If taxes are basically irrelevant and largely unnecessary, then MMT exposes the fact that we live in a potentially distributive money system…and all we have to do is truly realize the significance of that fact and craft policies that take effective control of the system. They stop short of that probably mostly because they do not have a fully fleshed out philosophical understanding of the concept behind the new paradigm, namely the natural philosophical concept of grace, specifically grace as in the gift/gifting, but also because they do not have a good understanding of cost accounting and the monetary and economic significance of the relationships between the datums found there.

In the temporal universe there is no such thing as total freedom, but rather only freedom amongst barriers. That means that to treat the economy and/or the money system as if they were God and hence that we must not touch or alter them is superstitious nonsense. The correct mindset is to take adult, ethical and yet graciously unobtrusive control of these systems so as to create the most freedom for all agents and the most free flowingness for the system.

That is what the policies of Wisdomics-Gracenomics does.

G:  I’d love to invite each participating writer to RWER to offer their best ideas for the five most important building blocks for a new economy.

Me:  #1 Base the economic system on a philosophical concept that integrates and INCLUDES both profit and concern for the individual and is yet a unitary thirdness, and regulate the economy so as to effectively eliminate the vast majority of inevitable conflict that will arise between the two.

#2 Actually align monetary policies with that concept that deal effectively with costs and time ( i.e. immediacy of effect via both directness and spanning time).

#3 Those policies are a monthly dividend paid to everyone 18 and older and a relatively high discount (40%+) to the retail product of each business model that is then rebated back to the producer giving it.

#4 Declare any shorting of the currency null and void.

#5 Use tax policy to discourage leveraged speculation, purely financial pooling of money and to encourage innovation, competition, AI and research on ways to produce more with less resources.

G:  Thanks for your ideas…

(1) Yes. But what is a unitary thirdness?

(2) I don’t understand this.

(3) This is Basic Income? I don’t understand the second part about a 40% discount.

(4) Would a Financial Transactions Tax assist a ban on currency shorting, or not be needed?

(5) Yes.

Me:  Sorry about the delay in getting back to you guy.

#1) A unitary thirdness is the result of the thorough integration of the truths and only the truths in apparently opposing perspectives, so much so that the body of knowledge, system, mental understanding is an actually distinct third reality. Intergation of opposites is the very process of Wisdom and thirdness is its signature. Oneness is the signature of the pinnacle philosophical concept of Wisdom pointed at by all of the world’s major wisdom traditions and is variously called satori-kensho, samadhi or grace.

#2) Three of the aspects of grace are directness, immediacy of effect and the ability to maintain an effect through time. A universal dividend economically accomplishes all of these.

#3) A basic income guarantee could actually be a way to trap people in second class citizenship especially as innovation and AI, which are really just getting started, reduce the rational need for human input in the economy. What is needed is a relatively abundant dividend that would guarantee a middle class level of lifestyle. The discount policy is also a relatively high percentage discount to the “retail product” of every business model (not just the model of retail) that a monetary authority with full arm’s length constitutional protections would be mandated to set the percentage rate and rebate participating businesses’ discounts back to them so that they could whole on their overheads and margins. This is an extremely potent policy as it would enable businesses to sell their products/services considerably below their best competitive price and along with the dividend immediately increase the the purchasing power of the individual. It also would do what up until now was considered impossible, namely beneficially and painlessly integrating price deflation into profit making systems.

#4) It might discourage it, but the reason it is important to declare naked/leveraged shorting of a currency is that this was one of the ways that anti-social financial intentions created the rare occurrence of hyperinflation, and if/when the new monetary paradigm of direct and reciprocal Gifting is awakened to and implemented you can count on Finance doing whatever they can to thwart it.

#5) Yes indeed. Let us have the dynamism of profit making systems and the ethical intentions of socialism thoroughly integrated so as to wisely create the unitary thirdness-oneness of Monetary and Economic Distributism.

Cost push…the most prevalent and undetected

Demand pull

Human freedom to act inflation which generally occurs at the same time as demand pull inflation, but is not actually related to or caused by plentiful demand as much as it is the general upward tendency/temptation to increase prices in profit making systems.

Me:  Money may re-circulate back through the economy, but the real point is that its re-circulation doesn’t increase individual incomes at all because as it re-circulates it is transformed from individual income into business revenue which is expensed against that business’s gross costs which may be as much as 99%. So in fact a businessman who spends $100 of his business revenue as if it were his personal income merely adds to/puts off his actual business expense and is headed for bankruptcy or having to hide his true income which of course could be perilous. This undoubtedly goes on a lot in cash transactions on the small business level because the scarcity of actually available income tempts it, and we know “creative” accounting exists a plenty on the larger corporate scale.

