Science is important, wonderful and necessary, and it exists as a wholly contained set within the broader mindset of wisdom/paradigm perception which is the ability to simultaneously perceive particularity and essence of operant factors so as to solve problems that appear to be in even inevitable conflict.
Chaos is likely an apparency ultimately resolved by contemplating the aspects of the natural philosophical concept of grace, like for instance unity and dynamism.
The outrage is spot on of course, but how many outraged speeches does it take to change things? The answer: A zillion with palliative reforms, or one more with the correct set of policy solutions to the most underlying problem because they align with the new paradigm concept that changes the operant conditions of the entire pattern under investigation.
The keys to paradigm perception are an integration of depth of knowledge, discernment of primacy of problems and willingness to embrace conceptual simplicity…because paradigms are single and singularly efficacious ideas which paired with aligned policies…change everything.
Let us perceive and act. The Martians are laughing and the earth and its inhabitants are moaning.
KZ: The full cultural and political implications of the neoliberal critique would not be felt until the demise of the Keynesian system of macroeconomic management, which emerged around 1968, and gathered pace with the end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in 1973. That model had included an ample role for public investment and planning, which combined comfortably with post-war modernist visions of social housing, expanded higher education, public service broadcasting, publicly funded arts, and so on. This may not have been driven by modernism in an avant-garde sense, but it represented what Mark Fisher has called ‘popular modernism’, as represented by mass literary culture and rising social mobility. Keynesianism cultivated a sense of progress as a collective temporal experience, most explicitly and coarsely represented by that symbol of macroeconomics, GDP growth. For Franco Berardi, neoliberalism involves the retreat of individuals into virtual and imaginary spheres of political transformation, combined with a terrible sense that dominant political institutions are now permanent. As a symptom of powerlessness, depression is the consummate neoliberal disease. Getting high and tuning out becomes a necessary techno-political fix in a society that has lost its capacity for collective reinvention but has rendered individual ‘creativity’ an economic obligation. It is living people in a dead society. And its many other symptoms fill our media daily. Inequality, exceptional and routine cruelty, hatreds by the dozens, failed families, governments, religions, schools, etc.
We need to kill this monster we’ve created before it destroys our species. We do this by first wiping out the price system, then neoliberal markets, and finally money. Since economics as practiced today is built around sustaining these institutions, with their end there is no more need for this economics. Then we could look to building anew.
Me: I would say we need to innovate/evolve the price and money systems first with the new paradigm of monetary grace as in gifting because it resolves the deepest flaws of finance capitalism (individual monetary scarcity, systemic monetary austerity and chronic price and aset inflation) while, with the 50% discount/rebate policies at retail sale and at note signing for green and big ticket items, also enables us to proceed directly and forthrightly toward a much saner industrial and ecological policy.
As the concept behind both the new monetary and financial paradigm and the next zeitgeist is the natural philosophical and epistemological concept of grace as in love in action, and active love/graciousness is recognized as both the highest ethical and spiritual value and hence the most evolutionary concept of self actualization…the further evolution you’d like to see ought logically proceed within that new infrastructure.
If you have a child out of wedlock and/or are under the age of 25 your dividend payment will be reduced by $250/mo. If genetic testing establishes that you are the father of a child out of wedlock, the same age limits are established your dividend will also be reduced by $250/mo.
If after taking a mandatory course in human relations and healthy child rearing, and 2 years of no domestic disturbances your $250/mo. reduction in dividend may be rescinded.
Couples who finish a course in human relations and healthy child rearing before getting married and at least 9 months before having a child will receive an additional $250/mo.
If more than one domestic disturbance occurs in a marriage and remediable counseling is refused the $250/mo. may be rescinded.
I find it curious that FJG and UBI advocates are at odds with each other. The fact is that both are philosophically aligned and can be integrated under the actual new paradigm concept of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting. Furthermore, their purchasing power benefits are doubled by the additional and actual paradigm changing policy of a 50% Discount/Rebate policy at retail sale. UBI/Universal Dividend and FJG are basically palliative policies which do not directly deal with the REAL problem, namely the parasitical, dominating and monopolistic private banking system and its paradigm of Debt Only as the sole form and vehicle for the creation and distribution of money/credit.
