Greg

🏒🔰📽️🤖☄️🌓🛸🤟

[Jamie Walters, CAIA @JWalters314]

Ryan, calling Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire an “IQ test” is not economics.

It is ideology with an insult attached.

The question is not whether Elon should be “destroyed.”

The question is whether any private individual should accumulate trillion-dollar power inside a society where the same public is told there is no money for health care, housing, infrastructure, schools, retirement security, or wage relief.

That is not jealousy.

That is political economy.

A trillionaire is not just a rich person.

A trillionaire is a private sovereign.

At that scale, wealth becomes command power: over politicians, media, labor markets, capital markets, defense infrastructure, public policy, technological direction, and national priorities.

And Elon’s fortune did not emerge from pure market magic. It was built inside a public-private system of NASA contracts, defense demand, EV tax credits, regulatory permission, public infrastructure, capital markets, government procurement, and a state willing to socialize risk while privatizing upside. It also exists within a policy environment that includes tariffs on Chinese EVs, measures often justified as industrial protection but which can shield domestic producers like Tesla from lower-cost competition while limiting consumer choice and keeping prices higher for American buyers.

If understanding economics means pretending all of that is just one man’s genius, then that is not economics.

That is propaganda.

The real IQ test is whether you can distinguish productive entrepreneurship from an economic system that turns public support, worker labor, monopoly power, asset inflation, and political access into private dynastic power.

You do not have to hate Elon Musk to understand that a trillionaire is a democratic failure signal.

You only have to stop confusing net worth with wisdom.

Ryan’s post is mostly status-policing: “agree with billionaire accumulation or you’re stupid.”

Fine.

Call me Forrest Gump stupid—sitting on the bench with a box of chocolates and still not buying the fairy tale.

[Lunwi @lunwi75]

Remember when Musk challenged the World Food Program to explain how he could solve world hunger with just $6 billion, they did, and he just completely ignored them?

[Greg @doppelgregger]

@themaddierune Champion of free will in a world of apathetic determinists

[Tally Sticks @widespreadhaze]

This is not a critique of MMT. It is a collage of bad historical analogies.

MMT does not say “print forever”. It says a currency issuer is not financially constrained like a household, but is constrained by inflation, real resources, external balance and political capacity.

Rome, Weimar and Zimbabwe were not normal modern floating-currency systems with intact productive capacity. They involved collapse, war, reparations, supply destruction, tax failure or institutional breakdown.

Nor is Fed QE the same as Treasury spending. QE swaps reserves for securities. Fiscal spending purchases goods, services or labour. Different operation, different transmission.

The “distorts price signals from day one” line is Austrian boilerplate. It assumes a neutral monetary price system exists before the state intervenes. It doesn’t.

The state is the monopoly issuer of the unit of account. It imposes tax liabilities, then names the prices at which it spends, lends, pays interest and purchases labour, goods and services. The private sector prices relative to that institutional structure.

Government spending does not enter from outside and “distort” the price level. It is the price-setting architecture from the start.

The real issue is not “money printing”. It is the prices the currency monopolist pays, including the interest rate, which forward-prices money and subsidises holders of financial assets.

Japan does not prove your point either. Its high public debt did not produce hyperinflation or bond market insolvency. Whether Japan stagnated is a separate real-economy question.

The question is not “can government run out of its own currency?” It cannot. The question is whether public spending, interest rate policy and the prices government pays are consistent with real resource capacity.

That is the MMT argument. You are attacking a straw man.

[Greg @doppelgregger]

@misterp55 🇨🇦here. I understand the federal gov isn't dependent on taxation for spending but the provincial/municipal are in order to fund their budgets beyond what's come down from the fed (which apparently is not enough). Is there any function to this or is it just some form of austerity?

[MMT for Progressives @MMTLabour]

MMT is an accurate analysis of how the monetary system works. It DOESN'T suggest infinite govt spending as a path to wealth & prosperity. Trolls who promote austerity for their own gain, deliberately promote lies about it. MMT lifts the veil from their fraud, so they hate it.

[Greg @doppelgregger]

@tonywestonuk Reading through these comments and I don't think anybody understands your question. There's certainly no argument against it.

[Tony Weston @tonywestonuk]

"I don't believe in MMT"
"MMT is psudoscience".

Ι feel that people who say this really don't understand what MMT is.

Its simple..
The Gov Tax, and The Gov Spend.

Since Tax demands can only be settled in the Gov currency, it must have been spent first.

[Greg @doppelgregger]

@Reil76 What currency would an independent Alberta use? CDN, US or issue it's own?

[Jay Anderson @TheProjectUnity]

@yoxics The middle class optimise for income, the wealthy optimise for assets. Selling assets creates taxable events. Borrowing against appreciating collateral does not. The rich don't live off income, they live off balance sheets.

He's smiling because he knows all of this is true.

[Greg @doppelgregger]

@PaulRS123 @floydmarinescu No. LVT>property taxes. Big difference (look it up). Better yet read "Progress and Poverty" by Henry George

[Common Wealth 🍁 @CommonWealth_ca]

A compelling case for Land Value Tax:

[Greg @doppelgregger]

@fnveenie @SBrooks_77 This has been my thought since the Tampa series. Demi needs more IQ to play with (move him up with Slaf and Nick) while Cole needs more space (maybe try him with Dach and Texier, though that line maybe defensive liability)

[Greg @doppelgregger]

@goalcauf 100 point *Selke guy (likely) 😏

[Greg @doppelgregger]

@DarinRossMiller @MrsMagdaBeard Agreed. My point was more about when the era of fiscal irresponsibility *started* (Nixon/BWA 1971 vs Fed Reserve Act 1913), as per OP

[Greg @doppelgregger]

@DarinRossMiller @MrsMagdaBeard Imho this was Nixon tearing up the Bretton Woods Agreement, abandoning the gold standard and the beginning of the fiat monetary system we have today (in a nutshell)

[Karras @Karras1909]

No. You have it backward.

They're wearing the Habs jersey. They're doing their dancing for the team.

They're fans. This is what it's all about. Community. They're not demanding some separate Indian team. They want to be Canadiens fans. Let's fucking go boys.

[Greg @doppelgregger]

Median income is more reasonable imho but I completely agree with the sentiment.

[Jenni @hashjenni]

My hot take is US Senators should be paid whatever their states minimum wage is. That’s how you represent your constituents, you live like them.

[Greg @doppelgregger]

@thereisnobeth Still hasn't cracked the thing that everyone thinks it's already cracked (translation)

[Greg @doppelgregger]

@HabsLaughs Names are not one of his skills