By Tim Youmans on Twitter:
Many years in the future... Earth is now uninhabitable because [reasons]... out of necessity, the people left figured out how to travel light speed, and are heading to a planet orbiting the star Tau Ceti to start over..
(Years into their journey)
Joe: Wait!!! We have to go back!
Kim: Ha! Good one. There is no going back, we only had enough fuel for one trip.
Joe: But we HAVE to!
Kim: What could be so important?
Joe: (mumbling) I forgot the money.
Kim: Huh?
Joe: I forgot the money! OK?
Kim: YOU FORGOT THE MONEY?!
Joe: Yes. I'm sorry..
Kim: You're SORRY? We're heading to a new planet to save our species, and you leave... wait, how much?
Joe: 100 trillion dollars..
Kim: You leave 100 TRILLION DOLLARS(!!) on our old planet with no way for us to get it?!
Joe: Yeah, pretty much.
Kim: I mean... we should just hit the self destruct button! What are we going to do? We get to our new planet full of resources and everything we need to thrive, but HOW ARE WE GOING TO PAY FOR IT?!! My goodness, Joe! You just killed the human species!!
The author concludes that these people would be saved if they understood Modern Monetary Theory, which is besides the point. MMT is just a (very good) explanation of how it works; money will always come into existence, and MMT can explain it, but an understanding thereof is largely unnecessary.
But excellent analogy nonetheless, see also: lefties wailing about all the wealth hidden in tax havens. There is no wealth hidden in tax havens, what is being hidden is ownership of real wealth in real countries.
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My other favorite analogy is rationing vouchers. When they are issued, it is akin to the government printing money and handing it out as Universal Dividends; when you buy food/petrol and hand over a voucher, that is akin to taxation (i.e. unprinting money - presumably they are then physically destroyed). Those vouchers had a certain value, just like coins and notes, because if you didn't need to use all your vouchers, you could sell them to somebody who wanted to consume more food/petrol than their allotted amount.
So in this case, the spending/money printing comes first and the taxation/unprinting comes last. The purpose of the unprinting is to prevent inflation, i.e. if there are more vouchers in circulation than there is food available, the value of each voucher falls accordingly. It would clearly be insane for the government to demand that consumers hand over vouchers when they want to buy food/petrol before any have been printed!
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