The Wood For The Trees

Quite apart from the sheer gall of a government with the economic record of this one, the term "Magic Money Tree" deliberately has the same initials as "Modern Monetary Theory".

Those who have turned the former into a catchphrase are terrified that most people, including most politicians across the spectrum, might realise that money itself exists by State action in the first instance, that the State does not need to tax or borrow anything before spending it (no economist disputes that, as phrased), that it is actually impossible for a sovereign state to run out of its own free-floating fiat currency, that there is no resemblance of any kind between the budget of such a state and the budget of a household, and that the tools are readily at hand to counteract any inflationary effect of the obvious political applications of these realisations.

The people who do not want these things to be acted upon, or even to be generally known, have political objections to the intended consequences, and they have social and cultural reasons for those objections. That is fine. That is a debate to be had. Our reasons for wanting those consequences are also political, and the roots of those reasons are also social and cultural.

But that is what ours are, and that is what theirs are. Screaming about "the Magic Money Tree", and presenting their own politically preferable economic arrangements as if they were the Laws of Physics, is an approach that deserves derision, and wholesale exclusion from adult company.