A great extended-metaphor explainer for money, from Cory Doctorow, channeling Warren Mosler:

… consider this thought experiment devised by economist Warren Mosler, one of the foremost proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT, the theory built upon this understanding of money): Sometimes when Mosler is explaining money to an audience, he’ll hold up a handful of his business-cards and ask, “Who will stay after the lecture and help stack the chairs and mop the floor in exchange for one of my cards?”

When no hands go up, Mosler adds, “What if I told you that there were gun-toting security guards at the all the exits, and they will only let you leave in exchange for one of my cards?”

Every hand shoots up.

Mosler has just turned his cards into money, through the creation of a non-discretionary door-tax.

Now, Mosler didn’t need to get his business-cards from the audience before he could levy this tax. He is the sole supplier of his cards, and while the audience will treat them as money, Mosler won’t. Mosler doesn’t need business-cards – he needs people to help clean the lecture hall and stack the chairs. At the end of the night, when the security guards turn over all the collected cards to him, he doesn’t need them – he can’t pay for his airfare to the next lecture using his cards, or pay for his hotel room with them. Indeed, given how cheap business cards are to produce, he can just dump all those used cards in a shredder.

When people say, “Government budgets aren’t like household budgets,” this is what they mean.

There’s a whole bunch more after that, too. Kind of amazing that this piece is appearing in Locus, but hey: I guess if I had a rep like Doctorow’s and an open-brief column in Anglophone genre fiction’s organ-of-record, I’d probably write about whatever the hell I was interested in that month, too.

(Anyone who wants to provide me with such an opportunity, get in touch, yeah?)