Benjamin Wilson

We must unlearn the deception that public funds "come from" taxes. The truth is that taxes are public collections of private funds created by private banks using credit that they were granted BY THE PUBLIC. To demand full funding of all basic needs, organized majorities must understand this fact.

Two things one hears often in Left spaces: "They've got money, we've got people" + "to pay for it, tax the rich." But the fuller, more powerful truth is that the Left can build monetary power—for money is a product of politics. Public finance is the terrain of struggle that connects to all others.

"By creating a city-owned public bank, Seattle can not only provide residents with low-cost financial services; it can also buy its own debt and pay interest to the city instead of private creditors."

This speech is a masterpiece—quite possibly the finest I've read or heard at any point this year on any political topic. The topic of this speech is democratic public finance: what it is, why it's necessary to democracy + equity, and how to do it. @videotroph.bsky.social is a visionary.

✅ Welfare support is a public good, which should not be means-tested or stigmatized. ✅ UBI is laissez-faire consumerism that repackages welfare in an effort to solve problems that welfare alone cannot. ✅ We need robust public options for work, as long recognized by labor & civil rights movements.

We can build the nia from the ground up with loops and collaboration across municipalities counties and states.

You and the others at MotL are doing work of such excellent quality and highly practical relevance that it's a pleasure for me to read/listen and promote it. I think the question is not so much *whether* these concepts + proposals will eventually picked up by Left movements as *when.* 🙏

Also FYI my @moneyontheleft.bsky.social colleague @wilbenjamin.bsky.social wrote this article in 2019 that explores some of these questions too.

“At its core, the current disaster stems from a deceptive Thatcherite conceit: 'There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers' money.’”

Awesome can’t wait to listen to this one!

"[T]he exogenous worldview installs both absolute and relative constraints at the heart of monetary ordering."

I post often about @moneyontheleft.bsky.social's proposals, for two reasons: 1️⃣ If realized, they would be truly transformative. 2️⃣ Understanding their transformative potential requires mass exposure + education, since we've been raised to treat the dominant neoliberal paradigm as empirical reality.

✨MotL 94 is live!✨ We speak with John T. Harvey about a new article he co-wrote with Billy Saas titled, “A Rhetorical History of Modern Money Theory,” out this month in the September 2026 issue of the Journal of Economic Issues. moneyontheleft.org/2026/09/01/a... Please listen & share! 🎧 🙌

Saas and Harvey trace how MMT emerged not merely as a set of first principles, balance-sheet descriptions, and policy prescriptions, but also as a deliberate discursive and rhetorical intervention against dominant neoclassical paradigms and institutions. moneyontheleft.org/2026/09/01/a...

How about shut them down because they are environmentally and socially harmful? And invest in things that are environmentally and socially positive. Stop pretending market discipline is going to save us from fascism. It is fascism's operating system.

Hi Professor Kendi, I spoke at @mayor.nyc.gov #RentalRipoff presser at the Tenement Museum. I said we will “no longer accept the violence of evictions as a matter of business as usual.” Posobiec called me a “freak show” & DeSantis piled on, but my friends at @moneyontheleft.bsky.social defended me:

Yes! Reject the veto power of bankers!

Green tech innovations are encouraging; what's discouraging is their not being built + used at scale. What we need even more is a new PUBLIC FINANCE system that will make funding their build-out the norm. That's why @moneyontheleft.bsky.social's Democratic Public Finance is key to a green economy.

Where are the nodes in the network? All those academic panel presentations are paying off!

Make finance sexy socialist again.

Is your lane housing? Health care? Child care? Libraries? parks? Climate? Labor? Decrim? Disability? Trans lib? Whatever your lane, public budgets are key factors of the conditions under which we fight. Currently, budget politics are zero-sum games. How can we change them into win-win processes? 🧵

“Money is always created (and can only ever make meaningful sense) in a public context; it is issued and redeemed by public authorities, and facilitates transactions only after it has been named as a public unit of account. Therefore, in a profoundly important sense, all money is public money.”

Thanks to @waforpublicbanking.bsky.social for hosting the public banking round table with @moneyontheleft.bsky.social. @videotroph.bsky.social and I were grateful to finally get this thing kicked off! If you’re in the Tacoma area tonight. Come out and see the talk on Democratic Public Finance👇

Q: How can we cultivate a paradigm of money founded on democratic inclusion, collectivity, + care—i.e., one of PUBLIC money? A: Part of the way is by seeing, as @robbhawkes.bsky.social notes, how "inequality + exclusionary violence are built into the logic of PRIVATE money," our current paradigm.

