You’re right Scott that Abenomics is still stuck in the debt paradigm and afraid of the big bugaboo of inflation. Either that or they’re so intimidated by the financial powers that be that they don’t dare counter them.

Inflation does not have to be a problem at all. The concept of balance assumes there are at least two things/factors that cancel out or integrate with each other in some way so that 0 is the effect. That’s why adding income directly to the individual with a dividend and reducing prices at the end of the economic process will create an equilibrium….because they balance the economy’s two primary problems. Now equilibrium (DSGE/libertarian economic theory) or disequilibrium (Keynesianism etc. theories) can become orthodoxies or obsessions that theorists can fall into. A good example of the latter is Steve Keen who despite all of his great work debunking DSGE has allowed that focus to blind him to solutions present in his own graphs debunking general equilibrium theory. For instance, in one of his recent youtube videos he presented a graph that resembled a saddle and correctly stated that in order for DSGE to be the reality the point exactly in the middle of the saddle would have to be where the economy continually tended towards. What he apparently missed is that if policy/action created a balance of relevant and incisive factors….you could reach that “magical” point of equilibrium on the graph.

However, just reaching that point is itself an obsessive orthodoxy of static equilibrium. What Keen actually missed was the insight that an equilibrium could be attained at any point on his graph….by balancing the economy/two most relevant factors according to inputs and outputs. But even then, the obsession of merely attaining (but not maintaining through Time) an equilibrium becomes the orthodoxy/obsession.

Nature abhors and resists a vacuum/stasis. In order to have a dynamic free flowing economic system….you have to push the vector of the entire economy over into increasing freedom for the individual and increasing free flowingness of the system. And that is why crafting policy to maintain a dynamic equilibrium requires “a higher disequilibrium” where total individual incomes EXCEED total costs/prices and the retail discount creates proactive price deflation. Then you have a true integration of both equilibrium and disequilibrium theories where dynamism and mathematics becomes a third unified solution.

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Kevin:  Democratising Money.

This will give you a theme to tie everything together.

To democratise a technology is to give everyone equal access to money.

Money is a technology.

We do not have equal access to money while-ever we make money tokens a store of value.

This is a common thread of all the main monetary reform movements.  Positive Money, Zero cost Money, The AMI removing the ability of banks to create new money, the local money movement, forgiveness of debt, removing usury, and the peer to peer creation of credit, Soddy’s work on money and debt, Henry George and Minsky, Evonomics, Public Banking etc.

A good summary of Soddy’s work which points out the problem is

“The fundamental error of economics is the confusion of wealth, a magnitude with an irreducible physical dimension, with debt, a purely mathematical or imaginary quantity. The positive physical quantity, two pigs, represents wealth and can be seen and touched. But minus two pigs, debt, is an imaginary magnitude with no physical dimension:”

All the above are ways of achieving the same thing which is to stop someone owning another person’s credit through the use of money tokens with a value.  By making money tokens free or zero value we will create scalable cooperative economic systems.

This is the way all the great cooperative systems scale.  Think google search.  Google search is free. The value arises from the use of the free technology of search.  That is, we have democratised search.  Think FaceBook.  We have democratised social interaction. Think AirBNB we have democratised finding a place to stay.  Think Trip Advisor we have democratised finding interesting things. Think Wikipedia. etc.

Make money tokens free and we will get the same expansion of economic activity as we reduce the cost of the FIRE industries and use the resources they take to work for our common goals.  Because money tokens have no value we cannot have a market in money – only a market in credit.  A market in money means the system attempts to increase the number of money tokens in existence and the easiest way to do that is to create more – and that is what we continually fight against and it costs a lot to do it.

Getting rid of money markets means we also get rid of the Equilibrium Theory of Money Markets and all the misery it brings.

One way of making money tokens zero value is through peer to peer credit with adjustments for inflation and no compounding of rent on credit.  This allows for a market in credit where the market is related to real assets.

If Promise theory is a better theory for explaining the interaction of autonomous agents then our theories (models) built on these ideas are more likely to help us make the world of economics more predictable.  Not entirely but much better than we currently do.

Me:   Kevin,

Your post makes perfect sense actually, but what do you think the perfect example of democratizing money is? That’s right, a universal dividend.

And as for the democratization of technology Douglas suggested that over 90 years ago when he coined the phrase “our cultural (national) heritage of productive potential” as a correct and workable justification for the socialization of credit.

Technology has been attempting to lift the so called “curse of Adam” for centuries if not millenia. It’s just that the business model of Finance has been forcing us to re-invent the wheel continually via their monopolization and claim to ownership of credit. If we broke up their monopoly with an idea that counters debt, namely Monetary Grace/Gifting, that would transform the entire structure of the economy and so society.

Soddy was clear and correct in his observation about the difference between wealth and money. But if the definition of inflation is too much money chasing too little goods….how can a policy of retail price deflation possibly be inflationary? And how can there be too little goods in ratio to money….if a good or service has to actually be purchased for the retail price discount to take effect?

So democratization of money and technology are actually two more aspects of the concept of Grace….which is the real common thread that runs through all of the leading reforms and cutting edge economic theories.

Love is the inner reality, willingness and ability to share and care, and Grace is simply Love in action, that is Love applied as our personal actions and as the Love aligned policies, in the temporal universe, of our various human systems.