Me:  Everyone here is missing the real problem which is the idea/currently enforced paradigm of Debt Only and which has no balancing counterpart despite the rigged, cost inflationary and hence unworkable inherent nature of modern technologically advanced economies. Everyone is mentally paralyzed by the fear of monetary inflation which is a misnomer because money actually isn’t the operative factor in such, and is largely or completely unconscious of the fact that the point of retail sale is the terminal summing of all costs and so all price for any item or service and simultaneously is the terminal and only legitimate ending point for the entire economic/productive process, that is where production becomes consumption. Hence it IS the perfect place to implement the new paradigm of Monetary Gifting with a monetary policy of a discount/rebate that mirrors the digital nature of both the pricing and money systems and so benefits all agents and not only prevents any possibility of inflation (retail sale is also the terminal expression point of price inflation including large asset purchases like autos and mortgages), but integrates price deflation painlessly and beneficially into profit making systems.

Behold! All things are made new!

R:  Lending does not create money.
It creates velocity, which is indistinguishable in practice from money.
It satisfies one side of the M x V = P x Q equation.
Anyone that can lend can create velocity.
So everyone can create “money”.

Me:  The velocity of money creates liquidity for enterprise with which they must pay their vendors and crediters, but does not increase the purchasing power or incomes of individuals by a single cent as its classical illustration erroneously depicts. This is because any money re-circulating is business revenue NOT anyone’s individual income that can be distributed willy nilly without regard for cost accounting and the necessity for businesses to pay their bills. Macro-economists miss this because they’re off in some three times removed abstract and/or eye glazing over mathematical fugue and hence have lost track of temporal commercial realities.

RR:  (Regarding home inflation)  Are we still in the sweet zone Dean? Does a despotic demagogue taking us on the path to global conflict (a distinct possibility given the new SOS) figure in anywhere in the bubble analysis?

Me:  Yes, all the more urgent that we implement a 50% discount at the point of retail sale (the point of retail sale for a home is the builder so a $200k home would then cost only $100k thus effectively integrating price deflation into the economy. And if we were smart enough and honest enough to confront the fact that private finance is a destabilizing, illegitimate, post retail sale and thus completely parasitical flow of additional costs we could thus make finance a public utility that could be added to retail sale you could reduce that to $50k.

Monetary Gifting is the new paradigm that will save financially dominated profit making systems from its own cost inflationary collapse.

RR:  While I commend your idealism Craig I cannot help but note your ideas are impractical and therefore render your enthusiasm useless in solving real-world economic problems. Simply repeating yourself endlessly, dismissing legitimate questions of how one gets from the less than ideal to the ideal in a real world, renders you merely an intellectual parrot. In time no one takes you seriously as you are incapable of thinking outside your own minds “paradigm” long enough to render it practical within the world we find ourselves. Material wealth flows in certain channels and the ability to recognize those channels and work within the pragmatic real-world structures we find ourselves is the only way we incrementally advance towards the ideal—assuming it is a good one and worthy of our striving. Utopian solutions seldom in history have turned out well. It might serve you to consider why that is? No doubt, you will retort I do not understand, as that seems your position of last resort when challenged with the lack of pragmatic specifics of how one advances from the less than ideal to the ideal. Alas we live in a less than ideal world and no matter how much wishful thinking we engage in we must work out our ideals with and among our fellows, and that inevitably means social compromise.

Me:  Utopias are not real. However, Wisdom (the integration of opposing truths) is also the best integration of the practical and the ideal. If we can over night create a Federal Reserve that backs finance when it takes leave of its moorings like it did leading up to the GFC, then with an intelligently lead mass movement of self interested constituencies we can just as easily implement a discount rebate policy and a balancing monetary authority to fund it.

There’s nothing impractical about that, and all it really takes is for one to act out the discount/rebate policy in one’s mind or with two other people until one sees how real its effects actually are. Some times lingering orthodoxies and current paradigms die only with repetitive efforts…but when the benefits finally hit you….it’s called the breakthrough AKA paradigm change.

Finally, compromise with a dominant force when a solution is actually available is not only stupid, its completely unethical. Please consider that truth.

Paradigm perception requires a peculiar and particular set of mental tools. They represent the two major forms of human mental inquiry, science and wisdom. Science is a trinity-mentally fragmenting-process and wisdom is a trinity-unity-wholeness-process. Integrated they make paradigm perception possible, and if one has a full historical and conceptual understanding of what a new paradigm is (a single concept that describes and integrates into an entire new pattern) and what it does (radically advances human thinking and survival) ….it makes new paradigm perception a fairly straight forward rational process.

For instance, all of the leading edge reformers have reflective policies regarding money, are aware of the problematic nature of the private business model of finance and agree there are negative effects to monetary austerity.  However, they haven’t sufficiently integrated this data to perceive the single concept of the new paradigm. They’ve taken it all apart in numerous and repetitive ways…but they don’t see the whole….because they are habituated to the current paradigm of inquiry (Science Only) and so do not include the essential mental tool of wisdom.

