Me:  All of this discussion is well and good, however, none of it focuses on and penetrates to the heart of the economic problem which is indeed the monetary paradigm.

There is no end to history so yes uncertainty is radical, but true and enduring progress does occur with paradigm changes….and history and the eventual new zeitgeist….that the concept behind the new monetary paradigm and behind ALL historic paradigm changes, will eventually make our times seem as primitive and un-evolved….as they actually are.

Decentralization is good if it benefits the individual in some way. It can be very bad when it occurs in an area of human endeavor that needs the hierachical ordering and ascension of philosophy and ethics, like in economics and the money system for instance.

This is where bitcoin and block chain fail. They are trying to evolve technically without taking into consideration that all human systems require the solidly hierarchical guidance of philosophy and ethics while the present economic and money system already is afflicted with a lack of ethics due to its being driven by tawdry philosophy.

The only philosophical concept sufficient to integrate both power and ethics is grace as it is the pinnacle concept of human wisdom, love. Grace is the active temporal universe form of love both in individual interaction and as policy in human systems. That means it is redemption of individual and systemic corruption via personal introspection and correction and systemic thinking and policy. Without this hierarchical mental necessity any attempt at evolution will fail because ethics is a human reality no matter to whom or to what one attributes that necessity to.

Decentralization is good in that it denotes empowerment to the individual. Grace is a universal suffrage concept that does the same while also being a bulwark against individualism becoming chaos and the mental illness of narrcissism.

First things first. Bring real ethics and the real wisdom of thoroughgoing philosophy to the economy and money system before you try to decentralize it into its already ethically compromised state.

Economics doesn’t need another data point “insight” it needs an entirely new philosophy, a philosophy which alters the entire pattern of economics in beneficial ways for every agent individual and commercial and makes the system flow with the abundant fluidity that the current data point rich pattern claims to accomplish but actually fails to actually provide.                                                                                                    Steve Hummel 09/12/2019

The wise seek out and find the elementally truthful factors and insights, that integrated, lead to true progress both within oneself and in the temporal universe. Complexities are all well and good and the wise heed them….and combine them in ways that transcend their mere data point significances. Thinking is several rungs down the ladder of epistemology from looking and knowing.                         Steve Hummel 09/12/2019

L:  CH Douglas had a lot to say about how nationalizing a central bank would be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.  You would do well to read what he had to say about it before you advocate it.  It might change your thinking.  Send me an email and I’ll email the PDF book.  Or you could ask Jim or Wally for the quotes on the SC forum.  I took great pains to frame my recommendations in my own book to avoid exactly those pitfalls, and you already have a copy of that.  I recommend that you add a paragraph outlining the pitfalls.  Of course, you might also mentioned that the Fed itself is completely in oppostition to the Constitution itself that mandates the regulation of money to Congress – not a foreign-owned corporation that serves the interests of international finance instead of the American people. It can’t hurt to speak the truth.  Quote Article 1, Section 8.

JR:  Hi Liam.

Douglas  was very much against privatising the trading bakns, with which I totally agree.

Me:  I have a great deal of respect for CH Douglas, however, he lived before there was a conscious concept of a paradigm change. He also lived in GB which did not have a constitution. He also leaned toward the Tory perspective which at best is a mixed bag of economic truths and untruths.

A good and correct post. However, we are doomed unless every economist and economic pundit quits fiddle faddling around with genuine but separate insights that are aligned with the new paradigm of direct and reciprocal monetary gifting….but are unconscious of that concept and precisely where, when and how to implement it.

Every data point, every reform, every preaching to the academic and chattering class choir moves us a thousandth of a millimeter closer to the goal of monetary freedom, economic stability and ecological survival.

On the other hand communicating the benefits to both the individual and enterprise of the handful of policies, regulations and structural changes of the new paradigm and building a mass movement that herds the political apparatus toward legislating and executing it would integrate the good intentions of all such reform movements and save us from our own apparent lack of survival instincts.

