If certain businesses raise their prices by high percentages in the run-up period to the new paradigm policies are enacted their competitors will be given an additional 10% Discount/Rebate percentage, and the inflationary offenders will have their discount percentage subtracted by the percent they inflated. This applies to after the new paradigm is implemented as well.

Me:  The anti-Fed crew on the republican side (and even democrats who don’t have a clue about money) will only result in more austerity as they believe the economy tends toward equilibrium and so does not need fiscal deficits. Of course there’s a lot better and more resolving monetary policy than fiscal deficits (Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting at the point of retail sale), but that will never come about from the right which is terminally orthodox and dense on the macro-economic topic of money and the economy. What Trump fears is rate hikes slowing the economy in an election year, period. He’s too much of a tool to see any actual third alternative.

Bob is right, nothing significant and/or permanent will happen until the private Fed is replaced by a true publicly administered national monetary authority. You must know that Ellen. Even then who is going to trust ANY politician to craft policies that will free both the individual and the small to medium sized business community??? No, you have to craft a policy that changes the entire paradigm/pattern. Killing private for profit finance is necessary, but you have to kill its paradigm of Debt ONLY as well. The 50% Discount/Rebate policy at retail sale does that in spades as it completely inverts the present realities/seemingly unresolvable problems of individual monetary scarcity and chronic inflation….in one fell swoop. To paraphrase James Carville, It’s the paradigm, stupid.

As for Trump being a white hat, set aside all of his almost certain illegalities and moral and ethical shortcomings his biggest flaw is that he’s a disintegrative demagogue who, like Steve Bannon, thinks bashing ideas together to the point of systemic collapse….is virtuous, and that somehow a more enlightened elite will emerge from the chaos. Yeah, riiiiight.

Integrating the truths in opposing perspectives is required NOT disintegrative rhetoric and not the belief in disintegration itself. Trump should fall on his head and hope an actually new idea results. But I’m certainly not holding my breath.

EB:  Sure, I know the Fed has to be a public utility to make it work. But I also think Trump is pragmatic enough that if he “got it” that the Fed could create a trillion dollars to fund his trillion dollar infrastructure plan without triggering hyperinflation, he could go for it. That’s our job, to get the information out there. Old ideas die slowly. We just have to keep hammering away. It was a mass uprising against Wall Street in Occupy, then a mass divestment movement, then a divest-our-public monies movement triggered by the Standing Rock protests, that finally brought the millennials out to support a public banking movement. A mass protest among Trump’s base against the Fed would be a good start in reforming it. It is no longer the Temple; the people have seen that the emperor has no clothes. That’s the first step in change. You guys are way too negative. We need to spot our opportunities and fan the flames. AOC and the Justice Dems are also an opportunity. They just need to be coached a bit in their solutions. Again, that’s our job. We won’t get anywhere if we close the door to every opportunity that arises. Strength in unity, that’s the only way we’ll prevail.

Me:  “We won’t get anywhere if we close the door to every opportunity that arises. Strength in unity, that’s the only way we’ll prevail.”

Couldn’t agree more with this strategy, but then why not offer up a direct and reciprocal monetary policy at retail sale that reduces prices by 50% and therefore immediately doubles everyone’s purchasing power, more than doubes the actually available money for every enterprise’s goods and services, absolutely ends any possibility of inflation and in fact beneficially integrates price deflation into profit making economic systems which is the wet dream of every libertarian leaning economist and pundit, immediately accomplishes economic democracy which is the failed dream of every socialist….and is just the kind of hiding in plane sight enormous temporal universe policy breakthrough that a paradigm change is characterized by.

The true beauty of the 50% Discount/Rebate policy at retail sale is that it implements business prosperity and abundant monetary democracy directly into the very woof and warp of the economic process itself. It’s a pattern change, not a piecemeal reform. 

You want a soci-political movement, you want to integrate the self interests of traditionally opposed political constituencies as per above, you want revolution….this is evolution?

Take it DIRECTLY to students, millenials, the small to medium sized business person and every beleaguered wage earner….and herd the politicians toward paradigm change.

JR:   Just as long as crrespondents realise that anything as unworldly as this is NOT Social Credit policy.