So far as additional taxes are concerned that might actually be true, but if you can believe MMTers our tax dollars don’t actually pay for government anyway. And even if MMT is only half correct and a sovereign government can simply create the monies for necessary deficits above tax revenues it only proves that direct creation of money is imminently possible….so why live in the old paradigms of scarcity and “necessary” re-distributive income taxation when a new paradigm of direct distribution works and everyone’s purchasing power could be increased considerably with the elimination of such?? And with an adequate dividend to everyone 18 and older virtually all federal transfer taxes could be eliminated as well.

E:  I don’t follow this. I thought a universal basic income was basically the social credit solution.

Me:  Unfortunately the basic/sparse/minimal aspect of the dividend actually IS most social crediter’s idea of its character. This however is both misaligned with the concept underlying social credit itself, namely grace as in abundance, individual empowerment and freedom and, so far as the economic system is concerned free flowingness as opposed to mere statistical equilibrium…which if understood correctly is actually a stopping point and not flow at all.

I stand on the shoulders of the giant of C. H. Douglas in so far as the form
of the dual policies he recommended but my Wisdomics-Gracenomics is an extension of those two policies that more closely dovetails with temporal universe realities and is a more fully fleshed out philosophical exegesis of its basic concept.

J:  Steve,

Measurement of inflation is “rising prices”. Therefore that must be its definition.  Full stop.

Orthodoxy have two definitions of its causes:

Demand-pull inflation; too much money chasing too few goods, (yes, inflation of the money supply) and,

Cost-push inflation resulting from rising costs, e.g. rising oil prices.

I believe that, in a situation where all goods can be sold,  i.e. there is little or no competition, profiteering could be a third cause.

Orthodox economists seldom, if ever, refer to the cost-push variety.  I believe that they are very wrong in this and that the cost-push form is the main cause of present price inflation. After all, that is a logical codicil of Douglas’ A + B model.

Me:  J,

I don’t dispute your definitions of inflation, and I would add another one I call freedom of human action inflation….because in profit making systems as Minsky and Steve Keen said: The fundamental direction of capitalism is up”. Also, in an unstable system plagued by an inherent scarcity of demand and that for a variety of idiotic orthodox reasons fails to take adult, ethical, thorough and yet gracious control of the pricing system the freedom to yield to temptation to inflate one’s prices….will inevitably be a chronic reality.

These points are why most social crediter’s lingering attachment to the paradigms of scarcity and equilibrium via minor amounts of dividend and low percentages of discount are both philosophically misaligned with its basic concept grace (one of whose aspects is grace as in abundance) and doomed to failure because continual minor increases in human freedom inflation will enable finance and businesses to game the system….unless the the discount percentage is so large that they will not be able refuse participation in the program which requires them to pass along the high (40% or more) discount to their consumers, and even if they raise their prices 2 or 3% will still reduce prices to their consumers by 37%. And if they keep raising their prices they will risk losing their market share as well as risk being booted out of the program because unwarranted serial inflating of their prices will be grounds for such booting of unhealthy, abnormal, anti-social and dumb son of a bitch reactions to being gifted with greater profitability due to being able to sell more volume via the dividend and discount, paying less taxes and being in a system that has a continually free flowing nature.

If every business model’s prices are 40% less than their formerly best competitive price please explain how that can be price inflationary????

J:  Steve,

In concert with the rest of the movement in NZ, I do not believe the discount system is workable and have never propounded it for that reason.

“Pure” Social Crediters propose it in two different ways, subsidising the vendor or refunding the purchaser, and jump from one to the other when challenged.  Because of the paper work involved in the second,  I will only consider the first, but nobody has suggested  how to stop the vendors simply lifting prices first when there is little or no competition.

My other objection to it is that, in present times, the main benefit would go to those with the most spending power, i.e. the top 1% or 10%, or 50%, depending on how you look at it.  I prefer to look at reducing the financial costs of infrastructure for everyone rather than subsidising private jets or multi-million dollar yachts.

I am using the correct term for a subsidy, a payment to reduce prices. It does not have to come from taxation, as some claim.

Me:  John,

I also think rebating their discounts back to vendors is easily the more practical way of implementing the discount.

However, your problems with the policy are in my opinion either quite easily handled or are of the “So what?” variety.

