Good attempt at integrating the BIG and JG perspectives. Personally I’m not that concerned about any “problems” associated with a universal dividend. 90% of us find purpose even under the present austerity and I suspect that even more would find the same under the relative prosperity available with it. Even so I think the best way to prepare us for a post scarcity economy would be to re-define the concept of full time work into 20 hr/wk of employment 20 hr/wk of volunteerism and/or self determined positive, constructive purpose plus a $1500/mo. dividend to everyone 18 and older. This would keep the labor market robust even with the virtual certainty that innovation and AI will destroy employment at a rate 20-30 times faster than it ever has before, allays any authoritarian fears that “everyone will become lazy” and also costlessly injects needed demand directly into the hands of individuals so that the economy will flow freely….like general equilibrium theorists dream it does. Of course if one wanted to work 40 or 60 hrs/wk and their employer wanted to retain them that would be fine and they wouldn’t have to do any volunteering while still receiving their dividend, and of course someone who just wanted to take care of their family would also still receive their dividend. Purpose trumps employment after all.

Actually we’ll want to implement another macro-economic policy strategically placed at retail sale where merchants would give say a 40% discount to consumers and then all of the merchants’ discounts would be rebated back to them by a monetary authority mandated to specifically do that. This would not only prevent any price inflation, but actually integrate price deflation harmlessly and profitably into profit making systems.

Of course the present monetary and financial authorities would resist this, but if we are smart we’d start a grass roots movement to communicate how the above two policies are in the interests of the small to medium sized business owner as it would insure a steady stream of additional demand for their products/services and enable them to sell them at 40% less than their best competitive price….while getting that full price. It’s what I call the new Steve/Powell Memo.

As David Graeber has shown us finance has been the problematic business model for at least the last 5000 years. I’m not interested in destroying finance, only de-throning and de-toothing it so it can take its correct and smaller place along side every other business model.

In order to de-hypnotize themselves and the general populace from the dominating monetary paradigms of debt and loan ONLY economists need to integrate monetary gifting into the debt based system.

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