What I try to say is that taxes don't pay for public infrastructure directly. The state creates an expenditure budget, and decides which taxes it's gonna charge. The fact that many politicians don't know better and conflate the two, has more to do with ignorance and believing the dogma of neoliberalism, than it has to do with the expenditure of public money and with taxation. Most politicians effectively treat taxes as if they do pay for the public infrastructure, but those concerns suddenly disappear when it comes to rescuing a bank, or to exceeding the military budget, and they remember that states can pay for that stuff without needing to collect that money through taxes in the first place. They even bother to remind us of that when it's the case. In the 2010 Euro crisis, Spain (I'm Spanish) 60bn € in rescuing a set of Spanish banks. Our then economy minister, Luis de Guindos, kindly reminded everyone that "this isn't going to cost a single euro to the taxpayer". So yeah, they only remind us about which stuff "needs" to be paid for taxes when it's actually important, such as healthcare, education or pensions, but they suddenly forget about that requirement when it comes to increasing military budget extraordinarily after budgets were approved, or to rescue a bank.

Your point about hyperinflation is a good one, and remember that I'm not claiming we should start creating infinite money for everyone. In the EU, for example, we have a theoretical budget deficit limit of 3% for many decades now. If you examine the historical reasons for this limit, it comes from a meeting some decades ago in which some higher-ups of the EU met for some hours to decide on a deficit limit, in the full reagan/thatcher period. They came out of the meeting with the number of the 3% limit, and also with the suggested 60% maximum debt as percentage of GDP. The 3% deficit limit was made up on the spot, literally in 30 minutes by a French economist called Guy Abelle, which he has admitted to later in life. The 60% debt was based on a study that compared the health of economies and their percentage of debt... until the study was found many years later to be faulty, because it had significant errors in the spreadsheets used to calculate that number, and upon correcting that there was no suggested number anymore... Look up "Reinhart and Rogoff mistake" on your favourite search engine. So yeah, those rules are absolutely made up and they don't obey any experimental or scientific criteria. That's not to say there shouldn't be a limit to budget, but the conclusion I want to get across is that deficit isn't a bad thing since it amounts to increasing the wealth of the public sector, and the limit of deficit should be calculated or even experimented with based on real, empirical data from real economies, and not what some old neoliberal farts decide in a meeting one evening.

I'll finish with an analysis of a case of hyperinflation, that of Venezuela in the recent years. Venezuela is and has been for the past century an economy based on oil exports. In the year 2014, oil prices were reduced from $130 per barrel, to below half of that. In an economy reliant on oil exports, this meant that Venezuela's purchase power to the outside world suddenly halved, with a corresponding immense drop in GDP. This is what originally led to a high inflation. Now, the price of goods for citizens is so high that they can barely afford them or not afford them completely. As a state with a central bank, you're confronted with two choices: you leave things be, and people literally don't have money to buy their basic needs; or you create money so that people can at least afford them for some time. The response was to create the money to alleviate the harshest consequences. This in turn enables the possibility that people can still buy products that are in shortage, which makes the price even higher, and the cycle restarts. The consequence, as we saw, was hyperinflation. But this hyperinflation wasn't triggered by money creation, it was triggered by an external event, i.e. the drop to half the price of the country's biggest export good and biggest sector of the economy. Of course the government could have decided to let the people starve, and there would have been only huge inflation and not hyperinflation, but is that really a solution? The goal is to prevent hyperinflation, or to minimize human suffering? Javier Milei, for example, seems to be currently on the path to "solve" the inflation problem in Argentina... By making the citizens so poor, that they can't afford to buy the goods and services, so that the businesses can't rise the prices. Sure, inflation goes down, but not by solving the economic underlying problems, and instead by creating immense amounts of suffering so that "the line can finally go down".

I appreciate your willingness to listen, all of this seemed crazy to me just a few years ago, but everything makes so much more sens when analysing the economy from the point of view of modern monetary theory, and the predictive capabilities of the theory are so much better, it's been proven so much during the COVID pandemic and the posterior inflation crisis.

You can absolutely reduce coal and gas without batteries. Hydro is a thing, nuclear also exists. Maybe it's cheaper and more environmentally-friendly to disconnect some solar and some wind from the grid during excess peak production and keep the nuclear running, than having huge storage? Also you're forgetting about the possibility for instant demand response, imagine things like AC units in summer or heaters in winter, where they could be turned on automatically during peak production to keep your house comfier for no cost.

