Alternatives to hard money question mark

[Hygro]

I've spent most of the past 15 years making fun the gold standard, Europeans for budget obsession, etc. In a perfect world my criticisms are correct. But in our world, it has played out horribly.

So what is hard money?
Backing money by a currency and requiring your government adhere to that physical limit? So if you ever want to exchange your money for that currency, you can do so any time at a fixed rate forcing your government.

That's basically insane. You need to increase your money as your quantity of stuff and quantity of people grow because otherwise things grind to a halt. Sure, in a perfect economy one single dollar zipping around faster than lightspeed can "pay" for everything. But practically, that "velocity of money" slows down as the quantity of money relative to the economy also gets smaller, meaning velocity never solves a shrinking or flat money supply.

It's further insane: if you don't let your government grow your money via deficits, which gold or whatever struggles to allow (your economy grows faster than you can pollute the environment finding new gold), all new money creation is create by bank loans. It's a long process but letting only private actors fund your economy means the more everyone takes out private debt, (which has to be profitable!) and the more assets rise because of the existence of more cash on hand, the more we head towards a financial crisis. Hard money, or insufficient government money has led to a lot of really horrible crises, and the only way out is soft money, at least for a while.

And we have really good examples of our quality of life improving ditching gold as an intermediary, in the mid 30s until 1948 when a powerful progressive was in charge. Not perfect. And in the gold period that followed, we were low key cheating (to beat the Soviets, to improve the welfare state, to maximize employment and economy and tech) which, when France wanted their gold, collapsed the system.


But the soft money system that followed has been a disaster. It is entirely captured by special interests, aka the rich, who have printed themselves literally trillions of free dollars. There are no consequences in real time, there's no "touching the stove" moment for US voters. They print money and call them tax cuts. They print money and call it consulting fees. They print money and call it national defense. The price of ownership: companies, houses, land, university degrees, has skyrocketed — huge inflation. They turn around and fund democracy damaging news, think tanks at an uncombatted level.

All English speaking countries are under complete media assault by this process.

Here, the executive has been overspending, but since it owns the computers that debit and credit its own accounts, it can just do that. They're overspending on their own masked national police force, and billions more for camps. It's not just holocausty, it's straight grift. Republicans used to sell out this country for a few million, wars for a few million personal gains. But they figured it out. While we argue if "MMT" is fringe or real they went "oh nice we can just cheat and nothing will happen to us" (because they figured it out as a party in the 70s, we didn't until the 2010s). They're gonna spend millions of real expenses these shoddy camps and pocket billions. And if we boot them out, they're filthy rich and allied for the next attempt.

You just couldn't do this on a gold standard because the crisis happens too fast. We're getting lucky with this Epstein thing and their unique leader is in poor health but he's also a slimy immortal lich so don't count on it. When the economy crashes, the team in power loses. The thing is, the rich are friends sort of, but they're in competition too. If someone is getting too much government money and them getting it will crash the economy when there's a run on gold, it hurts you and now you're pissed. Gold keeps them from colluding too easily.

Yes gold was coopted by the rich for the rich in other forms of debt entrapment, yes it's garbo. But we had some of our best wage gains for the bottom 80% during two gold standards, and the rich held each other in some kind of check. Even if one of those periods was literally the gilded age.

Europe has a partial solution but it's about to unravel.

In Europe they obsess over inflation and pretend its an economic problem. It's a political problem. "egg prices" the heroes say locking eyes and jump (The Other Guys spoiler, 1 min in). People hate that they make higher wages but then they can't flex around town because their servers are making more, too. And they've let us do all the defense spending. They limit money printing to 3% a year (deficit level allowed per member state). And the smart Scandinavian ones act similarly. In Sweden they give out quasi nobels to whoever can best articulate to keep spending down in fake economics.

In return, there isn't a big government grift machine to capture. There isn't runaway oligarchy creation.
Germany's about to go hard on its defense sector, and the Fox news creators of the world will eventually figure out how to worm their way in German / Swedish /

Danish etc in a meaningful way, the scales will tip and the recipients of big spending will be able to wedge into greater power as they have in the USA. We did have a 45 year head start but they aren't starting from our 1980 position, either.

It's a complex problem. Gold is so stupid. Inflation concerns are so overblown economically. But soft money was immediately hijacked by the rightwing to print trillions for the existing rich that allows trillions more of leveraged money to safely inflate their positions.

I don't think it's hopeless, but I don't see a functional replacement that doesn't use bad economic constraints or weird national myths (lies) about inflation and deficit fear mongering.

