Typography

While it somewhat lacked in structure, a good time was had by everyone in the live chat section of the big Warren Mosler vs Bob Murphy debate last night. You can see a replay of the debate here . One of Mosler's running themes (and which Murphy turned into a running gag) was the idea that he (Mosler) could give his business card a positive price by requiring members of the audience to hand over said card to Mosler's bouncer should they wish to leave the room unmolested. Voilà, modern fiat money. In order to get his fiat cards out into the audience, presumably Mosler would have had to spend them into existence by purchasing stuff from the the audience. Only then would audience members be able to afford to leave the room without being subjected to the bouncer's whims. In the MMT literature, this is called twintopt .* A state imposes an obligation on its citizenry to pay a tax, and then dictates what good or item (the "twintopt") will be sufficient to discharge that ...

While chartalism is usually associated with the state and its ability to tax, there's no reason that this must be so. In fact, I like to think of chartalism as stateless. I call this the McDonald's coupon theory of money . What I'm specifically addressing here is the chartalist idea that paper notes issued by the state have value because the state imposes a liability on its citizens that can only be discharged by the use of this paper. McDonald's Corporation can do the same thing if it imposes an obligation on the burger-eating community to pay for all Big Macs with McDonald's-issued coupons. One coupon buys one Big Mac, say. In order to pay their "tax" and get a burger, Big Mac fans have to somehow acquire these coupons ahead of time. McDonald's pays for a portion of its supplies by printing and issuing these coupons as payment. So one way that Big Mac fans can get their hands on coupons is by providing services to McDonald's... say cleaning floor...