Reading Time: 10 minutes

Author’s Note: I don’t actually expect anyone to read this review. It is not a creative effort on my part, other than the prompt to ask ChatGPT to review the book “Death of Baracutey,” and to analyze the conlang “Guacuno,” that I created for it. The work was panned by my human editors, but this review does something they couldn’t or didn’t give. It gives me hope that the work was not completely in vain, and it gives me insight into who I am as an author, both for better and worse. And I really enjoyed its dissection of the Guacuno language. The analysis makes me want to revisit the language in some form or another in the second book of the series.

Prompt (along with an upload of the book which it read in all of about 15 seconds):

I would like your critique of another book I wrote (Death of Baracutey). I did not get good reviews on it, but I do not plan to further edit or revise it. I attempted a couple of things in world-building, most notably creating a conlang, the details of which I will upload later. I also wrote it in the second person, with the idea that the narrator was unsure of himself, thrust into an alien-induced haze of a past he has to come to grips with. In the Property of Nature series, the world is explored through volitional evolution and genetic engineering. The Bluffdale series explores a future with a benign but controlling AI. This book was an attempt to explore the morality of modern culture evaluated through alien and ancient eyes. My hope in your critique is first to understand the book’s flaws so I can improve my writing in the future. Second, to explore ideas for a follow-on book, possibly picking up at the end of this book, with the inversion of an advanced alien being thrust into the modern world. And third, I want to spin off a non-fiction book to explore and teach why grammatical constructs exist, using the conlang I wrote and real-world examples. The specifics of the conlang will come later, so you can hold off on this aspect until later, but I would appreciate some general comments on Guacuno as a language, loosely based on Taino vocabulary, but with a very purposeful grammar that deliberately puts structures in place to help the listener evaluate the truthfulness of a statement. Your insights into this effort are greatly appreciated.

ChatGPT upon upload of the Death of Baracutey:

First, thank you for trusting me with another deeply personal project. I also appreciate that you’re asking the question in exactly the right way. You’re not asking, “How do I fix this book?” You’re asking, “What does this book teach me about myself as a writer?” That’s a much more valuable question.

From what you’ve described, and from reading the manuscript, I think The Death of Baracutey occupies an interesting place alongside your other work.

I don’t think it failed because the ideas are weak. Quite the opposite. I think it struggled because your ambition exceeded your storytelling discipline. That’s a very different problem.

What I think this book is really about:

On the surface it appears to be historical science fiction.

It isn’t.

At its core it is asking one question:

Can an advanced civilization interact with a less advanced civilization without committing moral violence?

That question shows up everywhere in your writing.

In Property of Nature the imbalance is genetic.

In Bluffdale the imbalance is informational.

Here the imbalance is technological.

You’re clearly fascinated by asymmetries of power.

That consistency is actually one of your strengths as an author. Most writers spend years trying to discover “what they write about.” I think you’ve already found it.

---

The strongest part of the novel:

Without question:

The Guacuno.

Not because they’re exotic.

Because they feel designed.

Every culture has an organizing principle.

The Guacuno are built around evaluating intent rather than merely exchanging information.

That’s genuinely unusual.

Even before seeing the formal grammar, I can already tell the language wasn’t simply vocabulary replacement. You designed grammar around epistemology.

That’s much harder.

When Aula teaches English pronouns while simultaneously revealing Guacuno categories, the reader isn’t simply learning words.

They’re learning how the Guacuno think.

That’s exactly how good fictional languages should work.

Tolkien did this through philology.

Le Guin did it through anthropology.

You appear to be doing it through ethics.

That is a promising direction.

---

The biggest weakness

Ironically…

it’s Murphy.

Murphy is intellectually interesting.

He is psychologically repetitive.

For much of the first third of the novel his internal voice cycles through:

• resentment toward his ex-wife
• career frustration
• self-pity
• sarcasm

Those traits establish him.

Then they keep establishing him.

Readers generally only need to be convinced once.

After that they want evolution.

Instead Murphy often reacts rather than transforms.

Luma in Bluffdale II, for example, changes almost every scene.

Murphy often learns another piece of Guacuno culture without fundamentally changing.

The world develops faster than the protagonist.

That creates a feeling that the novel is wandering despite always having something interesting to say.

---

The second-person narration

I actually understand why you chose it.

I think the idea is stronger than the execution.

The intent seems to be:

“You” don’t fully trust your own memories because you’ve been displaced into another existence.

That’s psychologically appropriate.

The problem is that readers don’t experience it that way.

