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

using our straight view, ideology should be glasses, which distort our view. And the critique of ideology should be the opposite. Like, you take off the glasses so that you can finally see the way things really are.

When you talk about a revolution, most people think violence. Without realizing that the real content of any kind of revolution acts, plus lies in

the principles and the goals that you strive for, not

in the way you reach for. While

police call someone a relative, by which they mean it's a person that holds that any view

is as good as any other view. My simple response to that is clear. No one holds that view. No one

believes that every view is as good as every other

view. Welcome to One Dime Radio. Today, I am here with Steve Grumbine, host of the Macro and Cheese podcast, which is a podcast all about modern monetary theory known as as well as a wide variety of other topics. He's been branching out into history and into other theories outside of modern monetary theory like Marxism. It's a wonderful podcast. I can't recommend it enough. I've been on it twice. It was an honor and both of those were really fun. One thing I really like about Steve Grumbine is he's the definition of what I would call a organic intellectual driven by pure curiosity and someone who's very practical. And I really like people who are on broadly calling the non dogmatic left and people are on this channel already know that I'm a proponent of MMT. What we're going to discuss today is more broadly social democracy. We're going to be doing a little series on this channel on ideological tendencies on the left, what's good about them, what's worth keeping and flaws in their approach. Social democracy is definitely worth talking about because probably that's the sphere you're most involved with in terms of who you've talked to. And largely MMTers tend to be dominated by people who are, uh, social Democrats, whether they're on the more radical wing of the DSA or whether they're just Democrats who will be willing to work with the Biden government. So the themes we'll be talking about is UBS universal basic services and why we believe it's superior to universal basic income, as well as the pitfalls of social democracy, like electoralism, strategic approaches. And, um, why haven't all social Democrats embraced modern monetary theory? But first I want to get into you, Steve. Why did you get into MMT? What was your like briefly your political journey like into getting into all of this? Cause I believe you didn't study economics formally, like a lot of the MMT. Is it correct? That's

correct. I mean, I have an MBA Master of Business Administration. I have a Master of Science in Technology Management. So I had to be exposed to a lot of the classical economists. And, but it was told through the lens of the CFO, if you will, of a United Airlines and stuff like that as your instructors. So you're getting a heavy dose of capitalism mixed with a lot of incorrect things that you don't know they're incorrect because you're paying a lot of money to learn this stuff from these professors only to find out that maybe they weren't, they weren't exactly on point. So it's, it's been quite a journey. I started out on the far right, actually, as a Christian conservative, grew up a Reagan Republican. And my trip to the left has been nothing short of a long, long ride. It has definitely been a forward leftward drift. And I would say I am significantly left of anything that would pass for Democrat in the States. But bottom line is that I'm evidence -based, I'm information -based. My thoughts and opinions tend to gravitate toward where there is factual support for the ideas and an imaginary or imagination -based approach to asking questions. Just why not? What would hurt? Why would this not work? Why would that work? So you could say I'm an explorer of sorts at this point because I'm not paid to do this. I mean, I do run two nonprofits that host the podcasts that you told me, said that I host. But quite frankly, those nonprofits, they're not real big. They don't pay a paycheck. So this is a matter of me truly trying to understand the world in which I live and trying as a father, trying to understand what a better society would look like. And that has taken me through Marx. That has taken me through MMT. That has taken me through the Bernie Sanders movement. And it's left me somewhat of a without a country, if you will. It's left me kind of left of the consensus, left of most MMT -ers. In fact, I find myself increasingly isolated from a lot of the MMT -ers because of that leftward drift. So it's an interesting place to be, lonely at times, but definitely going where the information takes me. I definitely