 

[Voidwalkin]

It's a complex problem. Gold is so stupid. Inflation concerns are so overblown economically. But soft money was immediately hijacked by the rightwing to print trillions for the existing rich that allows trillions more of leveraged money to safely inflate their positions.

Arguably, cultural issue.

If the argument is that poorer, relatively anyway, voters don't hold the rich accountable, and it holds true, why would we not expect the rich to use their influence to

A: prevent passage of any restablishment

Or, should that fail

B: go back to soft money using their high powered present position and the influence derived from that

 

[soundjata]

Like a snail, building its shell, calcification is what we do.
I saw Hong Kong: huge iron & concrete bars. Money bars.
I hear about war and reconstruction.
Economy is pointless. It is a lie. An hallucination.
It is not a condition for our existence but a jail, a sufferance.
Redemption is outside of it.

 

[Klaus Hergersheimer]

I don't really get what you're driving at...But I tend to find monetary issues downstream of fiscal ones, so saying that there needs to be a different money standard does nothing to convince me this will in any way to abrogate bad behavior.

 

[danjuno]

We need to return to gift economy. If it was good enough for Vikings...

 

[soundjata]

I don't really get what you're driving at...But I tend to find monetary issues downstream of fiscal ones, so saying that there needs to be a different money standard does nothing to convince me this will in any way to abrogate bad behavior.

Exactly.
Any monetary (or economical) system automatically leads to a situation of monopoly. (or relative monopoly if you prefer)
It is a simple fact that anyone can observe anywhere they look.

 

[soundjata]

Let us take the ant nest as an example of a society without a monetary system.

Now let us introduce a gold-coin, that the ants can trade between each-other, in exchange for material goods.

What kind of difference will that introduce into the regular ant society in your opinion?

Spoiler :

Corporations? Slave markets? Institutionalized abuse?
What else do we have on ants?

 

[Hygro]

Arguably, cultural issue.

If the argument is that poorer, relatively anyway, voters don't hold the rich accountable, and it holds true, why would we not expect the rich to use their influence to

A: prevent passage of any restablishment

Or, should that fail

B: go back to soft money using their high powered present position and the influence derived from that

Yeah you can't really go backward. The same process to add a random cultural gate or hard money gate is the same process to not elect the bad guys doing this in the first place. Any hope out of this mess will come from a lot of activist taxing and spending to counterbalance the damage, but that would require a woke electorate.

 

[amadeus]

I don't really get what you're driving at...But I tend to find monetary issues downstream of fiscal ones, so saying that there needs to be a different money standard does nothing to convince me this will in any way to abrogate bad behavior.

And this (I’m not arguing about the wisdom of doing it here, just talking about the history) is what happened in 1933-34 with FDR: the Gold Reserve Act allowed him to revalue gold from $20.67 to $35.00 an ounce. Poof! Instant money. It’s as old a practice as currency itself—Roman emperors too reduced the amount of gold and silver in coins, keeping them at face value.

There’s no perfect system, and gold is just as susceptible to shenanigans and manipulation, if not more so by taking it out of the hands of the Federal Reserve and giving it to the President.

 

[Voidwalkin]

woke electorate

Class consciousness!

I am, of course, a woke skeptic. I don't think it can transcend the barriers it ultimately seeks to. Good old class consciousness seemed to perform better - we may disagree but I of course don't think it is coincidental that the old left giving way to the new happens to coincide with increasingly weak ballot checks on the rich.

That said though I think the OP is a good observation. There are lacks of checks and balances on so many levels.

 

[Lexicus]

I've spent most of the past 15 years making fun the gold standard, Europeans for budget obsession, etc. In a perfect world my criticisms are correct. But in our world, it has played out horribly.

So what is hard money?
Backing money by a currency and requiring your government adhere to that physical limit? So if you ever want to exchange your money for that currency, you can do so any time at a fixed rate forcing your government.

That's basically insane. You need to increase your money as your quantity of stuff and quantity of people grow because otherwise things grind to a halt. Sure, in a perfect economy one single dollar zipping around faster than lightspeed can "pay" for everything. But practically, that "velocity of money" slows down as the quantity of money relative to the economy also gets smaller, meaning velocity never solves a shrinking or flat money supply.