They also do not have a particular breakthrough insight/innovation that will enable the new paradigm to rapidly if not immediately become the temporal reality and which new insight/innovation historically always accompanies a new paradigm. For instance the paradigm change of Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture had the innovations of animal husbandry and cultivation of crops, the Copernican paradigm change of Helio-Centrism had the invention of the telescope and the discovery of the ellipse. In the current monetary and economic paradigm change economists do not perceive the economic relevance, significance and effectiveness of tying monetary policy directly and reciprocally to the point of retail sale. Fully understanding this new insight opens one’s mind to the new paradigm because that policy is the very expression of the new paradigm….itself.

Finally, often, even after a new paradigm is perceived, it is not expressed. Usually this is because one’s image as an expert or as a scientist is in danger if it is expressed. Another of the signatures of a new paradigm is that it is conceptually oppositional to the current paradigm and the old paradigm is simultaneously habituated in the minds of both experts and the general populace. Hence it is easy for the orthodox and/or the non-scholarly vast majority to ridicule any new paradigm and its advocates. Hence few express it. And of course the authorities and purveyors of the old paradigm, especially regarding a new monetary paradigm which is the means of freedom and even of survival, can make one’s very life perilous if their monopolistic power and control is questioned. Therefore, declaring a breaking up of that monopoly could be very dangerous.

The real problem with healthcare and every other sector of the economy is that theorists think they’re advocating free markets when what they’re actually advocating is financially rigged, chaotic and hence ethically unenforceable “markets”. This is true of both capitalist and democratic socialist theorists. They’re all habituated to and blinded by the imminently parasitical current monetary and financial paradigm of Debt Only. Break up that most basic problem and glaringly contradictory monopoly by integrating the new paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting and its policies and regulations into the economy….and we’ll have real change that will truly benefit all agents instead of “Change You Can believe In” or  3rd rate intellectual populist demagoguery like “Make America Great Again”. Then a truly fair and ethical social contract can be honestly created for the first time, and all of the understandably angry yet reactionary social and political manifestations we’re seeing world wide can fall back into rationality or at least crawl back underneath the rock they came from.

Let’s not forget that insurance comes to us from the rackets. The coercion is simply a little less overt now is all. Also, as Minsky correctly observed “the fundamental vector of capitalism is up” and when a sector like healthcare/medicine is riven with monopoly associations it makes the force of that vector even greater.

And of course the utterly integrated monopoly paradigm of finance is more than happy to contribute to same both from the upper bound of cost and so price and from the entirely missed lower bound of costs/price.

All the more essential that the twin policies of Wisdomics-Giftonomics (universal monthly dividend and 50% retail discount/rebate) be implemented so that the “impossible” , i.e. price deflation be integrated into profit making systems.

FS:  Would it not be be better to teach “the actual scientific method”, recognisable by scientists, not some metaphysical analysis of what it might possibly be?

Then, would it not be be better to define a curriculum which teaches scientifically valid analysis? Though one would imagine that to be a very short course indeed!

Me:  No, because natural philosophy-wisdom, not “some metaphysical analysis” includes and encompasses science. In fact it makes for good science instead of scientism, and as the integration of an aspect or aspects of consciousness and the scientific method is the signature of scientific breakthrough it is precisely what settled science/orthodoxy needs.

FS:  The theory you espouse, “it makes for good science instead of scientism”, is demonstrably wrong for economics. The exact opposite is true. Adam Fforde’s paper (“Economics as a science” RWER-81) describes what economists consider to be the scientific method and dismisses the alternative which scientists would see as the scientific method — economists apply the very opposite of what empirical evidence shows to be true — scientists apply the scientific method because it works.

I am not dismissing meta-level analyses as useless. But that they do not provide a useful method of teaching. The vast majority of people do not work from abstractions to the concrete. They work from the concrete to the abstract.

While object oriented computer programming may appear to be an example of applying abstraction to design, see the books on how to refactor code so as to recognise the abstractions which are present in existing code.

If I were to follow your reasoning, I would teach arithmetic manipulations by introducing the laws of association, commutation and distribution and expect these to help the learning process — similarly, mathematics from category theory?
I think not.

Me:  Sorry, you’re not understanding me. I’m advocating using BOTH science and Wisdom. As for Wisdom not providing a useful method of teaching that may be true for those who start from a dogma and simply grasp that and obsessively spout it therefore dramatizing “faith in” something, but there are rigorous and effective spiritual “technologies” and traditions that help one begin from the actual starting line which is meeting and experiencing one’s own consciousness….from which abstraction can better and more effectively proceed. That way one does not become habituated to abstraction and “faith in” science only.

The biggest breakthrough economics ever had could probably be accomplished by 25-60 year old economists and pundits meeting themselves for the first time in the present.

