A little clarification of the discount/rebate policy.

It is a pass on discount of the agreed upon percentage of their “retail product(s)” to their consumers from mining to the business model of retail sale.

50% would be optimal because it would benefit individuals at retail sale by immediately doubling their available purchasing power, and would make the policy virtually irresistible to every business model because why would any enterprise not like to sell their product at half their best competitive price….and still get that full price via the rebating of their discounts? Also, if, for whatever irrational and anti-social reason, one refused to participate in a policy that benefited every individual and business, it would be committing commercial suicide as they’d have to sell their product at approximately twice the price of their competitors.

Finally, it would be extended even to the business model of Finance/Banking for their various loans which would both nakedly expose the tremendous power they possess with their money creation charters, and also enable them to become an ethically sharing and integral part of the economy instead of an attached, dominating and manipulative parasite with its monopoly paradigm of Debt Only.

For instance, if a home building corporation discounted their price for a home costing $200k to $100k and then the Bank discounted the loan from $100k to $50k (and of course the Bank would receive the full $100k via the rebate of their discounts to the individual) then the price would end up being only 25% of its actual cost….to the individual. Such is the virtual magic of the new paradigm of direct and reciprocal gifting.  

And I’m sure that every bank will want to participate in the policy….because if even one of their competition does and they don’t….its rapidly bye-bye Bank. And if they all collude not to participate they will be exposed as purely self interestedly opposing a policy that so greatly benefited every individual and every other enterprise….that the people and the rest of the business community would rise up…and demand that we charter a new kind of bank that would be happy to participate in such a good and gracious economic and social policy, that is a Bank that was actually interested in serving the public interest as well as its own.

Note: Some regulation would also be needed for some of their products and services. For instance leveraged purely financial speculations like the various derivative products as well as already on the books regulations regarding leveraged naked shorting etc.

Grace integrates and encompasses everything.

Steve Hummel 11/26/2017

Grace is both moral (recognizing and discerning wrongness) and ethical (the rational consideration of morals).

Steve Hummel 11/26/2017

It’s all well and good for China and Russia to attempt to blunt and disrupt US dominance regarding the petro-dollar and reserve currency etc. The one thing the US could do to make this not only irrelevant, but turn the tables on Russia, China and any other country that wants to become an export platform would be to stabilize and supercharge its DOMESTIC economy with a sufficiently abundant universal dividend and a price deflationary discount policy thus enabling them to re-industrialize because without the “necessity” of having to worry about unemployment due to the guaranteed middle class income from the dividend you could do that in the most technologically efficient and ecologically sensitive fashion possible.  Their consequent loss of the US market would force China etc. to seek other markets or better yet to stabilize their own domestic markets with the same policies.

Without a vision….you only see part of the solution.

The policy is The Generalized Point of “Retail Sale” Discount/Rebate “Pass On”.

This enables enterprise at all levels and business models throughout the economy to completely unobtrusively find their true and best competitive price for whatever product or service, discount it 50% to their consumer and then receive a rebate of their discounts back to them by a monetary authority specifically mandated to do so. It is completely valid economically, does not invalidate or eliminate costs or their accounting, but rather compensates for them within and throughout the entire process of the economy.

The net effects of the policy are an incredible stabilization of commerce,  an immediate doubling of individual purchasing power, the beneficial integration of price deflation into profit making systems, an end to the dominating financial paradigms of Debt, Loan and For Production Only, via their participation in the policy the transformation of  the business model of Finance from a parasite into partnership and finally, the saturation of the new paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting, again, throughout the entire process of the economy.

This policy is the discovery of the ellipse and the invention of the telescope, the sciences of grain cultivation and animal husbandry all wrapped up in one paradigmatic changing package. It is not just “greasing the skids” of commerce it is pushing it along on a cryogenic magnetic and levitatative rail that can enable greater innovation, resource conservation and profit. It’s the breakthrough integrative policy that can forever end the oppressive dominance of the business model of Finance and usher in a new golden age for general abundance and freedom for the individual.

Steve Hummel 11/25/2017

The whole monetary problem is summed up in the fact that the money system is not allowed to be direct to the individual in a constructive and freeing fashion, and Finance, which is mistakenly allowed by the political system to have a virtual monopoly on credit creation, does not/will not recognize the temporal/historic reality of the build up of a cultural inheritance of value and productive capacity in advanced economies, and so is allowed to usurp the overwhelming value and surplus created by that reality.

….my contribution of the new monetary and economic paradigm and its policies is a part, a stepping stone to that higher goal. The continuous negative effects of an unstable and scarcity ridden economy are such a stressful cloud, a gigantic neurosis on human civilization that resolving it with the policies of the new paradigm would be like a huge deep breath, a planetary stimulation of the vagus nerve, an advancement to human culture that we haven’t seen since the change from hunting and gathering to agriculture and maybe even since the birth of conscious awareness itself….because those policies bring consciousness to present time in the economic stopping/pausing point and ubiquitousness of the point of sale. It’s like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book title and insight “Wherever You Go, There You Are” brought to the primary purpose and every moment of the economy.  It’s a crashing through of consciousness into temporal affairs and so opens up and broadens the legitimate areas that an otherwise transcendental spirituality might neglect.    

