Ever wondered where MONEY comes from?

[Sculptor]

Free Book

https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/wp- ... R6HgUR5lZs

[Agent Smith]

Free Book

https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/wp- ... R6HgUR5lZs

With e-money we've taken another step towards, sensu amplissimo, utopia! Random thought so probably off-topic.

Anyway, money, last I checked, comes from how much a country is an economic power on the global stage. Explains, quite well, why having USD and the Japanese Yen in one's pocket can be so much fun.

[Sculptor]

Free Book

https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/wp- ... R6HgUR5lZs

With e-money we've taken another step towards, sensu amplissimo, utopia! Random thought so probably off-topic.

Anyway, money, last I checked, comes from how much a country is an economic power on the global stage. Explains, quite well, why having USD and the Japanese Yen in one's pocket can be so much fun.

Digital currency is going to be scary. Imagine working for MacDonalds where 20% of your wage can only be spent in their shops.

[attofishpi]

Free Book

https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/wp- ... R6HgUR5lZs

With e-money we've taken another step towards, sensu amplissimo, utopia! Random thought so probably off-topic.

Anyway, money, last I checked, comes from how much a country is an economic power on the global stage. Explains, quite well, why having USD and the Japanese Yen in one's pocket can be so much fun.

Digital currency is going to be scary. Imagine working for MacDonalds where 20% of your wage can only be spent in their shops.

I can't see that being permitted.

I can't load the link you posted, are you able to summarise the salient points?

[attofishpi]

Ok, I will tell you where money originated from - it came from peoples EFFORT where a coin was used to recognise that effort.

As in, my effort in growing some tomatoes and bringing them to someone to swap for a coin.

[Dontaskme]

Money really does grow on trees.



Money also comes in the form of paper, metal, ink and inscription. From metal,paper, ink and inscription, money is born.

[attofishpi]

Money really does grow on trees.



Money also comes in the form of paper, metal, ink and inscription. From metal,paper, ink and inscription, money is born.

Yep.

[Dontaskme]

Money really does grow on trees.



Money also comes in the form of paper, metal, ink and inscription. From metal,paper, ink and inscription, money is born.

Yep.

Money can also come from nothing. Making money quite worthless, actually. All things are made of the nothingness in which they appear to be something. For example: when you zoom into any object, eventually you reach the empty space of nothingness, same when you zoom away from an object.

We are the sole creators of our own nothingness. Therefore, we can know our own nothingness.

[attofishpi]

Money can also come from nothing.

How?

[Dontaskme]

Money can also come from nothing.

How?

There is no how, if there was you wouldn't be asking how.

[attofishpi]

Money can also come from nothing.

How?

There is no how, if there was you wouldn't be asking how.

ffs. This is the reason you must be loved at the local pub!

ps. It never ceased to amaze me how much effort Arising_uk put in to dealing with your ""logic""

[Dontaskme]

How?

There is no how, if there was you wouldn't be asking how.

ffs. This is the reason you must be loved at the local pub!

ps. It never ceased to amaze me how much effort Arising_uk put in to dealing with your ""logic""

You asked my how...

So I replied dont ask me. If I knew, I would tell you, but I don't, and if you knew you wouldn't be asking someone that doesn't know either.

A doorknob can only be known in relation to a door, without the door, what the heck is a doorknob?

Nothing can only be known in relation to something, without something, what the heck is nothing?

[Sculptor]

With e-money we've taken another step towards, sensu amplissimo, utopia! Random thought so probably off-topic.

Anyway, money, last I checked, comes from how much a country is an economic power on the global stage. Explains, quite well, why having USD and the Japanese Yen in one's pocket can be so much fun.

Digital currency is going to be scary. Imagine working for MacDonalds where 20% of your wage can only be spent in their shops.

I can't see that being permitted.

I can't load the link you posted, are you able to summarise the salient points?

Digital currency is being talked about at the highest level G20.


