Poster:  Yep, that certainly is a shift. My guess is that the cartel has simply been forced to confront the fact that they cannot steamroll over Assad and the Syrian army as long as Russia, Iran, and China are backing them. I have no doubt that Putin has made it clear that he will not be pushed any further, and that the cartel is courting a nuclear confrontation if they continue on the path they have been on. Looks like Brezinski´s ¨Silk Road¨strategy has run into a BRIIC wall, eh?

Me: Stuart,

I hope that is actually what is occurring. But if we don’t awaken to what will actually make our economic and monetary systems truly functional and stable and what will also free the individual financially there will always be instability re-inforcing the geo-political and geo-financial strategies of the major powers. And such reforms/transformations are probably best pushed simultaneously in both Russia/China and the West or it will be the same old same old of East versus West cold war, or White Russians versus Red Russians civil war

Thanks, and great post Liam.

Philosophy should be a priori to Policy and Life/Living, and if a philosophy of Life (and of economics and money systems) is fully fleshed out it brings clarity and ability to focus amidst the confusions in Life and on complex systems that have been consciously or unconsciously developed to be both complex and confusing….in order to attain and maintain monopolies that serve primarily self interests. Without due consideration of philosophy you end up with force when the stress of austerity and change is upon one. This is why Donald Trump is so popular. There are particles of truth in some of the things he says, but partial truths are historically never adequate and always end up blowing back at us. Progressives need to be aware of this, and offer a truly practical and complete philosophical alternative to Trumpism. If they don’t at worse they may end up with the rule of Nixon’s “silent majority”, and at best we’ll get the corporate and financial kabuki theater of Clinton or the well intentioned but incomplete reforms of Bernie Sanders. Again, Trumpism is a dark side reflection of the power of hope to move the electorate except it is mere brashness where the clarity of Wisdom and the power of grace/graciousness is what is actually called for. Let us have the complete philosophy that can bring actual functionality to our temporal systems and guide and align policies that can bring true economic hope to the individual.

Integration of the truths in apparently opposing ideas and theories is so important, and also why integrating the various economic and monetary reform movements is the next necessary step toward awakening the populace and the political apparatus so that the complete program gets implemented.

The biggest problem be-deviling economic and monetary theorists is their tendency to ignore/miss/dismiss observation of the actual processes of commerce/the economy. Hence they have almost gone off into an abstract and mathematical fugue. This is why economic theory missed the looming “great financial crisis” in late 2007 early 2008, and also why it still continues to be so beset by orthodoxy.

Theorists need to awaken to the empirical data of cost accounting because of its general use and usefulness to every enterprise, because of the dynamic effects of its conventions on the productive process/economy itself and because that data is utterly pinned to 3 and 4 dimensional space and time. This awakening will bring them out of their excessive abstractionism, and their mistaken notions of general equilibrium as well as DSGE’s pretensions to have resolved cost and time.  Factoring the calculus of cost accounting data into the economy enables an increased understanding and integration of the micro and macro economy and hence a greater clarity  to theory.

Larry,

Yes, that is true, but the important thing to garner from that is the integrative incompleteness of Keynes’ understanding of money…..and the completeness of Douglas’. There is room for both Debt and monetary grace/gifting, for both governmental (Keynesian) stimulus and (missing from Keynes’ theory) direct gifting to the individual via a citizen’s dividend and rebated discount to retail prices. Economies have not been in a state of equilibrium since the economy was much less industrialized and hence less capital intensive and closer to a state of barter. Hence they have “progressed” toward a more pronounced state of cost/price inflation, and the importance of including/integrating both Debt and Gifting becomes ever more important as innovation and AI increasingly destroy aggregate demand. Keynes’ theories were the fall back position of modern finance so that it could “live another day”….and as we see, once again dominate and manipulate the world with its paradigm of Debt ONLY. The insights of MMT (and other cutting edge theory and reform movements) regarding the importance and reality of national monetary sovereignty integrated with Douglas’ policies that enable monetary policy reach directly and all the way to the (then sovereign) individual can form the basis for a full economic and monetary integration philosophically based on a new and increasingly primary paradigm of monetary grace the free gift. This is my premise in Wisdomics/Gracenomics/Gracientialism.

