"balanced budgets" are recessionary. lots of government debt is generally preferable because it means the government is spending more money than taking in. that money eventually goes to citizens and fuels growth.

This is completely wrong, both empirically and theoretically and shows the liberal ideology deeply embedded in MMT theory.

The stuff above is largely correct but better stated in the Marxist way. There are two kinds of government appropriation, real and symbolic. Real appropriation is spending, the government ordering people to do something, build a road, teach some students, etc. Symbolic appropriation is taxation, it doesn't actually matter that the government takes some bits of paper (or gold), but it justifies the real appropriation and sort of determines how the burden of government action is distributed.

None of this is to say that getting rid of taxation is a good idea, indeed, it is impossible to get rid of government appropriation without getting rid of government entirely. It is worse to have a hidden appropriation that has distorting effects as in the case of the Soviet Union and better to have transparent taxation which doesn't punish certain kinds of enterprises (namely the state owned ones, by requiring them to fund the whole government).