Encourage saving with tax incentives and re-doubling purchasing power for green, big ticket items.

Educate general populace about carbon/energy/entropy problems with public service announcements

Subsidize research/projects on energy/entropy saving

Me:  It’s a monetary economy. The most significant and important factor in the monetary economy is free and available individual income to purchase the goods and services of enterprise. Modern technologically advanced capital intensive economies are increasingly cost inflationary due to numerous reasons and so requires continual injections of credit/debt in order to try to prevent the economy from spiraling down into recession or depression (and inevitably fail), because the paradigm of Debt Only for profit making private finance being A CONTINUAL FLOW OF ADDITIONAL costs REQUIRES the new paradigm of Monetary Gifting in order to stabilize the economy.

IOW, it ain’t actually a complexity problem/rocket science. It’s resolved with logic, calculus and observing the economic process with an eye for a place to implement monetary policy that has the most efficient problem resolving effects.

PB:  We humans leverage energy to produce an economic surplus. The key objective function we must minimize in this endeavor is waste. In the beginning, human labor, fueled by food energy was an important input. Today, human labor fueled by food energy pales in comparison to our leveraging of fossil fuel energy.
Also missing from your analysis is the importance of information as an organizing principle. Money, for example, is a network externality. The specific network is the payments system which is fundamentally a data network. The power (utility) of any data network scales as the square of the number of nodes (users) in the network. You might try to join this into an entropy model combining human energy leveraging, with the information theory definition of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. Even this is of course a toy model of great oversimplification, ignoring as it does, the larger ecological system of earth and sun we are embedded in. This is the only way I see to bring hard Physics, Chemistry, and Thermodynamics into macroeconomic theory. The only guy I know who is slightly attempting this is Steve Keen. I recommend him to you.

Me:   As I have posted several times before I consider Keen the best economist on the planet, and his research into the energy/entropy problem is of course spot on as well. However, leap frogging the cost inflationary economic problem resolved only by the new monetary paradigm is a fatal error as the current monetary paradigm of Debt Only and its continual flow of additional costs will stymie any action toward sane policies and projects….especially huge ones like off-planeting the most energy/entropy producing means of production.

Intellectuals are necessary, but their tendency to lose interest after merely identifying problems but at best only palliative solutions is not a good one.

YS:  The trouble with Lars Syll is that he talks as if no heterodox economics exists. I know very well there are many strands or schools among heterodox economics and they all have many defects and weakness. However, if economics can develop beyond actual mainstream economics, the burgeon of new economics must come out from at least one of them. (Of course, it is possible that some of them will be unified as different parts of a more coherent theory.)

Lars Syll’s talks, it seems to me, as if a new scientific economics emerges once a good philosophy and methodology are established. This is a pure fiction and betrays the history of all sciences and disciplines (natural or social). A science grows very slowly and sinuously. It requires enormous efforts and trials and errors. If Lars Syll wants to be a useful philosopher of economics, he should better pay more efforts on the state of heterodox economics. If he finds some deficiency and flaws, and if he tell those economists who work in those fields, the economists would reflect on their problems and try to find a better way. In a very wide sense, criticizing neoclassical and mainstream economics may be a part of above efforts, but actually it works in a very negative way in this blog site, where almost all readers already recognize there are fatal flaws in neoclassical economics. The next target should be to show a new direction for the construction of a new economics. If not, his efforts enhance disbelief on economics in general including heterodox economics. No science emerges from nothing. A science grows.

Me:  Except for its critique of Lars as an individual instead of a general critique of economic thinking, this is actually a very good post and nascent recognition of the real problem in economics. Yes, virtually everyone here knows there are problems with neo-classical economics, but economics itself is not the problem. 99% of the present economic problems we face could be rapidly resolved by changing the monetary paradigm. And it’s obvious why:

1) The monetary paradigm of Debt Only for the sole form and vehicle for the distribution of credit-money hasn’t changed for over 5000 years. This despite repeated historically identified systemic economic collapses due to inability to service debts.

2) Giving a public monopoly on credit creation is problematic…unless it is firmly and completely logically aligned with an unimpeachable ethic like the natural philosophical concept of grace. A private monopoly on credit creation is an utter contradiction of free enterprise theory and such an obvious ignoring of Lord Acton’s dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, so if we want free enterprise and individual and systemic freedom we will proceed with post haste in ending the present idiocy.