As for Richard Murphy here's the FOrword.
Foreword
1 Economics
2 Quantitative easing
3 QE and funding the Green New Deal
4 How to use local and hypothecated
bonds to fund the recovery
5 Debt
6 The national debt paranoia
7 The role of tax
8 Inflation
9 The radio interview I want to hear
10 Why does Boris Johnson want to
take on the nurses?
Money for nothing and my Tweets for free 1
When I began writing long Twitter threads to explain
some of my economic thinking late in 2020 there
was no plan underpinning that process. It was only
because the first one seemed to be popular that I wrote
another. And then a third. And so it continued.
Logically those Tweets should not have worked. It was
a little odd to think of creating an argument in up to
eighty paragraphs of no more than 280 characters.
It was even stranger to imagine that people might
then read the resulting Twitter threads, often without
unrolling them.
But they did. One thread has reached more than
1.5 million people and has had more than 125,000
interactions, so far. The least I could assume as a
consequence was that something resonated.
I reposted the threads on my blog1
. There they created
less of a reaction. Maybe that’s because what I had
to say was familiar to many of my regular readers on
that site. However, requests for the threads to be
republished as PDFs happened, quite often. Those
were made with regard to individual threads. But then
Foreword
1 Tax Research UK http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/
Foreword 2
it occurred to me that if I was going to do one thread I
might as well assemble the threads into an ebook and
put them out together.
‘Money for nothing and my Tweets for free’ is the
result. All the chapters in this ebook began life as
Twitter threads, barring two. Those exceptions are my
fantasy radio interview (chapter 9) and that on funding
the Green New Deal (chapter 4). Both seemed to
fit the theme of the rest of the ebook and they were
written during the same four month period in which
the threads were published and so I made exceptions in
their cases. Both began life as a blog posts.
It’s also fair to note that all but one of the threads were
written without this book in mind. The exception is the
one on inflation. That, I admit, was written to fill a gap,
as well as to address a real issue.
What is consistent is that every chapter, however it
originated, was written quickly, and often in a single
sitting of no more than three hours. A persistent and
relentless energy should, therefore, be apparent in them.
That relentlessness was motivated by the desire to
explain what I saw as a critical issue when I wrote them2
.
I do think economics is critical. It shapes the way
that we live our lives. Too few people, in my opinion,
2 In many cases it was also, to be candid, driven by the desire to stop writing
and have breakfast.
Foreword 3
understand just how the assumptions of economists,
most of them working in academic ivory towers in which
they appear more remote from reality than most in the
academic world, shape the possibilities with which we
are presented, let alone the choices we actually make.
It is the consequence of the assumptions that a majority
of economists have made that government is seen as
inefficient and that markets are almost always to be
preferred when any need is to be met. Likewise, it is the
assumptions of some economists that suggested that
austerity should dominate the politics of the last decade.
It was also economists who suggested that the 2008
crisis was not a sign of the structural failure of the
model that they themselves had created, which meant
it survived that catastrophic failure unreformed, leaving
us ill-prepared for Covid.
As a graduate economist, who became a chartered
accountant, entrepreneur, tax specialist in a practicing
firm, and then a campaigner for tax and economic
justice before going on to join academia, I like to think I
see the world a little differently from most economists.
It’s not that I don’t make assumptions, because we all
do all the time. It is that I hope that my thinking is a
little more rooted in reality than that of the average
economist is.
Foreword 4
That is not to knock economics. I like economic theory.
I read it. If I have to, I can do some of the maths that
goes with a lot of it. But the truth is that even those who
try to pigeonhole me into a theory don’t really get the
fact that my over-arching principle is that pragmatism
has to prevail.
So, for example, those who know modern monetary
theory (MMT) will see that it influences much of what
is in the ebook, at least with regard to money and its
relationship to government and government spending.
I happen to think that MMT gets much of that right.
However, much as I like what MMT has done in that
area, I think it has blinded itself on tax and on the role
of tax in society, which it underplays. In addition, on
savings and its relationship to both money creation
and inequality I am not sure that MMT has yet to even
notice that there is an issue for it to address, but I have.
In that case the MMT purist might find issues that
irritate them in this ebook. I am unapologetic for that.
Irritation is the cause of most progress.
My approach is, then, to look at the real world first,
and to use the insights that theory provides to mould
what I believe are pragmatic answers that can exist
within the real constraints that society imposes (rightly
or wrongly) to provide workable solutions to the
Foreword 5
actual problems that we face. If that tramples on any
theoreticians’ toes, so be it.
This conflict with pure theory is almost inevitable,
anyway. That is because what I do is applied political
economy, and not economic theory. In applied political
economy, unlike economics, there is no assumption
that there is an ideal form of economy. Market
fundamentalists and hardcore socialists will, in that
case, be disappointed by my approach. I believe in the
private sector, whilst recognising that it is riddled with
faults. I also think government is a fantastic tool for
