I’m just pointing out notable examples of central planning failures, with an understanding that the U.S. is unlikely to become the Soviet Union or Cuba any time soon.

But then, what’s the point? MMT is not communism. Central planning was the least of these thugocracies’ problems. I don’t recall defending some broad concept called “central planning,” yet you felt obliged to invoke the usual suspects. That’s just another version of Godwin’s Law.

But presumably, experts on MMT should have some feasible idea of how to implement it.

I make no such presumption. I think Marx nailed some of capitalism’s flaws, but he had awful ideas about how to deal with them. Bad as those “implementations” were, the critique still held and can be seen as a basis for the better solutions developed in the West (e.g., anti-trust and labor laws).

I think the risk outweighs returns.

Yes, and I disagree, not only because you overweight the damage that some unwanted inflation would do, but because you severely underweight the good that spending more could do. Whatever one thinks of “central planning,” subsidized railroads, Boulder Dam, TVA, rural electrification, and the Interstate Highway System were good ideas. Right now, our infrastructure needs a major upgrade. I believe the benefits of that upgrade far outweigh the risk of inflation from printing money to achieve it. Whereas you are quick to say what is on your side of the scale, you don’t seem willing to recognize what lies on the other.

Expectations may come from policy, but I suspect they come more from the fact that inflation hasn’t happened. It’s not clear how many basis points fiscal conservatism is worth relative to what wise government spending could produce.

Note that the tax policies you invoke, up through Clinton, cover a decade, and included both increases and decreases depending on how the political negotiations worked out.

You cannot have it both ways. First you doubt that the political system will address economic concerns via legislation, then you complain that the political process is, well, political. Think MLK: the arc of tax legislation is long, but it bends toward 2% inflation.

The Fed is much more effective, which brings me to my central claim: that interest rates, or some other pricing mechanism by which markets allocate risk capital, do the job that MMT thinks it can do.

That seems to me a false dichotomy. The Fed is not disqualified by MMT. MMT involves the Fed. If the government spends too much, the Fed can raise interest rates, and that will trigger a tax increase. As it is, the government must borrow to spend, and if the Fed doesn’t monetize the debt, the cost of borrowing will have negative economic repercussions. Thus, the Fed and the Treasury must cooperate in a policy that MMT says will be benign.

At the end of the day, MMT has only one purpose: to pull outputs from the growing output gap. No other fiscal/monetary theory permits that. We didn’t have MMT before because we didn’t need MMT before. But now we need an intellectual underpinning for closing the output gap by government spending on important work. That is “the point.”