One common objection to neoclassical economics is that it underweights the importance of history and class. It is therefore paradoxical that Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth, which claims to challenge orthodox economics, should be guilty of just these vices.

Let's start by saying that I wholly agree with the main claims she makes - that a government which enjoys monetary sovereignty can always finance its borrowing. Asking how we will pay for public spending is therefore daft. Instead, the question, as Dr Kelton says, is: can the extra spending be resourced? The constraint on raising health spending for example - if there is one - is a lack of doctors and nurses, not a lack of finance. Where there are resources lying idle, governments should raise spending to employ them. Dr Kelton explain these ideas wonderfully clearly, so I recommend this book to all non-economists interested in government finances.

For this economist, though, it poses a problem. I remember writing a research note for Nomura back in the early 90s arguing that increased government borrowing would not increase gilt yields because the same increased private saving that was the counterpart of government borrowing would easily finance that borrowing. Nominal gilt yields, I said, were determined much more by inflation than by government borrowing. But nobody accused me of originality. And rightly so. I was simply channelling Kalecki, Beveridge, Lerner and Keynes, who famously said back in 1993:

Look after the unemployment, and the Budget will look after itself.

For me, Kelton is - albeit very lucidly - reinventing the wheel. Reading her, I felt like Mr Jourdain in Moliere's The Bourgeois Gentleman, who was surprised to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life.

Here, Dr Kelton is more ambiguous than I would like. At one stage she claims that MMT "didn't exist" before the late 90s. But whilst the phrase did not exist, the ideas certainly did. Randall Wray is right to say (pdf) that "the main principles of functional finance were relatively widely held in the immediate postwar period."

And indeed Kelton does occasionally see this. There is passing reference to Lerner and to Keynes' How to Pay for the War, though not to Kalecki. And she cites JFK agreeing with James Tobin saying that "the only limit [on government borrowing] really is inflation."

Which is why I say she underplays history. I agree with Gavin Jackson that MMT is not new, and with Hans Despain that she neglects the ontology of MMT. We must ask, as she doesn't: why did these old truths get forgotten*?

I'm not sure about Wray's explanation, that it was because of the inflation of the 1970s. In principle, we might have interpreted that as consistent with functional finance, except that the inflation constraint on borrowing had tightened since the 50s.

Instead, I suspect the answer lies in Kalecki's great paper (pdf), "Political Aspects of Full Employment", written in 1942. He starts by saying "we are all 'MMTers' now":

A solid majority of economists is now of the opinion that, even in a capitalist system, full employment may be secured by a Government spending programme, provided there is in existence adequate plant to employ all existing labour power, and provided adequate supplies of necessary foreign raw materials may be obtained in exchange for exports.

What's not to like, he asks? His answer lay in something else Kelton neglects: class.

Capitalists, he wrote, disliked what we now call MMT because it weakened their power. If governments can use fiscal policy to maintain full employment, they don't need to maintain business confidence and so "this powerful controlling device loses its effectiveness":

The social function of the doctrine of "sound finance" is to make the level of employment dependent on the "state of confidence...[Capitalists'] class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view and that unemployment is an integral part of the " normal " capitalist system.

It is surely no accident that the backlash against functional finance came at a time when capitalists re-asserted their power over governments. Nor is it an accident that it's happened when capitalism has shifted away from mass-market Fordism to extractive finance capital: the former requires full employment and a mass market, the latter requires cheap money instead.

The analogy between government and household finances is of course a fiction - as we've known for almost a century - but it is a useful fiction for maintaining capitalists power.

Which is a big gap in Kelton's analysis. In treating public finances as merely a technocratic matter, she is ignoring the fact that capitalist power sometimes precludes good policy. She is making the error Kalecki warned us against:

The assumption that a government will maintain full employment in a capitalist economy if it only knows how to do it is fallacious.

Kelton is right. To implement her ideas (and those of Kalecki, Keynes, Lerner, Beveridge and Minskly!) however requires more than an intellectual (counter-)revolution. It requires a dismantling of capitalist power. And that's a tougher job.

* She neglects another historical question: if monetary sovereignty is as good as she claims, why were European nations (with the support of both public and economists) so keen to abandon it in the 1990s? One answer, I suspect, is that countries lacking the US's "exorbitant privilege" had less effective sovereignty. Whereas demand for Treasuries and dollars is so great as to give the US room to borrow, demand for drachmas, escudos and lira was not so great - and the dumping of such currencies meant their governments faced a tighter inflation constraint than the US.