Those who do not see that grace is always the best solution for any human interaction and any policy in any area of human endeavor simply have not learned to fully trust and integrate love into their thoughts and actions…which is the definition of grace.

Steve Hummel 07/19/2019

Economics of course, like every other area of human endeavor, needs rules/ethics. The laws of economics, like for instance the paradox of thrift, are not laws at all but only conundrums enforced on the economic system by the current paradigm of the monetary system, namely Debt Only, and would be resolved by integrating the new and primary monetary paradigm of Abundantly Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting.

It is logical that MONEY is the most potent and significant aspect of a MONETARY economy, so why not look at it using every one of the tools available in order to perceive how to make the money system serve us…instead of floundering around and allowing it to be a huge 5000 year old parasite and quasi psychosis, and so remain the main obstacle to economic free flowingness as it is today?

The debates about money get as ideologically rigid as the debates over economics. The two main considerations we need to have in examining money are 1) it has many aspects and definitions, but it is most basically accounting and 2) its current paradigm for the form and vehicle of its distribution is monopolistic/exclusionary and has been used to dominate the economy and the populace for the entire history of human civilization….so we most urgently require a new monetary paradigm.

Paradigms being continuing patterns are virtually hypnotic and so are virtually mentally accepted whole. They are like breathing, an essential activity we are normally unconscious of. Routinely being able to perceive them requires the integrative mental focus and discipline utilized in consciousness raising processes that exist in all of the world’s major wisdom traditions.

Two of the economists I have learned the most from about economics, Michael Hudson and Steve Keen, are contributors here and emphasize and share the above accounting and parasitical natures of the money system. They’re brilliant but, sorry to say, they’ve not acculturated the means of deciphering paradigms old and new. Hudson’s books about parasitical finance and his recent book about debt are excellent, but he misses the simple (but not simplistic) accounting operation that if intelligently applied as monetary policy would effect paradigm change. Keen looked straight at the new paradigm in recognizing that neo-liberal economics ignored money, debt and banks and yet did not perceive the concept that defines it. He even uses Godley accounting tables to enlighten the monetary effects of debt deflation and so how the flow of excess costs that technologically advanced capital intensive economies are inherently and increasingly afflicted with…must be addressed. But he missed/did not perceive the new monetary paradigm concept and how to integrate it into the economy in ways that would resolve its problems and benefit all agents individual and commercial.

The superlative mental discipline of wisdom/the integrative state of mind which includes math and science is required to fully perceive paradigms old and new is necessary….the better to perceive the pungently simple and resolving along with the delicious but much less enlightening complexities of only the problem.

Grace/graciousness as in abundantly direct and reciprocal monetary gifting (two way gifting/giving and receiving) is the concept of the new monetary, financial and economic paradigm. The 50% Discount/Rebate monetary policy at the point of retail sale exactly and precisely expresses/acts out that concept in the economy.

Integrates price deflation beneficially into profit making systems

Is a complete inversion of realities and an ender of orthodoxies which are the cardinal signatures of paradigm/pattern changes

The new monetary, financial and economic paradigm of Abundantly Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting is a huge assist to every individual and every enterprise, except private finance of course whose monopoly paradigm of Debt Only is the dominating and manipulating present paradigm and so must be replaced by monetary gifting and its policies, regulations and structural changes.

We have to become smarter and wiser than the ancients who only ever palliated the monetary paradigm with jubilees and/or unceremonious and uncivilized executions of the financial elite. My book Wisdomics-Gracenomics shows the way forward to that accomplishment. Besides the more than doubling of everyone’s potential purchasing power and the consequent more than doubling of actually available money for every enterprise’s goods and services, here are the key “knock on” benefits of the policies that can result with the implementation of the new paradigm:

elimination of transfer taxes

large individual and business income tax reductions

cost savings for both individuals and enterprise

beneficially integrating price deflation into profitmaking economic systems

fast forwarding of sane ecological policies, regulations and projects

extending the current ending point of the economic cycle from retail sale to the point and time of note signing with an additional 50% discount/rebate monetary policy so that the money system serves everyone instead of enslaving them

Immediate ability to re-industrialize the nation in the most efficient, productive and ecologically sane way possible

Likely political integration and social/psychological rejuvenation

With the intelligent acculturation of even a modicum of wisdom a tremendous increase in human purpose, human happiness and increased self actualization/consciousness raising

Models do not give us explanations because they do not go to the essence of what the models are trying to elucidate. Epistemologically they’re not designed to do that. They’re designed to model NOT to express the essence of that model…..which is its paradigm/pattern.

Zeitgeists/ethics of an age are even more mentally and ethically integrative than paradigms. Finance capitalism’s zeitgeist is the overt power of debt only. Social Democracy’s zeitgeist is the covert power of extractive re-distributive taxation. The zeitgeist of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting is grace as in universal monetary, economic and financial abundance and grace as in REDEEMED power.

Perceiving at the level of pattern/paradigm is a mental skill aka as wisdom which is above the scientific processes of data gathering, theorizing and philosophy. Paradigm perception and self actualizing ideas and concepts, i.e. wisdom are broader, deeper and consequently greater/more whole understandings of temporal and individual realities than science which wisdom/paradigm perception includes.

Paradigm perception, genuine religious experiences and consciousness raising are all of the same integrative nature and process of mental discipline.

Love is the superior spiritual value and grace, which is nothing more and certainly nothing less than love in action toward oneself and others in the temporal universe we all inhabit, and is again, its active expression. Science being a less inclusive, merely empirical mental discipline is yet an excellent and very useful tool that is and can be included within wisdom, its process and its pinnacle concept of grace.