Sorry but there's absolutely nothing wrong with what I'm saying.

The state is the only issuer of a given currency, for example the US federal reserve is the only issuer of Dollars. If we divide the economy into private sector and public sector, we can talk of taxes as "removing money from the private economy", and of public expenditure as "introducing money in the private economy". Every dollar spent by the state increases the available currency by 1 dollar, and every dollar collected as taxes reduces the available currency by 1 dollar. The state doesn't need a "savings account" since it creates its own currency, so for all intents and purposes, taxation is the destruction of currency and public expenditure is the creation of it.

There's no such thing as "tax money" as you speak of. The state creates currency, it doesn't need to firstly collect dollars that it can create itself. We saw this in the Covid pandemic when states started to spend tremendous amounts of money without collecting it first in taxes, the US government doesn't need dollars, it can create infinite dollars at a few keyboard strokes.

This is not to say that states should start creating arbitrarily big amounts of currency, but if they CAN do so, it begs the question, when should they stop? You mention inflation, but let me ask you, are you SURE that currency creation is the main driver of inflation? The answer is no. We've been poisoned by neoliberalism, we've been told millions of times that "inflation is a monetary phenomenon", and that somehow, markets are omniscient beings with perfect knowledge of currency flow, and they have a dial that they turn up when currency is created and prices grow proportionally as much. But is that really, empirically proven to be true? The answer is absolutely not. In fact, modern empirical studies show that currency creation is a very bad predictor for inflation.

Let's look at the latest inflationary episode for example, in 2022. If we look at the REAL reasons for the inflation, they are

1. bottlenecks in industry and in supply as a consequence of COVID effects

2. increasing energy prices and market destabilisation as a consequence of the Ukraine invasion

3. private companies increasing prices beyond the increase of price of their inputs, riding the wave of inflation to increase their profits

If you look at any inflationary episode in the developed world for the past 80 years, you'll find that inflation has very little to do with money supply, and in fact most times is caused by shortages in supply because of external reasons (oil crises, wars, pandemics...), and not because of excesses of demand as a consequence of currency generation. I'm not suggesting that unlimited currency creation is a good thing, of course it can introduce macroeconomic imbalances. But if evidence shows time and time again that inflation isn't a good measure of this, then how much should we ACTUALLY create? These are the questions that we should be asking, not "but how are we gonna pay for this?".

You also talk about debt. How come Japan, with 250%+ of its GDP in debt, has absolutely no issues? That's because debt isn't a bad thing. First of all, if a state indebts itself in its own currency, it can ALWAYS, by definition, pay it. And it doesn't need to collect taxes for it first. Tomorrow, Japan or the UK or the US, could press 3 buttons on a keyboard at their respective central banks, and perform an early payment of their debt by simply placing the amount of money indebted in the accounts of the owners of that debt. And again, it would NOT need to collect taxes first to do that. But furthermore, debt isn't a bad thing in and out of itself. If public expenditure amounts to putting money into the economy, debt is simply a way to make the private sector more wealthy! Wealth isn't a burden on taxpayers, it's literally the opposite! Many taxpayers own debt from their own country, and they receive an interest from it! "Public expenditure" is literally a synonym of "making the private sector wealthier"!

I seriously encourage you to open your mind about this, and really examine how much of the neoliberal dogma that we've been exposed to for the past 4 decades is really, actually empirically proven to be true. If you want to read more on this "new" way of looking at economics, which matched the empirical data a lot better and offers some interesting new points of view, it's called "Modern Monetary Theory" (MMT). Stephanie Kelton recently made a documentary called "finding the money" which introduces some of the concepts, and if you speak Spanish, the economist Eduardo Garzón has a series of videos in his YouTube channel explaining the basics of MMT. For some empirically based critique of neoliberal dogma, although not explicitly MMT, I suggest the English YouTube channel "Unlearning Economics".

Seriously, please consider how much of the neoliberal economics dogma that we've been exposed to, has been proven empirically, please have a look at it.

I'm sorry, but that's empirically proven false time and time again. That's not to say we should be creating as much money as possible, but for example I'm an EU citizen. Do you have any idea how much currency was created between 2010 and 2020? Look up any measure of the M2 or M3 monetary aggregate for the EU in that period, and look at the inflation rates for the period.