delivering many of the things that we need. It just so
happens it can also fail to do that. I can live with the
paradoxes and inconsistencies. Day-to-day we all do.
What that means is that instead of looking for perfect
theoretical worlds, in applied political economy the
question is, very often, why do we fail? The answer
invariably comes down to the fact that we’re human.
We’re not good at a number of really important things.
Complexity is one of them. Pragmatism is another.
Compromise is a third. Managing uncertainty is a
fourth. We also suffer a number of self-limiting traits.
Vanity, greed and belief in our own importance rank
high amongst these, and I will acknowledge straightaway
that I have been accused of all three before anyone does
so for me. These things are the given truths of applied
Foreword 6
political economy for me. They mean that things will
go wrong.
And the distribution of income and wealth and so
power in society, which is a given in society at any point
in time, has the marked propensity to make things
worse, meaning it too is a significant factor to take into
account in applied political economy.
My point in saying this is to suggest that economic
theory is not always a great tool, by itself, to suggest a
way out of the resulting mess. That mess is too complex
in its nature and its extent to be captured within any one
theory. Nor is any theory necessarily very enduring,
because the reality is that the mess we humans create
appears to be endlessly capable of adaptation. The
emergence of the climate crisis is evidence of that, and
changes pretty much every assumption we have made
to date.
What I am suggesting, in that case, is that there is no
perfect solution to an economics problem. I would
have thought we should have learned that by now, but
apparently not. Instead economics, on both the left
and right, still pursues the idea that there is some ‘ideal
state’ to which we are headed, whether it is the pure
market economy or socialism, or some other ‘ideal’.
That though, is not true. Not only does no such ideal
Foreword 7
exist, as indicated by the fact that all of them have their
opponents, but nor are they possible. And the idea that
these mythical ideals represent some sort of economic
nirvana is in any case just wrong: the propensity for
human error will be just as strong in an ideal state as
it is now, and without the moderating common sense
that is essential if an economy is to work. That is why I
look for practical answers to current questions, rather
than seek to promote a theory. What I seek to do is mix
an understanding of theory with a dose of experience
to which I add a portion of ethics to suggest solutions.
The ethics in question are, I admit, pretty important.
Remember too that there is nothing unusual in this.
When Adam Smith published what is considered to be
the first book on economics in 17763
it was thought to
be a work of moral philosophy. Many, in fact, saw it as
a footnote to his previous work, entitled ‘The Theory of
Moral Sentiments’4. Ethics and economics do mix, but
not quite as explicitly these days as I think they should.
In my case the ethics I use are pretty simple, but
powerful. It is my belief that if any society is to survive
it must expect that each person should be treated
as well as we expect to be treated, and that this is a
rule that applies both collectively and individually. As
is typical of my own more theoretical work, what this
does is to reduce the guidance for behaviour to the
3 The Wealth of Nations, which is still in print
4 Also still in print
Foreword 8
minimum number of variables possible. You and I are
of equal worth, and should treat each other as such,
is what I am saying, and I am also saying that this will
hold true whoever you and I might be. The logic is one
of reciprocal wellbeing. That explains what motivates
the thinking in this ebook. That the idea happens to be
embraced by every major wisdom and religious tradition
of which I am aware just helps.
In practice the book is split into ten chapters. All were
written between mid-November 2020 and mid-March
20215
. I have written a relatively brief introduction to
each chapter, giving a very little background information
and to them and then I let the thread or blog post speak
for itself.
I have resisted the temptation to edit the threads, three
very minor exceptions apart, all of which have been used
very sparingly. First spelling and punctuation errors have
been corrected. Second, in one case a minor factual
error has been corrected. And third, if a Tweet appeared
confusing I have sought to add clarity, but that has only
been done very occasionally. Otherwise I have left what
I originally wrote alone, deciding that if it worked in the
first instance then it should also do so now.
There is inevitable duplication, repetition and overlap
between the threads, and so chapters, as a result. I
5 To put this in context, I wrote about 400 blog posts during this period:
this ebook reflects a small part of my output. For the rest go to http://www.
taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/
Foreword 9
could, I suppose, have edited that out. The result would,
however, have been a very different. And, anyway, I saw
no merit in doing so. Nothing I think that I say here is
very complicated. But, that said, many have described
at least some of it as mind blowing because it challenges
what we have long been told to be true. When rethinking
long held assumptions the repetition of new ideas, in
slightly different forms, can be necessary, so I make no
apology for doing so.
The structuring of the chapters does not follow the
order in which they were first published. That is largely
because there was no book in mind when I wrote them,
so they were not required to have a logical flow. Subject
to the caveat that each thread went where I felt it was
necessary to go to make the overall argument that I am
seeking to present, I have structured them as follows.
Chapter one is an introduction to my overall theme.
This chapter spends time considering the nature of