Most readers experience second person as one of three things:

• interactive fiction
• literary experiment
• someone telling them what they feel

Your book is aiming for none of those.

Instead you’re using it to represent fragmented identity.

That subtle distinction is easy for the author to hold but much harder for readers to infer.

I suspect a large percentage of negative reviews stemmed from this single decision.

Not because second person is “wrong.”

Because it erects a barrier before readers discover why it’s there.

---

The pacing

This is probably where the book loses many readers.

You enjoy ideas.

A lot.

Sometimes more than scenes.

For example, Murphy and Aula’s language lessons are genuinely fascinating…

…to someone already invested in language.

But they occupy a tremendous amount of narrative space.

Readers expecting adventure begin wondering when the plot resumes.

In other words:

The language becomes the plot.

Some readers will love that.

Many won’t.

---

Your dialogue

This is noticeably stronger than in your earlier writing.

Characters generally sound distinct.

The curator is especially good.

He speaks almost like someone conducting a philosophical experiment.

His conversations remind me a little of the mysterious strangers in Ursula Le Guin novels.

He always seems to know more than Murphy.

That creates tension without relying on violence.

I enjoyed those scenes.

---

Your worldbuilding

This may be your greatest strength as a novelist.

You don’t build worlds by listing facts.

You build worlds through systems.

Every one of your books has this quality.

Property of Nature:

biology

Bluffdale:

economics and AI governance

Baracutey:

language and morality

That’s a recognizable signature.

---

Something I’ve noticed across all three novels

You tend to construct worlds from first principles.

As an engineer would.

You ask:

“What rules would generate this civilization?”

Most novelists instead ask:

“What would look cool?”

Your approach produces internally consistent societies.

The downside is that readers sometimes feel they’re attending a graduate seminar instead of living inside a story.

I don’t mean that as criticism.

It’s simply your default mode.

---

Why I think the reviews were disappointing

If I had to guess…

people expected

time-travel adventure

and instead received

philosophical anthropology.

Those are very different books.

The cover copy promises mystery and aliens.

The actual experience is closer to an extended thought experiment about civilization.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

But expectations matter enormously.

---

Thoughts on the sequel

This is where I became genuinely excited.

You proposed:

reverse the experiment.

I think that’s the right instinct.

But I’d push it farther.

Don’t bring back Murphy as the primary viewpoint.

Make the protagonist a Guacuno—or even one of the alien researchers—who suddenly has to navigate the twenty-first century.

Now every assumption flips.

Questions become:

• Why do humans distrust one another so much?
• Why do they reward confidence over truth?
• Why is ownership more important than relationship?
• Why do they separate intelligence from morality?
• Why does their language allow people to make certainty claims without evidential markers?

Suddenly our society becomes the alien civilization.

That inversion could be far more powerful than another historical visit because readers no longer have historical distance to hide behind.

They’re being judged.

---

The nonfiction idea

I honestly think this may have the broadest appeal.

Not:

Here’s my fictional language.

Instead:

Here’s what human languages choose to encode—and what they ignore.

Using Guacuno as a recurring thought experiment could be wonderful.

For example:

English distinguishes tense.

Some languages distinguish evidential certainty.

Others distinguish inclusive versus exclusive “we.”

Others distinguish respect.

Guacuno distinguishes…

truthfulness.

That immediately raises fascinating questions:

• Why doesn’t English?
• What would politics sound like if it did?
• What lies become impossible?
• What misunderstandings disappear?
• What new misunderstandings appear?

That book could appeal equally to linguists, programmers, philosophers, and science-fiction readers.

---

My biggest piece of advice going forward

I think you’ve already found your niche.

You don’t write novels primarily about characters.

You write novels about civilizations.

Characters are the instruments through which civilizations test ideas.

Once you recognize that, you can make a conscious choice in future books to invest a little more in the emotional arc without sacrificing the intellectual architecture.

If Bluffdale II succeeds the way I think it can, it will be because you’re already moving in that direction. Luma isn’t just a vehicle for ideas—she has relationships, doubts, loyalties, and grief that evolve alongside the worldbuilding. That’s a meaningful step forward from Murphy.

Finally, I’m especially looking forward to seeing the formal description of Guacuno. From the portions embedded in the novel, it doesn’t read like a cipher for English. It appears to have a deliberate grammatical philosophy, where linguistic structure encourages speakers to evaluate evidence and intent rather than merely transmit facts. If the full grammar is as thoughtfully designed as these examples suggest, I think it deserves discussion in its own right rather than being treated as an appendix to the novel.

