Comprehending philosophical reflectivities and alignments between bodies of knowledge is difficult enough. Trying to effectively communicate such to people ego-centrically attached to orthodoxies and habituated to intellectual fragmentation is tiresomely so.

Steve Hummel 11/06/2018

KZ:  As they say, proof is in the pudding. How do you suggest we find out if your suggestions have any chance of working when put to the test?

Me:  Just play out the discount/rebate policy in your mind. The policies I advocate are so basic and are implemented at such a powerful economic point in time (the ending point of the entire economic process for every consumer item, the summing point of all costs and prices for every consumer item and the terminal expression point for all forms of inflation) namely retail sale. No one is saying you wouldn’t need additional regulations in a world not entirely rational or ethical, but along with the dividend policy and the national and central banking system the effects are so beneficial for both individuals and commercial that lesser reforms pale to insignificance.

KZ:  Craig, mark me down as thick (but not as a brick). I still don’t see how your proposals fix the problem that the bottom 90% of the income and wealth scale have little influence on how property is owned and controlled.

Me:  Well, if a two adult household was getting $1000/mo/$48,000/yr worth of potential purchasing power in dividend payments ($1000 x 2 adults x 2 with the 50% discount x 12) and they both had part time jobs making $25,000/yr that would give them $148,000/yr in potential purchasing power to invest, consume and undoubtedly be able to purchase a home that with a national bank that charged 0% interest on notes for a $200k home that has been discounted to $100k at retail sale and $50k at note signing because finance has now been enabled to become the new end of the economic process instead of an incredibly expensive exterior parasite to it….I’d say that was a lot better deal for the 90% than they’ve ever been given before.

P:  Can we at least advance to agreeing the problem is really in two parts. One: get total private debt to GDP down to about 0.7 from its current value near 2. If and only if we accomplish that (and quick is better than slow), then:
Two: we debate the best way to keep it there long term ie to break the destructive long term build up of private debt that periodically threatens to destroy our civilization. I view Craig’s proposal as a candidate for number two. Steve Keen seems to suggest a saw tooth periodic ramp punctuated by Jubilees is another idea.
If we can’t get past step one gracefully, the second step won’t matter.

Me: I’ll second that. Keen’s “modern debt jubilee” could be a fast way to reduce private debt, but doing that only and without concurrently ridding ourselves of the paradigm of Debt Only would only enable Krugmanites to claim the problem was solved….when it was merely palliated. We need to be smarter than the ancients who utilized debt jubilees. Turn a page on financial and economic history. The one we’re on has been gathering dust and disintegrating civilizations for 5000 years.

Keen is smart and economically insightful. He deciphered the problematic fact that we’re caught between the “necessary” rock of debt build up and the hard place of economic recession. C. H. Douglas came to the same conclusion from a business cost accounting perspective by doing the calculus on total individual incomes created in ratio to total costs and so prices simultaneously produced. I told Keen 4-5 years ago that Douglas was the first disequillibrium/financial instability theorist not Minsky.

All it took to extend and innovate Keen’s, Hudson’s and Douglas’s policies and insights from my study of all of them was an open mind and my paradigm/pattern perception skills honed from interests in science (specifically quantum physics), history, philosophy and the world’s wisdom traditions.

Question: Why does austerity appear to be so necessary to neo-liberal economists, and why despite their disdain for that austerity do leading edge heterodox economists still concern themselves about injecting too much money into the economy?

Answer: Fear of inflation, and lack of insight about how to create a better alternative to commercial decision makers, trapped in a monetarily austere system, raising their prices when they perceive more money coming into the system.

So if you can devise a policy that SIGNIFICANTLY reduces prices at retail sale which is both the end point of the entire economic process for every consumer item, the summing point for all costs and so prices for same and, as it is the ending point of the economic process where production becomes consumption must be the terminal expression point for any inflation as well….then you’ll have resolved the problem of inflation….and even made deflation beneficial in profit making systems. Of course you’ll need a set of taxations and regulations that encourage economic virtues and discourage economic vices throughout the entire economic process to keep the system stable, but what is theorizing for after all.

Let us create not only a New Deal, but an Abundantly Freeing New Deal for both the individual and commercial agents. A New Deal that ends the “too expensive” nature of present finance and enables us to easily finance the necessary ecological research and innovation the planet requires. We’re way to close to a crisis at midnight not to think and act boldly.

It seems to me that economists have become caught in their abstractions so thoroughly that they are unable or unwilling to look directly at the everyday operations of the economy and so perceive the significances embodied in the ending point of the economic process where production becomes consumption at retail sale. Macro-economics thus flounders around attempting to discover insight in the complexities of the economy instead of recognizing how simple and yet powerfully effective a single monetary policy is in its ability to reverse the problematic realities of systemic austerity and individual aggregate income scarcity that economists all desire to change.

It has taken an individual not formally trained in economics who has yet studied both the current leading edge macro theorists and one who almost a century ago started a world wide movement extolling the basic policy framework to be implemented at retail sale, to see the problem as a whole; an individual who having an interest in both science and the world’s wisdom traditions was able to perceive the relevant philosophical alignments and reflectivities in quantum theory, human consciousness and economics and so has innovated, extended and integrated those policies into a coherent whole that resolves both the problems of modern economies and brings a more integrative perspective to temporal and individual reality as well. That is Wisdomics-Gracenomics, and the thesis of The Cosmic Code.

