@ Neil

“Economies need to have high levels of internal cohesion within the political zone and low levels of coupling with other political areas. Then they will be resilient and can pursue policies for their own people that may be quite different from other political areas.”

Precisely. This is actually a description of the concept of subsidiarity which is the only kind of globalization that can be of benefit to the individual of any nation (internal national cohesion) and not become an enforced tyrannical one size fits all ideology like either socialism or finance capitalism.

“gov’t employment programs are unworkable”

This is simply an arbitrary statement. The correct statement would be that they are workable and better than austerity, but they are a palliative and incomplete policy most basically because the productive process/economic system itself is inherently incapable of creating an equilibrium of total prices and total individual incomes with which to moment to moment liquidate those prices…by injecting money into it/an enterprise first…and hence what the economy requires are monetary policies which go directly to the individual first and which also do not incur a cost to the individual or to the system. In other words the actual solution entails the distribution of an ongoing gift of individual income, a universal dividend, and then (because as Steve Keen/Hyman Minsky correctly observe) price wise “the fundamental tendency of capitalism is upward” …so you also need to have a policy which deals with that price inflationary fact, and preferably proactively reverses that upward flow and effects actual price deflation, in other words a retail discount to the individual which is rebated back to participating merchants. The consequent increase in purchasing power from such dividend and discount policies would be to largely do away with the necessity for consumer finance in order to have a satisfactorily middle class lifestyle. As finance is a 5000 year old problematic business model…I’d say such “financial smalling up” policies are way over due.

*****************************************************************************

@ Nicholas

The price anchor is the retail discount mechanism I described above. In fact it is a price deflater which still fits seamlessly within profit making systems because it is rebated back to merchants.

As for “How does work get done?” it gets done the same way it gets done now….only better…by robotization and AI. If there is more demand is there any doubt that production will be willing and able to absorb it? Also, if free sway is given to technological innovation and AI is there any doubt that more production will be available per unit of resources? The fact is technology and AI are trying to free us, but rigid economic orthodoxy like the insistence that “only employment can be utilized as a policy to solve the problem” foolishly inhibits, but will not be able to resist that freedom. The job of the future is a positive and constructive purpose/purposes. What government should then focus on (and as it should now) is acculturating and encouraging the plethora of positive and constructive purposes other than work for pay.

@ Kevin and others

“progressive taxation and government direction of real resources to
tackle shortages and regulations to inhibit profiteering are better price anchors”

I disagree. Number one retail sale to an individual as I have mentioned before is absolutely the terminal end to price for any unit of service or product making it precisely the place to implement and direct policy. Number two profiteering within the productive process by industries leading up to and including retail sale could be monitored and graciously but definitively dealt with if it was serial and just flimsy accounting hiding profiteering. And again, even if some costs leading up to and including retail sale do go up the discount mechanism looking at and using the correct metric of the ratio of total costs and total individual incomes is there to reduce it. And don’t forget the discounts are fully rebated back to participating merchants so they are not harmed and can make more profit because businesses always make more profit when demand is readily and steadily available. Finally, the discount mechanism is a true macro-economic tool and is correctly placed at the terminal end of the productive process at retail sale…thus it can actually greatly reduce retail prices to consumers/everyone without harm to any traditionally productive enterprise. I mean like by 30, 40 maybe 50%. Why not? It’s rebated back to merchants after all, and discounting by these higher rates will simply better free the individual economically and also greatly reduce both the individual and businesses from the truly problematic part of the economy, namely Finance. Then, implement my trinitarian model for Finance previously posted…and the system flows gracefully and prosperously for everyone…even for the smalled up model of Finance. The motto again needs to be Transformation first!…rational and ethical regulation right along with it! Government needs to be sovereign but gracious, patient but adult and real, philosophically and ethically hierarchical and yet structurally obeying and reflecting the concept of subsidiarity.

Understanding the above is made easier when one “breaks through the sound barrier” about the most basic disequilibrating factor in economics which is that, as a flow, there is a continual scarcity of individual incomes created by commerce/the economy itself in ratio to total costs that need to be liquidated. In other words A will not pay for A + B. One has to actually decide to look at the dynamic flow of cost accounting statistics where depreciation costs and a host of other additional and extraneous costs will reveal that truth, and then do the calculus on the relevant data. That is the non-blinkered, non-orthodox and scientific way that reality is best deciphered. But one actually has to be willing to look at the data. I’ve tried to get the Austrian/Libertarian blogger Mish Shedlock and his forum members to actually do that for like 8-9 years. Nope. Orthodoxy gets in the way. Surely liberal progressive theorists can’t be that stubborn and orthodox.