IMO we need to integrate the idea of a BIG/Dividend AND work/service to the society. That resonates with the orthodox and the free thinkers. I recently floated the idea of having the authorities declare that the new definition of full time work was 15-20 hrs/week. Hence you could employ a lot more people and make the necessity of a BIG/Dividend a lot more clear as businesses could not expect to double their payroll and survive, but could double their employees and pay the same total payroll with the above integration. Again, that would make the inadequacy of total individual incomes more real to everyone which the rational person would say, “Okay, lets GIVE everyone an income that along with the new modern technologically advanced definition of full time employment enables them to have a guaranteed middle class level of income and lifestyle.

And service, so long as it was part time, to the nation whether it be caring for the family, elders, mentally ill, drug addicted or cleaning up the environment wouldn’t hurt a generation otherwise distracted from distraction by distraction.

Integrate. Once you have a BIG/Dividend and Discount in place… regressive forces will never be able to get rid of it. And the trend toward less enforced work and more leisure as in self determined attention to positive activity one enjoys…will take root.

John:  Probably partly because so many Social Crediters take an unlikely figure for the “gap”, a totally improbable 50% in this case.
In a fully functioning modern society (when it exists) the “gap” is filled by new debt. If debt incrteased by 50%. even half that, every year, the system would have collapsed copmpletely long ago.
I on’t claim it musty be as sm all as this, but a gap of 3 to 5% could cause the problems Douglas predicted and which showed his analysis is correct.
Neither Douglas nor anyone else has quantified the “gap|” or even devised accurate means of measuring it. For that reason. implementation of Social Credit remedies wopuld have to be done in small steps involving trial and error and cautions procedurte.
Until we have a Credit Authiority with reliable statistics to work on, we siumply don’t know what we can do.

J R

Me:  Yeah, so we can go another hundred years still relying on itty-bitty increases in income and itty-bitty decreases in amounts of borrowing…so the Banks can rule everything….forever. So we can “free” everyone into second class/welfare level incomes and the regressive forces say, “See, I told you it was just socialist enslavement all along.”

NO!!! The Dividend and Discount policies are the very definition and component parts of an economic equilibrium. They are the perfect reflections of the digital + and – nature of the money system, and zero in on the most basic metric that describes the deepest problem, the scarcity of individual incomes and the excess/additional costs that the system ITSELF CONTINUOUSLY creates.

No more infinitely small reform steps that can be easily reversed and that end up being one step forward three steps back!

Complete Transformation FIRST!!! Regulation if we need it …right along with it!

We need to think beyond “the Gap” as an orthodoxy, beyond a mere balancing/equilibrium and toward a higher disequilibrium of the gap ratio where individual incomes are HIGHER than costs/prices and yet the economy is also more stable.

Where we are CONSCIOUSLY utilizing philosophy and policy to change the vector of the economy toward individual freedom and systemic free flowingness, and toward money as a ticket for the distribution of production in a post scarcity high tech economy. Conscious Economics…that’s exactly what we need.

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Stuart:  Do you think being an authoritarian and a racist are mutually exclusive? To hell with any media spin, watch him on video and draw your own damned conclusions. You have to be pretty deaf to his statements on race, and the context in which they are made, to be oblivious to his racism. His scapegoating of Blacks, Mexicans, and Muslims is remarkably reminiscent of Hitler, and the way his racial dog whistles inspire his lumpen disciples to violence is sickening.

Me:  They can be mutually exclusive. I think Trump is politically very smart and I think he will shamelessly utilize demagoguery to get to his goal. After that I would bet you 10 to 1 he’s a moderate whose mind is at least open on certain matters. And again, I never said I liked him, I just don’t feel the need to swallow liberal or conservative media and political orthodoxy. You can drink the liberal kool-aid propaganda as much as you want, and right up until Trump is elected….I drink neither the liberal nor the libertarian/conservative kool-aid, I’m outside of the box and can see the idiocies and particles of truth in both perspectives. I’m even outside of the Social Credit box. I’m for looking and seeing and integrating. Not re-gugitating orthodoxy in any way.

Stuart:   Well, I suppose it helps to get outside the box to see how wacko wisdom can be, eh? But no, to be honest, I don’t know what you mean when you say “..which a lot like the modern attitude toward actual Wisdom now.”

Me:  Wisdom is the integrative process itself and also the means of garnering it. An integration is not a compromise that tries to conglomerate things that don’t work, are inapplicable and are not true. Modern economic and monetary theory, political perspective, and lots of other issues are so riven with orthodox thinking that even compromise is anathema let alone integrating the truth(s), intentions, workabilities and applicabilities of these things. Hence orthodoxy is rife, passes as truth and so no actual progress occurs. It’s just a lot of heat and no light. Wisdom is actually looking at things, not relating to them via an orthodoxy. Modernity either reactively rejects wisdom outright because they think it smacks of religion, or is so into orthodox opinion parading itself as truth that they wouldn’t recognize it if it came up and bit them in the ass. You have to de-construct everything…and then be willing to re-assess some of what you’ve de-constructed and re-integrated…if it actually does integrate. I came out of a liberal progressive perspective. There’s a lot of orthodoxy there…just like there is from the libertarian/conservative perspective.