3) Monetary Gifting as the new monetary paradigm strategically implemented with a 50% Discount/Rebate monetary policy at the point of retail sale immediately and terminally ends the two deepest and seemingly unresolvable problems of modern economies, that is, individual and systemic monetary scarcity and chronic price and asset inflation. The practical and epistemological need to bring directness of monetary policy to the individual and to enterprise is perfectly analogous to bringing directness to one’s relationship with god that resolved the monopoly powers and structural indirectness demanded by the catholic church prior to the Reformation.

As I have posted here numerous times the new insight regarding the terminal ending point of the entire economic process at retail sale, and hence the realizations that it is also the point of the summing of all economic factors and the supreme leveraging, pivoting and so paradigm changing power point for monetary policy perfectly aligns with the fact that a new tool, insight and/or policy has always accompanied paradigm changes.

Why blather on about the complexities of economics when the new monetary paradigm enables us to resolve its worst problems, and prosperously take a huge deep breath while also being able to begin addressing the ecological and energy/entropy problems because finance is now a public utility that serves us instead of being the civilization long dominating parasite it still is today?

“The next target should be to show a new direction for the construction of a new economics. If not, his efforts enhance disbelief on economics in general including heterodox economics.”

Correct.

“No science emerges from nothing. A science grows.”

Again correct, but sciences grow until they become stymied by their own orthodoxies and internal inconsistencies and so need necessarily to be transformed by a new paradigm in that area of human endeavor.

Isn’t 5000 years of inevitable economic failure due to the monetary paradigm long enough to wait for a new one?

LS:  “Economists need to do the same – abandon current methodology borrowed from science and develop a new methodology suited for the study of human beings and societies.”

Me:  This is a wisdom insight. And the “new methodology” you are seeking is in fact the integrative mental process of wisdom itself which includes, synthesizes, maintains the ethics of and ultimately transcends science. Wisdom is the best and most ethical integration of philosophy and policy, the ideal and the practical and of the mental modes of science and human consciousness itself. In other words of the truths, workabilities, applicabilities and highest ethical considerations in apparent OPPOSITES.

What economics needs is not a static one moment in time ideology, but rather to cognite on the wisdom state of the dynamic, interactive, integrative free flow of factors aka grace and then find the place in the economic/productive process that the most liquid factor in a monetary economy, namely money, will facilitate both its ending point (retail sale) and its continual re-starting/free flowingness.

IOW we must have a Wisdomics-Gracenomics that effects a new monetary paradigm.

The 50% Discount/Rebate Policy at the point of retail sale is way too simple for the erudite who are in thrall to complexity, completely unconscionable to the present financial elite and way too empirically, mathematically and paradigmatically potent to deny by anyone who actually looks at its beneficial effects.

Steve Hummel 07/26/2019

Me:  Reforms, which is what MMT and with the the thrust of which I agree, will guarantee that economics will progress “one funeral at a time”. Perceiving and understanding the new tool and/or discovery that enlightens a new paradigm by definition changes the character and realities of the ENTIRE pattern of the system/area of human endeavor that the paradigm applies to.

If we here are truly serious about change we will focus on analysis from the mentally integrative and ultimately inclusive level of the paradigm. Time in fact is of the essence.

JD:  I’m not quite sure what your final paragraph suggests. Actually since AOC linked MMT with the Green New Deal in Congress It has suddenly been seen as an opponent These all came out of the woodwork and therefore must be denigrated. It isn’t going to work but will delay progress.

Me:  Economists are stuck in the old paradigm, politicians are there to invalidate and further obfuscate the new one. NEITHER capitalism NOR socialism are the answer…Direct monetary distributism within the new paradigm of Gifting is. And a new monetary authority must be created to distribute the monies required based on the policy strategically implemented at the point of retail sale in order to drive a stake through the heart of private for profit money creation.

Do MMTers think for a minute that the FED won’t raise the FED Funds rate to 18-20% like Volker did under Reagan out of fear of inflation? Do they not think that the banks will try to game and de-stabilize the abundance aligned fiscal deficits they hold up as a solution when it is only a palliative reform?