Enterprises have pricing histories and if for instance in response to them raising them greatly and arbitrarily for 6 months or a year before the policy was implemented….the rule that such gouging would have to be reversed could easily be mandated in the law implementing it. I already mentioned that such serial and unjustifiable price increases would not be tolerated. “The bully pulpit” could be effectively used to discourage rogue businesses/businessmen from trying to rake in early profits, and once the dividend and discount were implemented their obvious beneficial effects would quickly become apparent to virtually all much the same as has social security which despite it being only a palliative policy has been able to resist reduction/elimination by regressive forces for almost 100 years. Even the terminally “principled” libertarian whose soldered in motto is “There ain’t no free lunch!” would probably only object for a short period of time before his wife whacked him over the head with a rolling pin, he grew a couple of new neurons, finally came into present time enough to stop regurgitating fallacious economic orthodoxy…and started enjoying life.

As far as the rich getting the larger percentage of benefit from the discount, I could care less in view of the tremendous general benefits of the two policies.

Hey Russia and your propagandistic media outlet RT, Stay the hell out of our electoral process. You are correct to fear western financial power and the encroachment of NATO, but your own gangster kleptocratic form of fascism requires self reflection and correction as well.

The above quote by Karl Marx is spot on, and unfortunately Finance is currently our master. C. H. Douglas’s quote that, “Systems were made for Man, not Man for systems.” spot lights the intolerably unethical state of our financial and economic situation.

The new monetary and economic paradigm is Direct and Reciprocal Gifting because it eliminates the rigged necessity to continually borrow which is no solution at all because the resulting build up of debt, even if at 0% interest, will eventually exceed the system’s ability to service that debt. With a continually adequate amount of monetary gifting the market for new finance could also be downsized which would make Debt wither down and the economy to become truly free flowing.

It is true that both of the last two financial crises were preceded by wild speculation which precipitated those crises, but beneath that fact the unethical untenability of compulsory debt build up remains, and the true underlying cause of the compulsion, namely the inherently cost inflationary nature of modern technologically advanced capital intensive economies.  This is not perceived by even heterodox economists because they are not educated in cost accounting and most accountants are not educated to perceive the economic significance of the datums they work with every day, hence they both miss it, and so Finance construes their dominating paradigms of Debt, Loan and For Production Only as unfortunately necessary.

Public Banking, MMT, Disequilibrium Theory, etc. reform economics….Wisdomics-Gracenomics transforms it!

This is how I discovered that Douglas’s retail discount policy could be applied not just at retail, but at each stopping and summing point in the continuous flow of the economy, in other words at the point of retail sale of any business model’s products or services to the next business model on the line toward the business model of retail sale. It also came out my being aware of one of the oldest insights of one of the world’s oldest wisdom traditions, Hinduism, in what is known as the Rig Veda, and that is the insight that the temporal universe follows an immutable and continuous process of Starting, Changing and Stopping also known as the cycle of action.

And so,….as a sale is a summing and stopping point within the incredible complexity of the overall economy, and both the money system and the pricing system are digital, Douglas’s macro-economic insight into the economy’s most basic problem, i.e. the rate of flow of total costs and so total prices, (because the cost accounting convention that all costs must go into price is always and correctly enforced) always tends to exceed the rate of flow of total individual incomes simultaneously produced….the point of sale is the exact time and place to implement a discount to prices that is monetarily gifted back to the enterprises offering such discount thus creating the ideal economic climate of lots of available purchasing power and miraculously up until now….price deflation painlessly and beneficially integrated into profit making systems. It’s a win-win for all agents and for the entire system.

Yes, that’s the structural power of Finance, and it’s an awesome power that Public Banking needs to balance, but even more powerful and subtle are the enforced monopolistic paradigms of Finance which are Debt, Loan and For Production ONLY. They are subtle because we are so used to them that we fail to see alternative ones.

Even very intelligent and iconoclastic people like Steve Keen can suggest actions (“a modern debt jubilee”) that perfectly reflect the concept of the new paradigm and yet, due to either philosophical neglect or perhaps simply habitual intellectual fragmentation still miss that underlying concept and so do not fully consciously perceive it.

Subtlety and apparent absurdity (conceptually paradigm changes are always oppositional, and inversions of the primacy of current ones) This has always been the problem with paradigm changes and consciousness raising.

Being willing and able to integrate the truths and only the truths in apparently opposing perspectives, i.e. an integrated duality, is the very process and signature of Wisdom, and thirdness-oneness, i.e. trinity-unity, is the signature of the pinnacle concept and human experience of Wisdom also known as satori-kensho, samadhi, grace/graciousness.  And these fit seamlessly within, and are descriptive of The Cosmic Code:

[ ( A x Z )  <–>  G/C ]