L:  I don’t understand how this process prevents price inflation. Every person in the process understands what the monetary authority’s role is. The seller (Person 1) sets his selling price freely. The buyer (Person 2) is offered and buys the product at 50% of the seller’s selling price. Then Person 3, being somehow assured that the buyer actually paid 50% of the seller’s selling price, rebates to the seller the 50% discount involved in the sale.

Apparently the buyer understands that the seller is going to be gifted the amount of the discount by Person 3, (the monetary sovereign), and the seller also knows this. So the selling price (before the discount is deducted) is really just twice what the buyer knows he is going to pay, and the seller knows that the sovereign is going to pay him another 100% of what the buyer pays. The 50% the sovereign pays the seller is created ex nihilo (out of nothing). Everybody knows this what happens.

Where in this process is the condition that the selling price cannot be freely and arbitrarily increased to the next buyer? What am I missing?

Me:  You’re missing, that part of the ability to opt into the policies is that you do not arbitrarily increase your prices except for a legitimate additional cost. Nobody will be fooled if prices are magically increased by 30-40%….right before the policies are implemented or incrementally month by month by a lesser percentage. I mean to paraphrase what one of my favorite cartoon characters used to say, “Consumers might be dumb, but they’re not Stuuuupid” …and neither will the monetary authority be so, and any enterprise who tried to de-stabilize such a beneficial system for all in such a manner would immediately lose their discount privileges…..and rather promptly go out of business.

You’re also not looking at the updated versions of the policies which includes a second 20% discount/rebate policy implemented at the point of sale of every business model to their next consuming business model on the route toward final retail sale where the 50% discount/rebate occurs. Of course if you accept the 20% discount and then don’t pass it on (that’s what the 20% discount is called, a 20% pass on discount) to the next business model….then you’re out of the the privilege to get rebated and you have to get all of your best competitive price….while your more ethical and intelligent competitor only needs to get 80% because of the rebate.

Only a fool without ethics and a desire to only profit more instead of embracing the beatific chains of ethics would reject a system that freed all, enabled him/her to better profit and actually make the system flow freely….and once the system’s efficacy was apparent to all, those who did embrace a more decent ethic would have a very strong bully pulpit to “nudge” even the most die hard and deluded “free” market/libertarian type advocate toward honest participation in a system of rational, ethical and workable control.

The universal dividend and the two discount/rebate policies will finally make fiat money systems work for all agents and resolve the major problems of financialization, chronic inflation, disequilibrium, debt deflation and austerity. The fears and “realities of Life” seemingly inherent in the old paradigm will get swept away by the new paradigm and its zeitgeist. That’s the history of human progress and paradigm changes.

L:  The governmental cost of administering and enforcing compliance for this business requirement would be huge, but I assume it would create no government debt. Right?

Me:  When you have a system that not only eliminates the possibility of inflation with the discount/rebate policies, but implements what everyone considers impossible…that is, integrating price deflation painlessly and beneficially into profit making systems….because its discount/rebate policies take effect at the very expression point for any and all price inflation…then as an advocate of MMT and fiat money systems you should be overjoyed because with these policies you’ve discovered not only an automatic monetary stabilizer but a paradigm changing monetary and economic inverting/transforming discovery. Inversion/transformation of a problematic duality/ratio is probably the primary signature of paradigm changes. Hence you no longer have to worry about inflation or have the “need” to try to curb it via taxation…and so you can directly fund any and all government.

In other words it enables a truly directly distributive monetary system…..that serves man instead of requiring him to slavishly serve the system.

Me:  Along with these normal strictures regarding policy opt in and participation business owners might want to ponder what the beneficial effects the doubling of everyone’s potential purchasing power and the lowering of price at the same time would mean to their increased profitability. Stable periods of copious amounts of available individual income being the ideal state of the economy…and then when you toss in price deflation with that you’d have an even better situation than the US found itself in after WW II when the anomaly of the middle class in capitalism occurred and lasted for about 25 years.

L:  Is there someone here who can describe how the system works–how at each stage of production/consumption the two parties (seller and buyer) are motivated to perform their necessary exchanges of goods and money so that there can be no inflation and the gifts and discounts are assured???
Craig doesn’t want to talk about anything but the assertion that it will solve all the problems with the present paradigm and that I ought to be happy about that.
I want to walk though each transaction from mfg to retail sale and see what the motivators for the participants are at each step. I’ve asked for that but the answer hasn’t been given.