feel that, that not exactly having an ideological tendency to be able to neatly fit into, I find that myself too being very critical, a lot of tendencies on the Marxist left. And part of why I even embraced Marxism to an extent was because of what I saw were the flaws of social democracy to not recognize class struggle. And tea is definitely just another layer on top of that, because it's something that not even all social Democrats have accepted, but it's growing rapidly. What's I find quite strange is the Democrats in the United States seem more quickly to embrace MMT than the Social Democratic Party of my country in Canada, the new Democrat Party, the NDP. They're really backward. They're really like in the Stone Age when it comes to their economics and they never get votes and they're always wondering why. And it's because they always talk about taxes and taxes and people aren't stupid. They know their taxes are going to go up. If you have that understanding of economics and that you have to get, get to get what you're going to spend from the taxpayer. So it's another, that's probably the pill to swallow that is the hardest for people on all sizes of the spectrum, but it's growing rapidly. And I think it's quite enlightening and useful and essential in my view, but you've spent much of your time talking about MMT. It's probably the biggest topic on macaron cheese as its original theme. So I guess for the basic question, maybe like a reminder, because maybe not everyone is fully peeled on MMT. Maybe people haven't seen my other stuff or your stuff. Why MMT? Why should people left or right? Whatever. Embrace MMT. Like, why is it true? And what was that awakening moment for you in which you're like, it all makes sense. Because, yeah, I can remember when that was the case for me with MMT. Just

think about it like this. I started out as a very, very right wing, kind of a Christophasius of sorts. I mean, seriously, like, I mean, I have to embrace it and own it. Because without recognizing that starting point, all the other stuff I say just doesn't really hold quite the weight that it does when you consider the ideological pivot that I took in my life. it's significant because it fundamentally changes everything, but I still landed on MMT. I still, I started MMT as a Republican slash becoming more of a libertarian, civil libertarian, loosening some of my social concerns, some of my social proclivities, some of the things that I thought were just so very, very wrong minded in many ways, but regardless, that's how I was raised. And that was the environment in which I grew up in. And we can say we don't want to be our parents, but you know, I grew up to in many ways, embrace the beliefs of my parents and I carried them forward as I went through school. Um, but MMT asked some stupid questions, some questions that just seem so ridiculous that you're like, why are you asking me that? Like little things like when people were putting the seeds out there into my brain, they were saying stuff like, have you ever seen a dollar? Do you know what a dollar looks like? I'm like, yeah, duh. And I pull out a paper dollar, right? This is like the clumsy, typical, that's probably what most people would do is like, that's a dollar, right? This beats a paper. And it was only when I realized that really a dollar is more of a unit of measure. Okay. Like an inch or a pound. And so this seemingly esoteric, simple, silly kind of awakening was the pivot point. It was a starting point anyway. It was like, okay, so in other words, it's something else. And I started understanding credit. And I started understanding how people do exchange and things like that. And then what really got to me, I think the thing that finally really pushed me over the edge was some of Randy Ray's work. Randy Ray is one of the original developers of modern monetary theory. I had already read a lot of Warren Mosler who was largely concerned. Goes

to nickname L Randall Ray, Larry Randall. Right. Yeah. Yes.