The real economic problem is much worse and much more insidious than simply DSGE and its rational expectations etc. etc. fallacious assumptions. It’s the long term 5000 year old assumption that private or publicly controlled finance and its equally long paradigm of Debt Only as the sole form and vehicle for the distribution of money. It is like breathing. We/re normally unconscious of it until like 2008 we can’t breathe/finance all of a sudden and it comes home to us in a panic how important breathing/a more than adequate amount of money is continuously available for exchange.

Keen nailed it with his de-bunking of DSGE and Hudson is spot on in his identifying finance as a huge parasite on the rest of the actually productive economy…IT’S JUST THAT THEY DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO PROCEED IN TRANSCENDING BOTH CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM WITH ABUNDANTLY DIRECT AND RECIPROCAL MONETARY DISTRIBUTISM AT THE POINT OF RETAIL SALE….and of course a relative handful of further regulations and a structural change or two..

How many times do we have to beat the dead steed of DSGE etc. and keep droning on with our particular (correct) social science insights?

“It’s the monetary paradigm, stupid.”, the insight of the policy power point of retail sale with a 50% Discount/Rebate monetary policy there and the ultimate integrative philosophical concept of grace as in monetary gifting leading and guiding the consequently transformed economy.

Thou shalt not ignore the obvious signatures of paradigm changes like:

1) conceptual opposition to the current paradigm,

2) complete inversion of individual and systemic realities,

3) a new insight and/or tool,

4) resolution of long term seemingly unsolvable problems,

5) non-comprehension,

6) occasional derision

7) caution regarding paradigm changes despite the presence of long term problems in the area of the paradigm change and even clear signs of political and economic disintegration therefrom

Y:  John, perhaps you rely too much on wishful thinking. Paradigm shift does not occur spontaneously. It is not a natural phenomenon. Have you ever imagined why Ptolemaic system continued more than one thousand years and how it came to be overturned?

Me:  Yes that is what Kuhn observed. Yet when a paradigm shift does occur it is both personally spontaneous and (depending upon whether it directly effects virtually everyone in the present moment, i.e. a mega-paradigm shift) it is a rapid temporal universe change as well. The Copernican cosmological paradigm change was genuine, but the shift to agriculture, homesteading and urbanization from hunting and gathering was a mega-paradigm shift. Today a paradigm shift in economics, finance and money would fit this category and given the rapidity and ubiquitous nature of our technological advancement such a change would truly be earth shaking.

Mega-paradigm shifts invalidate long held orthodoxies held by nearly everyone like “You must move about to survive” or “Increase in the quantity of money is the operant factor in inflation” or “The more savings the less money in general circulation”.

Y: Craig

we must distinguish economy and economics, financial economy and economics of financial economy, and financialization or monetization of the economy and economics of those phenomena.

Paradigm shift in economy and finance may proceed “spontaneously” by the technological and institutional change, but paradigm shift of economics does not occur without a group of economists who try to create a new economics. Lars Syll is busy criticizing mainstream economics but forgetting the re-building economics task. Do you want to face paradigm change without change of economics?

Me:  Yoshinori,

Thanks for the reply

“we must distinguish economy and economics, financial economy and economics of financial economy, and financialization or monetization of the economy and economics of those phenomena.”

No, not in my opinion at all. That is an arbitrarily reductive attitude and leads no where but further theorizing about this or that datum. It IS a monetary economy Steve Keen has established that. All of the leading reform movements are about money, finance and its negative effects on the economy. Meanwhile the 5000 year old monetary paradigm of Debt Only goes on and on and on.

We need an integrative perspective on the monetary effects of the present paradigm on the economy….not just another data point discussed….for the umpteenth time.

All the leading reforms are doing their own thing. I’m in touch with several of the leaders of those reform movements and have communicated to them that they all align with the policies of the new paradigm. They’re just not seeing the new insight that a discount/rebate monetary policy at the point of retail sale resolves the two deepest problems of modern economics. I don’t know whether that is because their minds are blinded by orthodoxy, they’re just complacent or they’re just letting their self interests in their own movements prevent them from integrating with the larger paradigmatic movement. It’s probably all of those motives/afflictions/self interests.

