Wage and price controls indeed will not work UNLESS you allow rental merchants to establish their most competitive price first, and then implement a discount to prices thereafter and at the terminal end to the economic process, namely retail sale, and then rebate the merchant for his discounts. Then no economic agent is or can possibly be harmed by it. Implement a percentage discount that is higher than the rate of inflation for a given period and you have the Austrian dream of deflating prices and a roaring profit making economy. You heard it here first (unless your conditioning and habitual addiction to an incomplete orthodoxy closes your mind to it) . It’s called Wisdomics/Gracenomics.

Jack:  The rebate check comes from a money tree that grows in your yard?

Me: No, it comes ex nihilo from a sovereign central banking institution (and eventually from a constitutionally created arms length 4th branch of government) absolutely governed by the policy mandates to distribute a universal dividend and the deflationary retail discount percentage….just like the private self interested Banks do now.

Joelg5:  “Confusion in this regard leads to totalitarian solutions and tyranny. Perhaps not unlike where the USA sometimes seems headed at accelerating speed.”

Me:  Yes it does UNLESS the policy mandates I’ve described on this thread are implemented. Why? Because those policies are based on the concept of grace as in monetary Gifting. As explained these policies are NOT heavy handed, intrusive or manipulative price controls, but rather gift both the consumer AND businesses by using the digital nature of debt and the money system and so are actually productive of increasing individual freedom and systemic free flowingness and even produce the Austrian perspective that price deflation should be the condition of the economy. Freedom is freedom. A = A. The idea that government policy MUST be intrusive, manipulative and tyrannical is a generalization that is irrational. “Check your premises.”

advancingtime:  Unfortunately, much of the impact and pain of raising the minimum wage falls upon small business, the real creator of jobs and directly upon the heads of workers it is intended to help.

Me:  Not if you do the reciprocal gifting policy of a (rebated back to retail merchants) macro-economic discount to prices. Gifting in a digital debt based money system is an extremely potent and powerful force.