neoliberal. 

Steve Grumbine (00:27:00): 

Amen. 

Rohan Grey (00:27:00): 

It’s a way of privatizing the gains from public investment. There’s no reason why we should be giving private hedge funds 5% return a year for the privilege of funding the Green New Deal. We don’t need them. We don’t want them. We can fund it ourselves with the public’s money. And if the problem ends up being that there’s too much investment sloshing around, if it turns out that those guys see that the economy is on the rise again, and they decide they want to start investing as well – and suddenly we find ourselves in a situation where there’s a limited amount of workers available to build new buildings, and we have to make a decision between letting the private investors build another casino or another high-rise building for Goldman Sachs or building a new school or a hospital – then we can tell them to take a seat, thank you very much.  

And if they don’t, we can confiscate that money away from them so that there’s more space in the investment space for public spending. But the idea that public banks are a kind of harnessing of abundant private capital is the other motivation. And a big chunk of that is the idea that we can’t create new capital.  

All we can do is either confiscate it – which is very, you know, hard and politically costly and requires a political revolution and all this kind of stuff – or we can win them over with honey instead of vinegar, and we can say, “there’s a seat at the table for you, and this is a win, win, win.” And, you know, that’s the kind of thinking that goes on here. Right? It’s partially misguided, and it’s partially bad economics, and it’s partially letting the wolves into the henhouse. We don’t want to privatize this process. We’ve tried that already – it’s the Rahm Emanuel school of public investment, the Robert Rubin school of public investment – but we’ve let enough Citibankers into the department of the Treasury.  

We don’t need to let in any more. 

Intermission (00:29:09): 

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, and Instagram. 

Steve Grumbine (00:29:59): 

I want to talk real quickly because this ties right back into this, you know, one of the famous exchanges of all time, especially for folks that follow the goings on within the Modern Monetary Theory, you know, theorists and activists and politicos is the exchange between Paul Ryan and Alan Greenspan.  

When Paul Ryan leans forward and says, you know, surely if we privatized social security, it will become more solvent. And in some rare act of honesty, Alan Greenspan comes out and goes, well, you know, it’s not really so much that we’re insolvent because we can certainly pay any amount we want. The question is, can we create an economy that has the real resources available for sale?  

And the reason why I’m bringing this up piggybacking on the public banking thing is the Andrew Yang phenomenon that has come about, with the Yang Gang and this real obsession almost to the complete and utter ignoring of any other policy space. This UBI group has come through the door and they don’t understand the effects of what a UBI is, given the nature of starting with the money story, starting with why the government provisions itself, looking for real resources, looking for goods and services, looking to provision itself.  

And the nature of just handing people credits as opposed to the price anchor and the structural reform that comes about with a federal job guarantee. Can you talk a little bit about A) Social Security and then, B) let us roll that into the concept – because I consider Social Security a basic income in and of itself – versus the UBI and the job guarantee. And I think we can take that as our final descent. 

Rohan Grey (00:32:00): 

So yeah, I mean, the first thing is I think most MMTers support a basic income in the sense that nobody should be deprived of any money to survive. I don’t think anybody thinks that nobody should have any money to survive. And I also think that most MMTers would say, in addition to that, regardless of how much money people have, they should have all of their basic needs met, housing, food, health care, etc.  

I think generally speaking, the progressive position on most things has been, it is better to offer direct public services for free than to presume that the way to give people access to their basic needs is to give them a check. Now, that’s not to say that giving people a check isn’t useful in and of itself, but the classic example here is school vouchers.  

School vouchers are typically seen – quite rightly, I think – as a neoliberal alternative to public schools. Don’t give people public schools, give them some cash and let the quote unquote market provide their schooling needs for them. Healthcare: don’t give people Medicare for all, give them a healthcare rebate and let them go, you know, purchase healthcare on the market, right?  