The problem is not the monetary system alone or as a whole, it is the paradigm of the monetary system. Specifically the rigidly exclusionary and monopolistic nature of the present paradigm of Debt Only.

MMT deals somewhat with the monetary scarcity that characterizes the current monetary system and paradigm, but it does not effectively/terminatedly deal with it mostly because it fails to see the exact nature/concept of the new paradigm and the specific point in the economic/productive process that an equally specific monetary policy can effect, that is, a new monetary, financial and economic paradigm.

If you’re involved in long and frothy debates regarding capitalism and socialism….you’re being manipulated BIG TIME. Even if you’re in long and frothy debates regarding the money system you’re still being manipulated. People have critisized the money system for a long time and nothing has ever happened to significantly change it. The problem is the monetary PARADIGM. The CONCEPT of the monetary paradigm. A paradigm is a single concept that changes and creates an ENTIRELY NEW PATTERN. That’s the difference. A paradigm, a genuine paradigm changes the entire pattern in the area of human endeavor it applies to. And if that pattern is as ever present and as powerfully significant and beneficial in its effects on every individual and every enterprise as the economy and the money system….then it will rank with if not surpass the greatest paradigm change in human history which was when we went from hunting and gathering to agriculture and homesteading.

The present monetary paradigm of Debt Only is THE problem, and the concept of the new monetary paradigm which is Abundantly Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting IS THE SOLUTION.

KZ:  Every culture organizes life around a few simple principles, activities, and beliefs. The other institutions and activities of the society hang from that core like branches from a tree trunk. These central acts, institutions, and values form what Ruth Benedict—arguably the most perceptive American anthropologist of the 20th century—called a “cultural configuration.” What’s called paradigms here are some of the branches of the western cultural configuration. One such branch, money must meet the needs of the configuration. So, above all else for current western society money is the source of status, prestige, power (political and physical), security, and individual identity. The Beatles were wrong. Money can buy love. H.L. Hunt and Ted Turner both said it, money is just a way to keep score. Money tells you how attractive, important, well adjusted, influential, feared, and loved you are. In short, money identifies who you are. Over the millennia money has served many purposes beyond these, consistent with the cultural configuration of the time, and an almost endless list of objects have served as the physical face of money (e.g. salt, corn, gold, silver, diamonds, cloth, almonds, tea, dried fish, tobacco, rice, etc.). And tied to all this, money is also the means used to purchase and sell everything from humans to every sort of commodity. But identifying money as the thing that makes members of society rich or poor is too simplistic. Naming money the most flexible cultural invention of humans is justified. Plus, money has a normative dimension. It places some people and items above others and elevates some actions above others. Money today can have two sources, banks and other private money creators, and governments (sovereign money). Which serves best the needs of the cultural configuration is an empirical question. Historically, the answer most common is sovereign money. To paraphrase A.H. Quiggin from “A Survey of Primitive Money: the Beginnings of Currency,” Everyone, except an economist, knows what “money” means, and even an economist can describe it in the course of a chapter or so. To say economists are clueless about money goes too far. But to say economists seem mostly unacquainted with money is not. Economists’ understanding of money is historically and culturally shallow.

PL: I disagree somewhat with your emphasis. Yes money has all those attributes, but its real role with respect to the survival of a society is as a medium of exchange. It is the vita and only link between what we create and what we need.

Mainstream economists recognize that money needs to be addressed of course, but traditionally consider it to be a passive player. In reality, a dysfunctional money system will destroy an economy. People sometimes use the very apt analogy that money is the life-blood of an economy.

KZ:  Paul, you say money “…is the vita and only link between what we create and what we need.” That’s absurd. What about the basic emotions, love and hate? What about life and death? What about community and the common good? What about war and peace? They’ve all at one time and another, one place and another linked what humans create and what humans need?

Money is created by humans and then used by humans. It is never passive. Life-blood of the economy, yes. But the economy is created by humans via culture. Which means money is important as a tool for art, religion, family life, crime, marriage, etc. As I noted, money is one of the most flexible inventions of humans.

I’m sure you’re correct that mainstream economists take money as mostly a “medium of exchange.” The other 99.99% of people on earth disagree. Which should tell you how disconnected economists are from their supposed object of study.

PL:  Money allows the “love” to flow between members of society, I don’t see how what I said excludes any of the interactions you described. Money represents a voluntary claim that we have on each other as members of society. When I have money, I have access to what you create. Our current money system has led to a gross imbalance and distortion, giving certain members of society an unjust and undeserved claim on the rest of us while starving the majority of access to the money they need to live happy comfortable lives.

Me:  This is precisely the point. Money is looked at from a reductionistic economic standpoint when it needs to be viewed from a fully integrative sociological, anthropological, economic AND spiritual-psychological one. Keeping the mass of the populace in a state of individual income scarcity via a monetarily austere system acculturates insecurity and strongly tends to trap people below the upper levels of Maslow’s self actualization pyrimidal model. If we’d instead create individual and systemic monetary grace as in abundance and security with the new insight that you can create exactly that plus beneficial price deflation with a 50% discount/rebate policy at the point of retail sale, that barrier would be removed and with the additional acculturation of even a modicum of wisdom in the form of counseling regarding the plethora of positive and constructive purposes other than and in addition to employment who knows what kind of a “Golden Age” might result?

The only thing that ever does work is love and love in action aka grace.

Steve Hummel 07/09/2019