The whole “free money” issue is 99% old fogeyism and 1% inadequate/failure to better acculturate positive and constructive purpose in addition to employment. If having a lot of money was such a hard and fast road to ruin the wealthy would have killed themselves off ages ago. Life itself is set up to be a problem by its apparent reality of Dualism Only of which Trinity/Unity/Oneness/Process AKA the integrative mental discipline of Wisdom is the answer.

Right off hand I can’t think of a better incentive to become gainfully employed than your first day on the job you get a 100% increase in your purchasing power with a 50% Discount/Rebate policy at retail sale. Then just craft additional policy that mitigates overconsumption like a sliding scale percentage of required “tax”/Gift of Gifted money into eco/energy and infrastructure bonds at a 5-6% rate. You could also require that one average at least part time employment for the first 5 years of receiving a $1000/mo. universal dividend or have it reduced by half, and then have it made whole by 2 years of part time employment.

Things like that. Monetary Gifting strategically implemented with 50% Discount/Rebate at retail sale and a universal dividend immediately resolves the deepest problems of modern economies and opens up additional benefits like being able to eliminate payroll taxes for welfare and unemployment insurance and lowering income taxes across the board because having resolved inflation at retail sale we could cognite on the fact that a monetarily sovereign nation doesn’t really have to tax at all except to enforce compliance by economic agents and prevent/effectively blunt the power of oligarchy from dominating the society.

Visualize it.

coberly: Steve

in the first place the payroll tax is not “welfare” it is you saving your own money for your needs after you can no longer work. it has to be a “tax” because too many people think they are too smart to need it… like they are too good drivers to need speed limits and stop signs. in return they get the best insurance for their savings that anyone can get in a capitalist society.

other than that your essay is so sky-high abstract it is meaningless…no insult intended, just an observation about “abstraction.”

and, finally, “you could also require…” should ring alarm bells.

the “free money” issue has nothing to do with “having too much money.” it is a real phenomenon visible in the rhetoric of people who think modern monetary theory will enable them to get whatever they want at no cost to themselves. you can see it in public spaces, no need to “visualize it.”

Me: You can call it whatever you want the fact remains that the 50% Discount/Rebate at retail sale and universal dividend policies accomplish what payroll taxes do without diminishing an economic agent’s purchasing power or revenue, and they also have the advantage of resolving at least three of the economy’s supposedly most thorny problems.

There’s nothing abstract about a monetary gift.

In order to fully understand life you DO have to think in terms of ideas like duality and trinity, unless you want to simply react to life instead of trying to more deeply/wisely understand it.

Finally, I’ve said many times here that MMT has the mechanics of money creation correct. That doesn’t mean I think it will resolve the money “problem” all by itself. Its an insightful palliative of the problematic monetary paradigm. What we need however is to actually change the monetary paradigm.

coberly: i knew someone years ago who had a book about the “gift” nature of employee-employer relations. i never read it, but at the time it struck me as a valid point, if it is strictly an adversarial transaction it becomes inefficient and ugly. more better is the situation where I might cut my old neighbors grass for free… that is a gift. and if my old nature thinks, “why, I should make a pie for that nice boy” that is a gift. but if i go to my neighbor and say “i will cut your grass if you bake me a pie” that may be barter but it is not a gift. for normal economic transaction the adversarial nature probably works best, but for an ongoing relationship like worker-employer if there is no gift quality to it, it becomes toxic.

as for “i’ve said many times here…” that is not an argument but it does suggest elements of the grand “i am more important than you think” delusions of paranoia.

heaven forbid i should ever become as deeply and wisely as you are.

Me: You call it what it is…within your/the current paradigm defines it as.

Duality Only vs Trinity/Unity/Oneness/Process is abstract, but not schizophrenically. Lets try defining it thusly:

Duality is the definition of a problem i.e. idea/counter idea, emotion/counter emotion, effort/counter effort that does not resolve, and thus can lead to a paradigm of Duality Only which traps one in analysis of problems ONLY or at the expense of or neglect of the search for solutions, or worse yet into obsessive incomplete/fallacious orthodoxy vs counter incomplete/fallacious orthodoxy.

Trinity is simply the integrative intellectual process of finding a key applied concept AKA Wisdom…that resolves the above problems of Duality Only. Its Hegel’s Thesis Antithesis and Synthesis or chemical synthesis. Or, using the tool of accounting that both the banks and government use to create new money only in the form of debt (equal debits and credits, i.e. duality) that with monetary gifting trinitarily sum to zero to increase purchasing power at retail sale and reduce the rate of flow of iincreasing debt at point of loan signing, for instance.

coberly: i should have said i try to call it what it does: thus “Social Security is not a “tax” but a mandatory savings and insurance contribution

…so the rest of us don’t have to support you when your best laid plans go awry.

obviously “mandatory” gives it elements of a tax..but don’t lose sight of what it does. with a tax you don’t get your money back or even control what it is spent on. what makes this all fun is to read thousands of people’s ideas about Social Security…as I have done… see than none of them know anything whatsoever about how it works.

other than that i can make no sense of what you are saying whatsoever.

Me: What if there was no such thing as a chemical synthesis, or the actual solving of problems? What a static, immutable and cumbersome universe/mindset that would be.