What Was Missing at NatCon 2024
2024-07-20
National Conservatives are a growing movement on the political right. They are largely united by their belief in the failings of liberalism, in protectionist trade policy, a halt to mass migration, and a more Christianized nation. The attendees of this year’s conference, hosted by the Edmund Burke Foundation, focused on many topics: free trade, their desire to decouple from China, weaponization of government, bureaucracy in government, and even the building of parallel institutions. But one topic, one that should be vitally important to anyone wishing to preserve a nation, was absent. That, being monetary policy.In my time listening to many panels, and many a plenary speaker, the Federal Reserve and monetary policy was brought up once: by Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) who made allusions to
MMT and Boiling Frogs
2024-05-03
“Why do we borrow our own currency in the first place?”Stephanie Kelton posed this question in her new documentary, Finding the Money, and a clip of Jared Berstein’s fumbled response to the question has gone viral on social media. Bernstein is the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers to Biden, and so we would expect that he would have an articulate answer to Kelton’s question, but he did not.Instead of trying to parse his response or explain why he fumbled, I want to provide an answer: the State borrows to expropriate real resources from the private, productive part of society. When I made this claim on Twitter, one MMTer responded (somewhat) approvingly: “We all agree on this part. The question is how they do it and what the effect is. MMT gets that part right [and] Austrians get it