Thanks Diarmid,

I can see that the need to pay taxes gives people one reason to use money, but I don’t think it’s the only reason and I find it odd to place so much weight on this particular interpretation of how money works. But the point of my clam analogy was that whether you think the government is continually spending tokens into existence, or whether you think it takes them from people to pay for stuff, you end up in the same place: the government funding identity. No policy conclusion that I can see flows from which interpretation you choose.

I like the idea of acknowledging the world is too complicated to have much confidence in the consequences of actions. It seems to me MMT has extreme confidence in the policy proposals arising from its verbal derivations, and not much concern about empirical testing.