Good ideas don’t always outcompete bad ones. But willful foolishness usually has a cost.

So it is with modern monetary theory. Ironically, this basket of economic fallacies, embraced by policymakers during the Biden-Harris administration, may have returned Donald Trump to the White House.

Exit polls conclusively demonstrated voters are fed up with the high cost of living. The economy topped their list of concerns; three-quarters of the electorate attributed some degree of hardship to inflation. The de facto embrace of modern monetary theory-style fiscal and monetary extravagance over the past four years explains how we got here.

For the unfamiliar, modern monetary theory is a fringe school of economic thought arguing that the federal government, as the sole issuer of legal tender, can issue virtually limitless amounts of new money to fund itself. Bucking thousands of years of evidence that such reckless policies lead to currency devaluation, advocates shirk all blame when inflation occurs, insisting instead that prices increased due to “corporate greed” and “price gouging.”

Perhaps some of that sounds familiar.