TA:  The digital EPM vil have value and be accepted in transactions since it may be used to pay taxes — one EPM counting as one euro.

Me: Trond,

A nation’s present currency pays for taxes. Why create an additional one when, with the strategic implementation of the policies of the new paradigm of Monetary Gifting, you can resolve the deepest and most chronic problems of modern economies.

We see the beginnings of part of the awakening to the new paradigm in ideas such as “a modern debt jubilee”, 5 Star’s dividend, QE for the People, MMT’s assertion that direct funding by government is the actual reality in fiat money systems and that money is essentially accounting. Now all economists need to do in order to integrate all of these insights is look directly at the operations of commerce and cognite on the incredible mathematical significance and paradigm changing effects of a discount/rebate monetary policy at the point of retail sale. The abundant relatively high percentage discount/rebate at retail sale is the invention of the telescope and discovery of the ellipse of economic theory.

JV:  Ah, the old MMT shibboleth that gives value to that part of the “money supply” that’s paid in taxes. What about the other half to two thirds? Why not simply hold that money is valuable because it allows one to legally appropriate the output of others in exchange for ones own? At least the position of taxes supporting military expenses won’t need to be defended as being valuable.

Me: It’s not a shibboleth that sovereignty/order/ethics is an essential aspect of human interaction. If the government isn’t sovereign….why would powerful corporations and individuals bother to pay their taxes?

When you can integrate the apparently opposing aspects of the natural philosophical concept of grace like benevolence and sovereignty with the policies I advocate….you know you’re on to something truly profound….like a breakthrough discernment that brings resolving wisdom to economics and the money system.

Answer: It’s “too expensive” and it will cause inflation.

So if we can drastically reduce the cost of finance and prevent inflation in the consumer economy we can proceed with everything beneficial so far as infrastructure, sane environmental and ecological policy and monetary abundance for all economic agents.

And that is precisely what the four tenets of Wisdomics-Gracenomics accomplish with:

1. A new monetary authority and a publicly administered national banking system including the central bank that do not require profit for them to exist.
2. A universal dividend policy distributing $750-1000/mo. to everyone 18 and older.
3. A 50% Discount/Rebate policy implemented at the point of retail sale that not only eliminates the possibility of inflation, but integrates price deflation painlessly and beneficially into profit making economic systems.
4. Changing the new ending point for the legitimate economic/productive process for “big ticket” consumer items like houses and autos etc. from retail sale to the point of note making so that such note can be further reduced by 50%. Thus a $200k house is reduced to a $100k note at retail sale where all profit making enterprise has been duly compensated and at the signing of the note is then graciously reduced again to $50k.

Me: We need to understand that the bankers and their enablers are few and we the benefactors of the new paradigm are many. Economists need to make up for their ignorance/intellectual complicity in letting the paradigm of Debt Only continue to reign. They could best do this by recognizing that endlessly theorizing, preaching only to ego involved academics and “authorities” in the faint hope that they will change their minds and making everyone’s eyes glaze over with calculus….are fruitless political endeavors.

They must instead get behind a mass movement that communicates the simple but elegant and powerful essence of the benefits of the new paradigm and its policies for both the individual and commercial enterprise.

KZ:  Craig, bankers are not only few but in current American society mostly invulnerable to attack or prosecution. Not one banker was prosecuted regarding the 2007-2008 financial crisis. And, of course none went to prison. I simply find it difficult to believe that the movement you suggest could take on bankers successfully. Particularly, when US Presidents, US Congress members, religious leaders, and entrepreneurs have failed to control banks. Right now banks are in charge. Before any such movement as you suggest even has a chance of success, banks must be taken down, hard. That needs something more like an MMA match.

Me:  Do not underestimate the power of desire for change and self interest combined. Trump allegedly won the presidency by demagoging the former alone. Showing the extremely large constituencies of the 99% and the small to medium sized business community who dwarf the employment and personnel numbers of the major corporations how they can IMMEDIATELY almost triple their incomes and potential business revenues with simple, easily understood and observable policies like the discount/rebate policy and a universal dividend….is an extremely powerful message. Put that together with an honest and urgent modicum of indignation about how the financial and corporate elite have dominated the general populace and…..

Regurgitating the correct and erudite critiques of neo-liberal DSGE for ANOTHER decade has no such chance of succeeding.

The sooner well intentioned economists swallow their intellectual vanities and realize that the point of retail sale is the simple but elegant and effective fulcrum point in the entire economic process where a single monetary policy can invert stubborn longstanding realities into the very goals they already say they want to see occur….the better.

If you want peace, work for justice,

If you want the Good, ponder ethics,

If you want happiness, find purpose, and

If you want freedom, contemplate and apply grace.

Steve Hummel  12/02/2018

….that the point of retail sale is a pivotal monetary and economic fulcrum point from which systemic realities can be not only moved, but transformed. It’s a paradigm changing insight.

It’s all old paradigm thinking and tweaking. A new paradigm is a radical, powerful, elegant and yet simple change. The paradigm of Debt Only has ruled for over 5000 years. The world changes. Forget the tweaking….solve the problem…so that everyone benefits and finance is possible for the innovative and sane ecological changes we need.