It's further insane: if you don't let your government grow your money via deficits, which gold or whatever struggles to allow (your economy grows faster than you can pollute the environment finding new gold), all new money creation is create by bank loans. It's a long process but letting only private actors fund your economy means the more everyone takes out private debt, (which has to be profitable!) and the more assets rise because of the existence of more cash on hand, the more we head towards a financial crisis. Hard money, or insufficient government money has led to a lot of really horrible crises, and the only way out is soft money, at least for a while.

And we have really good examples of our quality of life improving ditching gold as an intermediary, in the mid 30s until 1948 when a powerful progressive was in charge. Not perfect. And in the gold period that followed, we were low key cheating (to beat the Soviets, to improve the welfare state, to maximize employment and economy and tech) which, when France wanted their gold, collapsed the system.


But the soft money system that followed has been a disaster. It is entirely captured by special interests, aka the rich, who have printed themselves literally trillions of free dollars. There are no consequences in real time, there's no "touching the stove" moment for US voters. They print money and call them tax cuts. They print money and call it consulting fees. They print money and call it national defense. The price of ownership: companies, houses, land, university degrees, has skyrocketed — huge inflation. They turn around and fund democracy damaging news, think tanks at an uncombatted level.

All English speaking countries are under complete media assault by this process.

Here, the executive has been overspending, but since it owns the computers that debit and credit its own accounts, it can just do that. They're overspending on their own masked national police force, and billions more for camps. It's not just holocausty, it's straight grift. Republicans used to sell out this country for a few million, wars for a few million personal gains. But they figured it out. While we argue if "MMT" is fringe or real they went "oh nice we can just cheat and nothing will happen to us" (because they figured it out as a party in the 70s, we didn't until the 2010s). They're gonna spend millions of real expenses these shoddy camps and pocket billions. And if we boot them out, they're filthy rich and allied for the next attempt.

You just couldn't do this on a gold standard because the crisis happens too fast. We're getting lucky with this Epstein thing and their unique leader is in poor health but he's also a slimy immortal lich so don't count on it. When the economy crashes, the team in power loses. The thing is, the rich are friends sort of, but they're in competition too. If someone is getting too much government money and them getting it will crash the economy when there's a run on gold, it hurts you and now you're pissed. Gold keeps them from colluding too easily.

Yes gold was coopted by the rich for the rich in other forms of debt entrapment, yes it's garbo. But we had some of our best wage gains for the bottom 80% during two gold standards, and the rich held each other in some kind of check. Even if one of those periods was literally the gilded age.

Europe has a partial solution but it's about to unravel.

In Europe they obsess over inflation and pretend its an economic problem. It's a political problem. "egg prices" the heroes say locking eyes and jump (The Other Guys spoiler, 1 min in). People hate that they make higher wages but then they can't flex around town because their servers are making more, too. And they've let us do all the defense spending. They limit money printing to 3% a year (deficit level allowed per member state). And the smart Scandinavian ones act similarly. In Sweden they give out quasi nobels to whoever can best articulate to keep spending down in fake economics.

In return, there isn't a big government grift machine to capture. There isn't runaway oligarchy creation.
Germany's about to go hard on its defense sector, and the Fox news creators of the world will eventually figure out how to worm their way in German / Swedish /

Danish etc in a meaningful way, the scales will tip and the recipients of big spending will be able to wedge into greater power as they have in the USA. We did have a 45 year head start but they aren't starting from our 1980 position, either.

It's a complex problem. Gold is so stupid. Inflation concerns are so overblown economically. But soft money was immediately hijacked by the rightwing to print trillions for the existing rich that allows trillions more of leveraged money to safely inflate their positions.

I don't think it's hopeless, but I don't see a functional replacement that doesn't use bad economic constraints or weird national myths (lies) about inflation and deficit fear mongering.

IMO you're doing the same thing the NIMBYs and Abundance people are doing, which is misconceiving the problem as being located in the mechanics of the thing instead of the political economy.
In the NIMBY case this means the mechanics of housing construction, and how regulations have evolved to govern construction. In the Abundance case it also means the mechanics of constructing other kinds of infrastructure. In the case of this post, it is the mechanics of the monetary system.

The real problem, not to get all Marxoid, but literally, as Marx showed us, is political economy. The rule of the capitalist class is the cause of all the problems you describe here. It is really that simple. In human history the most egalitarian societies have used commodity money, and the most unequal and stratified societies have used commodity money. Fiat money has been used by social democracies and by oligarchic and autocratic states.

You can't solve the oligarchy problem in the United States by going back to a gold standard or specie or any other mechanical change to the monetary system. IMO there are good reasons to believe the kind of change you describe here would cement oligarchy even harder than it is now, but I'll leave argument on that subject to others.