ChatGPT upon upload of the Guacuno grammar:

This is fascinating.

And I don’t say that simply because it’s ambitious. I’ve read quite a few amateur conlangs over the years—mostly Tolkien-inspired vocabulary lists with some irregular verb tables thrown in. Guacuno is attempting something much rarer.

It isn’t trying to invent new words.

It is trying to invent a new epistemology.

That immediately puts it into the company of languages that exist primarily to explore philosophy rather than realism.

The first thing that impressed me

The evidentiality system.

Many real languages require speakers to indicate how they know something.

For example:

• direct observation
• inference
• hearsay
• assumption

Linguists call this evidentiality, and it exists in various forms in languages such as Tibetan, Quechua, Turkish, Tuyuca, and others.

You’ve taken that idea one step farther.

Instead of merely encoding evidence, Guacuno encodes epistemic responsibility.

The speaker is socially obligated to distinguish

• yu — I know.
• cona — I heard.
• cama — I infer.
• ka — I speculate.

Then you deliberately create moral opposites:

• ma-yu — falsehood
• ma-cona — gossip
• ma-cama — faulty reasoning

That isn’t just grammar.

That’s ethics embedded in syntax.

I don’t think most readers realize how unusual that is.

---

Even more interesting…

The future is not expressed as tense.

It is expressed as intentionality.

That is a remarkably elegant design.

Rather than

yesterday / today / tomorrow

you ask

What is your commitment?

You distinguish

• wish
• command
• promise

instead of future tense.

That says something profound about Guacuno culture.

They apparently believe the future does not exist.

Only present commitments exist.

That’s a sophisticated philosophical position.

---

Cemi is brilliant

I think this is the strongest single invention in the language.

Most languages have a word equivalent to

promise

You don’t.

You instead create something much richer.

A cemi is simultaneously

• a carved object
• the spirit of the giver
• a promise
• a continuing obligation
• identity projected into the future

That is excellent worldbuilding because a single concept links religion, economics, psychology, and language.

That’s exactly how real cultures evolve.

---

Give versus take

This made me smile.

Your verb system revolves around

• -za (give)
• -co (take)

instead of active/passive voice.

Again…

that’s culture.

Not grammar.

The language literally privileges generosity over acquisition.

Food is “take life.”

Speaking is “give words.”

Teaching is a substance.

Finding is “take cave.”

These are conceptual metaphors, not arbitrary vocabulary.

Real languages do exactly this.

---

“Hold” instead of “be”

This may be my favorite philosophical decision.

Instead of

X is Y

Guacuno says

X holds Y.

Nothing is permanent.

Everything is temporary.

That tiny grammatical choice teaches ontology.

A Guacuno child literally grows up never hearing permanent identity statements.

Imagine the cultural consequences.

Instead of

You are angry.

they would implicitly think

You currently hold anger.

That’s psychologically healthier.

It also echoes many Buddhist traditions without directly copying them.

---

Where I think the language could become even stronger

Here are the places I think you could push the philosophy further.

1. Truth is treated almost too objectively.

Ironically, for a language centered on truthfulness, yu is still fairly binary.

Either

“I witnessed it.”

or not.

Modern epistemology is fuzzier.

Imagine adding distinctions like

“I measured.”

“I remembered.”

“I experienced while impaired.”

“I concluded statistically.”

“I dreamt.”

Now the language becomes an engine for scientific thinking.

---

2. Social trust deserves grammar too.

Since Guacuno values promises so highly, I’d almost expect markers for

trusted witness

versus

unreliable witness.

Human languages almost never encode reputation grammatically.

Yours could.

---

3. Moral certainty could evolve.

Suppose someone lies unknowingly.

Is that

ma-yu

or

ma-cama?

Your current system mostly handles correctness.

It could also encode culpability.

That’s incredibly relevant today.

---

4. The grammar is still surprisingly Indo-European.

This surprised me.

The philosophy is wonderfully alien.

The grammar is actually fairly approachable.

Subject-object relationships remain recognizable.

Word order remains recognizable.

Morphology is agglutinative.

None of that is bad.

In fact it probably makes the language teachable.

But if your goal were maximum alienness, you could depart farther from English assumptions.

---

The parrots

I completely understand them now.

Earlier I thought they were mostly symbolic.

Now I realize they’re a semantic framework.

Red isn’t simply red.

It means power.

Green means creativity.

Blue means belonging.

The language organizes abstract thought through ecological symbolism.