Don’t give them public housing, give them a rental tax credit and let them go get housing from private landlords. These are the neoliberal alternatives to public service provisioning. That said, there is a point at which cash provides some flexibility and freedom in consumption choices. And people have different consumption needs, you know.  

When I worked in family law, there was a joke used to be – I don’t know if it was a joke or a tragic saying – good families are kind of good in very similar ways and messed up families are messed up in their own messed up unique ways. And every family is messed up in its unique way. And I don’t think it’s necessarily true, but that was the saying that people would sometimes say.  

I think when it comes to basic needs, you know, most babies need to sleep. They need to be fed. They need to be loved. Most children want to have rich educational experiences. They want to have friends. They want to have a bed that’s comfortable, they want to have healthcare. A lot of basic needs are quite similar.  

Obviously people have different needs within that, but the needs themselves are similar. When you start getting into the realm of kind of personal consumption, I might never want to go to a sports game in my life – although my wife just recently made me a Raiders fan and now I’m a Raiders fan for life, apparently – but before that, I never wanted to go to a sports game in my life.  

But I did love going to music concerts. Now in that context, it might make more sense to give you the option to choose the kinds of cultural experiences that you would like to go to. And one way to do that is to give people money. Another way is to invest in both to some degree and have some basic degree of minimum free services for both.  

And when you want to pay more you can pay more. For Social Security, I think part of the point here is that it goes alongside other forms of assistance, including Medicare and things like that. And that if there were other services that we could provide publicly, that would take a lot of the burden off Social Security to be the only way by which people have economic security.  

If every elderly person had guaranteed housing, guaranteed healthcare, guaranteed care assistance, then their social security checks would probably be able to be spent on more luxury and sort of consumption goods than they are today. But the other thing about those Social Security checks is they only buy something because there’s someone on the other side offering it.  

That someone on the other side is doing the work. And there’s a reason why social security is historically for the elderly, the sick, the young – these are the people that aren’t presumed to be able to contribute productively, or that it’s not reasonable to sort of expect them to do so beyond a certain amount.  

So the point of Social Security there, is a way of giving those people access to the goods and services produced by the working population. A universal basic income – first of all, the word universal there means everybody gets the same amount. That’s a design feature of what universal basic income proposals are.  

Yang to his credit is consistent on that. Some people like to mess around with that term and say, well, actually, you know, it won’t go to the rich. We’ll take that money back through taxes or something. And then you go, well, the rich are going to work this out pretty quickly, right? They’re going to work out that it’s not universal if they’re getting nothing out of it, or getting less than nothing because they’re paying more in taxes, right?  

So if it’s going to be truly universal, it really has to be no strings attached to everybody who wants it – not everyone who wants it – everybody. Which means if you’re rich, you’re probably going to invest that money. You’re not going to spend it on milk and eggs and cheese. You’re going to put it in stocks and government bonds and things, which means it’s going to be earning income for you, you know, earning interest.  

Your thousand dollars a month, which is $12,000 a year, you know, 10 years from now is worth $50,000. If you’re poor, you are going to need that money, which means at the end of the year, you’re left with zero, and the next year you’re left with zero, maybe a little bit. So by the end of the decade, the rich person is $200,000 up.  

And the poor person has some of their basic needs met, but is not $2,000 up. So wealth inequality and income inequality rises even as you might be giving some basic needs for the people at the bottom end of the spectrum. Compare that to a world where you’re providing public goods to those people, or you’re only providing income support to people who need it at the bottom.  

At the end of the 20 years or 10 years, the rich people don’t have anything more than they have, but the people at the bottom end do. And so the wealth and income distribution is compressed rather than expanded. So that’s the first thing is – making something universal like that, when there are different ways in which that money is going to be used by poor and rich, is going to increase the gap between the rich and the poor.  

The second thing is, putting aside Yang’s ridiculous claims about robots trying to take people’s jobs where there’s no evidence for that in the productivity, in the job numbers, and certainly in industries that really matter. We’re not replacing school teachers with robots. We’re not replacing lawyers and judges with robots.  