Me:  You’re adding complexity to the policies that is unnecessary. They are implemented exactly as described, and the reason why they will be opted into by virtually every enterprise is that it’s “an offer no enterprise can refuse” because:

1) why wouldn’t they want to be able to sell their products for 20% less….and still get their best competitive price with the rebating of their discount back to them???
2) if they mysteriously didn’t want to opt in and even one of their competitors did…how long do you think it would take for their competition to take a large chunk of their market share???
3) why would any retail business not want 2-2.5 times as much free and available individual income out there to purchase their products/services?
4) with the $1000/mo. dividend now able to purchase $2000-2500 of goods/services/mo. with the discount/rebate policies you’d have the immediate end to poverty because every two adult household would be making between $48 to $60k even if they didn’t do a lick, and much more of course if they were employed, even part time. So what would be the reason for both individuals and enterprise to pay transfer taxes for welfare, unemployment insurance etc.??? No reason at all because they are now totally redundant. Nice little savings
there for every agent.
5) Consider that MMTers and other heterodox economists, intelligent as they are, still can’t seem to think their way out of the wet paper bag of the current monetary paradigm of Debt Only, and hence can’t see that monetary gifting integrated into fiat monetary systems will result in the beneficially abundant and bounding effects of these policies….and also make it possible for the money system to be completely directly distributive (re-distributive taxation is waaay old paradigm) and hence income taxes for both the individual and enterprise would only need to be say 2-3% (just enough to be “pleasantly” reminded that the government is sovereign….and benevolent if you can force yourself to abide by the rules….while also benefiting from them as we see from these examples). Do these temporal universe policy effects sound like nice little incentives for businesses to opt into???

L:  Craig, here you go again. Nice sales pitch… without addressing the needed complexity I asked you to discuss. Maybe someone else here will have answers.

Me:  I think honest people here can see that there is reality in what I have said and explained in the above posts. If you’re looking for an explanation of the specific business model to business model implementation of the policies that could be rather easily enumerated as well. For instance the miner reduces his ore by 20% to the transporting industry if the miner or producer don’t do that themselves and gets that amount rebated back to them, the transport industry reduces their charges to the producer and receives their rebate, the producer reduces it charges to the transporter/wholesaler and gets its rebate, the transporter/wholesaler reduces its charges to the retailer and receives their rebate and the retailer reduces their prices by 50% to the consumer…rebate. Capital goods producers “pass on” the 20% discount the same as any other model to the producing business model, rebate. All service business models would reduce their charges by 20% if their services were to a business and 50% to any individual, rebate.

All of this takes place within the integrated underlying infrastructure of double entry bookkeeping which accounts for all such discounts and rebates by any and all business types and models including boutique or niche types. Any returned or damaged merchandise is accounted for in the returns and allowances and/or credit for damaged goods accounts. Complexity is delineated by the tool of accounting which is probably one of the top three or four human inventions.

It doesn’t accomplish or prove anything to sit back and level a general charge. Ask a specific question…and a learned accountant would undoubtedly be able to give you a precise answer.

L:  More scientific? …refusal to confront/accept specific attempts to explain??? You have made no attempt to explain. And certainly nothing you have said is in any way scientific.

Me:  Double entry bookkeeping is not scientific?

Looking directly at the moment to moment operations of the economy and

1) deciphering the fact that the pricing, money and accounting systems are all digital in the sense that equal amounts of debits and credits sum to zero,

2) that the point of retail sale is the macro-economic summing and terminating point for all costs including profit and

3) simultaneously the terminal expression point for any and all price inflation for any item or service and then

4) crafting digital policies around these insights that resolve chronic inflation, individual, commercial and macro-economic income scarcity and actually make price deflation a beneficial fact in profit making economies.

I’m in agreement with 99% of what heterodox economists say are the problems, I’m simply saying that they are long on theory and woefully short on effective policies. Paradigms old or new are tricky to perceive and think outside of, but when one does actually look at and see them and also recognizes the above digital and economic significances….everything changes.