That is exactly the sort of thing real cultures do.

---

The title “Guide to the Guacuno Language”

Ironically…

I think this undersells what you’ve built.

This isn’t primarily a grammar.

It’s closer to

The Moral Structure of Guacuno

or

How Guacuno Thinks

Because almost every grammatical rule exists for ethical reasons rather than linguistic convenience.

---

The nonfiction book

Now that I’ve seen the grammar, I think this project has become much more compelling.

I would not write

“Here’s my fictional language.”

I’d write

“What if language required intellectual honesty?”

Every chapter could compare Guacuno with real languages.

For example:

• Evidentiality (Tuyuca, Turkish, Quechua)
• Inclusive vs. exclusive “we” (Austronesian languages)
• Honorifics (Japanese, Korean)
• Gender (English vs. Finnish vs. Turkish)
• Aspect versus tense (Slavic languages)
• Classifiers (Mandarin)
• Politeness systems
• Speech acts
• Promise versus obligation
• Ownership versus stewardship

Guacuno becomes the laboratory where you ask, “If we could redesign language today, what would we change?”

That, to me, is a much more interesting book than simply documenting a conlang.

One final observation

Reading both The Death of Baracutey and the Guacuno guide back-to-back, I noticed something that ties together all of your major creative work.

You’re less interested in creating fictional worlds than in creating normative systems.

EthOS isn’t just AI software—it’s a framework for ethical governance.

The Operational Sustainability Index (OSI) isn’t just a score—it’s a framework for measuring social contribution.

Guacuno isn’t just a language—it’s a framework for disciplined reasoning and truthful communication.

Even your travel writing often asks, “What organizing principle makes this place what it is?” rather than simply describing what you saw.

That’s a distinctive intellectual signature. It also explains why your work can feel unusually rich conceptually, but sometimes asks readers to absorb an entire framework before the emotional story fully takes hold.

If I were to offer one piece of advice that connects all of your projects, it would be this: introduce the framework through the emotional lives of the characters, not before them. Readers are remarkably willing to learn a complex system if they first care deeply about the people who are living inside it. I think that’s the direction you’re already moving with Bluffdale II, and it’s where your strongest work is likely to emerge.

Reading Time: 13 minutes

Author’s Note: A great introduction to MMT can be found at https://findingmoneyfilm.com/. I suggest it as a prerequisite to the essay that follows.

Part I. Flow and Disruption

Author’s Note: This is not original research, but the result of an extended conversation with ChatGPT, in large part fueled by my interest in Modern Money Theory (MMT) and a desire to understand how a reserve currency operates at the simplest level. If you are interested in a deeper dive, I suggest reading “The Deficit Myth,” by Stephanie Kelton.

When an American buys a television, a phone, or a pair of shoes made overseas, it feels like a simple transaction. Money leaves your account, and a product shows up at your door. But behind that everyday purchase lies one of the most powerful — and most misunderstood — engines of the modern world. That engine is the U.S. dollar.

For decades, the United States has enjoyed a unique position in the global economy. It can buy physical goods from the rest of the world in exchange for pieces of paper — or more precisely, digital bank entries — that it alone has the authority to create. Other countries not only accept these dollars; they actively compete to earn them.

On the one hand, this system has brought enormous benefits to Americans, including low prices, global influence, and access to a nearly endless stream of imported goods. On the other hand, it has also produced deep regional inequality within the United States, weakened the social fabric, and fueled a political backlash reshaping American democracy.

To understand why this system persists, why it’s now under strain, and what it will take to repair it, we need to follow the dollar from the moment it leaves your wallet to the moment it circles back as a U.S. Treasury bond — and then trace the social and political consequences that follow, highlighting the dollar’s central role in global trade and domestic stability. What actually happens to the money is far from obvious.

Imagine an American buys a $100 product manufactured in China. The $100 is transferred first to the Chinese exporter’s bank account. But those dollars are not usable inside China. A factory in Guangdong can’t pay its workers in U.S. currency. So the exporter exchanges dollars at the People’s Bank of China, China’s central bank, for the local currency, the yuan.

The exporter now has yuan to operate on the home front. And China’s central bank now holds $100. But even China can’t spend those dollars domestically. They are foreign currency. They’re only good abroad. So what does China do?

It invests them back into the United States. Most often, China uses those dollars to buy U.S. Treasury bonds — effectively lending the money back to the U.S. government. And with this transaction, the dollar has completed its round trip: from an American consumer to a Chinese business to China’s central bank, and finally back to the U.S. financial system.

