MMT says you can get away with spending slightly more than you take in. The logic is that if you can print it you're not going to run out, per se, and a small amount of inflation is thought to be good anyway. I'm not qualified to comment on how correct that is, but it's true most countries accumulate debt over time, and nobody in finance cares until it's multiple times the annual GDP.

If you're straight up pretending that making more money gives you more stuff, your green paper is just going to lose the fight with reality. Places like Venezuala or Zimbabwe, instead of taking the hint early on, double down, and that's how you get 100 trillion dollar bills after a while.

Vietnam is doing pretty well actually.

I mean, the USSR didn't have hyperinflation until they were trying to redo the recipe at the end. "Money is real, and making more will help" is honestly a weird line of reasoning for people who hate "capitalism".

Depending on how you define smart, sure, there's been smart ones. At this point there's an accumulation of evidence markets work better than the Soviet system of markets+random constant intervention, but that wasn't always the case, and even now there's people who are smart but have Ben Carson syndrome, and think because they're good at their field they understand economics, and can quantify it's limitations with no research.

By some people's standards I'm a communist, too, since capitalism is poorly defined, and communism is often just defined as the opposite of it.