We’re not replacing doctors with robots. We’re not replacing social workers with robots. We’re not replacing architects and engineers with robots. So in a lot of work that’s really important, we’re not sort of roboticizing anytime soon. And we’re certainly not in areas where the human interaction is the point, right?  

There are certain jobs like widget-making that you could automate. There are jobs that are actually about human beings interacting with human beings, which by definition can’t be automated, right? So there’s always going to be some work that needs to be done. And then the question is, who’s doing the work?  

Who’s doing the work and how? Because first of all, if you think that nobody’s doing the work, that means you’re probably a privileged person who isn’t doing the work. If everybody in America got up tomorrow and is like, “Hey, we all stopped working, but we’re all somehow enjoying the same standard of living.  

I wonder why that is?” Chances are, if you turn on the TV, there’s probably some sort of subjugation of another country going on, and the extraction of value from the workers in that country. That’s probably how that’s happening. Right? I doubt that the minute that America gets a UBI, everyone in Bangladesh gets a week off work, right?  

So there’s always somebody doing the work to produce the goods and services that the UBI is buying. And then the question becomes – and this is where the job guarantee comes in. This is the most important part of it. My colleague, Raul Carrillo, and I wrote an article in the debate with Matthew Bruenig in the magazine “In These Times,” which was, do we need a federal job guarantee or do we need a universal basic income?  

And this was the crux of our argument, which is: we want a world where the production process is as democratic and empowering for workers and average people as the consumption process. The guy who created the early version of a UBI called “social credit,” a guy named C H Douglas, was very clear in his vision, which was that a UBI or a social credit system would create a democracy of consumers and an aristocracy of producers.  

It would be the Steve Jobs of the world, the Elon Musks of the world, the Jeff Bezos of the world who had run these mega factories. You know, we’ll just forget about the people that actually do the work in those places, but let’s pretend it’s only these sort of brilliant entrepreneurs at the top, and then a bunch of robots or, you know, horse-headed people, if “Sorry to Bother You” is anything to go by, right?  

So they would be the quote/unquote, captains of these robot armies, right? And the rest of us would buy the goods and services from them. Every month your UBI check gets deposited into your Amazon Pay account, and then you get to buy some stuff on Amazon, and then it gets delivered to you by a drone and everyone’s happy, right?  

Those people become insanely rich in that story – even more rich than they already are. Those 100 billionaires become trillionaires, those trillionaires become ten-trillionaires. The aristocracy of producers is the people who are empowered in a world where all we get is a check. A job guarantee says, no, we have a right to exist and be involved as workers as well as consumers.  

No gulags here, but if you want to contribute, if you are going to be contributing already, if you’re the kind of person that is the person, you know, doing Jeff Bezos’s laundry every week, or looking after his kids because he’s ignoring them, or whatever else, you’re a worker, whether you’re married to him, or you used to be married to him, whether you’re being paid by him – you’re a worker and you deserve to be recognized for the work that you’re doing.  

And we need institutions that recognize and respect and valorize and pay well for that work. And the only way to ensure everybody who wants and is able to work CAN work – under conditions that give them dignity and autonomy and freedom – is a job guaranteee. My friend, the historian David Stein, historian of the civil rights movement, says the definition of full employment he likes the most is the one where you can tell your racist, sexually-harassing, abusive boss to get fucked and to walk down the street and find another job without any cost to you — that’s full employment.  

And in order for that to exist, the government needs to say “Jobs don’t grow on rich people. They don’t grow on Jeff Bezos. They don’t grow on some private market. The jobs come from the same place the money came from: the blood of our politic, the blood of our democracy. It comes from the relationships between each of us.”  

If we say something is worth doing collectively, we can pay someone to do that work. That is the definition of a job. And if we look around the room and we see everybody who wants to work and we see every job that needs to be done, and we say, we’ll make sure you get a chance to participate in that process so you can go to sleep at night, feeling like you’ve done your part in your community, then that’s the essence of a job guarantee.  