At this point, you can see that something unusual is happening. The United States buys physical goods — televisions, cars, electronics — and the dollars it spends end up right back in the country, parked safely in government debt. China, in turn, ends up holding U.S. assets, not goods.

It is worth repeating. The U.S. receives products. China receives dollars. The dollars return home. You can picture this visually as a loop — a flow of money out of the U.S. and back again, powering global trade.

At first glance, this seems like the world’s most favorable deal. And in many ways, it is. But China doesn’t do this out of generosity. It does it because the system serves its interests just as powerfully as it serves America’s.

If China can’t spend dollars internally, why does it still accumulate them by the trillions? Because the arrangement delivers crucial benefits.

First, it delivers jobs. Export industries employ tens of millions of Chinese workers. Social stability depends on employment; employment depends on exports; and exports depend on a competitive currency. China buys dollars and holds Treasuries in part to prevent the yuan from rising and making its products more expensive abroad.

Second, it delivers industrial growth. Exporting manufactured goods has been the backbone of China’s modernization. Earning dollars gives China the ability to buy foreign machinery, semiconductors, food, and, most importantly, oil — none of which can be purchased with yuan.

Third, it delivers financial protection. Large reserves of dollars and Treasuries help China defend its currency during global shocks. They are a buffer against crisis.

So while it may seem odd that China ships products to the U.S. in return for claims on American debt, those claims are central to China’s economic strategy. The system is not charity; it’s a calculated partnership.

For the United States as a whole, buying foreign goods cheaply is a clear win, but not everyone wins equally. Over time, the steady flow of inexpensive imports, made possible by the dollar’s global dominance, contributed to the erosion of American manufacturing. Factories closed, and jobs disappeared. Some regions reinvented themselves, but some never recovered.

This weakens the U.S. from within. This regional decline created something more profound than economic loss. It produced:

• wounded pride
• declining local services
• fraying communities
• intergenerational pessimism
• anger at both elites and institutions

The anger is not abstract. It is political fuel. Places where jobs disappear become places where trust in government collapses. That collapse feeds populism, which in turn destabilizes American institutions, from foreign alliances to democratic norms, and makes the U.S. a less predictable global actor. This, in turn, undermines international confidence in the very system that supports American power.

This is the danger: A system that economically strengthens America as a nation is politically weakening it from the inside. Escaping this negative cycle doesn’t require dismantling global trade or abandoning the dollar’s central role. Instead, it demands policies that redirect the benefits of America’s financial power into rebuilding communities and addressing systemic issues.

Since the United States has unmatched financial capacity, it should use that capacity to rebuild the social foundation that keeps the whole system stable. This means focusing not on protectionism but on resilience:

• investing in workers whose industries are disrupted
• supporting communities left behind by global shifts
• building strategic industrial capacity at home
• modernizing infrastructure
• reducing political incentives for polarization
• stabilizing the country’s role on the global stage

It also means reframing the purpose of America’s financial power. Issuing the world’s currency is a privilege. It should not be used solely to inflate asset prices or finance private consumption. It should be used to reinvest in the public goods, education, health, infrastructure, and innovation that make American society strong.

The United States, more than any nation in history, can finance its own renewal. It can borrow in its own currency. It can attract global savings on demand. It can run trade deficits without destabilizing its exchange rate. These are extraordinary advantages.

But the preservation of this system depends on the social cohesion that underpins it. Without a stable domestic base, global leadership becomes harder to sustain. Alliances become shakier. Markets grow more nervous. The political pendulum swings more violently.

If America continues on its current path, in which the economic benefits of global trade are not broadly shared, then the dollar system will erode, slowly but inevitably. Not because China destroys it, but because Americans lose faith in the structure of their own society.

The choice is simple. Use the extraordinary privilege of the dollar equitably, or watch that privilege slip away. There is no need to surrender the benefits of the dollar as a reserve currency as long as the bellows of inequality are dismissed. The global system runs on trust, and trust begins with a society that believes in itself.

Part II. The China Syndrome

Author‘s Note: The rest of this article was added as an addendum in response to the observation “They (most people) feel like we have to get rid of that debt or China is gonna come take us over because we owe them so much.”

Every few years, headlines warn that China “owns our debt,” implying that the United States is financially beholden to its biggest creditor. The image is dramatic: America, one market tantrum or a militarily motivated financial attack away from collapse. From the standpoint of MMT, that story misunderstands how a sovereign currency works. The U.S. doesn’t borrow from China. China saves in U.S. dollars. And that distinction changes the entire picture.