John:  Douglas stated that, under the present system it was “necessary to produce a machine gun to sell a loaf of bread”.
Obviously, he was speaking”tongue om cheek” because whatever the extent of the”gap” the relative costs are a bit exaggerated.
However, the fact remains that, if we accept his analysis, it is necessary to bring new funds into circulation by borrowing to ensure that all of procuction will be sold.  The alternative is for some industry to go bankrupt.
Production of anything that is not a consumer good will do the job.  It might be new capital equipment or public infrastructure.
That is why, at present, all is well when industry is expanding and why a pause will cause a serious downturn.
It also means that, in “good times” whern expanmsion is occurring. or when governments are running deficits or both, the general increase in overall debt, less any inflationary factor of course,  should provide a reliable estimate of any gap.
Surely this is obvious?

Me:  You make a numerical orthodoxy out of “the Gap”, and a pecuniary orthodoxy at that. Economic Equilibrium is stasis. The temporal universe does not allow a stasis because it is process. Ideas are static…unless of course you cognite on the concept/idea of Grace which is BOTH idea AND process/action/policy COMPLETELY INTEGRATED. Integration is Wisdom. Grace is the pinnacle concept of Wisdom and BOTHNESS completely integrated.

Grace is abundant/abundance not scarcity, meagerness or an orthodoxy thereof. Grace being completely integrated bothness is/becomes a distinct third “thing” known as trinity/unity/oneness/wholeness and so escapes the orthodoxies of the opposing dualities from which it arose. Of course Grace can become an orthodoxy as well….if it stops looking and  integrating, but then it has fallen back into stasis and duality….which is not Grace.

John:  Steve, I can’t see how what you say applies to the practical argument I put forward.
I suspect the terms you use are your version of the most important aspect of Social Credit, the philosophy of the importance of the individual.
I haver no problem with that,  just with the highly improbable, un-thought-out way that some present the means of achieving it.
J R

Me:  Improbable and un-thought-out John? Everything, if it is to have integrity and be actually integrated/integrative proceeds from its philosophy, and likewise if policy is to be fully integrated with its stated philosophy…it must align LOGICALLY and CONCEPTUALLY with that philosophy. I’m just pointing out the alignment of economic theory and how it perfectly reflects the aspects of the concept of Grace, and also pointing out logical inconsistencies that some have with that. Conceptual and Cognitive dissonance is rife. People are confused about both economics and Wisdom. I’m just trying to get them to look at both and integrate them….because the goals of economics and the aspects of the concept of Grace actually DO align with each other.

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Me:  I believe you have asked me these questions before John. I think you have a misunderstanding that there are two types of discount policies. There is only one that makes any sense in a monetary economy and that is retail discount. The “just price” is kind of carry over language and thinking from the original non-monetary Distributists like Hillaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton who although they are philosophically in attune with Social Credit were advanced and surpassed in monetary and economic thinking by Douglas. Douglas, despite the fact that he saw things much more clearly than anyone else in the early 20th century and today’s economists are only now coming back to partially re-discover his insights, was at the very beginnings of what is considered macro-economic thinking. Macro-economics is concerned with aggregates, aggregate numbers and their effects on the stability of economies. Douglas was brilliant and insightful, but, being at the beginning of that new way of looking at economics I don’t think even he actually had a clear idea of what the macro-economic tool of the Discount could have. Everyone lives within the horizon of their own culture and times. Not even Douglas could completely stepped outside of this or see the effects of the new discipline of macro-economics.

I have done as thorough an exegesis as I currently can of the core concept of Social Credit, namely Grace/Self Awareness/Consciousness (these three are synonymous) and as only a part of that exegesis shown the logical and reflective philosophical alignments between them and the classical goals of economics and economic theory. Douglas correctly pointed out that all policy should align with its philosophical counterpart. I’ve just taken it a couple of integrations higher as I have also integrated linguistics and trans-personal psychology/spirituality into that study.

As for how would I stop merchants from tacking some more onto their prices, that is one of the reasons why I advocate a large price deflationary discount percentage in order to compensate for that possibility/inevitability as well as to reverse the entropic/cost inflationary nature of the economy.

And as for the rich getting the larger numerical benefit…..such socialist envy is irrelevant if the individual is guaranteed a relatively abundant, satisfactory middle class income level as well as increasing leisure time to pursue his own interests and/or self development. So I don’t trouble myself with it.