It’s a waste of time to either accuse someone of believing in the debt virus or to be a crank and believe in it. Mathematically, it’s correct that the system can pay for interest. However, in the real world….economies have never been stable. That’s never as in not a single time throughout the entire span of human civilization, and the reason is that the paradigm of Debt ONLY  has never been challenged as the actual problem and the new paradigm concept has never specifically been recognized and implemented in a paradigmatic fashion, that is, in a way that temporally inverts the realities of the old/present paradigm.

Self actualization of the experience of Grace saves the individual from her/himself, and policies aligned with grace will save the economy from its own idiocies and the money system from its monopolistic lack of ethics.

Too simple for the erudite, too basic and generally beneficial to be long denied.

Steve Hummel 05/17/2020

RL:  My professor told me once, that I had read enough, I needed to think more about what I had read and experienced.

MC:  Words of wisdom there Robert.

Me:  Indeed. Contemplation is the route toward self actualization, and integration is the route to truth. Present time is where one best experiences and meets oneself.

The point of retail sale is self awareness’s equivalent in economics, where the system’s most present moment, most basic purposes of production and consumption meet and are integrated, and where rational and ethical policy is most powerfully accomplished.

Conspiracy theorists are generally hasty third rate intellects. People who swallow whole either right wing or left wing propaganda are second rate intellects. The objective and serious intellect seeks the particles of truth in opposing perspectives and carefully tries to integrate those truths in a rational and more wholistic fashion. So far as conspiracies are concerned, especially broad, global conspiracies, this process almost always ends showing that such “conspiracies” are actually better explained as anger and fear generated by frustrations with the mostly unconscious mentally entrapping effects of the present paradigm that has gone on too long without resolving the problems that have built up around it.

The point is the best thing to do is to develope a truth integrative mindset. As a new paradigm itself is a phenomenon that integrates the truths in apparently opposing perspectives, that is, it is a (singular) concept that mentally expresses and temporally transforms an entirely new (pluralistic) pattern, we could call it developing paradigm perception.

The ancients had debt jubilees, but the problem of debt build up always came back. We need to be smarter than the ancients and finally drive a stake through the 5000 year old rule of the paradigm of Debt Only over our lives. That solution is the twin policies of a 50% discount/rebate price and monetary policy at the point of retail sale and a second 50% discount/debt jubilee policy at the point of note signing for big ticket items and green consumer products. These policies and regulations to deter anti-social gaming of the new paradigm will reverse the build up of debt and make it wither away so that monetary abundance for all economic agents becomes the new norm.

EB:  Yes 97% of the currency is already digital. They can freeze your bank account whenever they want. The danger isn’t going digital; it’s banning cash. Like it or not, we’re in a digital age. What we need is a Bill of Rights that is actually enforceable.

Me:  Yes, that’s a good non-reactionary, non-hysterical, non-conspiratorial analysis, and the way to make sure the money system is not morphed into some diabolical or even just biased instrument for social and economic control is to make damned good and sure that its purposes and policies are logically aligned with the highest of possible ethics, namely love in action/systemic policy, in other words grace…and any attempt to water down or game such policies is met with no uncertain punishment to individuals or commercial entities via taxation and threat of loss of benefits that those policies obviously bring to BOTH individuals and commercial agents.

Steve Keen is inching slowly toward realizing that double entry bookkeeping/Accounting is the infrastructure that the entirety of the economy is embedded in and that hence a strategically implemented accounting operation at a paradigmatically powerful point in the economic/productive process could solve our economic, monetary and ecological problems.

That operation is a 50% discount-credit/rebate-debit price and monetary policy at the point of retail sale (and an additional 50% discount/debt jubilee at the point of loan creation for big ticket and green consumer items as well)…and I have been advocating it for over 4 years.

Copernicus was made whole by Kepler and Galileo provided the temporal universe observations and empirical evidence to confirm the new paradigm. It’s the normal process of historical paradigm changes.

The current paradigm for inquiry is Science Only. The new paradigm is Wisdom which of course includes but also completes science.

The current zeitgeist is Power-Knowledge as in Data. The new zeitgeist is Grace as in Love In Action/Systemic Policy-Knowingness as in self actualization.