*************************************************

L:  This is an interesting article. The critical concepts of MMT are all included. I would add that although you must pay your taxes with the fiat currency, the sovereign DOES NOT spend it. It extinguishes it after crediting you with the payment. ALL government spending is done with newly created money. After all, since it has an unlimited source of money freely available by creation, it has absolutely zero need for taxes as a source. In actuality there is no need for budgeting either. That is only a necessary trade-off for entities in the system who are strictly USERS of the currency. To me, these features of a fiat money system are critically important.

Me: MMT has money creation correct and other insights about fiat money systems, but concerns itself primarily with government debt which is a rather small subset of total debt/private debt which strangles the economic system nationally and internationally. IMO their contention that inflation will not follow increased government stimulus is almost as hollow an orthodoxy as the conservative/libertarian claim of general equilibrium. When an economy is controlled neither on the lower bound of cost nor the upper bound of price that is the definition of chaos not equilibrium or even disequilibrium and combined with an inherent scarcity of free and available individual income the temptation to raise prices by business owners to garner more profit when more money comes into the system is inevitable. Such chaos cries out for rational, ethical and flowing order.

That order could be established by theorists looking where they currently aren’t, namely the moment to moment operations of commerce where incredibly significant economic and policy insights are to be found in the nature of double entry bookkeeping, the point of sale from one business model to the next and at final retail sale.

Me:  We need national financial subsidiarity via the new paradigm instead of well intentioned but problematical domination via elitist institutions.

In other words the true route to sane trade is making sure that the domestic economy of all nations is monetarily stable and abundant for all agents individual and commercial via the policies of a universal dividend and discount/rebate policies, and thus they can all industrialize/re-industrialize in the most efficient and productive way without having to worry about unemployment/a declining participation rate due to technological innovation and AI. Thus the consequent general national robustness will no longer compel either export platforms or dominating reserve currencies.

C:  Jorge Morales, Dave Taylor: All of the points you make are treated in the discussion at billyblog and those old books. The point that if you really want to confuse yourself and your friends, then change the meaning of basic words and misapply basic concepts. And misread what other people say (MMT, Lerner, Graham, Gulick etc etc) when they speak correctly using the accepted meanings. Most of the criticism above is of that sort. One criticism that is not confused, but that is considered in the discussion is the stuff about dutch elm. In that discussion I noted that of course the usual phrase concerns goods, to be complete you should say “exporting bads are a benefit, importing bads are a cost.” But as Bill Mitchell notes, that tautology, that truism “doesn’t equate, as I have been reading the last few weeks, in a conclusion that MMT’s preference is for a nation to have a current account deficit.” MMTers & predecessors are much more careful than critics who vastly overgeneralize what MMT says.

Dave Taylor:You really think that “people overthink things, make things more complicated than they really are”, Calgacus?

Absolutely. Undersimplification, not oversimplification are the intellectual vices of the age, based on the idea that nothing is simple, that all the simple ideas were discovered long ago etc. It is based on enormous amnesia, enormous ignorance of history. The simple, most trivial things are usually the hardest and take the longest to discover and understand. That doesn’t mean they aren’t simple and trivial.

Consider Aristotle’s distinction between the things that are simple to us (meaning what I would call “obvious to us”) and those which are simple in themselves. The great mathematician Andre Weil noted how any mathematician knows that saying something is trivial is not at all saying it is obvious. An even greater thinker, Alexander Grothendieck, said – praising himself when someone criticised an idea of his as trivial – said that of course that idea is trivial, all of my ideas are entirely trivial.

Me:  Calgacus,

“Undersimplification, not oversimplification are the intellectual vices of the age, based on the idea that nothing is simple, that all the simple ideas were discovered long ago etc. It is based on enormous amnesia, enormous ignorance of history. The simple, most trivial things are usually the hardest and take the longest to discover and understand. That doesn’t mean they aren’t simple and trivial.”

With the slight disagreement that “trivial” should be “seemingly trivial” ….you and Aristotle are absolutely right, and that is precisely why the when, where and why of the policies of the new monetary and economic paradigm have been missed by all of the otherwise brilliant economic thinkers including Keen, Hudson and the major figures of MMT.