The only way to solve the oligarchy problem is by organizing mass movements to countervail the social power of the oligarchs. They may have all the government-generated resource-claim tokens, but what matters in politics ultimately (despite fantasies of "AI" replacing all humans or whatever) is human beings.

 

[banzay13]

The only way to solve the oligarchy problem is by organizing mass movements to countervail the social power of the oligarchs

Trump's bot/ADF's bot/Putin's bot/Commi's bot/Someone's bot for sure
Organized independent resistance almost impossible now. The mass media, Facebook, Google will not let them rise from the depths, raise their heads

 

[uppi]

I've spent most of the past 15 years making fun the gold standard, Europeans for budget obsession, etc. In a perfect world my criticisms are correct. But in our world, it has played out horribly.

So what is hard money?
Backing money by a currency and requiring your government adhere to that physical limit? So if you ever want to exchange your money for that currency, you can do so any time at a fixed rate forcing your government.

That's basically insane. You need to increase your money as your quantity of stuff and quantity of people grow because otherwise things grind to a halt. Sure, in a perfect economy one single dollar zipping around faster than lightspeed can "pay" for everything. But practically, that "velocity of money" slows down as the quantity of money relative to the economy also gets smaller, meaning velocity never solves a shrinking or flat money supply.

It's further insane: if you don't let your government grow your money via deficits, which gold or whatever struggles to allow (your economy grows faster than you can pollute the environment finding new gold), all new money creation is create by bank loans. It's a long process but letting only private actors fund your economy means the more everyone takes out private debt, (which has to be profitable!) and the more assets rise because of the existence of more cash on hand, the more we head towards a financial crisis. Hard money, or insufficient government money has led to a lot of really horrible crises, and the only way out is soft money, at least for a while.

And we have really good examples of our quality of life improving ditching gold as an intermediary, in the mid 30s until 1948 when a powerful progressive was in charge. Not perfect. And in the gold period that followed, we were low key cheating (to beat the Soviets, to improve the welfare state, to maximize employment and economy and tech) which, when France wanted their gold, collapsed the system.


But the soft money system that followed has been a disaster. It is entirely captured by special interests, aka the rich, who have printed themselves literally trillions of free dollars. There are no consequences in real time, there's no "touching the stove" moment for US voters. They print money and call them tax cuts. They print money and call it consulting fees. They print money and call it national defense. The price of ownership: companies, houses, land, university degrees, has skyrocketed — huge inflation. They turn around and fund democracy damaging news, think tanks at an uncombatted level.

All English speaking countries are under complete media assault by this process.

Here, the executive has been overspending, but since it owns the computers that debit and credit its own accounts, it can just do that. They're overspending on their own masked national police force, and billions more for camps. It's not just holocausty, it's straight grift. Republicans used to sell out this country for a few million, wars for a few million personal gains. But they figured it out. While we argue if "MMT" is fringe or real they went "oh nice we can just cheat and nothing will happen to us" (because they figured it out as a party in the 70s, we didn't until the 2010s). They're gonna spend millions of real expenses these shoddy camps and pocket billions. And if we boot them out, they're filthy rich and allied for the next attempt.

You just couldn't do this on a gold standard because the crisis happens too fast. We're getting lucky with this Epstein thing and their unique leader is in poor health but he's also a slimy immortal lich so don't count on it. When the economy crashes, the team in power loses. The thing is, the rich are friends sort of, but they're in competition too. If someone is getting too much government money and them getting it will crash the economy when there's a run on gold, it hurts you and now you're pissed. Gold keeps them from colluding too easily.

Yes gold was coopted by the rich for the rich in other forms of debt entrapment, yes it's garbo. But we had some of our best wage gains for the bottom 80% during two gold standards, and the rich held each other in some kind of check. Even if one of those periods was literally the gilded age.

Europe has a partial solution but it's about to unravel.

In Europe they obsess over inflation and pretend its an economic problem. It's a political problem. "egg prices" the heroes say locking eyes and jump (The Other Guys spoiler, 1 min in). People hate that they make higher wages but then they can't flex around town because their servers are making more, too. And they've let us do all the defense spending. They limit money printing to 3% a year (deficit level allowed per member state). And the smart Scandinavian ones act similarly. In Sweden they give out quasi nobels to whoever can best articulate to keep spending down in fake economics.

