Me: And let foreign goods participate in the discount as well. That way the penalty on foreign countries would be minimal and domestic production would definitely be encouraged by the 35% discount. Of course the discount alone could be the policy for everyone, but sometimes you have to go into agreement with idiocy in order to make it more palatable and hopefully more likely that they will consciously realize the efficacy of a sane policy like a retail discount or a universal dividend.
In other words “tricking” the orthodox into cognition can sometimes raise consciousness. It’s a well known practice in most wisdom traditions.
GM: Besides renegotiating the WTO?
Me: I have no problem with re-negotiating WTO, TPP et all especially around a philosophy and policies based on gifting as corporatism with global reach goes hand in glove with the coalescing of financial power. Economic hierarchy itself is not necessarily the problem and does not have to be in conflict with the catholic social policy consideration of subsidiarity…..if the philosophy guiding and impelling it is primarily based on the various aspects of the concept of grace and the policies that extend from it accurately reflect the philosophy.
GM: Who eats the discount? Retailer? Manufacturer? Taxpayer? Whose ox is gored?
Me: You’ve been here for how many months and haven’t absorbed the concept of the National Credit Office???
GM: You have no problem? The negotiators usually have many.
Me: Like we don’t already know that? We’re here to raise consciousness about both the pragmatism and the ethical ascension of the wisdom concept of grace as in gifting applied to the economy and money system and actualize them in the temporal universe as policy.
When one has the cognition that the wisdom concept of grace as in gifting is not an “airy-fairy” MERELY transcendent one but also the quintessentially resolving, freeing and free flowing one TEMPORALLY is when they begin to realize that the set of spirituality includes, encompasses and edifies the sets of science and intellect….and they stop worrying about conflicts so much and start focusing on practical and ethical policy solutions instead.
GM: one’s ethical meat, another’s poison.
Me: Only if they forget to integrate love and grace into their opinions. Then full understanding and tolerance, both aspects of love and grace, will allow for differences of opinion and yet civility, another aspect of same.
M: Is a National Credit Office or Authority really necessary or could its job be performed by the whole community in a distributed and automated way?
CL: No, absolutely not. It would be public ownership of the entire blockchain. In fact, by having a national credit office, it would only contradict the very authenticity and trustworthiness of the network. The only way that a blockchain can be considered correct is if no one party owns a majority of the nodes on the network. It truly is the ultimate solution in public ownership of the banking system.
Me: PBI = Public Banking Institute
The biggest problem with Bitcoin is it is a structural “solution”. I have no problem with structural reform itself, but philosophy and ethics are primary and underlie structure, thus they trump it and are the proper means of guiding it. Also, Bitcoin is only cost subtractive. You can subtract costs all the way to a spiraling recession or depression…unless you have a direct means of increasing individual incomes and lowering prices for both individuals and enterprise.
GM: Could SC like Bitcoin take wing without government and bank support? In fact despite their opposition?
Me: “If someone in UT wants to use cannabis, illegal there but legal in CO, yet unbankable everywhere because of AML regimes(anti money laundering) should SC allow it and provide a discount?”
I think there’s an algorithm and also restrictions that purchase must be local already in place that would deal with that problem. Better AML is necessary, but the discount being only for goods and services should not be an AML problem.
“Could SC like Bitcoin take wing without government and bank support? In fact despite their opposition?”
I don’t think it could or should. Banking support of course will be kicking and screaming, but what else is new and what are ethics and even a cursory look at the history of money for?
GM: A lovely thought, and one that you should perhaps bring to the attention of the trade negotiators involved in the failure of the recent Doha round. Once they realize that the prophet Steve, peace be upon him, has spoken, surely they will put aside all self interest and do exactly that. But the question nags: If the case for grace and gift is as clear and compelling as you suggest, why has SC achieved nothing in a century?
Me: “If the case for grace and gift is as clear and compelling as you suggest, why has SC achieved nothing in a century?”
I’m sorry, it’s the question of an intellectual simpleton and/or someone who hasn’t taken the core of their own faith to heart. It’s obvious that western civilization is increasingly caught up in obsessive conflict and consequent intellectual and theoretical egotism, hence the answer is people and the system are “where they’re at”. I’m confident no one here (except apparently yourself) doesn’t understand that, or the difficulties of breaking mental habits. However, blithely characterizing a call to contemplate and self actualize love and grace both personally and systemically via policy as ” a lovely thought” seems itself to betray a lack of faith/confidence in same even though they be the core experiences of one’s own faith.
