Because Gifting the economic virtue of frugality via cost/price cutting or cost/price maintenance encourages the economic virtues of competition and innovation, and taxing the arbitrary choice to commit price inflation for the sole purpose of profiting more discourages that (price inflation) economic vice.

It also reflectively makes the system more direct and human instead of more removed via abstraction and so less in touch with what its systemic purpose should actually be, namely something that serves mankind instead of something mankind must serve.

“Systems were made for Man, not Man for systems.”   C. H. Douglas

Homes, Autos and Healthcare will be “retailized” and the Double Discount/Dividend policies will be applied to their prices.

Either a Public Banking system and/or the National Credit Office will fund all commercial loans after a thorough analysis of the market, borrower’s history and credit-ability and the purpose for the commercial loan itself.

An example of how the Double Discount and Dividend policies will make healthcare affordable with little or no insurance:

The Ophthamologist charges $5000 for cataract surgery and discounts his price 50% to the consumer to $2500, the surgeon is paid $2500 by the NCO to make him whole on his overheads and margin of profit.  The consumer pays the remaining $2500 with a credit card and gets $1250 rebated back. Hence everyone is whole and the entire procedure costs the consumer $1250. The consumer and his/her spouse both get $250/mo ($500 total which is the equivalent of $2000/mo in potential purchasing power) so less than 3 months they pay the rest of the bill to the Public Bank/NCO  (the discount and dividend only apply once for each purchase).  As the couple are both making, let us conservatively say, $25,000/yr via employment that’s as much as $200,000/yr ($50,000 x 4) in potential purchasing power for their wants and needs….so  they’re not sweating things too much.

Great set of theses. The Reformation is already under way thanks to your own and other’s work. Complete recognition of the Copernican paradigm change requires the recognition of an encompassing concept like Agriculture or Helio-centrism that simplifies and focuses its vision and crystallizes aligned policies that clearly shows all agents how they would benefit from the change.

That new paradigm id Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting.

Me:  I would say that we need to implement the policies of Social Credit first…then, if it can be assured that block chain isn’t just the confusion of chaos with decentralization and freedom maybe it could be integrated into the system.  Palliatives and reforms don’t seem to recognize that there are a million steps forward (or backward) from point one to point two toward an actual solution, while a solution, like a new cognition (a first time recognition)….leaps all the way to the goal.

Me:  Rickards is (probably unconsciously) making the world safe for the utter coalescence and integration into modern economies of the monetary and financial paradigm of Debt Only. Then it will take an incredibly bloody revolt to prevent the serfdom of the mass of individuals.

The speculative futures markets are a glaring economic and financial vice if not mortal frigging sin. The Derivative nonsensical nonsense that took place before the GFC is proof of that. We don’t need more and better ways to destabilize markets with how to game such. What we do need are policies that so enrich the mass of the populace and simultaneously integrate price deflation into profit making systems that the traditionally productive investment climate is the most attractive option.

wisdomicsblog.com

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Me:  I share Rickards’ fears about addiction to technology and the anti-social fugue that people are falling into with it. What I don’t understand is his not being on the bandwagon with an economic and financial theory/philosophy/paradigm of Gifting….especially as the concept/experience behind the paradigm itself is grace/graciousness which is the temporal expression of the Christian God’s attitude toward humanity.

wisdomicsblog.com

The Discount policy terminatedly ends the expression of consumer inflation which occurs at the point of retail sale. Taxes and gifting incentives can largely if not utterly end its creeping increase before retail sale, and making Banking and Finance mark up retail enterprises subject to the discount policy, instead of incredibly costly, dominating and parasitical money creating forces post retail sale for large assets as they are now, can deal with inflation that occurs for such asset purchases.

The Doubly Rebated Retail Discount

The monetary authority rebates back to the business the 50% discount they give to consumers. Likewise they rebate the consumer 50% of his discounted retail purchases.