In return, there isn't a big government grift machine to capture. There isn't runaway oligarchy creation.
Germany's about to go hard on its defense sector, and the Fox news creators of the world will eventually figure out how to worm their way in German / Swedish /

Danish etc in a meaningful way, the scales will tip and the recipients of big spending will be able to wedge into greater power as they have in the USA. We did have a 45 year head start but they aren't starting from our 1980 position, either.

It's a complex problem. Gold is so stupid. Inflation concerns are so overblown economically. But soft money was immediately hijacked by the rightwing to print trillions for the existing rich that allows trillions more of leveraged money to safely inflate their positions.

I don't think it's hopeless, but I don't see a functional replacement that doesn't use bad economic constraints or weird national myths (lies) about inflation and deficit fear mongering.

So the state must be able to print money without restrictions when necessary but should refrain from doing so when it isn't necessary? Yeah, I don't think there is a technical solution to that. The solution can only be political.

 

[Hygro]

IMO you're doing the same thing the NIMBYs and Abundance people are doing, which is misconceiving the problem as being located in the mechanics of the thing instead of the political economy.
In the NIMBY case this means the mechanics of housing construction, and how regulations have evolved to govern construction. In the Abundance case it also means the mechanics of constructing other kinds of infrastructure. In the case of this post, it is the mechanics of the monetary system.

The real problem, not to get all Marxoid, but literally, as Marx showed us, is political economy. The rule of the capitalist class is the cause of all the problems you describe here. It is really that simple. In human history the most egalitarian societies have used commodity money, and the most unequal and stratified societies have used commodity money. Fiat money has been used by social democracies and by oligarchic and autocratic states.

You can't solve the oligarchy problem in the United States by going back to a gold standard or specie or any other mechanical change to the monetary system. IMO there are good reasons to believe the kind of change you describe here would cement oligarchy even harder than it is now, but I'll leave argument on that subject to others.

The only way to solve the oligarchy problem is by organizing mass movements to countervail the social power of the oligarchs. They may have all the government-generated resource-claim tokens, but what matters in politics ultimately (despite fantasies of "AI" replacing all humans or whatever) is human beings.

This is the upstream assumption of everything I said. But we are now in the details of our actual reality, one that has coalesced from the infinite possibility into a defined shape where change takes place in relation to what there already is.

The reality is we were in the perfect place to organize completely in 1971. And with the growth of cultural individualism in the 1970s to match the social progress of the 60s and 50s and the economics progress of the 40s and 30s (to speak mythically) it seemed like we were going to make it. Solar panels on the white house 1979 baby.

But we didn't, and one very historically important piece, the thing that happened regardless of the possibility space, was that the rich pounced on the power of the purse the moment they could.


So yes, let's organize, yes. But whats in the way of organization and things working out. It always comes back to the million puzzle pieces of real life in between high level white-boarded brainstorming theorized action. Incentives, relationships, exposure.. Surveillance, finances and timing. If you and I and everyone ALL know no one would defect and we'd all show up for the revolution for the same week, we all stockpiled just right, full 180,000,000 worker American general strike, taking any form quiet or loud, we'd get 10 years of every concession 75% of Americans agree on (everything progressive). And if we could do it again and again, end of history.

But that's ridiculous. Not because it's impossible, just improbable, because of measurable things. Things like, "I'm tired" or "you sound like every other college demonstrator" or "I like my job, thanks" and "I don't think everyone else will show".

And the causes of those measurable things are social-material causes. Slacktivism dopamine brains and mass bodily inertia. Better parenting leading to mass violence aversion. A surveillance state. Money ruling everything around me. Money ruling everything around me worse because of specific policy choices. Money ruling everything around me because of one big policy choice that put the rich in collusion where there used to be some competition.

"We need to organize" yeah. But how much? Depends on what the opposition is. What is the opposition? Well, more or less difficult depending on how organized they are. What changes that? How rich they are individually. How united they are as a class vs in internal competition. Yeah, more than ever, now, in part thanks to soft money collusion.

So how do you put them back into competition? A real life victory needs to align a lot of things at once. They have us on the backfoot thanks to making racism loud again, making sexism loud again, making work hours long again, making ownership expensive again.

They have us on the backfoot because the percent of people willing to be for sale against a unified democratic class goes up as their relative buying power goes up.

And that's us on backfoot, not all the things that put them on the forefoot, regardless.

 

[Lexicus]

The reality is we were in the perfect place to organize completely in 1971.

