Might us money-reformers stop shooting ourselves in the foot ?

This is a personal plea, arising from how I’ve become a bit depressed that MMT might never succeed in displacing conventional beliefs about money. I see a potent force, that’s constantly impeding progress, coming from money reformers themselves. I feel we metaphorically shoot ourselves in the foot, by repeatedly using words like borrowing, debt and deficit. Such words, in the public mind, surely strengthen the very ideas about State money that we are trying to weaken.

The public knows full well what the words borrowing and debt entail to them - sums of money, owed to another party, that are due to be repaid in future. The public sees that when an individual or company goes into in financial deficit, they must be carrying debt to someone else.

I’m also depressed that the public-relations toxicity of these words doesn’t seem to be strongly appreciated by some money reformers, perhaps because their better knowledge and understanding of what, in the context of fiat money and a sovereign money authority, those words truly mean makes those reformers relatively immune to the toxic effects that the public likely experience. Even Steve, in his ‘Meme that is destroying Western civilisation’, has freely used the word debt when describing fiat money - even though he also talked of debt-free fiat money, later in the same piece. Of course, using that language is tempting simply because its strong conventionality will direct readers’ thoughts expressly towards the concepts intended. Yet it also misdirects those thoughts into accepting the very misunderstandings we want those readers to reject.

Surely we should seek and use alternative expressions, other words and phrases, and avoid using ’anti-MMT’ language when talking about MMT-style money reform. For example, a simple change might be to talk about National self-debt, government self-deficit, or even maybe self-borrowing ? Those hybrid words are only slightly more cumbersome, don’t sound wholly unfamiliar and bring the distinct advantage that, among some of the public, they might trigger the thought “What, no-one can be in debt to themselves, so what does self-debt mean then?”.

Likely there are other words and phrases that could do that job. But please let’s try to stop using words that don’t do the job.

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