DM: (Regarding whether or not Social Credit would be Pareto Efficient.) Thanks. If I understand it properly, the concept assumes there must be winners and losers in every transaction. I don’t agree. A good deal is any deal that two parties are in agreement of and satisfied with. That is a win-win transaction. It becomes win/lose when one party is desperate and the other takes advantage. In a social credit economy, desperation is eliminated because everyone has the means of food, clothing and shelter. What this is describing is an accurate description of the present order of things though. The deliberate shortage of money engineered by our present banking system, coupled with our flawed cost accounting system is screwing everything up.
GM: U do not understand your difficulty. Pareto efficiency describes a state in which everyone is well enough that no one can be made better off except by making someone worse off. ” Soak the rich” or “cut entitlements” to balance the budget are both Pareto inefficient. A win- win transaction is efficient, by contrast.
Me: Dean’s right. That Pareto efficiency is considered difficult or unobtainable is just another economic orthodoxy that social credit would nullify just like general equilibrium, that money is “a veil over barter”, rational expectations, perfect knowledge of all economic agents etc. that is part and parcel of current neo-liberal economic theory. You should listen to Steve Keen’s youtube videos and subscribe to Real World Economic Review Blog you’ll see that virtually all of neo-liberal DSGE (Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium theory) is modeled/based on unrealities and invalidities. Of course Douglas discovered that the economy was habitually in a state of disequilibrium, that the economy was essentially monetary, and that man was not homo economicus and didn’t always and everywhere think in terms of the market. Keen and company are very erudite intellects who just haven’t fully consciously recognized that the underlying philosophical concept of grace and its reflective policies macro-economically applied…are the answer. This despite the fact that Keen advocates “a modern debt jubilee” which is a “one off” perfect reflection of the ongoing effects of the macro policies of the dividend and discount. Keen is coming along with his recent inclusion of energy and the laws of thermo-dynamics as a factor in economic theory, but Douglas, even though thermo-dynamics was in its infancy, recognized the cost effects of waste and the futility of uber production and a mere policy of human employment as solutions to the economy’s inherent cost inflationary disequilibrium. They’re all nascent social crediters.
GM: In the 1st Place., Pareto efficiency is not a creed, as you seem to suggest, but rather merely a term to describe a state of affairs in which no one can get more unless someone else gets less. It is often used in describing a free market economy in which people willingly make exchanges to optimize their respective positions. Putting a stop to such exchanges, as we have seen at least in early postrevolutionary phases of communism in China, Russia, Cuba, Korea, inter alia, leaves people worse off in order to make some (either the proletarian masses or the party cadres, depending to some extent on the ideological perspective from which one evaluates the phenomenon). As a thought experiment, imagine a tribe of hunter gatherers in spring, when the herds are close by and the useful plants abundant. There is more than enough for everyone, and Perino-inefficient “redistribution” would not occur to anyone. Imagine the same tribe in midwinter, the herds and lush plants long gone. Some of the superior hunters will probably have dried or otherwise preserved more meat than others and notions of “fairness” may very well lead to rumblings of discontent and demands for redistribution.
Me: Scarcity is the operant factor in the orthodoxy (yes it is a belief dependent on such to make it occur as you demonstrate in your example) of pareto efficiency. “Free market” economic theory presently being basically an ideological fantasy enforced by monetary scarcity and Social Credit being a post scarcity economic theory and reflective set of policies….makes it basically irrelevant.
Me: (Regarding whether forces would be put in play against Social Credit if it ever became a movement.)
“It is not conceivable that if ever the new scheme of credit were to take its first step towards realisation there would not be an immediate and formidable repression of it.”
My reaction is of course it will. It’s the nature of those whose intentions are power and the maintenance of it to do so. In fact these forces have consciously and unconsciously done an excellent job of creating an authoritarian culture where the idea of gifting is looked upon as morally debased. If you read Sun Tzu the Japanese military strategist he says that the best way to defeat the enemy is to get them to think that fighting you is a hopeless and absurd task.
“only substituting United States for England and “media” for “newspaper owners” herein: “newspaper owners filling their tawdry columns with the speeches and counter speeches of the politicians. All those speeches were made up of wretched little vulgar personal attacks and replies and the background to it was the enormous crisis of England.”
As I have been saying here and elsewhere our media and culture have been riven with obsessive conflict, egoistic dualism where opposing theories, parties, etc. claim their particles of truth are “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” …and you GD better believe it or you’re an idiot liberal/conservative, blah, blah, blah when what is needed to extricate ourselves from the downward spiral of hostility and intolerance is the integration of their particles of truth, the deletion of their untruths, unworkabilities and palliatives as opposed to solutions and finally also integrating the highest ethical considerations or impulses of each side until the duality becomes a third and more unified thirdness with a higher ethical basic philosophy. I’m not the least bit interested in belaboring this, but in view of the culture’s direction I find this to be a natural, logical and wise suggestion….not “pseudo-mystical preaching or armchair psychoanalysis.”
Social Credit/Wisdomics/Gracenomics/ Gracientialism 