Progressive politicians don’t even notice how completely captured they are by conservative framings. Like the…

Progressive politicians don’t even notice how completely captured they are by conservative framings. Like the obsession with surpluses, derived from years of conservative slogans about them. Their measure of good government now IS the slogans. /1 #auspol https://t.co/iAnZMrbTzE https://t.co/QjmK6zaTNw

Like the fiction of ‘the economy’ more generally, the budget surplus framing was invented to bed down a permanent removal of public investment. As the MMT theorists point out, it’s a ridiculous idea derived from comparing national and household budgets. /2

A government surplus is a country starved of public investment. The same sloganeers are aware of that, they long ago replaced the idea of investment with ‘spending’, tapping into that same idea of rationing your (household) money. All designed to shut down public investment. /3

In the 20th century, reality showed the lie of all of this. In the first half of that century, governments spent big. It led to the ‘golden age of capitalism’ in the second half of the century. Decades of unprecedented prosperity. You have to spend money, to make money. /4 https://t.co/vWBO47Hga6

You have to INVEST. Investment leads to growth. Starving a country of investment by painting it as ‘spending’ means it goes nowhere. Nothing gets built, economic activity wallows in get-rich-quick schemes with widespread public poverty. And something even more important. /5

I’ve Tweeted before that what promotes investment is NEED. Social need. The Industrial Revolution wasn’t ‘capitalism’ or machinery. It was the liberation of humans from millennia of need. All of those machines were put to work to target that need. /6 https://t.co/2wbI0FvxAN

That revolution is now over 2 centuries ago. We’ve moved on, we have NEW needs now. Desperate needs. Climate change, a pandemic left uncontrolled, environmental degradation. Ageing societies with no workers. Etc. These needs should be triggering the next industrial revolution. /7

The huge money to be made from renewables, just for starters. There’s no conflict here between getting rich and addressing social need, that’s our modern perversion, to paint those as opposites. The people who got rich in the Industrial Revolution were making lives better. /8

But we’re wallowing in these ridiculous framings about surpluses and debt and ‘markets’. As if this fictitious market will fix all of these things by itself. Bullshit. The idea of markets was invented to entrench the holders of the wealth from the last Industrial Revolution. /9

What we now call the ‘fossil fuel industry’. Milking a revolution now more than 250-years-old, addressing needs long gone. They’re blocking the next Industrial Revolution, the one addressing today’s needs. Government needs to lead, to invest. /10

Not to act like accountants from a Kafka novel, counting the pennies so they get good optics for the news cycle about surpluses. They need to start bloody building things again. /end