Science:  [ Hypothesis  <–>  (True datum x Untrue datum) ]

Wisdom:  [Truth x Opposing Truth)  <–>  Larger, greater, more unified, more holistic truth ]

Note: Science is a trinity-unity-fragmenting-process. Wisdom is a trinity-unity-oneness-wholeness-consciousness-process.  Good science is always open minded and hence dynamic instead of static and dogmatic, and the signature of scientific breakthrough is always the integration of the scientific method as per above and an aspect or aspects of consciousness like curiosity, creativity, imagination, intuition, looking/looking closer, newness, nowness, perception/experience of continuousness/everpresence etc. etc.

Morals tend to be black and white. Ethics is the rational consideration of morals. Integrating (the very process of wisdom) the truths and insights of the two disciplines would ultimately result in discovery of the pinnacle concept of wisdom which would in turn be a new and different thing as wisdom is also the dynamic, interactive and thorough integration of opposites to the point of thirdness and greater oneness.

This is the concept behind the new monetary and economic paradigm, and even beyond that temporal application, the experience pointed at by all of the world’s major wisdom traditions.

There is a hierarchy of ways and means of knowing/knowledge that inclusively ascends from data to philosophy to self knowledge that are all monitored by the act and direction of looking. You look outwardly/scientifically at temporal data/facts, you look inwardly at and about the philosophical implications of those facts and their relationships to each other (contemplation) and this results in a third greater self actualization/self knowledge/atonement-at oneness of both the data and the philosophy.

This is all natural philosophy and natural spirituality.

You’re absolutely right, politicians and economists wallow in any number of unconscious and obsessively contentious dualisms that contain particles of truth and untruth, instead of integrating the truths in opposites to the point of greater unity and oneness. Integration of truths is the very process of Wisdom. Unconscious and obsessive contention is stupidity. The motto must be:

When in doubt integrate….and keep on integrating.

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MPs and pols from every major country won’t pay any more attention to MMT, or only slightly more….unless you show their constituencies a better way that they are able to understand because it is elegantly simple. You have to engage large constituency’s self interests like students, the common man and the small to medium sized business community with a policy or policies that will obviously benefit them….directly and unambiguously. I’ve been telling Steve Keen for years that he’s preaching to the choir. His recent Patreon campaign is a step in the right direction, but his message is still way too complex and therefore won’t adequately communicate. MMT is right about money mechanics, but its message is also way above the heads of most people. You need a single concept and a set of policies that will show the above constituencies what’s in it for them, and/or if they’re open to it, what it can do for others, the system and the nation. Then you create and focus a mass social movement out of that concept and policies that is able to herd the entirety of the political apparatus toward their implementation. It worked for Ghandi, it worked for MLK, Jr. ….it can work for the money and economic systems.

dnm:  You need different packages for different audiences, one very simple set of ideas for the general public, one tailored to journalists, one for politicians, one for business leaders, and so on.

larry:  dnm, Bill doesn’t see marketing and the like as one of his strengths, possibly necessary to build a mass movement. He is an academic. His role as he has characterized it is to develop and put forward ideas and analyses and for others to engage in the other activities that may be necessary for general acceptance. Mosler has been trying as well as Kelton to change the minds of legislators. As receptive as Sanders has been to Kelton’s views, it is unclear whether he has taken her views completely on board. Mosler has said that his successes have been uneven, and he is something of a politician. So, it seems to me to be a tad unfair to expect Bill to be able to do everything. Building a mass movement is a quite specialized skill. What Bill has is his integrity. To me, this counts for a great deal.

Me:  @dnm and larry

You’re both right of course, and my comments are not to be considered a critique of Bill or anyone else. The fact remains however that a mass social movement is the correct vehicle for the political success of the various heterodox theories, and that would best be accomplished by an integration of the truths in each of them expressed in specific direct policies that every agent could easily perceive was in their self interest and was also attended by a resonantly humane and valid philosophical/psychological concept that they could easily go into agreement with.

dnm:  I broadly agree with your latest comment. One worry is that self-defined MMT groups end up spending >95% of their time preaching to the converted, in a best case scenario. In the worst case, the attempt to find a “valid philosophical/psychological concept” that all can agree on consumes all available resources. Ideological purity is the enemy of practical results.

Me:  @dnm

“In the worst case, the attempt to find a “valid philosophical/psychological concept” that all can agree on consumes all available resources.”

Well yes, but looking at the expressed goals and policy suggestions of the various heterodox movements of MMT, Keen’s Minsky Instability/Disequilibrium theory, Michael Hudson’s Financial Parasitism, Ellen Brown’s Public Banking and the handful of monetary reform movements….an underlying conceptual thread can be discerned. And along with other policy extensions and innovations, I’ve spent the last several years doing an exegesis of that common thread concept. So for the most part that effort has already been done.