Morals tend to be black and white. Ethics is the rational consideration of morals. Integrating (the very process of wisdom) the truths and insights of the two disciplines would ultimately result in discovery of the pinnacle concept of wisdom which would in turn be a new and different thing as wisdom is also the dynamic, interactive and thorough integration of opposites to the point of thirdness and greater oneness.

This is the concept behind the new monetary and economic paradigm, and even beyond that temporal application, the experience pointed at by all of the world’s major wisdom traditions.

There is a hierarchy of ways and means of knowing/knowledge that inclusively ascends from data to philosophy to self knowledge that are all monitored by the act and direction of looking. You look outwardly/scientifically at temporal data/facts, you look inwardly at and about the philosophical implications of those facts and their relationships to each other (contemplation) and this results in a third greater self actualization/self knowledge/atonement-at oneness of both the data and the philosophy.

This is all natural philosophy and natural spirituality.

You’re absolutely right, politicians and economists wallow in any number of unconscious and obsessively contentious dualisms that contain particles of truth and untruth, instead of integrating the truths in opposites to the point of greater unity and oneness. Integration of truths is the very process of Wisdom. Unconscious and obsessive contention is stupidity. The motto must be:

When in doubt integrate….and keep on integrating.

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MPs and pols from every major country won’t pay any more attention to MMT, or only slightly more….unless you show their constituencies a better way that they are able to understand because it is elegantly simple. You have to engage large constituency’s self interests like students, the common man and the small to medium sized business community with a policy or policies that will obviously benefit them….directly and unambiguously. I’ve been telling Steve Keen for years that he’s preaching to the choir. His recent Patreon campaign is a step in the right direction, but his message is still way too complex and therefore won’t adequately communicate. MMT is right about money mechanics, but its message is also way above the heads of most people. You need a single concept and a set of policies that will show the above constituencies what’s in it for them, and/or if they’re open to it, what it can do for others, the system and the nation. Then you create and focus a mass social movement out of that concept and policies that is able to herd the entirety of the political apparatus toward their implementation. It worked for Ghandi, it worked for MLK, Jr. ….it can work for the money and economic systems.

dnm:  You need different packages for different audiences, one very simple set of ideas for the general public, one tailored to journalists, one for politicians, one for business leaders, and so on.

larry:  dnm, Bill doesn’t see marketing and the like as one of his strengths, possibly necessary to build a mass movement. He is an academic. His role as he has characterized it is to develop and put forward ideas and analyses and for others to engage in the other activities that may be necessary for general acceptance. Mosler has been trying as well as Kelton to change the minds of legislators. As receptive as Sanders has been to Kelton’s views, it is unclear whether he has taken her views completely on board. Mosler has said that his successes have been uneven, and he is something of a politician. So, it seems to me to be a tad unfair to expect Bill to be able to do everything. Building a mass movement is a quite specialized skill. What Bill has is his integrity. To me, this counts for a great deal.

Me:  @dnm and larry

You’re both right of course, and my comments are not to be considered a critique of Bill or anyone else. The fact remains however that a mass social movement is the correct vehicle for the political success of the various heterodox theories, and that would best be accomplished by an integration of the truths in each of them expressed in specific direct policies that every agent could easily perceive was in their self interest and was also attended by a resonantly humane and valid philosophical/psychological concept that they could easily go into agreement with.

dnm:  I broadly agree with your latest comment. One worry is that self-defined MMT groups end up spending >95% of their time preaching to the converted, in a best case scenario. In the worst case, the attempt to find a “valid philosophical/psychological concept” that all can agree on consumes all available resources. Ideological purity is the enemy of practical results.

Me:  @dnm

“In the worst case, the attempt to find a “valid philosophical/psychological concept” that all can agree on consumes all available resources.”