They will not be able to do this if we have a national non-profit making banking, financial and monetary system with the new paradigm’s policies. Get real, we have to cut off the head and the nuts of the present paradigm’s primary structural impediment to the new paradigm. MMT doesn’t do that. It punts. It is reform.

We don’t need caution. We don’t need reform. We don’t need reactionary responses to false assumptions. We don’t need endless unfruitful debates between capitalists and socialists, and we particularly do not need the disintegrative bashing together of ideas in the vain hope that a more ethical elite will arise out of the ashes of collapse like the erudite dunce Steve Bannon believes and the very stable idiot Donald Trump advocates.

We need paradigm change with the very expression of the new one with the 50% Discount/Rebate policy at the point of retail sale. And we need it yesterday.

Regarding a post entitled Thought Experiment: Radical Abundance

Me:  Great post. However, everything you conjecture could be accomplished much more quickly with a directly distributive monetary system. Both private finance capitalism and re-distributive socialism are monetarily old paradigm. Integrate their particles of truth, highest workabilities and highest ethical consideration of the world’s major wisdom traditions and the thirdness greater oneness we all seek will emerge.

KZ:  Rob, major cultural shifts are dangerous and disruptive. Look at the number of wars and deaths related to relatively minor religious differences. Or, what seems minor looking from outside the wars. The industrial revolution has killed millions, displaced millions more, and changed cultures around the world. I know Trump feeds on disruption, but I’d prefer less, not more disruption right now. Maybe 20 little cultural changes, rather than a single big one.

Me:  Ken,
Correct, but when a new paradigm is recognized the change can be virtually instantaneous. Couple that with the viral capabilities of our communication technology today. Also, economics and the money system is not an abstract science like astronomy, cosmology or quantum physics. It effects virtually everyone everyday throughout the day.

Every historical paradigm change has occurred when a new tool and/or insight is discovered which confirms the concept of the new paradigm/pattern. That new discovery/insight is the monetary and economic paradigm changing power of the terminal ending point of retail sale and the temporal universe effects of the abundance creating power of a 50% Discount/Rebate monetary policy at that point.

KZ:  Craig, the core of any culture never changes quickly unless the culture is collapsing or has already collapsed. Unless people are desperate, that is. The institutions, concepts, language, etc. arising from the core may change quickly, but even that may take years. For example, the video game maker Atari began in 1972, grew to dominate video gaming in arcades in the 1980s, collapsed in the 1990s, and has been reborn after 2010. Besides nostalgia, Atari remains due to name recognition and association with important changes in western history. Humans are often reluctant to let go of the familiar, even when it’s dying. And that includes economic ways of life.

Me:  Paradigm changes don’t happen very often, but when they do they occur extremely quickly because they are a new concept and both a mental and an empirical/temporal change.

When that empirical/temporal change is itself empirically huge and obvious, is a complete inversion of temporal reality and immediately effects virtually everyone as do the various policies enumerated in my book, then the change is even quicker. Paradigm changes are also agreed upon very progressive events so virtually everything related and even tangentially related ALWAYS adapts to the new paradigm.

The culture as a whole may take some more time to fully adapt as the tangential benefits of a paradigm change in economics, finance and the money system may not become immediately apparent.

KZ:  Craig, in all honesty this kind of radical and accelerated change in the core structure of a sub-culture as important as the economy, would and should scare the hell out of anyone involved in any way in that sub-culture. It runs the risk of ripping that sub-culture (economy) apart. This could destroy the society. Even if the results of the change are what you suggest they will be, the economy and perhaps all of society will be in bedlam even before that is shown to be the case. This problem is particularly acute with economic life. Observe what a stray wrong word by a political figure, major banker, or Wall Street trader has created multiple times over just the last 10 years. Sometimes the pandemonium is debilitating in and of itself.

Me:  Oh c’mon Ken, stop being such a cassandra and so whiggish. Doubling and in some cases quadrupling every wage and salary earner’s purchasing power, democratizing economics like it has never been democratized before, saving profit making economic systems from itself, bringing a refined sense of ethics to the economy and money system for the first time in history, enabling the fast forwarding of sane ecological policies and yes, driving a stake through the heart of private for profit money creating and their problematic paradigm of Debt Only with the new paradigm of monetary gifting….these things are going to be a disaster?????