So a $10 item or items costs the consumer $5 plus he/she is rebated $2.50 of the $5 they spent. Voila! The consumer’s purchasing power is increased 4 fold, price deflation is seamlessly and beneficially integrated into profit making systems and the likelihood of competitive businesses increasing profits is assured.

The Dividend, Full Employment Re-definition and Self Chosen Purposes Policies

Life is work, and any positive and constructive activities within that definition are valid and noble.  The natural law that an animal is entitled to take from the abundance of the environment is also valid, and in the case of the human being from the increasingly abundant cultural heritage of our productive capabilities.

A $1000/mo universal dividend is implemented giving everyone 18 and older $4000/mo potential purchasing power.

Full employment is re-defined as 20 hrs/wk of employment if one can find it and 20 hrs/wk of self chosen purposeful activities.  No restriction on the number of hours one can work is implied or demanded by this policy and if one wants to work 40 hrs or more per week their obligation to seek other purposeful activities is not required of them and they still receive their dividend payment.

Parenting can be counted toward all 40 hours of employment and the dividend payment of course is also granted, but 10 hours/wk of it must consist of specific activities like parenting education, classes in early childhood development, personal socialization skills and self development for both child and adult, and other purposeful activities are also strongly advised. Higher education would be treated the same as parenting.

20 hours/wk of employment and 20 hours/wk of self chosen purposeful activities will both increase one’s total purchasing power and help everyone make the transition to the leisure society easier and more fulfilling.

The helping professions, the clergy and the government with on going public service announcements should participate in a coordinated effort to help the individual become aware of and find their own self chosen purposeful activities.  Any problems with finding purpose and/or self destructive activities could be rapidly identified and helped and as a last resort with someone who continually struggles with inappropriately using one’s dividend payments they could be administered in constructive and responsible ways until the individual has handled the source of their problem.

Me:  Don’t get me wrong Steve Keen’s work is brilliant and inconoclastically insightful, but it’s all been a rediscovery of C. H. Douglas’s insights made before the second world war including his now also correct emphasis on an energy and technology theory of value which was summed up by Douglas’s Cultural Heritage theory of value of productive capabilities built up over the last couple of centuries. My soon to be published book Wisdomics-Giftonomics: The Integrative Theory of The New Monetary Paradigm, extends and expands upon Douglas’s theory of Social Credit and integrates all of the coalescing thinking and incomplete policy recommendations of Keen, Michael Hudson, Ellen Brown’s Public Banking and MMT.

CG:  I think free income for no labour is a communist mistake, not justified by Keen’s energy argument, and it is like the social credit nonsense mentioned by Steve Hummel in another comment at Revengeance Economics (same video). Low interest rates rewarded financiers with banking fee strategies for no labour and socialist give aways are financed for no labour.

Me:  I must have rebutted the confused idea that Social Credit was socialism a thousand times over the last several years on the internet. Social Crediters were in fact more opposed to socialism and socialist re-distributive taxation than traditional capitalists were back in its early days, and vice versa socialists were just as opposed to Social Credit. My book Wisdomics-Giftonomics is actually a further extension of Social Credit and an integration of traditional capitalist thinking and Austrian economic desire for price deflation. Considering the incredibly destructive history of the conflicts between capitalism, socialism and populist/fascist thinking over the last century, and as disintegrated as profit making systems and western civilization have become you’d think a genuine third and integrated alternative that would utterly rejuvenate profit making systems and double individual purchasing power via price deflation would be welcomed. Only the arrogance of orthodox thinking prevents such solutions from being recognized.

CG:  Social Credit says freely given credits must be handed to consumers to counter a theoretical deficiency in demand in the economy. In that way it resembles communism and Steve Keen’s idea of free income also resembles communism. Social Credit is based on a fallacy about banking and money supply.

Me:  And what might that banking and money supply fallacy be?