DT:  Demonstrably, Hume’s oversimplification can be reversed if the logic is dynamic (i.e. is not just a statement of observed relationships but actually forms the relationships observed). MODERN data processing was impossible before Algol68 took account of language level as well as numbers, producing an architecture in which the multi-user, multi-purpose operating system was distinct from the programs it was managing, and distinct programs likewise could be structured as a basic program repeatedly calling sub-programs only as required.

Me:  Curiously, you are correct also Dave. New paradigm perception is not only a kind of ultimately integrative experience it’s also a looking glass straddling one because it brings a full and expanded consciousness to both the old and new paradigms. In fact a new conscious experience is a component part of new paradigm perception….very much analogous to the data processing example you presented that integrates thought and action, i.e. statics and dynamics. And of course that is exactly what the discount/rebate policies of the new paradigm do.

There is one historically provable truth, which even though it may be anathema to the scientific and objective minded individual, and that is that once a new paradigm enters the consciousness of the individual, especially if it is in an area of human endeavor that is pervasive and always in effect like the economic and money systems….that everything and everyone adapts to the paradigm change…and NOT the other way around. The paradigm changes the pattern because that is what a new paradigm is….a pattern change.

It also reminds me of a quote attributed to Gautama Buddha: “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.”

….simply the entirety of the present monetary, economic, political and social psychological system we all live in, and that is dominatingly smothered and “controlled” by the paradigm of Debt Only. It is almost utterly ethically and/or mentally corrupting and people simply consider it “normal”.  Some criticise it, but they do so without fully comprehending the anchoring paradigm that keeps all of its shittiness in suspension. Hence nothing ever really changes.

If after he took office Obama would have broken up that monopolistic paradigm by ordering a modern debt jubilee of $100,000 be distributed into everyone’s bank account  with the one proviso that they pay down their debts with it, and then implemented the dividend and discount/rebate policies I advocate we would have had incredibly prosperous times for the last 10 years instead of the longest recession since the Great Depression. Then all that would remain in order to keep that prosperity going for a very long time would be to do the structural change I suggest of doing away with private finance’s money creating powers and replace it with a publicly administered national bank, and along with that a new arms length fourth branch of government and monetary authority guided by the concept behind the new paradigm, namely grace, to distribute the dividend and discount/rebate policies.

It’s not too late to make these changes. All it takes is an awakening to them and a mass movement to herd pols toward their implementation.

…it has taken the proud former owner-operator of a butique residencial window cleaning service with an open mind and the right combination of intellectual curiosities to implement and solve the economic eruditions of some of the most cutting edge economists with three temporal universe policies and one structural change. And this was accomplished simply by looking where they weren’t, that is, at the moment to moment operations of commerce. Looking at and deciphering the nature of the systems at work there, discovering when and where in those systems the ideal places were to implement policies and then finally, with an integrative study of the world’s major wisdom traditions, discovered the many aspects of the concept upon which not only the new paradigm in economics and money systems will be based, but historically has also progressed every human system and increased knowledge of the temporal universe itself. All increased knowledge is fully conscious knowledge.

Consciousness is essentially love, Wisdom is the study of consciousness/love, the continual integration, experience and expression of love is Grace and Grace is the most basic underlying nature of the cosmos.

Here are three economic innovations that will also have positive social, political and psychological benefits if we work together to acculturate a new zeitgeist of graciousness instead of mere profit, power, cynicism and harshness:

A universal dividend of $1000/mo. for everyone 18 and older

A 20% discount/rebate policy at the point of sale throughout the entire economic process

A 37.5-50% discount/rebate policy at the point of final retail sale for every product or service.

Paradigm changes are always innovations that are conceptually oppositional to the current/old paradigm. Let us end monetary austerity with abundance and employment only with employment and monetary gifting.

L:  I am a proponent of MMT and the use of sectoral balance monitoring to adjust the unemployment to near zero by guaranteeing a minimum wage for public infrastructure projects with the government spending adjusted to provide jobs for all unemployed workers willing to work. But this article convinces me that if and when capitalists think the way described in this article some sort of control mechanism would be needed to avoid an ever-growing incentive to increase automation to a point where only publicly funded infrastructure projects employ the labor force. The labor force is the consumer base for 70% of GNP, and if automation is allowed to decimate privately employed labor GNP will decrease accordingly and the fraction of the labor force ejected from private enterprise will increase. Finally, I suppose, industry will be mostly automated, the labor force will all be working for the government at the guaranteed rate, and the GNP will have decreased to fit the ability of the labor force to pay.