Uh, L Randall ran. I used to always call it L Randall Ray until he laughed at me in an interview one time and said, just call me Randy. It's like, hey, Randy. Okay, I'll do that. But his writing name is L. Randall Ray. All his professional work shows up as L. Randall Ray. But he had written a primer on MMT in a bunch of blog posts, a series of blog posts on the publication New Economic Perspectives. And I think it's 53 blog And of those 53, it takes you through step by step on so many of the questions people just toss at you about things they think they know about money. he literally lays it out in very easy, understandable ways. And Warren Mosler, who was a hedge fund manager and millionaire and people are like, well, why would you as a leftist want to know anything about what a hedge fund millionaire says? It's like, well, a guy knows what he's talking about. Even if, even if you don't like his political angle, or even if you don't like the fact that he once ran a bank or was a hedge fund man or whatever. The point is he understands the way money literally works and not just the way it works, but where it comes from. And I think that's the most important light bulb moment is where does money come from, what is the nature of money and what are taxes really for those three things. Those three things really, really shook my belief system. Understanding A, number one, that currency in terms of the U .S. dollar, as we know it, a fiat currency, meaning by decree, is a creature of the state. It's a creature of the state, whether it's the U .S. dollar, whether it is the Japanese yen, the Chinese won, the Canadian dollar, the Australian dollar, the peso, all these are issued by the government. They're not issued by banks. Although banks have authority based on the government, giving them agency to create their unit of account for loans and stuff like that. The government creates its own money. And it was in that moment that I had that epiphany that said, well, wait a, hold on. If, if, if the government creates some money, why the hell does it need my taxes? And that was a really big deal because as a right -winger, you don't want your hard earned tax dollars going to somebody's bad decisions, right? You don't want it going to their ooh, icky things like gay, gay stuff, or you don't want it going to, I don't know, somebody's abortion. You think up the ick factor, whatever icky thing of the day that Republicans and right -wingers tend to get grossed out by. They didn't like that. And so they didn't want their hard -earned tax dollar going to it. Paying for drugs, giving people drinks, whatever. There's all buying them, buying them processed food on their food stamps, whatever crazy, weird thing that right -wingers don't like it today. That was the thing. And coming from that side and having to unplug from that and realizing that there's no money in the economy if the state doesn't spend and somebody will say, well, banks create money and 97% of the money in economy is banks. You say, well, that's a policy decision. Banks are lending to fill the gap that the federal government chooses not to fill with sovereign spending. So when you take out a loan, you get money, but that money, you use do whatever. The bank in turn, heaps your interest that you pay on the debt, but the rest of it wipes out at zeros out and I'm like, what do you mean zeros out? And then it was like, but your taxes do the same thing. When the government issues money out to you, that's your asset, but that's the government's debt. I'm like, well, wait a minute. So in other words, money is debt. And, and you'll hear Warren Moser say that the national debt, for example, is a sum total of every untaxed dollar in the economy. And so it's like, wait a whole night. And then you'll hear him say, but the dollar is just a tax credit. And you're like, what does that mean? So in other words, it's for redemption, not for spending. In other words, that's the lure. That's the hook. That's the, the magnet that forces us to use the government's money. That's why Bitcoin and things like that will never replace the dollar. Because as long as the state is able to enforce a tax, it's got an obligation payable only its tax. And so this awakening radio, this stuff that I'm telling you about was things that made me say, holy crap. So all the fighting between Democrats and Republicans about paying for things and raising taxes to pay for things and wanting to cut taxes, because we don't want to pay for your bad decisions and all this stuff. It's like a pitch battle. It's fake. It's fraudulent. It's not real. It doesn't exist. It's a fight, but it's a fight over nothing. It's not real. And when that hit me, and that was a big deal because I mean, God, how many fights do you have with whatever parties, political parties in your country and my country and other countries are all about not wanting your hard earned tax dollar to pay for someone else's bad decision. And then when you find out that that entire paradigm is wrong, some changes come through. And then I would say the last really super big thing, other than the fact that the currency is a simple public monopoly the currency -issuing government. The other thing is the difference between currency issuers and currency users. And this light bulb moment is kind of game set and match, right? You understand that the currency -issuing authority comes from law. It's a creature of law as Rohan Gray, who is another one of the leading second or third generation MMT scholars would tell you money being a creature of law means that the laws that surround money are created by your country, by the government. And the tax that it uses to incur an obligation that requires you to need that currency is why you do things. It's what creates markets. It's what creates buyers and sellers of goods, as Mosler would say as well. So understanding that, I said, well, wait a minute, Article I, Section 8 of the U .S. Constitution, this