And from our point of view, it’s important to have a democracy of consumers, yes, but it’s also important to have a democracy of producers. And the only way — this is the story that I like to tell the most, you know, I was a child advocate, right? I loved Roald Dahl as a kid and my dad’s British and stuff. “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”… 

Steve Grumbine (00:43:40): 

Yes. 

Rohan Grey (00:43:40): 

How is it that Charlie got to become a chocolatier at the end of that story? Well, the answer is Willy Wonka let him. For 20 years beforehand, that factory door was shut. It doesn’t matter how many kids walked by and wanted to be a chocolatier in that story, as long as Willy Wonka owned that factory – not to sound too Marxist about it – but as long as he privately owned the means of chocolate production, no one got to be a chocolatier until he decided, in his weird, sadistic little games to choose somebody to take over his factory.  

In a world where we say no way, everybody gets to access the chocolate factory, and the most deserving people get to become chocolatiers based on some social determination process, then it doesn’t matter what Willy Wonka wants. He’s just a weird old billionaire. And every Charlie who wants to become a chocolatier can have a chance.  

And that’s what a job guarantee is about. It’s that the world of making and producing and creating and being the value creators for the community is too important to leave to rich capitalists. 

Steve Grumbine (00:44:44): 

I love that. I want to ask you, I oftentimes talk about the job guarantee as the ultimate democracy enhancer being that the local administration of these jobs would be based on the local community saying, “This is what we value. This is what we’d like to see done.” And I can’t think of anything that would bring people more to the polls, more involved in their community, more involved in caring about what local decisions are made or bubble that up to the national, even.  

I can’t think of a greater democracy enhancer than the job guarantee program. Am I barking up the right tree there? I mean, is that sound? 

Rohan Grey (00:45:24): 

I think so, definitely. I mean, think about it. Most workers spend eight hours a day, you know, half of their waking week at work. It’s an incredibly important part of their life. To feel like you have control over that space, to feel like you have the ability to choose which space you’re in, and to feel like you have the ability to demand that space.  

Not to be grateful that somebody chose to give you it, but that it’s yours by right in the same way as a kid in a classroom says, “I don’t, you know… The teacher’s not doing me a favor by giving me a seat. I deserve to be educated. I deserve to have a seat in a school.” Or “I’m not in a hospital by the grace of the hospital administration.  

I’m there because I have a right to healthcare, you can’t keep me away. This is my spot.” That is incredibly empowering and allows you to start taking ownership of what work is and what it is you’re doing. You see this in places like India, where they have a rural employment guarantee for a hundred days of work.  

It’s not perfect, but it’s been a resounding success relative to keeping people unemployed. And you see it in the Argentina case with the Jefes and Jefas program. It was originally intended for male heads of households. And there was a huge amount of uptake by women who found it incredibly economically empowering to have their own source of income away from their husbands and use that to create community gardens, to create community childcare co-ops.  

And when they did interviews with these people asking them, ‘why do you want this?’ Earning an income was number six out of 10 or lower. The first ones were ‘I get to give back. I get to learn a skill. I get to be in a group community with other people. I get to feel like I’ve earned my money. I get to feel independent.’ These are really deep, psychologically valuable things for people and work that, up until that point had not been valued, started to be valued.  

Home work that women were doing that was unpaid for decades, started to be socialized and formalized into paid work, like paid childcare co-op, which was actually part of the reason why they shut it down. It was too empowering for them and they started to sort of see the households slipping away from them [laughs] and all the men in government were not particularly happy about that.  

So yeah, I think it absolutely is democracy. I think democracy – economic democracy and democracy in the workplace – is just as important as democracy at the ballot box. And until we know we have a right to be in the economy – to participate – we can’t start exercising all the other rights that come with it. 