Each of these have their place of course, and ascendingly their areas of influence. The pedants largely works with data and with instruction of same. Their mindset is largely proscribed although the best of them question the area of their expertise.

The philosopher deals with ideas and concepts and their relationships to each other and tries to make more general conclusions about them and about life in general. Their mindset is obviously larger.

The paradigm perceiver is one who consciously sees and yet dares to step out of the present pattern and inhabit a new one. Most people are unconscious of even the present paradigm let alone be conscious of a new one. The paradigm perceiver requires not only courage, a high tolerance of ambiguity and dogged perseverance but a willingness and ability to simultaneously integrate thinking hierarchically-holistically and decentralizingly-reductionistically. This is because of the nature of the paradigm itself which is a single concept that describes and integratively fits within and creates a whole new pattern.

A pedant may doggedly try to convince his fellow instructors, theorists or authorities even though they are generally egocentrically not interested in listening let alone looking, and this usually a source of great frustration.

A philosopher largely faces the same problem with his ideas.

A paradigm perceiver knows the human mind is simultaneously the easiest and most difficult thing in the cosmos to change. Hence he or she does not bother with those who aren’t interested in changing or looking, but rather is interested in communicating their vision to those who will change by showing them their obvious self interests in the new paradigm….because being paradigm perceivers they realize that the nature of a new paradigm is that it is an obvious and out sized historical advance for everyone in whatever area or areas it applies to….and so in fact is inevitably in their self interests.

True paradigm perceivers are the equivalents of time travelers. They already know what the future must and eventually will be so they are in a continual state of knowingness in the present. Knowingness is the pinnacle of human mental states, and not coincidentally is a component part of a new paradigm itself and so it aids the perceiver by their continual looking/contemplation of the new paradigm.  Then the only thing further needed is for the paradigm perceiver to eliminate any personal blocks that may inhibit he/she from effectively communicating their vision.  

…because it is a knowingness which is way above knowing data, perceiving a theory or even a philosophy, and knowing something in its highest and fullest sense is a part of omniscience which of course is attributed to God, or to a man or woman in a particular instance or area of human endeavor due to the discernment of Wisdom which is the perception and integration of the truths, workabilities and highest ethical considerations in what are considered opposing sides or perspectives. It is also discerning a singular concept that describes and effectively integrates into a pattern in such a way that it resolves long standing problems in that pattern to the point of creating a third and distinctly new pattern. In other words it is the integration of hierarchical and de-centralized mental perception…at the same time, i.e. atonement/oneness with God.

The new paradigm in economics and the money system is Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting, and the new economic and monetary ethic-zeitgeist is grace.

…aren’t actually in business at all, but rather the “business” of going bankrupt over a 1-10 year period. . It’s a ruse, a ponzi scheme because systemically total costs and so prices (because the cost accounting convention that all costs must go into price is always and correctly in force)….always exceed total individual incomes simultaneously produced. And systemically that enforces continuous borrowing which incurs additional costs of course….and so does not resolve the problematic costs/prices to individual incomes ratio.

Macro-economists look only at the debt deflation aspect of the problem which is indeed correct enough, but they miss the micro-foundational cost accounting factors of ever increasing depreciation costs of fixed capital assets which keeps increasing the lower bound of costs for enterprise, and the fact that systemically individual incomes can never equal total costs and prices because time and the pooling and re-investment of money prevents total free to purchase individual incomes from ever equaling total costs and prices.

And all of the leading macro-economists agree that capitalism is demand constrained and in one way or another tend to advocate increasing individual incomes. But again, because they are not looking at the everyday operation of commerce and do not perceive the terminal summing and ending point of the economic process at retail sale and also do not conceive or perceive that both the pricing and money systems are digital in nature. Consequently, they do not see how a discount to prices at retail sale that is rebated back to the enterprise granting/gifting such to the consumer could be utilized to dramatically increase individual purchasing power and at the same time not only prevent any purchasing power corrosion, but to painlessly and beneficially integrate price deflation into profit making systems.

And this is why Wisdomics-Giftonomics and its policies is far superior and far more beneficial to the individual, to enterprise and to the entire system….than any other economic theorist or monetary reformer.

….between MMTers and  Wisdomics-Giftonomics is the former (apparently) want to remain dominated by the current financial paradigm and the latter doesn’t.  This is a failure/refusal to perceive at the paradigm level and hence becomes reform instead of transformation.

MMT is petite, Wisdomics is robust. MMT is thinking. Wisdomics-Giftonomics is Wisdom, i.e. knowing.

Science without Wisdom (self awareness and the ethical imperative it denotes) is the orthodoxy and stupidity known as scientism. The scientific study of economics requires Wisdom no less. In fact, as it is a monetary economy and money is the product that grants freedom or enforces enslavement if not loss of life without it….it requires it even more.