Private banking and their monopolistic monetary and financial paradigm of Debt Only ARE THE PROBLEM. End that paradigm and their dominance with the policies of the new paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting (JG, UBI and a 50% Discount/Rebate policy at the point of retail sale. The fact is for-profit money creation and distribution is not a legitimate business model but an expensive parasite on the actual productive economy. No other business model is allowed to add an additional 50+% of costs post retail sale. Imagine going to the grocer and buying $100 worth of goods, then getting a phone call from them saying: “Oh, sorry, its necessary to charge you an additional $50 for those goods, please remit.” Retail sale is the terminal ending point of the entire economic/productive process where production becomes consumption. Integrate the new paradigm of Monetary Gifting into the debt based system and the private banks will become the horse shit picker uppers after the invention of the internal combustion engine.
Both science and religionists have it wrong…because they don’t mentally integrate, experience and so understand that nature is both particular and ecstatic.
Mere, orthodox, obsessive and somnambulistic Dualism is the entire problem that humanity has excruciatingly slowly dealt with since its first paradigm change from unconsciousness to self awareness occurred.
Grace is the full, unitary, simultaneous, conscious and so exstatic experience of the cosmos….of which you are an integral part.
Taxation to fund government and to control inflation is unnecessary and theft.
Taxation to direct industrial policy toward sane ecological goals, ensure the ethical compliance of economic agents with the philosophy of the new paradigm and to maintain the stability of the entire system is necessary and wise.
The whole problem on this blog is its obsessive fixation on economic theory….when the real problem is the monopolistic monetary and financial paradigm that alternately gooses and strangles the economy. Change that from Debt Only to Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting and as I have pointed out a hundred times here the economy’s deepest and most thorny problems will resolve, and we will also be able to make giant strides toward surviving climate change to boot. Carry on.
You guys are all erudite, but you’re aiming at the wrong/primary problem. Change the monetary and financial paradigm from Debt Only to Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting and all of the major problems you’re talking about will either immediately disappear or be able to be easily regulated away. All of the astrological tinkerings that developed around Ptolemaic cosmology resolved or disappeared when helio-centrism was confirmed. Think about it.
Me: Excellent post Rodger. Money generally staves off desperation and hopelessness. You still have the problems of wealth when you end the problems of poverty, but the choice between the two is a no brainer.
The natural philosophical concept of grace as in Gifting and its primary policy of a 50% Discount/Rebate at the point of retail sale is not only the new monetary and financial paradigm it is also the next new zeitgeist replacing knowledge and control with grace as in graciousness. Then we can begin to build a true “golden age”. So be it….with post haste.
RMR: The mechanics of the “50% discount to the consumer at retail sale” are unclear to me. Currently, prices are based on cost and competition. How would prices be determined for the 50% to take effect? Is this another way to create a deflation?
Me: Someone goes to Walmart to buy groceries or to a home builder for a new house. Participating merchants (read every one of them because why would they want to have to get 100% of their price when their competition who do participate only have to get 50% from their customers) Walmart or Acme home builders reduce their price 50% and log an entry in their sales account for the remaining 50%. The government or monetary authority creates the money and debits or credits it back to the merchant so they actually get their full price.
Voila`! One policy doubles the purchasing power of everyone’s earned income and thus also the free and available demand for every enterprise’s goods and services, not only forever slays inflation, but beneficially integrates price deflation into profit-making economic systems and so also enables the fiscal deficits necessary to create the best infrastructure possible as well as make green purchases for EV’s, solar panels/batteries skyrocket when we also implement an additional 50% discount/rebate policy at the point of loan signing for such green items.
RMR:
Prices change daily. That’s a problem.