Indeed, for the latter above it will be a disaster, but the major structural bad actor and impediment to paradigm changes ALWAYS at the very least loses it monopoly dominance, primacy and power. Good riddance.

Nomadic tribal leaders and witch doctors? Virtually no more

The Catholic Church? The aspect of the natural philosophical concept of grace as in Directness ended its monopoly sacrament powers

Ptolemaic cosmology? No more.

Gutenberg Press? All those poor scribes and monks had to become gardeners and counselors instead

There’s no end to history and anecdotal human stupidities will always be with us, but paradigm changes are basically “All good” …and we aren’t in any way in a position to worry about some of the inevitable off gassing of confusion or disruption in economics and the money system when we may only have 15-20 years to address human climate change and ending private finance’s monopoly paradigm is the only way we’ll “get off the dime” in that direction.

KZ:  Craig, I’m neither a Casandra nor a Whig, in the conservative, middle-class sense. But I am careful when it comes to setting things in motion that cannot be controlled. Lots of socio-economic experiments have been set up with human communities. Most were small. Some were even useful. But the large ones nearly always failed, with adverse consequences. Take these examples of changes underway now. Same-sex marriage is widely accepted now. Yet, just 20 years ago it was widely rejected. The change has two sources. Millennials accept such marriage and have spread that acceptance widely. Also, with only a few exceptions most religions in the US accept same-sex marriage. How would this have turned out if 20 years ago, upon your advice laws were enacted making same-sex marriage equal to any other form of marriage? Considering a directly economic question, how much preparation would you suggest before ending or reducing by at least half copyright and patent protection? A year, two years, five years? At least two, I think.

Me:  You ARE apparently conservative and whiggish on the issue of the monetary, financial and economic paradigm. Your caution at a time of looming multiple crises that can only resolved by STARTING with that paradigm change betrays such. You are very erudite. It surprises me that you do not recognize the necessity of the urgency the issue requires.

When and where a paradigm change is called for urgency is the keynote. The monetary paradigm hasn’t changed in the entire history of human civilization. Reform is inadequate. Piecemeal measures cannot resolve longstanding problems held in place most strongly by the mindset of the old/current paradigm. I am neither naive nor lacking in knowledge, especially in the integrative mindset which enables me to think and perceive on the paradigmatic level. With one emphasis I repeat the final paragraph of my last post:

There’s no end to history and anecdotal human stupidities will always be with us, but paradigm changes are BASICALLY “All good” …and we aren’t in any way in a position to worry about some of the inevitable off gassing of confusion or disruption in economics and the money system when we may only have 15-20 years to address human climate change and ending private finance’s monopoly paradigm is the only way we’ll “get off the dime” in that direction.

KZ:  Craig, I don’t disagree that the west faces many problems. Pundits, prophets, and mystics offering histories and solutions for all these problems are not only a dime a dozen, but number in the thousands. Which of these “all insights” hope-filled paths are we to follow? I prefer being careful over being right, eventually after years of pain and grief from the ten, or more wrong choices before the right one.

Me:  Ken,  I suggest choosing the one which is the most inclusive of only the relevant and true data and observations. Virtually all of us here agree that the heterodox theorists like Steve Keen, Michael Hudson and Lars Syll here with the approach of MMT are parts of the puzzle. The only thing lacking in their approach is the all inclusive study of the paradigm. That is the supra-cultural approach in the area of human endeavor to which the paradigm applies. In order to understand a paradigm it is essential to define it first. It is a single concept that fits seamlessly within and creates an entirely new pattern. In order to perceive that definition one must practice integrative thinking of the opposites of singularity and plurality/pattern. As I have continually posted here paradigm perception and the wisdom process both being the integrative process itself are completely analogous.

I see Abundantly Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting at the point of retail sale to be the new paradigm concept and policy because it resolves both monetary scarcity and price and asset inflation. It is nothing if not productive of systemic and individual economic democracy. Its effects are empirically and mathematically verifiable. It is simple but transformational EXACTLY like the definition of a new paradigm above and like every other historical paradigm change has been. When someone comes up with a more beneficial and resolving concept I’ll get on their bandwagon.