CG:  The resemblance of Social Credit to communism and Steve Keen’s basic income to communism is justified. All three are income without market priced labour in exchange for that income.

Me:  Theorists on the left and right can regurgitate orthodoxy for another zillion years or take an honest look at actual aggregate costs and the aggregative insights to be found in the day to day operations of commerce.

300-400 years ago when the costs of technology and a multifaceted productive process were largely absent the economy could be close to an equilibrium of costs and prices albeit at the “cost” of being incredibly less productive compared to today. Now all of those ADDITIONAL flow of costs must be factored into price by cost accounting convention. Depreciation allowances are correctly given to businesses otherwise no enterprise would be viable now. However, no additional individual income is provided to liquidate those costs and so the the system is hamstrung by the fact that the rate of flow of total costs/prices always tends to exceed the rate of flow of total individual incomes simultaneously produced. Keen has basically re-discovered this fact by macro-economically observing that whenever the rate of creation of new credit/debt slows marks the start of a recession.

And so you see that in fact the only truly ECONOMICALLY RATIONAL action to be taken is a continuing flow of ADDITIONAL income directly and/or reciprocally distributed to both the individual and enterprise…..so that systemic free flowingness may be attained/maintained.

First of all a paradigm is a pattern, an established pattern. Established patterns become habitual and ingrained. Hence they are difficult to think outside of. Secondly, a new pattern is a complex set of observations, conclusions and policy recommendations that all point in the same philosophical direction that numerous theorists and reformers in the area in which the new paradigm is applicable come to….and yet their individual discoveries and conclusions are fragmentary and incomplete. Consequently they do not fully perceive the new paradigm and do not have the “Ah ha!” moment of cognition (recognition for the first time) that is one of the signatures of new paradigm perception.

Even more importantly, the natural philosophical concept behind the new paradigm itself is not perceived, which if the area in which the new paradigm occurs is general enough, change has not occurred in that area for a long time and is germane to the healthiness and  mental significance of Mankind….then it can become an even greater thing known as a zeitgeist, an ethic that enables mankind to further evolve and develop….and that is what the concept of Grace/natural personal experience of graciousness is.

Graciously and rationally re-integrating economics and natural philosophy/spirituality is the route to finding ecological sanity within an economics of abundance.

We’re not going to reach an earthly Valhalla, Heaven or Nirvana via abstraction and mathematics alone, and any scientific protestations to the contrary are merely confirmations of that fact. In my first book I referred to this need and this necessity as the theory of MESST, Monetary Economic Spiritual Synthesis Theory, and attempting to penetrate the above scientifically religious fact and  its egotistically orthodox mental barriers somewhat nuanced the title of my second book to Wisdomics-Giftonomics.

Am I just trying to establish a new religion? Of course not. I’m four square for abstraction, mathematics and science, for good dynamically open minded science and most of all for the signature of scientific breakthrough which historically has been an integration of the scientific method and an aspect or aspects of human consciousness like imagination, intuition, visualization, integration and curiosity. I’m attempting to bring to economics an awareness of the necessity of having an integrative mindset. Discerning the truths in opposites and then integrating them is the very process of Wisdom, and the pinnacle mindset of continual integration is the dynamically balanced mental process that can combine temporal universe facts and awareness of the beatific chains of ethics so as to enliven both to each other within the individual so that they can agree to the rationally wise path ahead.

Throwing off austerity and yet resolving the paradox of economic abundance and ecological sustainability can only be thoroughly accomplished via the same process of integration/integrative mindset  bringing humanity to a more ethically enlivened philosophy that enables the willingness to achieve such rational balance.

Finally, as overcoming the current monetary and financial paradigm of Debt Only requires the ability to fully see and integrate a seemingly opposite new paradigm of direct and reciprocal monetary gifting, likewise bringing an integrative ethic to macro-economic theory can avoid the dogma of macro Only by looking at the day to day commercial/micro-economic operations and deciphering the aggregative insights to be found there.