I disagree with this completely. In fact the early 70s mark the end of a long period of radical ferment in the US which was essentially crushed by state terror, including a number of assassinations of high-profile figures. With the labor and civil rights movements both effectively purged of radicals, the environment for organizing was... poor.

 

[Voidwalkin]

They have us on the backfoot because the percent of people willing to be for sale against a unified democratic class goes up as their relative buying power goes up.

I think it can be argued here that the amount of such people is very likely to increase as individualism rises. If you do not see yourself as part of a group, if the group does not cohere for reasons X Y and Z, there is less and less counterweight morally when considering if one should act against the groups interest.

This is of course true for the rich themselves, too. If larger identities like American become less meaningful, the moral calculus of action X begins to change.

 

[Hygro]

So the state must be able to print money without restrictions when necessary but should refrain from doing so when it isn't necessary? Yeah, I don't think there is a technical solution to that. The solution can only be political.

Yeah. Oops.

I disagree with this completely. In fact the early 70s mark the end of a long period of radical ferment in the US which was essentially crushed by state terror, including a number of assassinations of high-profile figures. With the labor and civil rights movements both effectively purged of radicals, the environment for organizing was... poor

Well that’s basically my point, it was like now or never. Not “unleash the tools”

But of course who unleashed the tools? Nixon. And while we joke of his quasi progressive legacy in contrast to how much worse it got, he was giving dictator vibes all the same as what followed, he just didn’t have a cult, a court, a congress, and a complicit media.

So it’s not like it’s “our fault”. The intelligent critique of hard money is mostly leftwing and its power is the promise of a liberating financial system, but that didn’t make its implementation nor its outcome anything of the sort.

I opened this thread like, anyone have any ideas?

My best guess is, the way out is through. But what is through? Inflationary levels of bottom up mega stimulus? We want to raise taxes to 99% on number of categories, there has to be compression or the power differential is too great.

But what can we do meantime so that every time the rich print themselves free money, the voters feel the pain in the next cycle? Hard money helped, surely there’s a mechanism to transfer future loss of democracy pain into present economic pain.

 

[Voidwalkin]

Nope. I've got nothing.

All imaginable mechanisms would need mass support. The current ideologies in America render that impossible.

I briefly proposed re-imagining the left here as socially non-interventionist and hardcore economically, and was unimaginatively(and predictably) compared to George Wallace.

The ideological entrenchment is deep. There will be no end of racism, sexism or arguably harmful traditionalism forthcoming anytime soon. The left, in present incarnation, will not abandon its pursuit of the destruction of those things, nor even temporarily suspend it(which should perhaps be unsurprising, given that the most influential leftists are really the sons and daughters of the wealthy who just find the ethics chic). They will not compromise; nor will the poor dumb rednecks they oppose.

Too many wedges for the wealthy to exploit to prevent emergence of any mass movement intended to benefit the poor, then.

 

[Lexicus]

Hard money helped, surely there’s a mechanism to transfer future loss of democracy pain into present economic pain.

I don't think it did. I don't think you can really make a case that oligarchs during the periods of "hard" money were less rapacious or less (relatively) powerful than today's oligarchs. And modern states with functional finance are a tool with massive, massive potential in the hands of a left that knows how to use it.

So it’s not like it’s “our fault”. The intelligent critique of hard money is mostly leftwing and its power is the promise of a liberating financial system, but that didn’t make its implementation nor its outcome anything of the sort.

The issue here is that most of the MMT people who "discovered" this framework were and are liberals who never wanted to crush the rich. Most are still mired in the liberal fantasy that the rich can be accommodated, and juggled with other interests in a pluralist society.

This is not the case; social democracy cannot afford to rest on its laurels but must assiduously seek to bring about the euthanasia of the rentier as soon as humanly possible.

Another way to frame this is that we should never have expected the end of the (ghost of the) gold standard to lead to a liberatory era or "liberation economy" by itself. Some of the MMT libs perhaps believed this would be the case under the naive theory that merely spreading a correct understanding of economics would naturally lead people to better politics.

Again, we should never have expected this to happen. I can't remember if I've ever seen Kalecki referenced by an MMTer, but he was right and has been consistently vindicated. The rich would prefer to shrink the pie (and ultimately, to flip over the table/cook the planet) than give up a bit of power, even if giving up power might be more profitable in theory.

The social destruction of the rich is at least as important a task for a left government as raising living standards for the poor. The old idea that you can grow the pie and everybody can win, while not exactly false, is a mirage that leads only back to the oligarchic present.