Me: Yes, that is precisely what will happen unless we awaken to the new paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting and then acculturate ourselves intelligently to leisure/self chosen purposeful activity.

Unless we think we can do away with profit, innovation and competition the labor participation rate will increasingly plummet. Technological innovation may decrease the need for human effort, but AI reduces the need for human PARTICIPATION. It is a far more disruptive economic force.

JB:  Hi, Craig, in Adam Smith’s day as through all history there have been big winners & also losers: in love, war & obviously with economics. I think of the Newport in R.I. as well as the place of the same name in California, near where I used to live. My obvious main point is that at any given time the big winners & those who support them defend the system. A secondary point is that these winners change over generations/decades, while some at the bottom improve their economic lot greatly. The changes come from many sources: the competence/ interest of second/third generations, as well as the vicissitudes of life including inheritance tax & size of next generation who split the pot. I taught in San Bernardino, CA where an itinerant milk shake salesman encountered McDonald’s #1 after WWII. He bought the firm & his widow became a billionaire in today’s terms. Joan Kroc lived an affluent period for decades. Similarly with Elvis Presley’s daughter who was a neighbor above San Bernardino in the local mountains.
Our economic models are anything but dynamic, & special events like natural resource/tech discoveries, celebrity & natural events (wars, storms, etc) all play a role in the economic ups/downs of individuals/firms/nations. The famous empires of global history all were gone within a few hundred years, or far less. People accept this generally, especially if they have left home & worked/fought elsewhere. I have never met many people who wanted to share the shirt off their back. They were oddballs. A generic response, my friend.

Me:  James, Thanks for the reply. Your historical perspective is accurate…because it depicts aspects of the zeitgeist of the current economic paradigm like burden, effort, indirectness of reward, domination, submission, enforced instead of rational hierarchy etc. Cultures follow and reflect their ideational/philosophical foundations.

The policies I advocate will be largely responsible for ushering in a new philosophical foundation upon which the populace will express its various aspects in every sphere of human endeavor like graciousness, gifting, cooperation, integration, flow, free flowingness, newness and nowness of consciousness etc.

Change is a thought away, and huge change is a new, basic, paradigm changing idea away.

DT: Following Mervyn’s link in the “fuzzy” discussion, here’s Bill Mitchell in 2016 [http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=32743]

“Marx, in the – Introduction, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (February 1844) was proposing that humans have the capacity for self-deceit and create religions for that purpose. The important point he was making is that there is human agency involved.

“He wrote that:

‘Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people’.

[In context, this is an atheist Jew reacting to a protestant interpretation of Christian gratitude, forgiveness and cooperative care for creation as an opiate created self-deceptively for others – i.e. to quieten their own consciences – by the heartless capitalists who had stolen creation].

Mitchell adds: “Mass consumption became the opiate in the Post Second World War period”.

Commenting on this, ‘Steve’ said [on Thursday, January 7, 2016 at 16:40]

“Yes capitalism and religion have psychologies that encourage infantilism, puritanism, authoritarianism, consumerism, and increasingly shallowness and distraction. I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I’m for Distributism and Wisdom, and Wisdom’s pinnacle concept and natural value Grace/graciousness which requires a rational and ethical mental rigor plus contemplation in order to avoid falling into the above flawed “hang ups” which inhibit mental as well as economic and monetary flow. There’s a duality to the trinity-unity of the dialectic that goes: thesis, antithesis and synthesis….and thesis, antithesis and ascension of knowledge/knowingness”.

Has Steve now changed his pen-name to Craig, I wonder? I agree with Craig here, anyway: huge change is just a new, basic, paradigm changing idea away.

Me:  Regardless of who says it the many aspects of the natural philosophical concept of grace are imminently relevant and resolving of any and all problems/conflicts…in any area of human endeavor. That’s why contemplation of the natural philosophical concept of grace is so utterly important. In fact, historically, an aspect of grace and its temporal universe effects has always been the operant factor in every true progression and/or paradigm change that humanity has discovered/re-discovered. The concept of grace is the deepest, broadest….and most relevant concept in the cosmos. That is precisely why it is the concept behind what I refer to as the cosmic code.