Steve Grumbine (00:47:53): 

I think that’s brilliantly stated. And let me finish this portion off and get your take on this. Some of the things that come at us, you know, they always talk about the job guarantee as “make work.” And they talk about it being forced labor, and they say that “real freedom is UBI” that you’ve already addressed in spades.  

But when you look at the types of jobs that can be compensated, I think it’s fair to say that we’re looking to redefine what work is as well. It’s, isn’t just a matter of what’s profitable to “the man.” This is a different view of what work is, what it means to serve your community. And we often hear about, well, what about artists?  

And what about motherhood? And what about – the ‘what about-ism’ is what we get hit with with this job guarantee. And you know, there’s many folks out there that are trying to present what sounds like at least verbiage-wise, a job guarantee, but it is not the MMT approach to a job guarantee, or even…  

It lacks vision. It’s not what we’re trying to do. It misunderstands the role of the transition job, as Warren Mosler would say, the counter-cyclical stabilizing effect of a job guarantee. But in particular, these things are typically – these types of roles are typically brought up as ‘Aha! We found the silver bullet that defeats your job guarantee.  

These are not covered by your job guarantee.’ Talk about what the spectrum of available ideas – I mean, it seems like it’s limited only by our imagination. 

Rohan Grey (00:49:36): 

Yeah. That’s it in one sense. It’s limited only by imagination. If a job is just something someone gets paid to do, at its core level, then anything that we’re willing to pay people to do, and to see value in, is a job. There are people who think that a UBI is freedom because in their mind they’re putting themselves in the position of the consumer.  

But the important part, you know – as we talked about before about, you know, “Who do we owe? Jupiter” – is to see the other side. For every person who’s consuming, there’s a production system on the other side. And you know, I might get a UBI and buy something off Amazon and go, “wow, I’m free!” And the person in the developing world who worked in a sweat shop to produce that might feel extremely unfree in that moment.  

And so we don’t eat a UBI check, right? We eat the stuff the UBI check buys. Where does that stuff come from? That’s the conversation UBI advocates are not having, or when they do try to have it, they quickly descend into platitudes about the market or about robots, which are completely unrealistic, if not completely wrong.  

The second thing is about the kinds of work. And one of the things here is a lot of work is currently not recognized in the formal labor market and that can include care work in the home. It can include certain kinds of art work. It can include a whole range of things:, environmental protection work, work of indigenous communities.  

And there’s two sorts of answers that you can have for that. One answer is it’s always going to be too hard to sort of recognize that, but let’s just give up and give people a check. I find that the other option is to say this work is not being recognized. We should recognize it. And we should recognize it as work and create the institutional system to formalize and socialize that work so that it isn’t resting on mothers, in their homes, in the privacy of their homes with no support.  

You’re a single mother at home, raising your kid, and you’ve got no support and you get sick — you’re shit out of luck. If you have a public healthcare system and a single teacher gets sick for a week, that’s okay. There’s a bunch of other care providers who can step in for that person because it’s a system.  

That’s the difference between privatized care and public socialized care. It’s that one puts all the burden on the individual at the home and the other puts it on public institutions and the collective. But the other side of it is it’s a really kind of sad form of defeatism and, almost condescending in my point of view, to say that we’ll never be able to recognize this work, because what that means is somebody gets a check, whether they sit on the couch and watch cartoons – and I’m not saying people are always going to do that, I’m not saying that all – but I’m saying, if you do sit on the couch and watch cartoons, you get that check.  

If you spend that whole day doing care work for your community, you get that check. Is that recognizing the care work or is that saying, it really doesn’t matter which one you do we’re going to get the same check, but maybe other things will recognize that care work. Maybe you’ll get a volunteer award from your volunteer community until that volunteer community finds out you’re gay and then the church kicks you out or whatever else, right?  

Because the church controls the means of volunteering in that world, right? The Willie Wonka chooses who the interns get to be in the world where access to volunteer work is privatized rather than access through a job guarantee. But if the check itself doesn’t care whether you sit on the couch or do work, then the check can never really be said to be recognition for the informal work you’re doing because it’s recognizing nothing.  