Take the all inclusive truth perceiving and integrating approach of the paradigm. That’s actually all I’ve ever advocated for….because it takes only the truths, highest workabilities, most relevant applicabilities and highest ethical considerations of apparently opposing perspectives.

KZ:  Craig, there is no “most inclusive of only the relevant and true data and observations.” That is beyond our understanding or capabilities. Perhaps your proposal will give good results, perhaps not. I know you believe it will. Only practical application will give us the answer to this question.

Me:  In the first place I disagree. The wisdom process is precisely of that nature, and that’s why it is defined and valued as the deeper knowledge that it is. That doesn’t mean that I said that the new paradigm was the end of history for economics or anything like that. In fact I mentioned in this very thread that there is no end to history. So I was not using that phrase in any universal sense like you misinterpreted it to be.

My proposal WILL give good results because of its nature (gifting), because it DOES IMMEDIATELY double every employed person’s purchasing power. That can be confirmed by yourself if you actually look at the temporal universe effects of the 50% Discount/Rebate policy. If a person goes and purchases $100 of groceries (or any other purchase of whatever price) and only pays $50 for the groceries that yesterday cost them $100 their available income HAS BEEN DOUBLED has it not???

It WILL integrate beneficial price deflation into profit making economic systems because garden variety “monetary” inflation is NEVER/HAS NEVER BEEN more than a smallish single digit percentage and hyper-inflations never occur except after several prior disastrous circumstances have occurred including and finally a privately controlled central bank leverages up speculators in order for them to short the currency and that is what kicks hyperinflations in. Consult Steven Zarlenga’s excellent research on this process in his book The Lost Science of Money. ppgs 575-588.

Wisdom is always the best integration of philosophy and policy.
It is thus by definition the ultimate in both thought and practicality.

KZ:  Craig, I accept that you honestly believe what you write. But that does not make it so.

Gift economies are not new in the world. Neither are cultures that emphasize guidance via wisdom. For example, many American Indian tribes combine the two. But these don’t always go along as expected or desired. For example, in working with a number of the tribes since the 1970s, I’ve witnessed (ethnographically speaking) dozens of feuds between tribal members over the size and reciprocity of gifts and what they saw as the failure of tribal councils to settle the problems. Though troubled by these events tribal members do not favor ending either their gift economies or tribal councils. There’s an old joke on reservations. Rifle shots on Saturday night are two families settling such a dispute. No one dies (at least never heard of anyone dying) but there are lots of missing ears, fingers, and hair partings. Humans have never invented a culture that is successful most of the time; let alone all the time. We’re always “working out the kinks.” This is the best we’ve ever been able to accomplish. Perhaps Sapiens will get better at fixing itself with time. At few thousand years should be a good start in that direction.

Me:  “I accept that you honestly believe what you write. But that does not make it so.”

Sorry, but this is the (oft unconscious and I’m sure well meaning) trick of those laboring under the current paradigm for inquiry, namely science only. It is science that has the epistemological problem NOT wisdom which can and does rigorously include science in its calculus.

I’m virtually the only one here integratively proposing BOTH a new philosophy and new policies implemented at a newly considered point and time that will obviously have direct, mathematical and empirically verifiable benefits for all agents individual and commercial.

You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know when you say, We’re always “working out the kinks.” There is no end to history, but paradigm changes are stepping stones that only go progressively forward….especially if and when the individuals in the culture are informed and infused with the increasing consciousness that can result from understanding/experiencing the insights to be found in any of the world’s major wisdom traditions.

Economics is dead, long live Wisdomics-Gracenomics, which includes and completes all of the valid heterodox insights so often espoused here.

Like virtually everything else in life integrating the abstract and the the dynamic observation of the moment will yield more enlightenment of truth than merely one of those two modes of thinking/experiencing.

Whoring only after math, statistics and abstraction is one of the reasons economists for the last century have missed the direct observation of the entirety of the economic/productive process itself and hence not cognited on the potentially incredible leveraging power to be utilized at its terminal ending point where a simple accounting and algebraic operation regarding monetary policy could simultaneously resolve the two most troublesome problems of modern economies (that all heterodox economists agree upon by the way), namely individual monetary scarcity and chronic asset inflation.