L:  Craig, a lot of what I’m reading here is like a sales pitch. What I need is a simple example that takes a product from raw materials to sold finished product and gives the discounts, dividends and rebates at all stages of the process and the source of funds needed to commence the next cycle.
Nobody has given that information in what I’ve read.

Me:  The policies speak for themselves because they utilize the fact that the point of sale is a complete summing and stopping point and at final retail sale is also a terminal summing point for any and all inflation.

As for the source of funds it obviously would have to be a governmental/monetary authority. It could actually be the FED. They are the monetary authority (wink, wink….because the too big to fail private banks are the real monetary authority)…but NOT the government (wink, wink because Finance and its monopolistic paradigm are the actual ruling authority).

But all it would take is honest and informed people to expose this ruse and establish the government as the actual ruling authority and mandate that the FED fulfill the policies of the dividend and discount/rebate. Fiat money systems with temporal universe actual, rational and ethical controls must serve Man, Man must not serve tyrannical systems.

MH: Warren Mosler has a workable solution, and importantly one which any EZ member can usefully adopt unilaterally, incl. Italy.

Me:  MMT has the mechanics of money creation correct. But like every other mere new theory or iconoclastic insight it neither rises to the level of paradigm nor simultaneously plumbs the depths of and seamlessly integrates into the temporal universe….which is what occurs in a paradigm change. The policies of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting go to the heart and the groin of the problem (the current paradigm) and implement the paradigm change.

KZ: Craig, the belief that money is created by rules, or stated in a more grandiose way, of law drives a stake into the heart of the belief that markets make all economic decisions for us. The creation and the use of money are purely political creations. Thus, changing the nature of money is a political choice, not a market result. Clearly, the political processes may be complex and difficult to describe, and may involved some market actions, but the political actions that make money always extend beyond any one or several markets. In fact, these markets are themselves creatures of cultural rules. You are suggesting changes to those rules. It’s impossible to say a priori what impacts a “universal dividend,” or an “assured middle-class lifestyle,” or “linearizing price deflation,” or “monetary gifting” will have. But certainly, these are interesting questions to consider via observation.

Me:  It’s not impossible to say what the monetary and economic effects of those policies will be….because their temporal universe and mathematical effects throughout the entire legitimate economic process will be exactly what I’ve said they will be. Now you CAN say that their individual human effects may vary, yes, but their above effects….ARE what they are.

You could also say that certain agents may try to undo or retard some of those effects, and that would very likely be correct also, but of course part of the implementation of any set of policies denotes enforcement of them and/or various levels of punishment for not doing so….like kicking cheaters/non-com pliers with such policies…out of the privileges they might otherwise enjoy from them.

KZ:  Craig, two items speak against the path you suggest. First, the always present uncertainty involved in all aspects of human society. Second, human judgement, which is involved in every action and decision of humans. Obviously, neither is predictable. The result, sometimes the cheaters win, and humans choose a path that disagrees with the one you prefer.

Me:  Yes, one can’t know which ideas will win or not. But I’m no longer concerned with that.

Over all I tend to come down on Keen’s point of view on this issue, but again, the entire debate takes place squarely within the current paradigm of Debt Only when if the new paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting were implemented neither the dominating mercantilist/export platform nor the manipulative reserve currency strategy of national economies would be necessary…because domestic economies would create sufficiently abundant individual incomes to maintain free flowingness….without having to resort to such.

Furthermore, if nations didn’t have to worry about the negative monetary effects of unemployment due to a universal dividend and retail discount/rebate policies guaranteeing a satisfactory lifestyle, then they could industrialize/re-industrialize and therefore have even more robust and self sufficient domestic economies. And of course with abundant demand there would undoubtedly be much more employment…than if demand was left scarce anyway.

Me:  Ken,

You’re 5/27 post is exactly spot on. It is a litany of private Finance’s additional costs post retail sale and so lays bare its money creating power to be parasitic and illegitimate. It also accurately describes many of the means by which finance’s virtually monopolistic paradigm of Debt Only as the sole vehicle and form for the distribution of credit/money sucks the profits and vitality out of the rest of the legitimate economic/productive process. Systems were made for Man, not man for systems. I’m confident everyone here believes this to be true. They just don’t know how to make the system serve us.