Think of this scenario: Today, Walmart sells widgets for $10.00 each. In response to the new law, Walmart increases the price to $15.00 each, collects $7.50 for each one sold, then uses coupons to cut the price back to $5.00 each.
Walmart has now collected from the government, an extra $2.50 each, though some people use the coupons and some don’t.
Now multiply that by the hundreds of millions of items sold by the many thousands of different retailers all over the country, with prices changing every day — billions, perhaps trillions of price changes.
Who is going to monitor all of that? d
And then, what about services? Does the process extend to the guy who comes to my home to wash my windows? Mow my lawn. My cleaning lady? My babysitter? How are their prices determined?
Think of the used car dealer negotiating his prices. What is the “real” price that will be the basis for the 50% from the government?
Then there is the question, does this apply only to retail? What about wholesale? Is wholesale included in the process? If not, who decides whether something is retail or wholesale?
Then, there are medical services, which are covered by Medicare, or by private insurance, or not covered at all. How are they handled? And think of all those deductibles.
Then there are home sales, the single biggest purchase anyone makes. Are they included in the process? If so, how would those prices be calculated? (Home prices include many factors — land, building, contents, necessary repairs, closing costs, etc.)
And by the way, is the 50% paid by the government taxable? At what rate? Does that give the IRS another job it can’t handle?
The bookkeeping is mind-boggling. I visualize a bureaucracy bigger than the Pentagon needed not only to monitor all that, but just to physically make the payments for it.
About the only good thing I can say about the complex process is: It would employ millions of people.
I would rather give $X to every man, woman, and child in America, and to allow them to use it as they please. Much simpler and fairer.
Me: Roger, While it’s always important to analyze thoroughly it is a mistake to over complicate when it comes to paradigms. The key to paradigms is actually their simplicity (they are always a single concept), their universality (the definition of a paradigm after all is an entire pattern) and the resolution of the major problems of the current/old paradigm (inflation despite individual monetary scarcity and systemic monetary austerity).
In the first place the accounting infrastructure for the primary temporal universe changing 50% discount/rebate policy is already in place. It will simply require another T-account to implement it. The slight continuous changes in price is of no concern as the 50% discount still mathematically creates beneficial price deflation for both commercial and individual economic agents. Secondly, in order to opt in to the wildly beneficial 50% policy you will have to click the “I Accept” button that outlines the rules, regulations and punishments for trying to game the system. If you read my book these include both tax incentives and disincentives (tax cuts for abiding by the rules and a 100% tax rate on any revenue garnered by large arbitrary unjustified price increases, and if one is a serial arbitrary inflater loss of the 50% discount/rebate privileges). Also, individual and corporate taxes will priorly be able to be reduced by at least 50% as the efficacy of fiat monetary systems with beneficial deflationary consequences become mathematically apparent, and if one abides by the rules further incentives could easily reduce rates even more.
Of course house prices and services of all kinds will be included in the 50% discount regime. All they will need to do is opt in and register with the monetary and accounting systems that will oversee the new paradigm. Certain businesses/products will not qualify for the 50% discount and they will have to get 100% of their price from the consumer like hard core pornography, cigarrettes, etc. Petroleum/gas prices will qualify for the 50% discount/rebate until their market share is drastically reduced by ecologically intelligent alternatives made much more competitive by the second 50% discount/rebate at the point of loan signing.
In my book I also sketch out the policies of a new government department semi-whimsically referred to as the Department of Competition, Innovation, Boycotting and The Bully Pulpit which will report flagrant rule breaking enterprises to the public. If social security is the “third rail” of government bureaucracy messing with the new monetary paradigm which just doubled your purchasing power, cut your taxes and saved the planet will become the public relations kiss of death for anti-social businesses. So be it.
RMR: Or, the government simply could send each man, woman, and child a $10,000 check, which not only is simpler (we already have done something similar), but it’s less regressive than basing reward on purchasing. It would narrow the Gap more effectively.
I assume you won’t like this because you wrote a book, but that’s also why Stephanie resists the idea that federal spending doesn’t cause inflation. She wrote a book.
