Thread by @davetroy

Countries don’t function like households or small businesses. Inflation does not function the way popular imagination thinks it does. This talk offers good insights into why 99% of what’s thrown around as “obvious” is both facile and wrong.

ted.com/talks/stephani…

Likewise, while taxing billionaires more is probably a good idea, it is a tangential problem to creating the public goods we actually need, and promotes the idea that all wealth is a zero-sum endeavor—which it is not.

In fact, that’s a pillar of Nazism and the alt-right.

When people on the center-left succumb to zero-sum ideas about wealth, they are subscribing to a hierarchical model of society, with winners and losers: the same model behind “replacement theory” and xenophobic fears about immigration.

Likewise, the gold standard and crypto fetishes rely on a hierarchical worldview and that wealth is a zero sum game. This was an underlying idea behind the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and sparked the animus that led to the holocaust. Don’t subscribe to this toxic idea.

Libertarian right-wing extremists are counting on selling “common sense” ideas about zero sum concepts of wealth to CEOs, politicians and the public because it allows them cover and aid in their war against “dirty central bankers.” Don’t fall for it; don’t let them use you.

This talk by Dale Beran which I produced in 2017 gets at the hierarchical ideology motivating the Alt-Right. Most people want to grow the pie; fascists want more of the same pie.

ted.com/talks/dale_ber…

As we careen into December 3rd and a battle over the debt ceiling and a possible collapse of the dollar as part of a plan to shift assets into crypto and gold, people need to gain awareness of this history and dynamics — and not be used by fascistic right-aligned forces.

Tax them because they should be taxed and it’s just reasonable. But don’t use not taxing them as an excuse for austerity measures or withholding public goods, because there is no reason to do so. It also reinforces the wrongheaded hierarchical worldview behind the gold standard.