Economies are very complex, but the actual operations of historical paradigm changes are always quite simple. Economists need to look at that fact and act….not merely go on a stupendous figure, figure, figure with math and/or abstract theoretics.

TH:  We need to think in terms of fully automated systems and abundance.
Current CO2 levels are forcing the system by 2W per m^2. That is less than 0.2% of incoming solar energy.
Lauching mass from automated systems on the moon to create mirrors at L1 that allowed us to modify the incoming solar energy by just 1% would allow us to counter all current global warming.

We need it.
We need it soon.
We need it for all sorts of other reasons that most people don’t want to think about because thinking about such risks causes them to go into anxiety attacks.

We have the ability to produce a world where everyone can experience security and freedom far beyond what most experience today.
And such freedom comes with responsibilities, so it is not freedom from all constraint (that is extinction).

The cost of such security and freedom, is giving up using markets as a dominant measure of value.

As a transition strategy, a Universal Basic Income (a relatively high one), will allow us time to make the necessary changes.

On current trends, this technology can be available by the mid 2030s, if we make it a priority.

If we don’t, then we are not looking at sea level rises of a few cms, but rather of 10s of meters.
Loss of ports and coastal cities. Temperature is rising exponentially, as positive feedbacks kick in.
The problem is perfectly solvable, but it has to be acknowledged before it can be solved.

This is a problem of far greater magnitude, at the same time as it is an opportunity to create something that has never before existed – a truly just and stable society, that has as its highest values individual life and individual liberty – both of which demand responsible actions in social and ecological contexts.

Me:  You’re right. Survival is doable…if we change the monetary, financial and economic paradigm from scarcity to abundance.

That doesn’t mean encouraging profligacy, but it DOES mean relative abundance for all WHILE we make damned good and sure that we concurrently proceed with post haste with the projects that are necessary to human and other species survival.

In fact non-survival is not an option and survival trumps EVERY OTHER consideration. So let us end the biggest stumbling block to proceeding with such by making such projects financeable.

That means we end private for profit money creation so that finance/cost is no longer a consideration for such necessary projects, and awaken to the simple (but not simplistic) way to not only prevent inflation, but rather to beneficially integrate price deflation into profit making systems. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B…

TH: Align with the first 3 paragraphs.

Not so sure about the last. I spent a bit of time on Douglas and his approaches 35 years ago, but wasn’t entirely convinced; and it doesn’t deal with the abundance issue – of any exchange based monetary system being systemically incentivised to remove any universal abundance. We see so many instances of that now, particularly in the realm of intellectual property, but also many other places.

I notice in much of your writing you align with the high basic income model. We seem to agree about far more than we might disagree.

Me:  Yes, I’m sure we’d agree much more than disagree. Douglas’s Social Credit was a great theory and Keynes was the banks’ fall back response to it, it’s just that it was never a new paradigm. I have run my innovations of Douglas’ policies by the people who hold the torch for Social Credit and they just cannot embrace it. I think because they are hung up in General Equilibrium theory when what we need is “the higher monetary disequilibrium” that a 50% discount/rebate policy at retail sale would effect. Along with the dividend and discount/rebate policies ridding ourselves of for profit private money creation is essential IMO because it violates both Occam’s Razor and Lord Acton’s dictum regarding power. Until we rid ourselves of the idea and the main structural impediment to rapid action for planetary survival, that ecological sanity is “too expensive” because private for profit finance is sacrosanct….there will be no real action in that direction. A public monetary and financial system of course could be just as problematic as our private one….unless it was made a constitutionally separate fourth branch of government that was guided by the policies above which firmly and directly align with the concept of the new paradigm, namely graciousness as in love in action/policy and viz economics monetary grace as in gifting. Paradigm changes are characterized by conceptual opposition to and complete inversion of the current/old paradigm. They also have a new tool and/or insight that opens the possibility of changing temporal universe reality. The discovery of the power and leveraging point of an abundance creating monetary policy at the point of retail sale is just such an insight.

You’re technological ideas ARE very interesting.

Name of a corporation offering immersive experiences designed to create peak experiences, integrative thinking and learning and the consequent happiness that a positive attitude in life bequeaths one.