By the way, my first book does allow that federal deficits do cause inflation, but I later changed my mind. It happens. Writing a book isn’t the end of learning. It can be the beginning of another book.
Me: My policies include both a $1000/mo. universal dividend which paired with the 50% discount/rebate policy enables everyone 18 and older to have $2000/mo guaranteed purchasing power, and a job guarantee. Those are both good policies, but they are just palliatives. The ancients, who were smarter than we are, used the debt jubilee to reset the problem (the monetary paradigm of Debt Only) which Is also one of my policies, but the burden of debt buid up always came back because again, the real, deepest problem is the current/old paradigm of Debt Only. The 50% discount/rebate policy integrates price deflation so effectively into profit making systems because it occurs at the strategic point/ending point of the entire economic/productive process and is so continuous,ubiquitous and abundant that debt will not build up.
Acquisition can become a mania that’s true albeit most do not fall into such even when they are quite wealthy. My observation is that graciousness is the solution to human life, and continuously and ubiquitously implementing graciousness as in Monetary Gifting would be a very nice way to make the self actualization of grace/graciousness a greater human reality. All you’d need is a reminder of the actuality of such for the experience to catch on.
S: I’ve come to believe that Social Security is not only a payment to retirees that they’ve earned and deserve, but also an indirect but still efficient government economic stimulus program. Since most SS money is spent rather than saved, and even in some cases, taxed back from wealthier recipients by the states in another form of redistribution, it is stimulative to the economy.
It is not the dreaded socialism, because it does nothing to control the means of production; seniors do that through their boosted purchasing power (i.e. demand).
It is also, of course, one of the greatest anti-poverty mensures ever devised. Those who oppose SS have no alternative, just as they have no alternative to the ACA. Well, poverty and death are the real alternatives, if left to the so-called “free market” which is not and never has been free (all the 19 megabanks would have failed in the GFC if left to the “free market”).
But as you point out, the desire to maintain the Rich-Poor Gap, plus the will of even those who would benefit, not to ever ever allow for anything that looks like a “free lunch” lest someone less deserving then them, in their opinion, benefit, will prevent SS from being divorced from the payroll tax mechanism.
Very soon, probably in the Biden Administration, SS is going to have to be “reformed” or else it will start “running out of money.” Neither Biden – who cares but is clueless – or Trump – who pretended to care but was also clueless – took their own lessons from spending trillions to fight Covid to heart. If Covid spending proved anything once and for all, it proved that the federal government could spend an almost infinite amount of money when it wanted to – unbound by anything except a shortage of things like PPEs and doctors (nurses’ salaries went up during the pandemic. Why is this a bad thing?). The public has actually finally begun to catch onto this lesson, but in the absence of socially beneficial spending elsewhere, and in the presence of asset market bailouts, the only way Joe Public can benefit is to buy stocks, bonds, or even ephemeral instruments like Bitcoin (I believe this will end badly, and may already be doing so).
Yanis Voroufakis and others say we are entering the age of Techno-Feudalism, leaving capitalism behind. Maybe so, but the neo-feudalists will only get even wealthier in that system. Buy stocks, bonds, land, etc. What else can one do?
Me: Scot, Yes social security is a good program but it’s not actually direct (you have to work, if you can find it, for 40-50 years before you can collect it) and it may not be socialism, but it requires socialistic re-distributive taxation which liberals have idiotically embraced in order to try to (unsuccessfully) stave off inflation thus pinning themselves to neo-liberal macro-economics and simultaneously setting up the eternal (and unnecessary) political gridlock we find ourselves in because enterprise will always oppose the additional costs of funding it and the left can’t think a new thought because it hasn’t recognized the better alternative of the new monetary and financial paradigm of Gifting.
The combination of a $1000/mo. universal dividend and the 50% discount/rebate policy at retail sale resolves inflation, guarantees a livable income for life for every adult 18 and older….and enables us (individuals and enterprise) to eliminate the payroll taxes for welfare, unemployment insurance and even faze out those for social security. In other words it is a better, more effective policy and politically integrative to boot.