money, how it is created and what it represents within
the overall theme of managing the economy, which is
the dominant issue that these combined chapters seeks
to address. Because money is so widely misunderstood,
including by most economists, getting this basic
understanding right is essential. For that reason the
theme reappears again in several other chapters, and
most especially in chapter 6, which was the most
Foreword 10
successful thread that now appears in this ebook. In
that case if you don’t get chapter 1 on first reading try
chapter 6 next, even if it says it is on the theme of debt
because it is also about some economic fundamentals.
In chapter 2 I discuss the phenomena of quantitative
easing, or QE as it is now called, which has changed so
much about what we understand about government
financing in the last decade or so, to the extent that
nothing now is remotely like it was in this field in 2007.
The fact is that now, unlike then, we know government
can create money at will, and this changes everything. I
elaborate this theme in Chapter 3, where the link between
QE and funding the Green New Deal is explored.
That in turn leads to a more detailed discussion in
chapter 4 on how to fund the investment that we need
to transform our society and make it sustainable. I
make no apology for labouring this point so early in the
book. The most common question asked by journalists
and others of politicians who say that they want to
transform society is ’How are you going to pay for it?’
I wanted to make clear, upfront, that I can answer this
question: money is not a problem or an obstacle to
creating the world that I think we both want and need.
In chapters 5 and 6 I address the issue of debt. The
so-called national debt is fuelling a national political
Foreword 11
paranoia that is crippling our society so the issue is
worth two chapters. My argument is that we needn’t
worry about this issue. I unashamedly offer two takes
on this theme. It was important enough to require two
threads. Both get a place in here.
After that I turn in chapter 7 to one of my own favourite
themes, which is tax. As with money and debt, I argue
that we misunderstand the role of tax in our society. Even
those on the left who profess their belief in tax usually
make the mistake of thinking that tax pays for government
spending. By the time that you reach Chapter 7 in this
book I sincerely hope that this misconception should
have been put firmly in its place. Tax does not pay for
any government spending. What it does instead do is
reclaim the money that the government spends into the
economy to make sure that inflation is under control.
In this context it plays an incredibly significant role in
the management of the economy. That does not mean
it pays for anything, but what that role does also mean
is that tax is also a powerful instrument for the delivery
of social and economic policy. It is these issues that are
discussed in chapter 7.
Having mentioned inflation, the whole of chapter 8 is
dedicated to that issue. In particular, I suggest why I
think inflation is unlikely in the UK at present, and why
those promoting the idea that it might be really have
Foreword 12
other social agendas in play that should be ignored, as the
Biden administration appears to be doing in the USA.
Finally, in chapters 9 and 10 I turn to the application of
some ideas. In chapter 9 the application is in the form
of a fantasy radio interview, where an informed person
answers the usual nonsense asked by interviewers
on programmes like ‘Today’ on BBC Radio 4. I have
been on that programme, but not of late, and not on
these issues. The BBC and other broadcasters are
deeply reluctant to consider the possibility that there
are alternative economic narratives to the one driven
by debt paranoia that they insist on presenting to the
nation. It would be great to change this.
Chapter 10, finally, looks at the power relationships
in play in a real issue that is likely to rumble on for a
while. This is the nurses’ pay dispute. As I explain,
there is much more to this than the simple issue of
‘affordability’ that the government claims to be the
case. The government’s ability to afford what they
want has now been exposed. There are, then, power
politics at play here. The real question is who does the
government want to benefit from the way that they
run the economy? It would seem clear that it is not
NHS nurses. The chapter looks at the consequences.
In the process it suggests how I look at applied political
economy. Everything in that subject is about the use of
Foreword 13
power to reward some, and potentially prejudice others.
The question it asks is for whose benefit do we structure
society? The answers that this government provides are
unappealing. And that is what motivate me to write these
threads. There will, no doubt, be more to come.
Richard Murphy
Ely, Cambridgeshire
March 2021

[attofishpi]

There is no how, if there was you wouldn't be asking how.

ffs. This is the reason you must be loved at the local pub!

ps. It never ceased to amaze me how much effort Arising_uk put in to dealing with your ""logic""

You asked my how...

So I replied dont ask me. If I knew, I would tell you, but I don't, and if you knew you wouldn't be asking someone that doesn't know either.

Well. There it is. ShouId I bother!!!....Y did U state that money can come from nothing if you don't know how?

[Dontaskme]

ffs. This is the reason you must be loved at the local pub!

ps. It never ceased to amaze me how much effort Arising_uk put in to dealing with your ""logic""

You asked my how...

So I replied dont ask me. If I knew, I would tell you, but I don't, and if you knew you wouldn't be asking someone that doesn't know either.

Well. There it is. ShouId I bother!!!....Y did U state that money can come from nothing if you don't know how?

A doorknob can only be known in relation to a door, without the door, what the heck is a doorknob?

Nothing can only be known in relation to something, without something, what the heck is nothing?