If you don’t have the funds to pay for something now (or you do have them but you decide to borrow against it instead) you are committing to settle at some future point instead of now. But you are consuming the service or acquiring the good in the present. That most certainly is borrowing from the future. It’s literally what the word “obligation” means, which is the word you should have all-capped. MMT tries to use rhetoric and accounting gimmicks to gloss over this.

We already have an “MMT system”. When inflation manifests, those scary “central planners” invariably raise interest rates and reserve reqs. They can also sell bonds to shrink the money supply, as I’m sure you’re aware (“stealing from the future” in the process!). I don’t see how those monetary tools will vanish if an AOC becomes Prez.
And given that the examples of hyperinflation are all exceptional extreme cases of either zero productivity or rapidly declining economies (John Law, Zim, Venez, Weimar), we also need to assume that a massive supply side shock has bowled over the national economy and the “MMT system” is trying to fix it by pumping new money into it (which is patently false, MMT academics recommend shrinking the money supply under those conditions, prior to inflation, using monetary policy as now).

“when you rack up debt you are either borrowing or stealing from the future”

Money initially has no value. It is only a token. When a govt or a private bank creates new money it is intrinsically worthless. It only gains value when it is exchanged for real goods and services, creating (or rather, measuring) productivity. Therefore it is impossible for a currency issuer to ‘steal value from the future’, except in the limited sense that interest payments on outstanding bonds deplete a fraction of its current fiscal capacity and transfer it to the owners of the debt, adding to their own private purchasing power. Interest payable, and to whom, should be the focus, not the total debt.

While we’re on interest payable and its social impact: China owns a large share of US bonds. This is a result of US consumption of Chinese goods, itself the result of cheap Chinese labor, which has decimated US manufacturing (amongst other countries). Is it then not fair to say that the US appetite for cheap imports sacrificed its own manufacturing industry and led to a rise in foreign held treasuries, burdening the current Federal budget with interest payments? In this wider view, the restructuring of the US economy toward free trade is what ‘stole (a small part of) the future’, not the issuing of bits of paper. And if you believe in free trade ideology, total utility is increased regardless.

What about the third of treasuries held by the government? Is it stealing its own future from itself?

The trouble with the reception of MMT is that so many people think it is far more radical than it is, and that is simply because it seeks to empower govt to spend money on the plebs (can’t have that, free lunch blah blah, who ever thought it was a good idea to pay someone to work? what about the American Dream?).

btw I was searching for Benjamin Franklin on money, somehow found your blog entry

In practice, this just means the thugs have a bigger ratchet to wield from their ivory tower, even while they can afford to let the plebes pretend to have a democracy. We have seen that setup before, in Carthage and modern day China, amongst others.