Well yes, but looking at the expressed goals and policy suggestions of the various heterodox movements of MMT, Keen’s Minsky Instability/Disequilibrium theory, Michael Hudson’s Financial Parasitism, Ellen Brown’s Public Banking and the handful of monetary reform movements….an underlying conceptual thread can be discerned. And along with other policy extensions and innovations, I’ve spent the last several years doing an exegesis of that common thread concept. So for the most part that effort has already been done.

…is either stuck in obsessive dualistic conflict and/or the false oneness actual onlyness of ego/narrow and rigid orthodoxy.  The answer is always trinity-unity-oneness-wholeness-consciousness-process, in other words the dynamically interactive resolution of opposites otherwise known as the state or condition of Grace.

It should rather be called “The human freedom to act inflation” and could and without controlling financial services undoubtedly would increase….unless you take adult, responsible, complete, graciously unobtrusive, ethical and benevolent control of the entire pricing system with my point of sale discount/rebate policy.

“Oh you’re a fascist or communist and want to control everyone and every commercial agent!”

“Oh, you’re a libertine who wants to destroy all values with monetary profligacy!”

Give me a break. I’m not advocating either of these dogmatically loaded statements. I’m simply saying that there is in fact no such thing in the temporal universe as total freedom. There is only freedom amongst known (conscious) barriers.  The question is do you want only monetary freedom for a wealthy elite which is the current and historically ubiquitous trend, or do you want satisfactorily relative monetary freedom for everyone and potential greater profitability for any enterprise?

The discount is a beneficial, benevolent policy for everyone, it recognizes “human freedom to act inflation” and it consciously and graciously controls the pricing system for the common Good…..and it even enables a slight and ethical ability to inflate without destroying the benevolent effects of the policy….if you dare inflate 2-3% per year and risk losing market share and the discount is 50%, then the net purchasing power of everyone is still increased by 47%….and you are free to do so. Likewise if you as an enterprise don’t pass on the discount to your consumers you’re immediately out of the program and out of business as a result.  In other words you’re free to do the right thing for yourself and others, and if you’re an anti-social and/or greedy asshole….bye, bye.

When you embrace the beatific chains of an ethic of Graciousness….it all becomes much more clear to you.

AH:  You can’t really have a deflationary currency for any sustained period of time. The raison d’être of currency is to provide a stable standard of value in terms of which markets can trade. People require something to be able to set prices in. They need a value unit to *think* in terms of. That’s the role that currency serves. If your currency is deflationary, it behaves less like a currency and people will look for other more stable assets to use as currencies instead. So while it might be interesting to think about what would happen if we had a deflationary currency, that’s like asking what would happen if we went faster than the speed of light. If it’s deflationary, it’s not a currency anymore.

Me:  My Reciprocal Discount policy at the point of sale within and throughout the entire economic process refutes the necessity you point to….because it is reciprocal. In other words it is a beneficial policy for both the individual and enterprise, to the individual increasing their purchasing power by 40-50% and to the enterprise because it allows them to sell at 40-50% below their best competitive price….and yet because their discounts are reciprocally rebated back to them….they can be whole on their overheads and profit margins.

Costs, eventual/actual prices and the full monies to liquidate them are equated and accounted for so the currency is stable but prices to the consumer (both individual and commercial) are greatly reduced by the discount. The reciprocality of the rebate distributed back to the enterprise initially giving/gifting the discount is the very real “trick” that enables the benefits to all.

Something to do, someone to love, something to hope for……and someone or something to give back to.

That keeps the love and graciousness going, developing, strengthening and becoming a more conscious experience.

Steve Hummel  11/21/2017

As I’ve said many times here I believe Public Banking is a very important aspect of the solution to our monetary and economic problems. The one thing that is missing from all of the leading edge reforms like PB, MMT, Steve Keen’s Minsky disequilibrium/instability theories and Michael Hudson’s correct identification of Finance as the primary business model problem and Rent seeking as its vice ridden economic effects…is they all still remain almost entirely within the current paradigm of Debt Only. The dominating paradigm of Debt Only must ITSELF be overcome. That process begins with CONSCIOUS recognition of what the new paradigm is….otherwise there is all manner of conflict, confusion, palliatives, genuine reforms which are yet “epicycles” and so do not resolve the deepest problem in the area in which the new paradigm must take place. Recognizing the new paradigm is half the battle won, a clarifying experience and a tremendous inducement to its further actualization in the individual and the world. This is not just my opinion it is the correct historical process elucidated by Thomas Kuhn. Let us pursue the new monetary and economic paradigm and look for its various signatures.

