No, it appears you may have misread, or simply have a fundamental misunderstanding about how things work.

Let me see if I can't reframe this to be more palatable.

If you bought into unbacked fiat currency (and you do so when you trade time for work), you in essence buy into MMT, you don't realize it at first because you don't directly control when it changes, but it does eventually change as the value spent from printing exceeds the value produced over time, its part of any currency lifecycle.

I think the misunderstanding you may be having is you are looking at a narrow time horizon. You need to be looking at the entire cycle because it is cyclical.

MMT (https://www.investopedia.com/modern-monetary-theory-mmt-4588...), its not new, its money printing, and printing is not a new concept. The Mongol Yuan dynasty did it and overprinted back in (1200s), its been tried a number of times since, and failed, and most if not all economies today use fiat in the form of some reserve currency, so it does apply broadly.

Macro effects from a shortfall of value from productive efforts relative to printing start becoming noticeable at around a 3:1 liability to value ratio, and unwinding generally tends to usually take 1-3 years depending on the sector, but that's when there is no printing. Generally speaking direct good producers will force price increases to maintain value, and it trickles down through intermediates from there before showing up in governmental statistics as inflation. For more data oriented on this you may want to look at Ray Dalio/Bridgewater's report on Big Debt Crises series (Argentina,Zimbabwe). Its an excellent read.

Now, incentives are only incentives as long as the value not only meets costs but provides net profit of at least cost inflation for the following two to three years, depending on inflationary acceleration the cost may exceed what normal people have to spend so productive efforts may become wasted if left to spoil.

Compare two examples, you produce something with a 20% expected profit margin and fixed costs upfront, you lock in profits by contract (futures).

The end of the year comes around and you find out the inflation at the end of the year is 2% in the first case, and 400% in the second.

In the first case, its obviously an incentive because you make 16% profit that year, and the prices are stable so costs don't rise more than 2%.

In the latter case, you lose capital reserves. Its no longer an incentive or profitable, and because it changed so rapidly, you have to assume it will continue to do so for a time, markets collapse as less workers can buy the goods you sell.

When the medium store of value is no longer a store of value, factor and goods markets based on that medium of value crash. People won't sell you 1000 dollars of time/labor upfront and accept being paid 1$ in value and be unable to buy anything by the time you get to the market for your own goods.

Unrest and upheaval often occur as food /transportation becomes scarce.

Now back to those two points, the 2% and the 400% may be the same system, but at different times/stages, the first may be the first 20-30 years, the last may be 50-60 years from adoption or a 100 years, it all depends on how much printing occurs in relation to population growth and production.

Fiat like Ponzi schemes have stages where they look sound, externally, right up until a liquidity crisis. You can make a direct comparison between money printing and the expected rate of return on a Ponzi scheme. Its all fine until outflows exceed inflows above and beyond which inevitably happens when you print yourself out of that crisis (as a bailout). You may kick the can down the road a bit, maybe even to your children, but each time you use the lever for that printer more crises will follow until the underlying cause corrects.

This continues up until a point where the exponential printing runs you into debt traps that by the time you know you are in them, its too late to get out.

You then have a razor edge choice to make based on lagging data and accelerating volatility, and that margin for error shrinks until you must choose one or the other.

The choice being inflate at an ever increasing rate (hyper-inflation) where the means of production fails because the market fails as trade fails, or a deflationary spiral, different circumstances same problems.

Fundamentally this situation is a form of the economic calculation problem.

So you can say they have incentives, if you only look at just a narrow window of time during stage 1 and discount later stages, where your statement would be true.

If, however; you look at this from later stages or as a whole, then it is most certainly not true.

As a system engineer, you regularly have to look at all possible states of a system, where time is effectively invariant, written history provides convenient material documenting failure domains of the more probable outcomes for future economic planning (because its already happened at least once), but that doesn't preclude a new situation from occurring that hasn't been documented.

Fundamentally, value doesn't come from nothing, its value for value in exchange of trade which is what money represents, and once that no longer holds true, people don't trade their time or productive efforts for nothing.

Nations over centuries have been trying to break these fundamental limits and failed each time because they do not control value, the people producing goods and factors decide in free-market economies so long as the medium store of value is stable.

Any subsidy, safety net, or worker protections all come with a cost that must be paid by the government for that economic incentive to be an incentive, if you don't believe economic planning includes enforcing a balanced a budget, that itself is a tacit belief in MMT which has a known outcome, regardless of what you may end up calling it.

You have to balance the money being spent with production value being generated, and that's not measured in currency, its measured as a spectrum of what people are willing to exchange for their time, and what they can get in exchange for trading that time without unreasonable loss of that value.

The bottom line being enough to provide food & necessities for survival and raising enough children sufficient to maintain population above the death rate.

Debt only decouples the immediate individual effect from the action. If you don't pay your debts, then productive efforts of others in the economy do so until they can't at which point prices rise or fall until the currency becomes worthless as a store of value for trade.