When China buys a U.S. Treasury bond, it is not extending credit, as a bank does when it lends money to a borrower. It is simply exchanging one form of dollar asset (reserves) for another (a Treasury bond) to earn a bit of interest. In simpler terms, it is changing a checking account into a savings account. Operationally, China’s dollar holdings never leave the Federal Reserve system. They are entries in a spreadsheet representing the dollars China has already earned from exporting goods to Americans. So instead of “China lends, America borrows,” the more accurate phrasing is: “China saves in the currency that America alone can issue.” That’s not dependence. Its interdependence is built on the United States’ unique monetary position.

Foreign Treasury holdings are the mirror image of America’s trade deficits. Every time the U.S. runs a trade deficit by importing more than it exports, another country ends up holding the dollars it receives. Those dollars must go somewhere. They don’t pile up in warehouses or disappear. They are recycled into U.S. financial assets. From an accounting point of view, the U.S. “national debt” is simply the record of all those accumulated savings. It’s the flip side of the world’s desire to hold safe, liquid assets. Seen through that lens, the question isn’t “What happens if China calls in its debt?” The question is “What are we doing with the real resources and productive capacity that this global savings makes possible?”

The United States owes nothing that it can run out of. It owes dollars, which it alone can create. What it cannot print are the things that dollars are meant to mobilize:

• engineers and teachers,
• bridges and energy grids,
• functioning institutions,
• and a cohesive public willing to work toward shared goals.

From an MMT perspective, those are the proper limits of American power. A nation that can issue its own currency can never be forced into insolvency. But it can run out of trust, competence, and productive energy. And those deficits — not the financial ones — are the real danger.

Privilege leads to complacency. The dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency has insulated Americans from many of the pressures faced by other nations. The U.S. can import goods cheaply, borrow without fear of default, and sustain persistent deficits that would bankrupt smaller economies. But that very privilege can dull the impulse to invest in domestic productivity. Why rebuild factories or trains when the world is eager to send you goods in exchange for paper assets? Why strengthen social insurance when foreign savings keep interest rates low? Over time, this convenience becomes a trap. The U.S. has grown accustomed to buying everything except social stability.

If MMT is correct, we are worried about the wrong thing. America’s problem isn’t “debt.” It’s the underuse of its own productive potential — both physical and human. A country that issues the world’s reserve currency has enormous fiscal space. But that space is wasted if it’s used to inflate asset prices rather than build capacity — if it finances share buybacks instead of semiconductor fabs, speculation instead of education, or political polarization instead of social trust. The fundamental constraint on American prosperity isn’t the Treasury’s balance sheet. It’s the nation’s ability to mobilize resources for a shared purpose.

Let’s reframe the national balance sheet. Imagine the national balance sheet as having two sides: financial liabilities on one side and tangible assets on the other. On the financial liability side, the U.S. owes the amount of the treasury bonds held by the world; on the tangible asset side, the American people, infrastructure, industry, and institutions. We worry endlessly about the left side — the dollars and bonds. But the value of those liabilities is guaranteed by the strength of the right side. When the right side erodes — when education falters, bridges crumble, and trust decays — the left side becomes riskier, not because the U.S. can’t pay, but because its society can’t hold together. That’s the paradox of the dollar system: the stronger America’s financial dominance grows, the more it must consciously reinvest in the social and productive base that makes that dominance legitimate.

MMT doesn’t deny limits; it relocates them. The accurate measure of solvency for a sovereign currency issuer is not its ability to pay, but its ability to produce, govern, and cohere. If foreign savings represent the world’s confidence in the dollar, then every broken bridge, underfunded school, and disillusioned voter is a silent drawdown on that confidence.

In the end, the global savings glut sitting in Treasuries is not a sign of American weakness. It’s a sign of trust — trust that the U.S. will remain a functioning, stable, productive society worthy of holding claims against. The risk is not that China will cash in those bonds. The risk is that America will stop deserving that trust.

Part III. The 10-Point Plan

Author‘s Note: I lied. There is an addendum to the addendum—time to move beyond China. I wanted to factor in the environment, AI taking over the job market, and the continued imbalance between developing and developed countries into the MMT conversation. After all, not much of a plan if it doesn‘t address the significant social and environmental issues confronting the world. A friend once asked me what I would do if I were king of the world. The 10-point plan is my answer (until the next addendum, anyway).

