You say it's a "given". I say it was created by policy in the first place, and to create new policy now to aid and abet your so-called "given" is pure folly.

Wordy Bill has posted Part One of his response to a German critic of MMT. I figured I'd read it, as it should be an overview of key points of controversy from the perspective of one of the mainstays of MMT thought. Bill says:

The aim of fiscal policy is not to deliver a particular fiscal outcome (surplus or deficit). Rather, it is to ensure that the discretionary government policy position is sufficient to ensure full employment and price stability, given the spending and saving decisions of the non-government sector.

He emphasizes the word "given".

The spending and saving decisions of the non-government sector are a "given", he says. In other words: Those decisions create an economic environment, and the aim of fiscal policy is to ensure full employment and price stability in that environment.

I disagree.

The spending and saving decisions of the non-government sector arise largely in response to policy. Those decisions may seem a "given" at the moment. But it's not like the government had no hand in creating them. You know goddamn well, for example, that economic policy encourages saving. It has been policy since the beginning of time, almost, to encourage saving. So when you look at the amount of money that has been tucked away as saving in one form or another, what you are looking at is a result of policy: the decisions of individuals (or groups or businesses or whatever) in response to policy.

That's not at all the same as what Bill says, that those decisions are a "given".

This comes up because I recently quoted the last bit of Chapter 10 from Keynes's General Theory. Here again is his last sentence:

We have to accept [the sufferings of unemployment] as an inevitable result of applying to the conduct of the State the maxims which are best calculated to “enrich” an individual by enabling him to pile up claims to enjoyment which he does not intend to exercise at any definite time.

We do not have to accept the spending and saving decisions of the non-government sector as a given. Those decisions are an inevitable result of policy. If the result turns out to be a problem, then the policy was bad, and we should change it.

It is a great error to accept as given, that which is not a given.