Well said, thanks for posting.

I first heard of this in what seemed at first a common sense debate with someone over the relative merits of crypto-currencies vs what we have now. Things deteriorated for me when my respondent countered with “Well if you know modern monetary theory…”

It was obvious I wasn’t aware this was even a formal term for a fixed set of old policies.

On research, applying common sense again, we see the name itself was chosen deliberately to confuse common sense arguments. The person wielding common sense is made to look an idiot by the “Expert” when they assume the term means literally what it says, when actually it does not.

Common sense says modern monetary theory should include all of the most recent research on all things monetary, including crypto-currencies, but on research we see it formally means something really quite old, and exclusive.

It seems to me to be a very cunning mind trick, to try to discourage anyone carrying out further research on actual monetary theory, because the truth is they don’t want that system to be changed by anything.

Wikipedia describes it as “an evolution of chartalism” .

I would describe it more simply as just plain old charlatanism.