is specific to the United States. It's the same, ironically, around the globe, different legal reasons, but it's the same, fiat currency works the same period. And so with that in mind, I had to understand the difference between states like Maryland or DC, Virginia, DC is not a state, but you get my point. These areas that are not currency issuers, they're currency users. And then the federal government being the currency issuer. It's like, well, what does that mean? They're not like just printing money, which is you hear everybody say, what are they doing printing money? It's not printing money. What happens is the government pays its bills by an act of law. They pass a law. It, the law says who they're paying and what the price terms are and so forth. Once that law is passed, Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution says Congress alone as the power of the purse. So Congress authorizes spending. The president signs it in the law, the executive branch signs it in the law. then the federal reserve with computers, he strokes the, the amounts that the government said in their bill. He strokes those amounts into the government's bank account. And then the government writes a check and sends it out to whoever. And in most cases, sadly, you see it's the military. It's a Northrop Gorman, Boeing to, to Alliburton, to Blackrock, to whomever. And so that is how the government spends. And that money then, once it's spent into those areas, trickles down in the form of salaries and other payments to other companies that springs their work and other contracting agencies, et. So that first dollar spent by the government is usually spent on government contracts. That was a big awakening too, having gone through business school, learning about contracts and hearing that the government takes out bonds to finance spending. Well, that's not really the case at all. government literally does it by decree, by fiat, by law. So putting all that into perspective, if you stop, it's kind of like, okay, I've just been through a centrifuge, personal centrifuge, all the parts are scrambled. I got to wait for it to come back together for me to make sense. So all the connecting synapses and all the thoughts that I had about all these other things had to reconnect because everything changed with that understanding. And I think that that's what's hard for most people because you see what I just said, doesn't neatly fit into a meme. It doesn't neatly fit into a one page index card. Yes, you can say some quick things like taxes don't fund spending, but then you end up spending 10,000 words trying to explain what taxes don't fund spending means. And they're like, what do you mean? Of course they do look. So it challenges everyone's core understanding of what they think money is. It challenges everyone's core understanding of where they think money comes from. it challenges people to really think beyond austerity ideas, ideas of reducing deficits and cutting spending, because now you realize that that's not really necessary. That's not really what you would want to do. And then you dig deeper and you alluded to this and this is all cut off here, you understand class. Once you integrate class into your MMT perspective, you start beginning to understand what are the implications of the state being the monopoly issue or the currency. And you say, well, we have a democracy. Well, do we? I don't think so. Do we have the ability to affect the spending voters? I don't think so. I think that you see legalized bribery in the form of lobbying and legalized bribery in terms of all these other aspects of the revolving door between industry and government, and you can say, wow, government's captured. But if you understand capital and labor and the relations there within, you can start to to understand slightly different things. So Marxists and other socialists don't need to be afraid of MMT because MMT is very neutral. It's benign. But the way it's leveraged in terms of the way the political economy of your government, of your nation works is not benign. That's a very specific use case. It's not MMT, it's political economy. It's the value system that overlays the lens that is the operational reality that is MMT. It's a lot of words right there, but if you understand, you stop saying, well, I see them using MMT for bonds. Well, you don't use MMT. MMT is a of the way a fiat currency works. But how different might a fiat currency work if you, Tony, or myself, or some of your listeners were the ones in charge of making the decisions that it was democratized, that people actually were able to say, hey, we don't value that, or hey, we do value this. What if we were able to express our values through the money as the government spends it into existence? Since we don't really have that agency, and these are those moments where you're like, wow, we could have a green new deal and why we could do all these great things, we could have universal basic services, which we'll talk about. You realize, well, wait a hold on. There's this barrier between me and the ability to execute my class interests through this public money and it is public money. It's not taxpayer dollars. How do you do that? If you have no means to affect that through electoral politics, which is what traditional social Democrats and most MMTers will just source the vote. This is where we depart because I don't believe we have a democracy and I believe that the placebo effect of voting actually keeps us further from organizing to show dual power, to provide a socialist perspective, a people perspective, a labor -first perspective, instead of us organizing and educating and each one teach, each one reach one, we're busy stumping for candidates that don't even understand this stuff to begin with, and more importantly, into a system that was created for the wealthy elite, the landowners, et cetera, and not the people. And I think that's where I land here. That

