While I think the economy is a myth, a re-badging of society, we could get much more sensible public…

While I think the economy is a myth, a re-badging of society, we could get much more sensible public discussion if we could at least distinguish between the budget and the economy. All of the talk of 'finding the money' for things is budget talk. /1 https://t.co/suob7dweIA

The economy, if we are going to use that idiot term, is the productive capacity of Australian society to produce things. If you do nothing to enhance that productive capacity, or even talk about it, then you're stuck as we are now only with debates about accounting. /2

About how much money is available, and how much of it will need to be borrowed or printed. If we focused instead on the longer-term ways that wealth is generated, the 'economy' would collapse in a puff of smoke back into society, and its productive capacity to do things. /3

Something that is hardly if ever mentioned now is the capacity of government itself to produce wealth or 'revenue'. The main revenue discussion is around taxation, which is libertarian framing. Governments can invest in productive capacity, they can make shedloads of money. /4

The politics of the economy doesn't like this, because 'the market' is supposed to generate the wealth, and governments are supposed to just help the markets. And taxation is then robbing those market entrepreneurs. It's nonsense. Look at sovereign wealth funds. /5

Harnessing public resources and pocketing the revenue for public use. Not allowing parasitic market operators to siphon it off for themselves and their shareholders. There's no reaosn at all that government can't be in the business of making their own revenue, of.../6

...supercharging productive capacity. (And yes MMT people, also of printing money, provided it matches actual productive capacity.) The tedious solemnity of State and federal budgets, the great religious ritual of the economy, is political. Not economic. /7

Designed to encourage the idea that there's a finite pot of money, produced by the market, and government has no role in that except to distribute it, and then only in a grudging sort of way. The whole fiscal-monetary tug of war is part of this same fiction. /8

In reality governments drive all economic growth, all productive capacity, not least because what we call 'business' is itself a creation of government. Yes we've had trade for centuries, but trade isn't business in the modern meaning of that term. /9

The Corporations Act creates business, in the modern meaning. Government also creates 'the market', through regulation. The whole dreary spectacle of reduction of society to an economy, or really a budget, and a handful of KPIs linked to that budget like interest rates. /10

It's all a political invention. Not economics. A lot of modern economics would disagree, because it benefits so much from the invention. It's like a mutual parasitism. 11/11