From right to left a journey

Sabrina put up a nice post about her journey, I think its worthwhile to bring up my own.
I am completely surprised at where I am now.

Up to the middle of 2008 I had always considered myself to the right of centre, conservative
with fiscal policies etc although to be really honest about it I had no real interest in
either politics or economics. I would suggest I did care about what happened to other people
so there was an element about my make up that wouldnt make me like a Randian style of world.


September 2008 the Great Financial Crisis come upon us and although it didnt have an effect
on me as such I was very curious about what happened as we had supposed to have learnt from
the Great Depression of the 1930s.

At first gravitated to blogs that where to my political leanings lay which were blaming competiveness, the
welfare states, national debt being a problem frankly the whole of right wing thinking economics
wise.
One day a question was asked by a blogger

It was "why do governments borrow except for in wartime? its madness"

Now the question was rhetorical really as he then went on to make a whole argument why they
shouldnt. But I was intrigued why indeed do they borrow? I knew the usual answer that it was
the difference between taxing and spending and that they borrow to make up the difference but
a quick check showed me something odd in that for most of the last 300 years the UK had borrowed
just about every year as by that standard we should have been broke as a country a long time
ago.
I decided to look a bit further as it didnt really make sense so I searched until a few searches
in a website was suggested

http://rodgermmitchell.wordpress.com/

Rodger was explaining something he called monetary sovereignty which was an understanding
of how a FIAT money system works and claimed that deficits were not only desirable but
actually necessary. In that kind of system it is the government that create money that is
used by the private sector and that a growing economy required an expanding quantity of money.
That government borrowing was actually an illusion, that taxes dont fund the government and
bonds dont play a financing role in todays system.
The government own the printing press and nothing backs that money ie gold, silver etc.
This was mind blowing to me and straight away knew without doubt that he was quite correct
and that it had to be that way. This was a few months after the general election in the UK
that had the prime minister to be saying "the country has overspent on its credit card" and
now ive found out thats a misleading slogan at best a complete lie being the worst. My whole
political beliefs were based on a non truth.

Reading more of Rodger (who is a lovely man I should add)it couldnt be this simple
but I kept coming across a reference to something called MMT which I found stood for
something called Modern Monetary Theory that Rodger said was related and a lot of the
comments on his pages were by people calling themselves MMTers.
A quick google and I found this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism

Where I found it was a school of economics that used the nickname MMT. On further investigation
I found it was part of what is called Post Keynesian Economics, now I knew a little bit
about John Maynard Keynes but what I didnt know that the Keynesian economics that the press
and the right like to believe is a school called NeoKeynesian economics who one of the
people that profess to be that are Paul Krugman. Further that the Post Keynesians claim to
be the real descendants of Keynesian theory and that the Neo Keynesians are part of the mainstream
current dominant school of Neo Classical economics.

Back to my story so I started reading some of the MMT sites (links to a few on my profile)
This was much more sophisticated than Roger and showed a truth to the system that I realised
we were not being told and it seem to be something certainly the right wing parties were seeking
to obscure.

My base for how the system works has then been changed, what else could be wrong?
It seems pretty much all the right wing ideology is based on Neoliberal/Neocon beliefs in the free
market and the equilibrium which then ensues is completely and damagingly wrong, its exactly why we
are in mess we have.

Next time you hear a politician say we have run out of money, stop think and ask yourself is this really
true?

Andy