And it’s recognizing less than nothing because it’s recognizing anti-work as much as work. But to go to your question about what kind of jobs can be done, I mean, I have a slightly different view to Warren’s. I don’t think that a job guarantee job has to be transitional. I think people can stay on the job guarantee for their entire life if they want to.  

And so do people like Bill Mitchell and I think others in the MMT community would agree. And I understand Warren’s perspective, I don’t think the job guarantee has to be transitional. The other thing is the way that I think about it is there’s sort of three layers to the job guarantee. And this is again thinking about it as a lawyer, not just as someone designing an economic program.  

The first level for me – and for others in MMN I think I can speak for – is the legal right, because without the legal right, there’s no guarantee that everybody gets it, right? And you can say, we’re going to give a job to everybody and we’re going to have a job office where the unemployment office used to be.  

But if the person at the job office is screwing me over because I’m black or because it’s been underfunded and there’s a long line and nobody cares – until I have the right to sue, to demand relief, to say ‘this is a violation of my rights. I demand they be honored’ – then you cannot guarantee that every person is going to benefit equally from this program.  

And obviously creating the legal right doesn’t mean that everyone just magically overnight does benefit, but it is a critical precondition for people to be able to benefit equally. And this is why even though rights aren’t the be-all and end-all of social justice struggles, that rights have been at the center of most social justice struggles, particularly in the United States, throughout history.  

The right to vote, the right for public education, and the right for healthcare; the right is a critical part of the legal enabling infrastructure. So the job guarantee – part of it, for me, the word guarantee there is about a legally enforceable right. The second part – and this is the part that most MMTers talk about and focus on because it’s the sort of meat and potatoes – is the programs, the job creation programs that will ensure that right actually can be experienced by most people.  

That’s the actual thing that ensures that there’s a job available for everybody, and that job is tailored and it pays well and it helps you gain skills, et cetera. And for that to work, I think, and for it not to be stigmatized, we need a world where those jobs are considered part of and in the same category as every other public job.  

So I don’t think as a matter of both design and rhetoric, that it is a good idea to put a big Scarlet “J” on job guarantee jobs and say they’re somehow structurally different from every other job in the economy. It could be that certain people need the equivalent of what is sort of Employer of Last Resort program for them.  

But it could be that for a lot of people, regular public jobs programs are the way in which they experience the job guarantee. If you have a lot of public jobs, the number of people that will need to rely on the Employer of Last Resort is less. And the way the analogy that I use for this, when I try to explain this to people is public schooling.  

There are people who have special needs in public schools, right? People with behavioral problems, people with learning problems, et cetera, those people need additional support beyond what an average public school classroom will be able to provide. Now, in order for that public education system, to ensure everybody has a right, we need to catch those people with the most needs.  

So that those special support services are critical to ensure that everybody’s education guarantee is real. But that doesn’t mean when we talk about public schooling the first thing we think about are those special needs schools or the schools for kids with behavioral problems or schools in prisons and things like that.  

Those are the ones that catch people who the standard public school doesn’t support adequately. Now I would say all of those are parts of the education guarantee system. And I would say in the same way that there are programs specifically to catch people at the bottom, like what we would call an MMT Employer of Last Resort job guarantee program.  

And they’re critical. The whole system doesn’t work without them, but people who work in average public sector jobs, people who work in even, you know, private sector jobs that are part of this system, they are all benefiting from the job guarantee.They all exist because we’ve committed to ensuring everybody has a job.  

And if those jobs work for you and you don’t need to be on that quote unquote job guarantee jobs, great. But they are not somehow separated out from the rest of it. The whole system together is what gives everybody a job. And we wouldn’t say that because in theory, every kid could be in a special needs class, that therefore public education is defined only in terms of those special needs classes.  