If anyone here can say that their ideas, theories, policies or whatever if implemented can immediately do more than double everyone’s potential purchasing power, double the potential business revenue for every enterprise and beneficially integrate price deflation into profit making economic systems….WITH A SINGLE POLICY, and with a couple of additional ones make every mega project necessary for ecological sanity and survival affordable and imminently doable…then I’ll get on their bandwagon. If not….for chrissake get on mine. The friggin’ end is near guys, ya know what I mean? Like a lotta, lotta dead people like yourselves and your families from probable resource wars and/or ecological disaster.

Or we can regurgitate the things we’ve been regurgitating here for years. IT’S THE MONETARY PARADIGM GUYS. Prove me wrong with better and more beneficial policies. I’m ready to hear them.

Y:  Craig reminds me the necessity to re-read Stanilav Andreski’s Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972). According to the book, if I remind it correctly, social sciences develop by fierce fighting between revolutionary idealists and realistic conservatives who question the plausibility of idealists’ proposals. It is a shame that Andreski-type sense of balance has been lost for a long time.

Me:  Ah yes, what we actually need is more dualistic three ways from the middle mental erudition….that makes a fine data point….and leads absolutely no where. NOT! Meanwhile ignore the mathematical, empirical temporal and paradigm changing effects of just one policy insight/breakthrough.

The recognition of the policy power point of retail sale with a 50% discount/rebate monetary policy is the telescope and the discovery of agriculture of economics and finance. You just have to let it settle into your current paradigm conditioned mind long enough to compare the differences it will make to virtually everything in those bodies of knowledge.

And despite the fact that the geo-political flames are leaping higher and the populace is getting more and more angry and impatient with the stresses the current monetary paradigm enforce upon them…..lets discuss other data points another hundred times.

Focus on the pattern change and the pragmatic regulations and structural changes to keep it from being undone by the gamers…..and lets choose life, not death via a thousand excuses and distractions.

R:  Illiberal Reformers tells the story of the progressive scholars and activists who led the Progressive Era crusade to dismantle laissez-faire, remaking American economic life with a newly created instrument of reform, the administrative state. If many of their names are unfamiliar today, the progressives changed everything, permanently altering the course of America’s economy and its public life. (Leonard, Thomas C.. Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (p. ix). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.)

A bit closer to home and shows how idealism doesn’t always play out the way the idealists planned. Not that idealism is not needed, mind you, just that it must be wedded to pragmatism too if it seeks to have long lasting impacts in the world.

Me:  Rob, That’s precisely the point…REFORMS never last…but everything adapts to a genuinely new paradigm….not the other way around.

JD:  Bill Mitchell said in a recent lecture the the paradigm shift is under way.

Me:  Bill Mitchell is using the word paradigm shift to attempt to bolster MMT’s claim that it is such a phenomenon. Unfortunately it is just one of several reforms that are aligned with the actual monetary, financial and economic mega-paradigm change whose simple yet transformative operation is entirely expressed in the 50% Discount/Rebate monetary policy at the point of retail sale.

Visualize a large circle with smaller circles within it entitled MMT, Public Banking, Keen’s Minsky financial instability hypothesis and disequilibrium theory and Michael Hudson’s financial parasitism. Then place blogs like this one in a circle outside of the large circle representing abstract thinking about those reform circles inside the big circle.  Draw several circles entitled Anthropology, History, Sociology, Psychology outside of the large circle. Then put the words Wisdom/Grace/Graciousness in parentheses precisely in the center of the large circle and draw arrows from all smaller circles pointing toward (Wisdom/Grace) which of course is the discipline and the concept behind the new mega-paradigm. Title the illustrationMonetary Gifting: The New Mega Paradigm in Economics, Finance and The Money System and draw an arrow down into the large circle toward the actual concept and expression of the new paradigm itself: Abundantly Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting At Retail Sale. Finally, draw an arrow toward the words (Wisdom/Grace/Graciousness) in the very middle of the large circle to emphasize that all theories and data need to be integrated toward and with the discipline that is Wisdom and its highest concept and experience Grace/Graciousness.

Aligned reforms are good, but “It’s the monetary, financial and economic mega-paradigm, stupid.”