Douglas: The economy is individual income scarce and thus unstable, and Gifting is new monetary paradigm

Keen: Classical/New Classical concept of General Equilibrium is false and the economy is monetarily/financially unstable

Hummel:  Because he studied the signatures of historical paradigm changes and recognized that:

1. their mental and temporal expression was always one or more of the various aspects of the philosophical concept of grace and that
2. Douglas’ realization that double entry bookkeeping was the infrastructure within which the entirety of the economy and money system were embedded but was caught in the classical concepts of equilibrium and scarcity when abundance was a primary aspect of grace and
3. Keen’s de-bunking of DSGE was correct but still caught in the old scientific paradigm of dualism instead of the dynamically integrated duality within a trinity-unity-oneness-process aspect of grace
4. He was able to step outside of the current monetary and economic paradigms of scarcity and embrace grace as in abundance and to create workable policies aligned with it; and also step outside of the current scientific paradigm of rigid dualism and embrace grace as in Wisdom (the cosmic code of an integrated duality within an integrative trinity-unity-oneness-process, i.e. the integrative mindset and process itself)

MH:   Even before the novel coronavirus appeared, many American families were falling behind on student loans, auto loans, credit cards and other payments. America’s debt overhead was pricing its labor and industry out of world markets. A debt crisis was inevitable eventually, but covid-19 has made it immediate.

Massive social distancing, with its accompanying job losses, stock dives and huge bailouts to corporations, raises the threat of a depression. But it doesn’t have to be this way. History offers us another alternative in such situations: a debt jubilee. This slate-cleaning, balance-restoring step recognizes the fundamental truth that when debts grow too large to be paid without reducing debtors to poverty, the way to hold society together and restore balance is simply to cancel the bad debts.

The word “Jubilee” comes from the Hebrew word for “trumpet” — yobel. In Mosaic Law, it was blown every 50 years to signal the Year of the Lord, in which personal debts were to be canceled. The alternative, the prophet Isaiah warned, was for smallholders to forfeit their lands to creditors: “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.” When Jesus delivered his first sermon, the Gospel of Luke describes him as unrolling the scroll of Isaiah and announcing that he had come to proclaim the Year of the Lord, the Jubilee Year.

. . . . .

The U.S. economy has polarized sharply since the 2008 crash. For far too many, their debts leave little income available for consumer spending or spending in the national interest. In a crashing economy, any demand that newly massive debts be paid to a financial class that has already absorbed most of the wealth gained since 2008 will only split our society further.

This has happened before in recent history — after World War I, the burden of war debts and reparations bankrupted Germany, contributing to the global financial collapse of 1929-1931. Most of Germany was insolvent, and its politics polarized between the Nazis and communists. We all know how that ended.

America’s 2008 bank crash offered a great opportunity to write down the often fraudulent junk mortgages that burdened many lower-income families, especially minorities. But this was not done, and millions of American families were evicted. The way to restore normalcy today is a debt write-down. The debts in deepest arrears and most likely to default are student debts, medical debts, general consumer debts and purely speculative debts. They block spending on goods and services, shrinking the “real” economy. A write-down would be pragmatic, not merely moral sympathy with the less affluent.

. . . . .

Critics warn of a creditor collapse and ruinous costs to government. But if the U.S. government can finance $4.5 trillion in quantitative easing, it can absorb the cost of forgoing student and other debt. And for private lenders, only bad loans need be wiped out. Much of what would be written off are accruals, late charges and penalties on loans gone bad. It actually subsidizes bad lending to leave them in place.

In the past, the politically powerful financial sector has blocked a write-down. Until now, the basic ethic of most of us has been that debts must be repaid. But it is time to recognize that most debts now cannot be paid — through no real fault of the debtors in the face of today’s economic disaster.

The coronavirus outbreak is serving as a mind-expansion exercise, making hitherto unthinkable solutions thinkable. Debts that can’t be paid won’t be. A debt jubilee may be the best way out.

Me:  100% agree. Except we need to be smarter than the ancients. Monetary Gifting IS the answer, and Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting with a 50% discount/rebate price and monetary policy at the point of retail utilizes one of mankind’s greatest tools which the ancients had only a relatively rudimentary knowledge of.

Debt crises kept happening in ancient history and they’ll keep on happening now even if we have a debt jubilee now. Jubilees are palliative reforms. Direct and reciprocal monetary gifting is the policy and very expression of the new paradigm concept. Look at it. Don’t be an erudite dunce.