It’s the whole ecosystem. And I think that’s the way to think about the job guarantee is that every way in which the public is supporting jobs being available to people is part of the job guarantee system. The larger – the last sort of layer – is the most abstract, which is: what does an economy look like when we have a real meaningful job guarantee, the legal guarantee, the programs that give it meaning.  

That’s the kind of job guarantee economy. And that’s the David Stein quote that I said before, when you can tell your boss to get stuffed and go down the road, or when we don’t have the problem of recurring recessions, where every 10 years there’s millions of people that get thrown out of work. When the private sector knows that if, you know, there’s a downturn in private investment, the public sector will counter-cyclically step in, et cetera, et cetera.  

So you’ve got the legal right. You’ve got the whole suite of programs that give people jobs of which the Employer of Last Resort is a critical part, but not the only, and not the kind of exclusive part that makes the job guarantee work. And then you’ve got the broader social dynamic that’s created as a result of an economy that has that right and those programs.  

So I don’t mean to sort of engage in MMT revisionism if, you know, if other MMTers want to distance themselves with that, that’s fine. But that’s how I think about this when I think about what we’re trying to build. We’re trying to build a right that every child knows they have from the moment they’re born, till the day they die, we’re trying to build a whole range of institutions to ensure all of these things exist.  

And, you know, there were public job guarantee programs in the New Deal. Some of them were teaching. Some of them were providing public murals. Some of them were beautifying parks and railways and government buildings, right? Some of those could be jobs that are skilled. Some of them could be jobs that are permanent.  

Some of them could be jobs that are transitional. Some of them are jobs that could be whoever turns up one day and not the next day, right? They don’t have to all be identical to be part of giving life to that job guarantee. And then lastly, it’s what an economy looks like when we live under that condition, in the same way as you can imagine: what does an economy look like when we have healthcare for all?  

What does an economy look like where every child gets an education? That’s a vision as much as anything. 

Steve Grumbine (01:00:55): 

Yeah. I want to cap this off with this statement and let you close out with this. I look at not only the Green New Deal and the need for a Marshall plan, a need to mobilize, but I look at what is thrown around by many, including AOC – and I hear many MMTers talking about this – as a just transition from these, what we would consider detrimental industries that we would like to move away from and move toward more socially beneficial, more ecologically friendly employment, et cetera.  

That you know, the job guarantee provides a just transition as well for those that are displaced within these industries, like for example, healthcare, let’s say we get rid of private insurance. Now we’ve got a lot of people out there. There’s going to be a transition. There may be plenty of people that we’d need to service the new system.  

But the point is is that there is a just transition. There is a facility there to make sure that those people that would otherwise be resistant to change, know that there is a transition from where they are today to where they could be tomorrow. Can you talk about a just transition? 

Rohan Grey (01:02:15): 

Yeah, sure. So one of the first articles I ever wrote about the job guarantee was called, “Who Owns the Intellectual Fruits of Job Guarantee Labor?” and it was about intellectual property and who owns the intellectual property of work done through a job guarantee program. Deeply ironically, that article is paywalled, but it’s available on my website – I’m happy to share with people if they reach out.  

It’s paywalled because the publisher who it’s the itellectual property of would kill me. Anyway, the reason I wrote that piece, and one of the things I said in that piece, is that often we talk about a job guarantee in terms of the pay and in terms of the conditions at work, which are obviously crucial and access to the work.  

But one of the other things is the nature of the output that comes out of that work. And I said, in this article, you could imagine two different worlds, two different futures, both that have the job guarantee. In one, all the work that the job guarantee workers produce is owned by either the worker themselves privately, they get the copyrights in it, or by the entity they work for – the government agency, the nonprofit, the private sector, the wage subsidy, whatever.  

In that world, you pay to access knowledge; everything’s behind a paywall. You pay to access culture. Every TV channel is the subscription service. You pay to access technology. Every tractor has got a patent, that you can’t open the hood and see what’s going on. And in general, it’s pretty unfree with respect to that level of society.  

