more armchair economics

I ran across a series of blog posts about "Modern Monetary Theory", and I'm trying to make sense of them.  The authors reach a lot of conclusions that I like politically, which suggests I'd better be more than usually skeptical to avoid confirmation bias.  One idea in particular intrigued me, and I thought I would try to analyze it on my own before reading more of what they have to say about it.

As I understand it, one of their fundamental principles is that over the past 80 years the U.S. and most other developed nations have moved from the gold and/or silver standard to the "tax standard": the value of the U.S. dollar, no longer backed by a fixed amount of gold per dollar, is ultimately backed by its ability to pay U.S. taxes (which, the libertarians will point out, is backed by the U.S. government's ability to punish people for not paying taxes).  In a way, this is nothing new: for hundreds of years of gold-and-silver coinage, a coin's worth was not only the value of the metal in it but also the promise that the King would accept it in payment of taxes.  We've just eliminated the precious-metal component entirely.

( more analysis here )