Me: As Steve Keen has observed the economy is monetary not “a veil over barter” as neo-classical economic theory characterizes it. Money is actually one of the greatest and most useful inventions in history and for those reasons should not be abandoned. Money in fact is not the problem, but rather its virtual monopoly control by the business model of finance and its almost utter paradigmatic monopoly ideas of debt, loan and for production only by same.
The major problems with “the neo-classical synthesis” are its failure/refusal to confront these monopoly paradigms leaving the business model of finance curiously dominant in what is alleged to be a free and free flowing market, and its abstract and largely unconscious understanding of time as a mere flow of clock time instead of a flow of moments, each moment of which the vast majority of individuals and most enterprise, i.e the system, must endure a scarcity ratio of total individual income to total costs/prices enforced by the cost accounting convention that all costs must go into price, the continually rising depreciation costs of fixed capital, the continually rising costs of wasted energy enforced by the laws of thermo-dynamics and the inexorable wedding of profit making systems, obtainable (labor) cost efficiencies and now the coup de gras of AI which is posed to eliminate aggregate individual demand at a rate far exceeding the rate by which innovation has ever and always eliminated it since the industrial revolution.
And the way to eliminate these systemic problems including the dominance of the business model of finance is to wisely integrate a new paradigm/economic concept of monetary grace as in gifting into the debt based money system with strategically implemented policies specifically designed to rectify/invert the above scarcity ratio.
PG: “Gift extra money into the system and the rich will just end up with it, so you’ll have to gift more and more forever. Social Credit fails to address the imbalance of economic power. There is no escape from within our current concept of money as a limited supply of anything made valuable by its own scarcity. That is the fundamental problem.”
Me: Inequality of income itself is not the problem, but rather compulsive systemic inequality. As the monopoly monetary distributive paradigms of only debt, only loan and for production only enable finance to enforce systemic monetary scarcity, monetary gifting is the new paradigm that forms a proper dualism to integrate that will break up that monopoly financial condition and with aligned policies will result in the thirdnesses of wisdom which are the classical values of individual prosperity, economic flow and systemic free flowingness.
Barter is a fine concept on the individual level, I have no objection to it there, however it is systemically regressive or even never actually existed in a spatial-temporal sense if we look at David Graeber’s analysis. Hence it falls into systemic unworkability and inefficiency and becomes an object of obsessively contentious dualism which unfortunately characterizes almost everything theoretical these days including economics, politics, religion etc. So what we need is the thirdness of wisdom, a Wisdomics if you will, in order to extricate ourselves from both habitual dualism and the current lingering mess.
PG: Money is created as debt to a bank on a schedule and then saved and replaced with new debt creating multiple principal debts of the same money BY DESIGN of the banking system (4:1 in the USA according to Fed stats) . Add in private debt outside the banks and you have a situation where everyone is trying to pay off (in the USA) as much as $10 in principal debt with only $1 dollar available. That is why the system never has enough money and is dependent on constant growth of debt to banks to avoid collapse.
And money created as a promise of something specific from someone specific (Producer Credits) can potentially be exchanged between 3rd parties or used as savings just as effectively as conventional money. It’s not barter. It’s time limited credit money created as a pre-purchase of the goods and services we actually want and payable only in those goods and or services. Thus there is never a mismatch between production and the money available to purchase that production. The ratio is always 1:1 by DESIGN.
Me: What about the ever increasing additional capital costs of depreciation etc. that must inevitably be computed and added to price? What about the disruptive force of AI that is poised to eliminate aggregate individual income at a rate 20-30 times greater than it ever has before? What about the inevitability of demand pull inflation because “the fundamental direction of capitalism is up.” ?
“Producer credits” ignore and fail to provide the necessity of having a dual macro strategy of a dynamic way to increase demand and simultaneously decrease prices and are actually just misplaced dividends entrusted to enterprise who already have depreciation allowances to give them a stay of execution of additional costs while the individual languishes in ever increasing scarcity of demand.
From previous interactions with you producer credits appear to be your answer to the libertarian irrational computation that government is ALWAYS bad…..even if, as in the case of Wisdomics, its mandated monetary and economic policies were directly focused on all of the actual problematic issues, and their effects were the accomplishment of individual economic freedom, greater freedom and likelihood of profit for enterprise, a dynamic systemic free flowingness…..and last but not least the only way that we will ever practically accomplish an integration of the best aspects of the agendas of both the left and right, namely abundant economic democracy and the elimination of then redundant and oppressive governmental bureaucracies.
Fixed ideas inevitably become rigid and blinding orthodoxies. What economic theory requires is a guiding philosophical concept whose many wise aspects includes dynamic process as in consciousness of continual change.