Modern economies’ two primary and chronic problems are scarcity of free to spend individual income and price/asset inflation. A universal dividend begins to resolve the first problem, and the twin digital discount/rebate policies at the point of sale between business models throughout the entire length of the productive process and also the 50% discount at the terminal end of that process for every item or service at final retail sale….which point just so happens to also be the terminal expression point for all consumer price inflation….and so these three policies automatically double everyone’s purchasing power and not only resolves the chronic problem of inflation, but painlessly and beneficially accomplishes what has up to now been considered impossible, namely the integration of price deflation into profit making systems. That is far more than any theorist or politician has ever conceived let alone accomplished, and its not even the end of the benefits that follow on from them.

Such dramatic and definitive progress characterizes a paradigm change, and that’s exactly what we need.

KZ:  Craig, some good points but don’t forget all the things you want to fight are not accidental. A little history here. Lewis Franklin Powell Jr. (September 19, 1907 – August 25, 1998) was an Associate Justice of SCOTUS, serving from 1971 to 1987. Powell compiled a conservative record on the Court and cultivated a reputation as a swing vote with a penchant for compromise.” But before he was a Supreme Court Associate Justice, Powell planned the future we’re now living. On August 23, 1971, Powell was commissioned by his neighbor, Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., a close friend, and education director of the US Chamber of Commerce, to write a confidential memorandum titled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” an anti-Communist, anti-Fascist, anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America for the chamber. It was based in part on Powell’s reaction to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the American consumer movement. Powell saw it as an undermining of Americans’ faith in enterprise and another step in the slippery slope of socialism. His experiences as a corporate lawyer and a director on the board of Phillip Morris from 1964 until his appointment to the Supreme Court made him a champion of the tobacco industry who railed against the growing scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer deaths. He argued, unsuccessfully, that tobacco companies’ First Amendment rights were being infringed when news organizations were not giving credence to the cancer denials of the industry. That was the point where Powell began to focus on the media as biased agents of socialism. The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding society’s thinking about business, government, politics, and law in the US. It sparked wealthy heirs of earlier American Industrialists like Richard Mellon Scaife; the Earhart Foundation, money which came from an oil fortune; and the Smith Richardson Foundation, from the cough medicine dynasty to use their private charitable foundations, which did not have to report their political activities, to join the Carthage Foundation, founded by Scaife in 1964 to fund Powell’s vision of a pro-business, anti-socialist, minimalist government-regulated America as it had been in the heyday of early American industrialism, before the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Powell Memorandum thus became the blueprint of the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as well as inspiring the US Chamber of Commerce to become far more politically active. CUNY professor David Harvey traces the rise of neoliberalism in the US to this memo. Powell argued, “The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” In the memorandum, Powell advocated “constant surveillance” of textbook and television content, as well as a purge of left-wing elements. He named consumer advocate Nader as the chief antagonist of American business. Powell urged conservatives to take a sustained media-outreach program; including funding scholars who believe in the free enterprise system, publishing books and papers from popular magazines to scholarly journals and influencing public opinion. This memo foreshadowed a few Powell’s court opinions, especially First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which shifted the direction of First Amendment law by declaring that corporate financial influence of elections by independent expenditures should be protected with the same vigor as individual political speech. Much of the future Court opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission relied on the same arguments raised in Bellotti. Jack Anderson of the Washington Post made the memo public, claiming Powell was attempting to undermine American democracy. However, in terms of business’ view of itself in relation to government and public interest groups, the memo only conveyed the thinking among business persons at the time. The real contribution of the memo was to facilitate institution-building, particularly updating the Chamber’s efforts to influence federal policy. The memo was a major motivator for the Chamber and other groups modernizing efforts to lobby the federal government and shape the future of American society. Trump benefited from all this work, even if he couldn’t read the memo (too many big words).

Me:  Yes, I’m well aware of The Powell Memo. What we require is a new INTEGRATIVE Powell Memo, it being a mere reaction to liberalism. Integrating the best aspects of both the left and right economic perspectives so as to create a thirdness greater oneness is precisely what the policies I post about here will accomplish. Integration of truths and the simultaneous deletion of untruths is the very process of Wisdom itself.