The intellectual common. The other one is a world where we say, well, if we’re going to pay public money for this public production, then the fruits that come out of it should be in the public sphere. Which means every piece of art is released as a commons where anyone can use it, access it, remix it, share it.  

Every book is available to read for free, to be remade and be edited, can be mocked up and be, you know, whatever you want. Every piece of scientific knowledge is available to everyone in the world. Elizabeth Warren says, when we finance the Green New Deal, we’re going to make sure that America takes the lead in technology so that we can sell it to the rest of the world and make a profit.  

Well, I would like a world where the Green New Deal technologies we invest in are given away to every other country in the world as part of reparation for the American empire, amongst other things, but because it’s good to share. Because this technology is so important to saving the planet it’s too important to withhold from people just because they can’t or won’t pay.  

Every piece of knowledge, culture, information that gets produced gets shared and becomes part of common. So that’s two different visions of a job guarantee, which means we have to think about not just the provisioning of jobs, but what the purpose of the work is. And part of the point of the just transition, I think, is that for too long workers in certain dirty industries, certain fossil fuel industries have come to identify their identity as workers with the particular work.  

Even when that work ceases to be socially valuable and starts to be socially harmful. So to give up on coal is to give up on your identity as a worker. I think that’s understandable, but tragic. What we need and what the Green New Deal framework so brilliantly does, is it says, “No, you are valuable as a worker.  

Your identity as a worker is real and meaningful and important and will be protected. You’re not going to be given a severance pay and patted on the head and told sit on your couch after 40 years of work, that might’ve sucked but might’ve given you a sense that you earned your way through this world.  

You will be given the chance to keep holding your head high and earning your way through this world.” As a worker, as a valued worker, as a worker that can support their family the way they were doing yesterday. But we are going to switch out bad work for good work in the same way as I would call a kind of proprietary enclosed enclosure-based intellectual production system, “bad work,” and commons-based production “good work.”  

The point of the just transition is to say, we are going to end bad work and replace it with good work. But as we do that, we will make sure every worker stays a worker and is respected and rewarded as a worker should be. And to separate out your identity as a worker from whatever work you might have been forced to accept and to go actually one step further and say, you know what, this time round, we’re going to ask you what kind of work you want?  

What kind of work do you think your community needs. We’re not just going to give you slightly better gruel than they were giving you. We’re actually going to say to you, what do you want to eat today? And you get to choose for a change. And that’s the promise of the Green New Deal in terms of transforming the night shop of work.  

And I think that’s as important to the idea of a job guarantee as anything else is that it’s about letting people decide what is valuable work. Not presuming that markets, or, you know, the profit motive or some, you know, investor class, even if it’s a government social wealth fund or some bullshit like that, can determine “what work is” better than the people who are actually doing the work. 

Steve Grumbine (01:07:59): 

With that, Rohan, I want to thank you so much for this incredible interview. I learned so much. And I really want to tell you how much I appreciate you taking this time with us. 

Rohan Grey (01:08:10): 

Yeah, sure, man. No worries. It’s been a pleasure. I hope some of it’s useful. [laughs] 

Steve Grumbine (01:08:14): 

I can’t wait to see you at the MMT conference, part three here at Stony Brook university. You want to leave us with a little advert for that? 

Rohan Grey (01:08:24): 

Yeah. The theme this year is New Economics for a New Economy. So I think it ties in directly with what we’ve been talking about. I think MMT has well and truly arrived on the global stage. I think everybody knows about it now, or if they don’t, they will. Now’s the time to show that this new world is not only something that’s in our minds and something that can be made true, but now’s the time to make it true.  

So please join us and get involved. This it’s an exciting time to be involved in this community to be pushing these ideas. 

Steve Grumbine (01:08:56): 

Fantastic. I agree. I can’t wait to see you Rohan. Thank you again. 

Rohan Grey (01:09:06): 

Take it easy, mate. 

End Credits (01:09:06): 

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

• Download Audio (mp3)