Excellent episode. Should it be titled "In praise of fiat currency?"
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Mind you, I'm not talking about 'framing', but simply the justification for the policy (I'll the propaganda for another time). I'm encouraged that Matthew Yglesias, who writes for the Center for American Progress, a progressive outfit, has stumbled into modern monetary theory (italics mine):
Does…
I'll have more to say about the report put out by the chairmen of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, but this section, found on page 6, "Our Guiding Principles and Values", indicates the lunacy and moral bankruptcy of the commission*:
Bring spending down to 22% and…
Earlier this year (in June), Channel 4 television here in the UK broadcast series 2 of Inside Nature's Giants (ING from hereon... titled Raw Anatomy in the US, you poor, poor people). You may have heard it here first. Hopefully you're familiar with ING series 1 - it looked at the anatomy of…
Roger Lowenstein discusses the problem with the 'goldbugs', those who want to return to the gold standard (italics mine):
Let us interject that in any monetary system, some authority must fix either the price of money or the supply. McDonald's can either set the price of a hamburger and let the…
This was a great episode. It touches on an almost omnipresent kind of error people make in approaching economics: reification of the concept of "the economy." The terrible thing is, after sniffing out this fallacy, the writers have exactly inverted how it is being manifested in popular discussion.
The cheif offender in the promulgation of this fallacy is Keynes' idea of the "paradox of thrift": that although individuals selfishly want to hoard all their money in a downturn, protecting themselves against potential future losses, the right thing to do "for the economy" is to spend, spend, spend.
South Park's MO is to expose the idiocy of various popular, irrational crusades or prejudices. And yet in this episode, they wind up extoling raw, unfounded faith in the sphere economics. They are groping toward the idea that economic activity, confidence in any kind of monetary order, is based on people's expectations that there will be things produced in the future for their money to buy. Of course that is not faith, it is a rational asssessment of human society.
But they have confused this confidence in man's future productivity with what is really an unfounded faith in fiat money. So in order to carry through their thesis they end up endorsing the doctrine that most embodies the fallacy they are trying to pick apart.
Hilarious! They depicted exactly the solution this administration is using -- put it on the kid's credit card.