was very, very well put. You made me do, you gave two good segues there that I want to get into one being the angle of class, and perhaps that's what we both might consider to be what is most lacking on the MMT front, a sort of class analysis, which probably was best articulated by a Marxist theory, as well as UBS and UBI. First, I do want to say ideology, because that is such a theme of what you're saying as well. And a big obstacle I find when explaining MMT to people is that people will say, well, if this was really true, what the MMTers are was indeed the fact. How come everybody doesn't know this? How come this isn't common knowledge? What's very interesting is in the history of the theory of ideology, Antonio Gramsci, who basically takes Marx's idea of ideology, which is the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling Gramsci's definition of ideology is common sense. He uses the terms interchangeably. I find that fascinating because sometimes what is common sense is in fact literally folklore. That's not to say that common sense doesn't have kernels of truth, it often does, but it's always a non -contradictory truth. It's a very linear one -dimensional truth that leaves out all the contradictions in that ideology and all the other aspects of reality that don't fit into the ruling class's framework, into the dominant purveyors of ideology. And certainly, MMT does not fit into the ruling classes ideology. Some people will think it does just because the government prints a lot of money and some people will say, well, they're practicing, they're, they're practicing MMT. Aren't they doing MMT even though Jerome Powell openly critiques MMT and all the people in power say they reject it. But because it's, imagine that you tell people that this is how money works, that money is really a unit of measurement that you can't run out of inches. It's like saying you can't run out of money is like running out of inches. If you tell people that it really changes the perspective of what they can demand. And you've been touched on a great point, which is the MMTers will think, well, why don't we just use democracy to advocate for the public purpose? And someone like Warren Mosler, who is a fantastic explainer of MMT, brilliant genius economically, but sometimes the way he talks about politicians and the fact that others don't understand MMT, he seems to think that it just boils down to their ignorance and that they're just stupid and aren't making the right policies. But the ruling class have a vested interest in not allowing people to know this, or at least obfuscating the reality, is very inconvenient. It's inconvenient for the dominant sociopolitical order. It's like destabilizing what Plato would call a noble lie. It could have cataclysmic consequences in empowering the dominated classes of society. So yeah, I think you touched on something very important there because MMTers will try to ... I was Stephanie Kelton in her book, The Deficit Myth, mentions how she would try to persuade politicians that this was true. And some politicians ended up, at least on the Democrats, ended up accepting it, but they would say, no way my voters could ever, no way I could tell my voters this. I would lose support or I would lose donors, I would lose funding, et cetera. be seen as a crazy and it's, it's difficult because even the, when the people who know it's true, don't want to admit it's true, you're in a position. Well, I mean, how do you advocate for policies in a way that makes sense? That is sound because they're then forced to say, well, it's taxation and they'll say, well, where are you going to get the money from? It's not the working class. So we'll tax the root, the rich. And it's like, okay, fine. But like the number, the math doesn't check out in terms of like, if you, if you taxed a ruling class, you wouldn't be able to fund all of these programs if that's how you thought it worked. Right. So you can't like fool people that way. So I find it at this point, they just, they should just expose, expose the noble life for what it is. But I think before we get into UBS and UBI, I think the Marxist angle is great. Because I'm not, I've been following your podcast for quite a while and you didn't always have that angle of the embracing Marxism and very few MMT years do. And to be fair, it's not a problem really with MMT in my view, it has to do with the fact that most people in general aren't Marxists, especially in the United States. Most definitely extremely, they have a phobia of anything related to Marxism. Although Bill Mitchell, one of the co -founders of MMT is a Marxist and he's been on your show, one of a really great recent episode you did. Yeah. so when was that point when you finally did get introduced to Marxism? And I mean, I don't know how strongly you identify with a Marxist. Like I don't think I've ever seen that dogmatic. Like dogmatic in terms of what kind, right? I'm

not dogmatic. No, we... Yeah,

the sex. The sectarian. I don't care.

I laugh about that stuff. Because the thing, right? It's good to inform ourselves from history. History is very, very important. I mean, I have dug in deeply into history, going back to probably even before the fall of the Roman Empire, but my goal in going through history started originally, okay, with understanding the arc of revolution. Okay. That was my primary purpose in going backwards and starting to look at different revolutionary moments in time. And they're not moments in time at all is what I figure found out, right? They're not moments in time. They're like a wave and they start with certain things, certain contradictions that are just minor league, maybe annoying to people. And then they ramp up as the contradictions become more and more challenging to live with. And then they become impossible to ignore. And then the people rise up and you can see Toussaint Louverture in Haiti is a prime example of this. This is the Obama of revolutionaries. Okay. He is a non -revolutionary. He's a guy who saw himself as being one of the bourgeoisie, wanted to be one of the ruling class. He wasn't really about the people.