By the way, what ever happened to Ellen Brown’s Public Banking Google group? I woke up one morning and couldn’t access it. I probably got banned for suggesting too many times that she work for creating a true public national bank instead of state public banks. State banks are like social security, somewhat better than rapacious rule by private banks, but a pale palliative reform that actually solidifies the the entrapment of the present paradigm. again better to envision a new monetary and financial paradigm which actually and thoroughly solves problems.
RMR:
I became a bit lost in your one-sentence first paragraph, but “redistributive” is not socialist. Claiming that something is not socialism but is “socialistic” makes a mockery of English and logic. It looks like a sad attempt to hang someone with an epithet that doesn’t apply.
Shall we also claim that conservatism is not Nazism, but is “Naziist”?
Anyway, the U.S. tax code always has been ostensibly “redistributive” in that tax rates are higher for higher incomes. Are you opposed to that?
Unfortunately, the higher income folks know how to avoid past efforts at “redistribution,” and instead use financial “piggism,” the swinish attempt to hog all he money for themselves.
Me: “Claiming that something is not socialism but is “socialistic” makes a mockery of English and logic. It looks like a sad attempt to hang someone with an epithet that doesn’t apply.”
I’m for progressive taxation….but with much less overall taxation which is possible by making direct monetary distribution in a fiat system. The government must have the cudgle of taxation or you’d have complete economic chaos instead of the alternately goosed and strangled financial chaos we presently have. Taxation has largely become theft as the right says. They just have to stop demaguoging the socialism and embrace the policies of the new monetary paradigm. The left is correct that economic democracy is a good idea, but increased taxation doesn’t accomplish that….while the policies of the new paradigm do….in spades. Everyone needs to re-examine their own orthodoxies is all.
No, it’s just exposing the fact that the right considers it so. My statement agrees that taxation is not socialism because it isn’t government ownership of production, yet advocates for greater taxation play into the regressive agenda and strengthen political gridlock because they can’t think of better policy alternatives as I have shown are possible with the new monetary paradigm.
T: “…taxation is not socialism because it isn’t government ownership of production…
”
This simple fact must not be understood; otherwise so many people everywhere would quit using the “socialism” argument. And we wonder why economics is so poorly understood and taught.
But New Deal legislation IS indirect socialism; government still backs the private sector’s profiteering should those forward thinking, rugged individuals need bailing out from time to time, i.e. Chrysler.
Me: Yes it is kind of quasi-socialism in that sense. Wat we require is an integration of the interests of both business and the individual that is so beneficial that it is “an offer they can’t refuse” ….but with no uncertain rules that all parties must abide by. Like for instance if you opt into the 50% discount/rebate you agree to not inflate your prices unless you have incurred ACTUAL additional costs….additional costs that also consider the huge cost SAVINGS you receive by the elimination of payroll taxes and 50+% cuts in corporate income taxes. In other words there’s no gaming of the system or you get taxed for price increases and eventually lose your 50% discount/rebate privileges. In other words if you inflate Mr. anti-social asshole CEO…you lose the gracious benefits the government has bestowed upon you.
RMR: A couple of questions:
1. Which agency would audit this?
2. How much profit margins are the businesses allowed?
3. How much profit margin is a new business allowed?
4. What about newly created products?
5. Are executive salaries considered part of a business’s costs. (Including “Mr. anti-social asshole”?)
6. Does this apply only to sales to the public or are sales to other businesses included?
7. What about export sales?
8. Are imports included?
9. Are services included or just products?
I have a few more questions, but the above nine should help you crystalize your thinking.
Me:
RMR:
1. It would require a department of at least the size of the IRS, not a “committee.” This would be a monster addition to the bureaucracy.
2. The allowed margin is the whole point of your recommendation. You would have to fix everyone’s margins or your system would fall apart. Think it out. Do you really want to be in the price-fixing business?