In this episode, hosts Tyler Suksawat, Will Beaman, and Scott Ferguson sit down with Washington State Senator Bob Hasegawa to explore his nearly two-decade campaign to establish a public bank in Washington State, launched in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street crash.

New In the Loop! 🔊 ✨ The Fight for Public Banking with Washington State Senator Bob Hasegawa ✨ We sit down with Washington State Senator Bob Hasegawa to explore his nearly two-decade campaign to establish a public bank in Washington State. Please listen & share! 🎧 🙌

My friends at @moneyontheleft.bsky.social agree! Evictions are violence. @mayor.nyc.gov champions the masses. Let’s occupy our ship of state: #DemocraticPublicFinance is conveyance to the land of justice & housing & #UniversalRoyalEducation for all. Utopian visions fuel the heart of government.

YES! Defending tenants rights AND the humanities at the same time?! They say it couldn't be done. Behold the brilliance & courage of @antoniamarrero.bsky.social. 🥰

Yes! I love the reframing of money’s promise here. As an IOU, money is much more powerful if we collectively organize its promise and coordinate how to deliver on said promise.

✨ New Page! ✨ We’ve launched a dedicated Arts & Culture page on Money on the Left. We’ve always maintained that arts & culture are integral to political economy, never just an afterthought. This new space gathers all of our cultural critiques, interviews, & essays into one clear home on our site.

Excited to share our latest episode which, unlike our standard releases, was recorded 11 years ago in 2015, 3 years before the MotL podcast began. Here I speak with my friend Mario Rendina about his 30+ years of experience working in public job training & placement within municipal government.

That's why universities need Loops of their own.

'HUMAN BEINGS HAVE NEVER EXISTED OUTSIDE MONETARY RELATIONS BECAUSE THERE CAN BE NO SOCIAL TIME OR SOCIAL SPACE THAT IS NOT ALREADY STRUCTURED BY FORMS OF MUTUAL OBLIGATIONS AND COLLECTIVE COORDINATION' moneyontheleft.org/2026/06/20/t...

"What if money is constitutive of social life as such? From this perspective, money is not fundamentally a means of exchange, a creature of the state, or a technology of debt, but the process of organizing interdependence, sharing, and common action." moneyontheleft.org/2026/06/20/t...

There are plenty of nuanced criticisms to be made about MMT, but the notion that MMT proposes "merely technical fixes" is a specious, oft-repeated leftist trope, which typically functions to firewall authentic left organizing & activism against MMT's genuine political import & implications.

If you haven’t read this yet, fix that as soon as possible: it’s a beautifully crafted response to a great album. And if you teach literature, you might want to consider using the second and third paragraphs as an example of how close reading works.

A must read! Not your dad’s barter myth essay! Goes so much deeper! Happy father’s day weekend!

Good morning, friends! Today's the 8th day of Early Voting. Counting today, we've just 4 days left to shift the balance of statewide power in New York. If we win most of these primaries, the Left will be able to contest for universal health care, child care, housing—and force Hochul to #TaxTheRich.

Friends, over the next 3 weeks I plan to use my account mainly to boost Leftist NYS Assembly primary campaign posts. I want to direct maximal attention to them because to shift the balance of statewide power next year, we must win ≥7 of them. (If you need to mute or unfollow me, I understand.)

It’s the people stupid.

There are no exogenous shocks - this terminology is an “ideological pathology”

I say this as someone who canvassed for Z since Dec 2024: THIS YEAR'S PRIMARIES ARE WAY MORE IMPORTANT. Why? Because to actually deliver Z's agenda, we must replace many NYS Assembly members standing in the way. If you want #TaxTheRich and all the things it'll provide, focus on the Assembly now.

Historians don’t just help prevent historical catastrophes from being repeated. They loosen the aura of inevitability and naturalism that surrounds everyday dysfunctions

The chilling thing about this Nazi eugenics poster that counts how much a disabled person’s life costs to the German taxpayer is how CONVENTIONAL the economic argument is. This is the message of “taxpayer money” as a mechanism for public finance. You are either making money or costing money.

One of the most exciting possibilities about public banking is transforming corrupt local institutional landscapes that force even progressive officeholders to make deals with private wealth.

Fuck around & do some Democratic Public Finance.

Wall Street investment banker says, Seattle should definitely NOT try to create a public bank. “I can’t fathom how that would actually work, if I can’t make money.” He looked increasingly concerned as we mentioned the public banking movement across the US.

Lots of updated resources at moneyontheleft.org

I wish we could tax politicians and media for saying tax payer money