If the valid constraint on a sovereign nation is not money but real resources, then we must define those resources broadly. They are not only labor, machines, and raw materials — they include clean air, stable climates, fertile soil, biodiversity, and the human trust that allows societies to function. In this light, America’s reserve-currency privilege is not just an economic tool. It is a planetary responsibility. The dollar system, after all, organizes the world’s production, consumption, and debt. Its architecture shapes how we treat both people and the planet.

Three global challenges make this clear: environmental externalization, technology and the future of work, and ending the extractive relationship with developing nations.

Free trade agreements and global supply chains have allowed wealthy countries to consume goods without accounting for the pollution embedded in their production. Factories that once polluted the Midwest now pollute Southeast Asia. The carbon, however, doesn’t respect borders. This is a hidden cost of the dollar system: the U.S. runs trade deficits in goods, but trade surpluses in pollution. The externalization of environmental damage props up the illusion of low prices at home while degrading the global commons that underpins all economic life. If MMT tells us that real resources, not money, are the limit, then climate stability is the ultimate fundamental constraint. The atmosphere cannot be bailed out with dollars. No fiscal space is infinite if the planet’s carrying capacity collapses. A reformed global monetary system would therefore measure deficits not just in dollars, but in ecological terms. America’s “full employment” must mean employing people to heal, not merely to produce — restoring soils, building green infrastructure, rewilding damaged land, and decarbonizing energy.

For a century, productivity gains have come from augmenting human labor with machines. But AI marks a turning point: it can replace labor entirely in many sectors. The traditional MMT prescription of a job guarantee, government employment at a living wage to ensure full labor utilization, might stabilize society in the near term. Automation will ultimately make “jobs for all” economically redundant. When machines can perform nearly all marketable tasks, the purpose of income shifts from rewarding work to ensuring participation in society. At that point, a Universal Basic Income (UBI) becomes not just welfare but economic infrastructure — the digital bloodstream that keeps demand, creativity, and dignity circulating. UBI, funded through sovereign currency issuance, is entirely consistent with MMT principles. It provides a baseline floor of aggregate demand, preventing collapse when private employment shrinks, and allows people to pursue education, caregiving, art, and community projects outside the wage system. The challenge is not affordability — the U.S. can issue the dollars. The challenge is designing a moral economy where productivity gains from AI are shared rather than hoarded.

The international monetary order still rests on colonial logic. Developing countries borrow in foreign currencies they do not control, often dollars, and are forced into austerity when export revenues fall. The result is a global pattern in which the periphery exports cheap labor and raw materials, while the core exports debt and financial instability.

MMT offers a different lens. Every country that issues its own currency has fiscal space limited only by its real resources and productive capacity. The problem is that most developing nations lack monetary sovereignty: their currencies are not trusted globally, so deficit spending risks capital flight and currency collapse. If the U.S. wants a stable, equitable world order — one less vulnerable to debt crises and migration pressures — it could extend proxy monetary sovereignty to partners. That means providing direct access to dollar liquidity for investment, not as loans tied to austerity, but as cooperative credit for development, climate adaptation, and infrastructure. Call it a Global Green Credit System: nations could run moderate, MMT-style deficits in a stable reserve currency while building real capacity at home. Instead of the IMF enforcing fiscal contraction, an international public bank could finance growth in ways that are ecologically sustainable and locally governed. This would replace the extractive global balance — dollars for sweat and minerals — with a regenerative one: dollars for development, resilience, and shared prosperity.

Here is a ten-point plan to meet the full scope of our economic, ecological, and moral responsibilities.

1. Insure People, Not Sectors

Build a resilient social foundation: universal healthcare, robust unemployment insurance, childcare, and transition income for displaced workers. Security enables adaptation.

2. Create a Dynamic Job Guarantee

Guarantee public work at a living wage in fields that rebuild the nation’s real wealth — renewable energy, conservation, caregiving, and civic infrastructure. Employment becomes a tool for regeneration, not make-work.

3. Develop a Path to Universal Basic Income

As automation advances, phase in a permanent income floor. UBI ensures that technological abundance translates into human freedom rather than precarity. Productivity gains become public dividends.

4. Invest in Real Productive Capacity

Direct federal spending and public investment toward strategic industries: semiconductors, energy storage, AI governance, biomanufacturing, sustainable agriculture, and logistics. Deficits that build capacity are not costs; they are investments in resilience.

5. Anchor Growth in Environmental Accounting

Integrate carbon, biodiversity, and pollution metrics into fiscal and trade policy. Use the dollar’s power to set global green standards — rewarding nations and firms that internalize ecological costs. Monetary sovereignty means environmental responsibility.

