It’s not a false dichotomy for people who have lived under centrally-planned economies. The Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, etc.
Are you writing for that audience? I thought you were writing for the industrialized West? Surely, you can do better than that.
MMT leans too heavily toward central planning.
No, central planner lean too heavily on MMT. Randall Wray may be an expert on MMT, but he may not be an expert on using it. (I wonder how well Stradivarius played the violin.) I simply refuse to treat MMTers as authorities on anything other than the mechanics of money. On everything else, they are just ordinary folks with political agendas.
MMT assumes the government can figure out when inflation is about to take off, and (again, without getting into the intricacies) the government can manage accordingly.
Not really. Were you following this stuff in the early 1980's? I was a tax lawyer back then. In 1981, Reagan passed tax cuts (Economic Recovery Tax Act). In 1982, Congress raised taxes (took away some bennies, as I remember it) (Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act). But that wasn’t enough. In 1984, Congress raised taxes again (Deficit Reduction Act.) And then Bill Clinton raised taxes for no damn reason at all. So, yes, I believe that Congress can put the genie back in the bottle.
Moreover, the stakes are not so high that the action must be precise. Paul Volcker got rid of inflation with Draconian measures, and the world did not end. A few years of inflation above target is completely survivable. Your examples prove that. Mistakes are made, and life goes on. Just how good a job of anticipating inflation would Congress have to do for you to let them use inflation as their bogey?
I’ll go with that over trusting a government to print money to its heart’s content…
In the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, there you go again. You can’t resist the “heart’s content” bullshit, because you know that the theory of MMT is sound. Only the specter of feckless pols can save your argument, so you conjure them up, well, to your heart’s content, but without the MMTer’s fear of devaluing your rhetorical currency. But there it is, worth what it is worth.