If you're a US citizen, I beg you take a graph of inflation for the USA since WW2, look at the inflationary periods, and tell me: what happened in those periods? Consistently, inflationary periods have been caused by external events such as oil crises, or wars like the current one in Ukraine, or such phenomena. Money creation is a very poor predictor for inflation

I know the neoliberal dogma has poisoned the public discourse for decades and it seems obvious and common knowledge that money creation leads to inflation. But it really, REALLY, hasn't been historically the case, and this has been proven empirically time and time and time again.

Totally honest question: do you feel this way too about Russian soldiers in Ukraine, or IDF soldiers in Gaza?

While those trains are indeed always late, at least they don't pollute cities the way that ICE (Internal Combustion Engines) do!

We need, as commies, to establish grassroots movements that will improve things locally, create safety nets, organize labor to get progressively better victories through strike and if necessary through other means, and to have a growing sector of workers that are class-conscious. When the material conditions arrive, we need to have a critical mass of class-conscious workers so that we can organise as best as possible, and help to educate the rest of people, and to discuss the wants and needs of the workers and translate those needs to the vanguard party. But we also need the vanguard party.

You talk about how things can "go wrong and corrupt the entire thing", but by doing so you're forgetting that that's already the case, that we live in a corrupt, bloody and oppressive system, which kills millions every year worldwide through violent and less-violent means. You say it's never happened, but I disagree with you. Ask an anarchist and they'll tell you about Zapatista and Rohinya movements. Ask a Marxist-Leninist like me and we'll tell you about Cuba and the USSR and why we believe they're inherently more democratic and less oppressive than the current system, although admittedly not perfect. Our best tool to prevent the system from being corrupt, is to have as many class-conscious workers as possible. So let's organise labor, let's create communities and activist organizations, and let's improve things on a local level, so that people's material conditions start to improve and as a bonus we can draw more people to the movement that actively improves their lives.

You're insulting all the people who suffered even more oppressive regimes than Stalin or Mao as a consequence of NOT arming themselves. Chileans suffered Pinochet as a consequence of lack of oppression of the fascist opposition during Allende. Spanish suffered Franco as a consequence of lack of oppression of the fascists during the Spanish Second Republic. Oppression is sadly a tool that must be used, as sparingly as possible that's true, to prevent reactionary elements from maintaining or reinstating even more oppressive structures.

People everyday in post-colonial countries suffer immeasurable despair as a consequence of lack of revolution. If you criticise Stalin or Mao and consider them undesirable and illegitimate, you should be even more convinced of the illegitimacy of current western governments that impose imperialism on the global south. Every day that we delay or refuse these armed revolutions, we're perpetuating this system which is even more harmful than the USSR or communist China by any metric possible.

The only exception was started by rich landowners because they didn't want to pay taxes to the king. (American)

You really think the US is the only American colony that seceded from its colonial authority by means of violence? And are you implying that the current US government isn't tyrannical?

or succeeds only for the winners to establish a new tyrannical system

You're just making that up. You're tautologically defining any successful violent revolution as failed because it didn't eliminate every single hierarchy overnight. Even if I'm a Marxist-Leninist I can conceive why you'd make that argument about the USSR (though I'd disagree with you), but if you make that argument about Cuba too you're just wrong. Cuba is a state much more democratic and much less oppressive by every metric than its predecessor. You're just falling into that mentality that "the only acceptable revolutions are those which failed".

Additionally, you're failing to acknowledge that non-violent revolutions, such as Allende's Chile and the Spanish Second Republic, can end up in bloodshed and a more authoritarian and repressive form of government not as a consequence of violent revolution, but as a consequence of the lack of it. As a Spanish myself, I'd have much rather seen a version of my country where there was an armed socialist repression against fascism (for example by the CNT or some Bolshevik party), than the history we lived, where a democratically elected, non-violent leftist government was nevertheless couped, plunged into civil war, and eventually turned into fascism. An armed revolution could have actually possibly prevented that. (Funny historical note: the only country that really supported the struggle against fascism in Spain was the USSR, despite the Italian and German fascists helping their Spanish counterpart.)

You say that as if communists don't want democracy. I want the highest degree of democracy possible, I just understand that the material conditions that allow revolutions don't always allow for extremely high democracy at the beginning, and how a vanguard party of communist intellectuals can initially serve well to guide an uneducated populace or, worse, educated against communism as we are now.

Anti-communists thinking that by doing blanket condemnations of past mistakes instead of historical and material analysis of why it happened, how much was necessary, and how much was the excess, they can totally avoid them in the future and bring down capitalism with the power of love.