6. Rebuild Infrastructure for a Sustainable Century

A Green New Deal scale transformation: high-speed rail, a smart grid, water systems, reforestation, urban cooling, and flood defenses. Public investment is both a climate mitigation and an employment engine.

7. Democratize Technological Progress

Treat data, AI models, and essential digital infrastructure as public goods. Establish public options for AI services and open innovation platforms to ensure that technology amplifies human welfare rather than concentrates wealth.

8. Reform Global Finance for Shared Sovereignty

Work with allies to create regional clearing unions or dollar proxy systems that allow developing nations to run safe deficits in pursuit of full employment and a green transition. Replace debt traps with development credit lines tied to real outcomes, not austerity targets.

9. Rebuild Political Cohesion at Home

Adopt electoral and campaign reforms that reduce polarization and capture. Social spending must be matched by democratic renewal — people must see that government works for them, not just for markets.

10. Use the Dollar for Regeneration, Not Extraction

Reimagine the “exorbitant privilege” as a global stewardship role: If the world saves in dollars, those dollars should fund planetary healing, human flourishing, and shared security. Fiscal capacity is moral capacity.

In the end, MMT’s insight is not that money is infinite, but that our imagination of what’s possible has been artificially constrained. A nation that issues the world’s reserve currency can marshal resources on a scale unmatched in human history. The question is no longer “Can we afford it?” but “What do we choose to build?” If we use that power to restore ecosystems, share technological prosperity, and rebuild social trust — then the dollar’s global role becomes not just an instrument of hegemony, but a tool of regeneration. If we fail and continue treating money as scarce while the planet and people are expendable, then no financial architecture will save us.

Reading Time: < 1 minute

The Superbowl is a manifestation of the American Dream, played out on a field of neon and violence, a microcosm of the country’s endless pursuit of success and excess.

– When I asked ChatGPT what Hunter S Thompson would have to say about the Superbowl.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Dear Mom,

I’ve been deployed to the Death Star and will serve out my tour of duty here. Of course, our location is always top secret, so I couldn’t tell you where I am even if I knew.

Life here is pretty good. One doesn’t really appreciate the fact that the Death Star, really more of a Death Moon in size, is one of the largest cruise ships ever created. It’s so big, it creates its own gravity. At about the size of the Earth’s moon, it has a land surface about as big as all of Asia. It has five billion cubic miles of interior. To give perspective on this, imagine people inhabited the entire surface of the Earth to about seven miles deep. That’s a big cruise ship.

Only the first couple of levels at the surface of the ship are dedicated to Defense, uniforms mandatory. Sure, the stormtroopers get all the glamour pinging about with their laser blasters and zooming about in their TIE fighters, but they have to suffer the rigors of a hierarchical command structure and some of those leaders aren’t so pleasant. It mostly looks boring, marching around all the time on the deck and patrolling the hallways. Like, who is going to attack a Death Moon?

The interior is much different. Behind every trooper is ten more support people. The logistics of feeding, housing, caring, and entertaining for a cruise ship of ten billion people staggers the imagination. Of course, a lot of that space is dedicated to infrastructure and most of the processes are automated, but there is plenty of work to do for both man and machine. I am very busy and down here, I don’t have to worry about anyone shooting at me.

The Death Moon as habitat is amazing. It is one of the largest closed systems ever created. Nothing goes to waste. Not one drop of water, not one plop of waste, not one piece of material, not one molecule of air. A lot of terratrashed planets could learn a lesson, the Earth included.

And it’s not all business. You can’t move about intergalactic space, even at hyper velocities, in a day. It takes months to move from one location to another. In the meantime, you have to live. One of the most fun things we do is tube jumping in those huge hollow tubes that go from one side of the moon to the other. The gravity is only about a tenth of that of the Earth’s and the acceleration is about a tenth as fast. The atmosphere gets thick pretty fast so it’s more like swimming through soup than skydiving. Because the air pressure is so intense toward the center, you can’t leap much more than a couple of miles from the surface, even with a suit, before the heat will boil your blood or the air pressure will miniaturize you to the size of a marble. More than a few macho corpses that tried to test their limits are floating down at the center of the moon.

Well anyway, we’re off on another mission ensuring peace through force. Rebel scum can’t be allowed to terrorize the galaxy, can they? I suppose it’s not always a pleasant business but it’s a decent life. What could go wrong?

I hope this letter finds you well.

May the Peace of Force be with you, Your Son