Liberals and conservatives get stuck in their respective orthodoxies and miss the real point of logic and progress. The Thirdness greater oneness/trinity-unity-oneness process the dialectic [( thesis x antithesis) <–> synthesis ] gets lost in all of the heat but little light.

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Me:  The heart of the money problem is twofold:

1) How to remedy the inherent scarcity of free and available individual incomes in ratio to total costs/prices without causing/increasing inflation and
2) How the current monopolistic paradigm of Debt Only enforces the continual build up of debt/additional costs, and how it also prevents the establishment of the price deflationary/doubling of individual purchasing power remedies of the dual policies of a universal dividend and a retail discount/rebate.

KZ:  Craig, in my view the heart of our “money” problem is the belief by politicians and others involved in liberal democracy that compromise with capitalists is possible and should be pursued. In my view, it is not possible and is not worth pursuing. For most in the capitalist group the vision of America they hold is of a pro-business, anti-socialist, minimalist government-regulated America as it had been in the heyday of early American industrialism, before the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. They see no need to limit the methods used to get to that end. After all, they are defending western civilization and fighting the takeover by socialism. But mostly they are assuring the rich, whom they represent stay rich, and poor remain poor. Mainstream economists mostly aid them in this effort with big words and high-sounding theories that are mostly just walls behind which to hide the intentions of their capitalist employers. Economists debate the theories and the math, but the debate is meaningless. Just a smoke screen for the deliberate effort to maintain the wealthy in their place in control and ensure the poor remain always poor. Keeping in mind Jay Gould’s description of this situation. Physicists are scientists, biologists are scientists, sociologists are scientists. Economists are not scientists. Economists pretend to be scientists, but their actual work is protecting capitalism and capitalists. I suggest we take economists for what they are, rather than what they pretend to be.

Me:  I was referring to the money problem itself, and you characterize the political part of the problem accurately. That could be most effectively addressed by showing how the best aspects of the agendas of both the left and right are accomplished by the paradigm changing policies I’ve long suggested here. For instance:

1) A universal dividend to everyone 18 years of age and older of sufficient amount and doubled in its potential purchasing power by the discount/rebate policies immediately accomplishes the heart of the liberal agenda of economic democracy and the end of poverty.

2) If every adult is assured a satisfactorily middle class lifestyle without employment this immediately satisfies the conservative agenda of frugality and downsizing government by enabling the elimination of all transfer taxation for unemployment insurance and welfare and their respective bureaucracies. This actually works for both the liberal and conservative agendas as both individuals and enterprise pat these taxes.

3) With the two discount/rebates policies linearizing price deflation throughout the entire economic/productive process the erosive effects of inflation are ended for both individuals and businesses

4) With the accomplishment of integrating monetary gifting into the now bounded and stabilized economy all but a small percentage of income taxes to keep the government legitimated (say 2-3%) will no longer be necessary because fiat monetary gifting…will be able to all but replace it. Taxation will return to its legitimate purpose of discouraging personal and economic vices instead of being a “necessary” burden on the individual and enterprise which in fact is just a way for finance to enforce austerity with its paradigm of Debt Only and also enforce the mistaken assumption that taxation is necessary to control inflation.

https://www.thenation.com/article/what-will-kill-neoliberalism/

That is an article with the right frame of mind, i.e. change, not just debate. The UBI/universal dividend idea is obviously an integral part of future economic systems because technological innovation/AI will inevitably be a greater and greater disruptive force and labor expense is the softest and most readily available means of cutting costs unless you do away with profit, competition, innovation and AI…so good luck with that. One of the tricks in paradigm change is a genuine integration of the truths, workabilities, applicabilities and highest ethical considerations of opposing sides…not the usual compromises that pols idiotically tend to craft that insures lack of agreement and no actual progress.

An actual integration is a cleansing/purification process that requires REAL statesmanship and generally a new insight to enable….a lot more statesmanship. That is why the discount/rebate policies I’ve suggested here are so important because they contain a new insight that has been overlooked by virtually all current theorists that show agents on both sides how they will benefit….rather than have to give up/suffer even more than they are suffering presently.