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The problem is both off budget spending and the fact that we allow financial casino capitalism at all. As to the latter pols have to grow a couple and decide that such destabilizing vehicles and capabilities like derivatives and shorting/naked shorting of the currency will be considered “null and void”. You want to regulate even speculation on regular commodities and actually productive parts of the economy, but you want to particularly stop stupidities and obviously destructive and de-stabilizing speculation on money/debt.

Answer:  The intensification of the dominating rule of Finance and its monopolistic paradigms.

If we implemented the policies of Wisdomics-Gracenomics and ushered in the new paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting it would eliminate Finance’s enslaving Debt hold on every other business model, enable enterprise to decentralize while profiting more, innovate and increase efficiencies freely without the need to provide “adequate” employment in the form of mostly bullshit jobs and end the deeper problem of the old paradigm of Debt Only which enforces continuous debt build up and so debt deflation, and so also economic instability.

It’s saddening and frustrating to see otherwise intelligent and progressive reformers like Dr. Billy Mitchell miss the deepest problem (the continued enforcement of the old financial paradigm) and so fall into mistaken and hidden authoritarianism regarding the policies of the new paradigm (a relatively abundant universal dividend and a relatively high percentage point of sale rebated discount to prices). His recent blog posts extolling MMT’s job guarantee as the only solution and cranky dissing of UBI/universal dividend are a failure to integrate old and new paradigms. And by the way he seems to be entirely unconscious of the synthesizing complementary policy of the point of sale rebated discount.

Perceiving and thoroughly understanding a new paradigm is difficult, and is very much like both a thorough scientific breakthrough and what devotees of the world’s various wisdom traditions call “the process of sanctification” and/or discipleship/the path of the Bodhisattva. If you don’t rigorously and objectively follow the path to scientific truth or the goal beyond religious dogma which is self actualization/self knowledge….then you fall back into orthodoxies instead of advancing to paradigm perception and greater understanding.

Probably the major relevant aspect of the concept of Grace to thinking is the fact that it includes the thorough integration of the truths etc. in opposites. Hence it cannot be a mere reaction or a rigid orthodoxy. Thus it is the categorical avoidance of egoistic opinion, closed mindedness and all of the irrationality, loss of focus on solutions and resistance to necessary change that so often attends intellectual discussion.

If one would simply adopt the ethic of monitoring whether or not they are truly considering legitimate truths in opposing perspectives, and further adopting the mental motto of “when in doubt integrate….and keep on integrating”,  more Wisdom and its integrative solutions would present themselves to scholars and decision makers.

And in a period where looming civilizational problems are met with obsessive contention from all sides and attempts to “put lipstick on a pig” and call it actual and/or beneficial change seems to be the best we can do, graciously considered integrative solutions would be the breath of fresh air alternative for survival.

Wisdom is the best integration of the practical and the ideal. Grace is the dynamic, interactive and thorough integration of the truths in opposites.

Thus Wisdomics-Gracenomics.

Wisdomics-Gracenomics is economic philosophy, economic theory and economic policy. It is the innovative philosophical and policy extension of C. H. Douglas’s Social Credit some of whose insights have separately been re-discovered by the best present day economists of Steve Keen, Michael Hudson, the various economists who advocate MMT and Public Banking reformer Ellen Brown . Hence Wisdomics-Gracenomics is a deep enough integration (Wisdom) of Social Credit and all of these reforms/reformers that it brings to full consciousness both the new monetary and economic paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Gifting and even the concept behind the new paradigm itself (the natural philosophical concept of Grace) as well.