3. and 4. No one knows “what they would have been.” That’s the whole point of the question.” And what is a “true innovative product”? No one can answer that. You’re skipping by the real weaknesses in your program. Think it through. I’m helping you, here.
5. If the answer is “yes,” then all a company needs to do is raise CEO compensation, which would subvert your program.
6. Very vague definitions here. Easily re-defined by businesses. Again, think it out.
7. Really?? So an exporter’s price would be double the price domestically?? Goodby American exporting. You definitely need to rethink this.
8. So, you envision the United States government sending billions of dollars overseas to assist foreign manufacturers in lowering their prices???
9. My cleaning lady? My plumber? My gardener? The snowplow guy? My barber? How are you going to determine what their profit margins should be?
In total, you have suggested an uber Rube Goldian project, massive in complexity, that does nothing more than provide the populace with buying power — something that easily can be accomplished by simply sending people money.
Me:
Basically the system operates seamlessly within the same accounting/economic infrastructure it already operates within. It’s just that it’s much more beneficial for everyone because the monopolistic, parasitic and increasingly uncompetitive/unworkable monetary and financial paradigm….is changed.
RMR: I disagree with every single thing you have said, but I respect your right to say it, comfortable in the knowledge that your program never will be implemented.
Me: You are of course entitled to your opinion, but the truth is that your concept of Monetary Sovereignty, which is a very good and valid concept, is what will never be implemented because it does not qualify as an actual paradigm change and does not have the policies (merely the demands) required to accomplish such. Unlike my policies, It does not have the ability to integrate the self interests of both individuals and commercial agents and hence lacks the possibility of political integration necessary to break through our current gridlock. Historically, everything adapts to a genuine paradigm/pattern change, not the other way around, but certain signatures must be fulfilled in order for it to be a valid and actual change needed. First it must be the actual concept that changes the actual problematic present pattern. (the monetary and financial pattern. Genuine paradigm changes have always been in conceptual opposition to the current problematic paradigm (For instance terra-centrism vs helio-centrism and in this case Debt Only vs Monetary Gifting). It must completely and immediately invert temporal reality with its policies (For instance individual monetary scarcity, systemic austerity and erosive price and asset inflation vs individual monetary abundance, systemic/fiscal abundance and beneficial price and asset deflation). Other signatures apply.
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The real problem, identified by Steve Keen and Michael Hudson, is the fact that private debt always builds up and continues to do so despite the occasional reform, and has been recurrent since the time of Rome because they stopped doing debt jubilees which was the ancient’s relative solution to the debt problem. And even with that the debt jubilees needed to be recurrent because the debt problem still re-occurred.
The other thing economic reformists fail to recognize is that inflation has always occurred and will continue. MMT, which is a largely accurate account of the fiscal money creation process and scheme to increase fiscal spending, thinks that simply trying (and failing) to balance production and consumption will stop it, and anyone who thinks we can simply spend and not have erosive inflation will be severely disappointed when higher prices occur.
There are multiple identified reasons for inflation, but what economists have missed about it is that the ROOT and most PROBLEMATIC cause of inflation is that ultimately it is a DECISION by a CEO or other business decision maker and that there currently is no sure way to prevent this from occurring until now. With the large 50% discount/rebate policy and its strategic implementation point at the very end of the economic/productive process at retail sale inflation’s root cause is finally empirically and mathematically put to rest. With the discount/rebate the retailer gets his full price and every agent commercial and individual benefits by the discount’s “knock on” enabling policies.
The reason the 50% Discount/Rebate policies of the new monetary and financial paradigm works is because it mimics both the process of money creation, that is the debits and credits of accounting and the apparent actions of the dualistic temporal universe, stimulus/response, back and forth/reciprocality . Even more importantly it also mimics the generally overlooked and/or missed aspect of existence namely trinity as in body/mind/consciousness-self awareness, time/change/process-dialectic, directness/significance/relevance-science.
Social Credit/Wisdomics/Gracenomics/ Gracientialism 