“We like to think of the government as being like a big household, earning money, budgeting it, and spending it. But sovereign nations with a printing press and an army do not work like that.”

In 1993, I took a distance economics course from Heriot Watt University. I more or less understood the concepts except the last section: monetarist economics. That topic kind of brought my final mark down.

I’ve kind of tried to go back to studying this abstract concept, but I still haven’t “grokked” it. Yet it seems to work out OK. For example, even the world’s biggest corporation cannot take on debt similar to governments, run continual deficits, yet stay solvent decade after decade. The governments have tools at their disposal to handle money differently. If the money masters are behaving responsibly and ethically (another discussion), maybe we should let them continue with their “magic.”