GH:  Craig, your question is rhetorical.You’re not really interested in why we are not all proselytising for monetary gifting. You know what you think and it’s a long time since you listened to any counter-argument.

Me:  I will listen to any argument/theory that adds to the list of policy solutions I have advocated here that the new monetary and financial paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting accomplishes.

Virtually everyone here is engaged only in rhetoric. Several times I have asked for posters here to give their specific policies. Nothing but crickets. Instead of complaining about how arduous a nomadic existence is, how the rains haven’t come, the game is scarce and the lions that lurk are increasingly hungry this name dropping debating society should be looking to discover that if you put seeds in the ground and corral a male and female bovine your world is turned upside down in incredibly beneficial ways. In other words think paradigmatically.

So please do not lecture me about being rhetorical. Ya know what I mean?

NR:  I still think Mr. Edward Ross makes some very valid points about the age-old practice of a needy “STATE” shoveling” printed & stamped coinage {plus borrowed money in the form of the glorified I.O.U’s; known as bonds, bills, debentures & notes} at any problem that cannot be solved otherwise. And he does so with a trenchant wit. ‘Monetary gifting” was once called “Prairie freigeld” back in the 1930’s when the social credit government of Alberta started printing the attractively designed stuff, as “social dividends”. But when their pulp ‘n paper product was proscribed as not acceptable as legal ‘coin of the realm’, it suffered the same fate as Confederate dollars during Reconstruction. But, rest assured that Ralph Hawtrey, Keynes & several other chaps from the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos & British Actuarial Society, whom you may not respect very much, were quite gentle in their debunking of the rather temperamental Major Douglas’ s opus magnum.
“Major Douglas’s monetary theories are about as useful as a misprint in a multiplication table”, said M. Hawtrey. Not to mention the Major’s rather curious misunderstanding about Say’s ‘law of markets’ embodied in the “A + B theorem”. That one can be easily ‘offed’ by a couple of Venn Diagrams’. Thank you for your patience. My critique is intended only as a didactic argument which I hope benefits all; In the old German academic sense of “erklarung”.

Me:  Hawtrey did not understand money at all and was rebutted quite thoroughly by Douglas. Keynes actually plagiarized Douglas by simply restating one of his major points and claiming it as his own. How convenient and covert it was that the Canadian federal government declared Alberta’s monetary gifts ultra vires.

I’m not a social crediter by the way. Social crediters are stuck in classical ideas of equilibrium, I’m not, as all of what I advocate aligns with what Steve Keen has written regarding the financial instability hypothesis of Minsky with the exception that he, who even though he has correctly complained that an economist can get his PhD in economics without taking so much as a rudimentary course in accounting, still does not recognize the fact that the entirety of the economy is embedded in an accounting cycle that invalidates the quantity theory of money and the velocity of its circulation.

Your Telos and Technos is a quite good philosophical book. However, like virtually every present tome on economics its ideas and abstractions need the focus on present time reality that the garden variety accountant, mostly unaware of the underlying economic significances he deals with every day, could bring to it.

DT:  Craig, you and Norman are here saying some interesting stuff, but as a “jonny come lately” Englishman who can only imagine the history you North Americans are talking about, I would appreciate a few references. For example, I know about Venn diagrams, Norman, but apart from the fact that Douglas has been accused of misunderstanding Say’s Law, not in what way. I didn’t know about the ‘ultra vires’ as against the suggested logical put-down, Craig, but I do know that the financial instability Minsky wrote about and Keen simulates is what happens when one uses PID control logic to achieve an equilibrium, and uses D corrections to avoid danger faster than one uses I feedback to re-correct one’s aims. This is standard chaos theory, applied to (representing) financial entrepreneurs shuffling nominal investments to make monetary profits. I do recognise as fact your bit about the entirety of the economy, but that only explains the error in the theories, not the chaotic implications of the facts.

Me:  The instability/chaos comes from the monopolistic onlyness of the monetary and financial paradigm, and allowing private finance to maintain that paradigm is the height of idiocy. There are plenty of legitimate private financial services that can aggregate and find investment for prior-ly created money and savings, but money creation is not one of them

Money creation either as debt or as monetary gifting must become a public utility guided by the supreme ethical concept of grace as in love in action and its applicable monetary, financial and economic policies. Anything less is folly and/or non-confront.

Helio-centrism and the discovery of the ellipse ended the unstable anomalies of Ptolemaic cosmology and the policy of a 50% discount/rebate at retail sale and the concept of monetary grace as in gifting will end financial instability.