DT:  Craig, Norman not being able to distinguish between a panacea (universal medicine) and rebuilding from the foundations up doesn’t unfortunately make your panacea paradigmatic. You haven’t defined what you mean by money, and paradigm change is about reinterpreting what we can already see.

Norman is wrong in thinking economics has a quantification issue, when actually it is where the money is going. You propose dealing with the quantification issue by giving half of it back. Half of what? The debt?

If you reexamine what money is, one finds it has long been Ponzi money: the banks making their profits by selling or renting out non-existent gold and people down the line paying for it with real goods. The banks have lent nothing, so there is no debt to give back. And you are proposing to give nothing? All the banks really do is acknowledge our credit-worthiness.

If you were to understand giving money as giving credit where credit is due, then that is a paradigmatic change with which I could agree. It points to spending our own credit rather than the banks’ (i.e. to credit card finance paid back by doing good with it) as the practical solution you are seeking. Our savings are worth nothing, but up our credit limit. If we don’t do good with what we buy with them they will gradually disappear.

Me:  DT,

Nonsense. I know money and I know what paradigms are and their effects. Money is most basically and importantly accounting, and the current monetary paradigm is Debt Only. That is, virtually all of it is created as only a debt obligation despite the fact such monopolistic nature de-stabilizes the macro-economy with debt deflation. All of the other characteristics of money pale to insignificance by comparison, and utilizing the direct and reciprocal, +,- infrastructure of accounting at retail sale enables the control, direction and benefits of money/credit more than a zillion off target monetary or economic blabberings will ever do.

It’s exactly like I have said on here a hundred times. Pundits talk all around money and whore after the complexities of the economy when the elemental and deep simplicities which are the keys to perceiving and executing paradigms are what is needed.

“the practical steps to correcting our political economy are relatively obvious. The difficulty lies is getting them through as political programs.”

Correct. That’s why advocating a policy of a 50% discount/rebate at retail sale would be so effective because it unifies the interests of the traditionally opposed political perspectives of labor and management….against the real problem which is the too big to fail banks and their monopolistic paradigm of Debt Only. A 100% increase in purchasing power for the individual is simultaneously a 100% increase in potential business revenue for virtually every business model but finance after all.

And functional finance is really nothing more than the palliation of bank dominance and economic de-stabilization.

Me:  Sorry Norman, but you’ve fallen into the same complexity traps you (correctly) bemoan. Carping about interest being the sole problem IS monetary crankery. Recognizing that the monopolistic paradigm of Debt Only as the only form and vehicle for the creation and distribution of money is NOT. It (paradigmatic analysis) recognizes that the money cranks have their calculus wrong, but also recognizes that when the power of money and vested interests are stood up against mathematics…mathematics doesn’t matter. Why? Because the wealthiest commercial entities on the planet are financial/money creating ones which shows the economic power of their paradigm. Focus on the real power, the real issue, the real problem…the monetary paradigm. No one here but me has spotted that real problem, analyzed its economic effects and the benefits of changing it. Until one understands and analyzes from a paradigmatic level (which is both conceptually simple and pluralistic as in pattern effects) they are a Ptolemaic analyst.

Monetary Gifting. Too simple for the intellectual vanities of the erudite. Too temporally earth shaking to deny.

90% of learning is memorization and addiction to it. Wisdom is being in the present moment and integrating the truths in apparent opposites so that one can actually see and control their own abstractions moment to moment instead of, like Marley’s ghost, them blinding, distracting and weighing you down.

We need to heed to the history of paradigm changes and the signatures of their historic accomplishment.

One of those is that they have always been accompanied by a new tool and/or insight. Like the elementally significant, deep and powerful but simple point where production becomes consumption, namely retail sale, and of a direct and reciprocal price and monetary policy at that point.

The increased economic workability, universally beneficial applicability, ascendant ethical consideration, and potential affects of such a policy in other problem laden bodies of knowledge/areas of human endeavor and so make such a conscious discovery a potential mega paradigm change of which there have only been two in human history. Those were the accomplishment of conscious self awareness which opened Pandora’s box and the apparent chaos of yea and nae, and the change from hunting and gathering to agriculture, homesteading and urbanization which enabled increased comfort-ability with that chaos but failed to follow through to discover and generally apply the ultimate unitary natural philosophical concept of grace as in love in individual action and systemic policy.

All of the well-intentioned research and detailed economic erudition would pale to insignificance alongside a pattern change in finance and the money system from Debt Only to Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Grace as in Gifting.

With the universal dividend and 50% discount/rebate policy at retail sale we will have a Quasi-Monetary Demand Economy and the first truly free and undominated financial one. Right now we have confused chaos for a “free” economy and allowed Finance’s monetary paradigm of Debt Only to rig and smother that chaos.

We must throw off the slave mentality we’ve been socialized into and create the mature and realistic economy that the new monetary paradigm creates.  Civilization and the planet depend upon it.

Steve Hummel 06/04/2020

The only economic questions needed answered are: What is the retail price and how much are you going to discount it and rebate the discount back so that total debt diminishes instead of builds up?

And everything else will fall in line with simple but straight forward regulation to keep corporate decision makers from trying to game the discount/rebate policy…despite the fact that it’s effects are wildly in their interests and to their benefits.

The most important factor keeping the problems of criminality, social unrest and economic instability chronically in suspension is poverty, and the key factor enforcing poverty is the current paradigm of Debt Only. The new monetary paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting and its policies would completely transform the economy and the society.

Steve Hummel 06/02/2020

No one and no factor can excuse monetary and economic dominance, which is the antithesis of freedom.

Graciousness is the ultimate meritocracy and the essence, experience and expression of true freedom.

Steve Hummel 06/01/2020