Grace is the moment and each proceeding moment. Hence it is both Now and future nows. It is both stasis and process, beginning and end. In fact it is all three of Start, Change and Stop which defines conscious experience of one’s Self and of Life. Grace in fact is simultaneous Bothness (the integrated truth(s) of apparently opposing ideas-realities/Duality) and Bothness/Andness (the fully integrated reality traditionally known as Trinity-Unity which includes consciousness and conscious awareness of whatever subject/temporal situation being considered). The Cosmic Code is an Integrated/Integrative Duality Within A Fully Integrated and Conscious Trinity-Unity . The personal experience of Grace is both Wisdom and its pinnacle state, Natural Existential Mysticism. Grace is both Science and Spirituality and their truths….consciously integrated and experienced at the same time.

Hysteria seems to be “carrying the day” as the last Republican debate of the year took place tonight in the USA. We were treated ad nauseum to the worst kind of jingoistic Islamophobia and militaristic calls for action against Syria, Iran, ISIS/ISIL and even Russia. Anti-intellectualism and the worst kind of crack pot populism was broadcast directly into the minds of frustrated and stressed out Americans by CNN. It was pathetic. Economics and politics is poor theater. Progressives had better wake up and realize that intellectualism doesn’t have a chance against fear, stress and anger….at least not with the majority. Trump is tapping into the same mentality that Mussolini and Hitler tapped into. It’s a winning formula. The only way to head off an onslaught of such lemming like suicidal idiocy is an economics of jubilee followed by an adequate amount of cold hard cash, paper or digital, in the eager hands of the individual. It’s a race between monetary grace the free gift and a repeat of the worst of the twentieth century.

Grace has always been associated with both internal freedom and free flowingness of motion. In a monetary economy personal economic freedom is a continuous satisfactory level and flow of money. Joy is the immediate and natural experience of freedom from some enslaving situation or personal condition. One is released from a restrictive, burdensome and oppressive mental and/or bodily state and consequently experiences joyous freedom and flow. This is Grace, and enslavement is its opposite.

The crucial point to note is that all of this physical building activity was paid for physically as each and every project was produced, and was entirely paid for physically when it was completed and ready for ultimate purchase and use.  All of the discussion surrounding this calamitous financial event is discussed in purely financial, and never in fundamental physical terms—the assumption being, apparently, that the financial system is somehow a mere reflection of the physical aspects of the production system.  It seems never to be suspected that the financial system give a distorted reflection of the physical economy.  Abstractionism is elevated above reality.

Although the physical costs of all production are met and fully acquitted as production occurs, the financial costs of that production are not so liquidated and are carried further and further into the future as unliquidated debt charges against future, and unrelated, production.   Any interruption in the issue of additional credit for an ever-expanding program of production breaks the flow of debt repayment and leads to a series of bankruptcies and foreclosures upon real assets.  Of course when it is realized that and increasing number of debtors are having difficulty in, or will be incapable of, meeting their debt obligations, the issuers of credit become inclined to reduce or cease issuing new credits for new production and this exacerbates the problem by further contracting the supply of production credits and shrinking consumer income and demand.  Attempts by governments to stimulate the economy by further expansion of credit for production only worsen the situation because it generates not only new incomes but new costs as well—and so it does not have the desired effect of revivifying the economy.

The core problem is one of increasing financial illiquidity which cannot be rectified by issue additional cost-creating financial credits.  The error is in attempting to rectify the economic problem through attempts to stimulate new production when the actual problem is a lack of consuming power or effective buying power in the hands of consumers.  The goods have been produced but consumers have insufficient purchasing-power by which to purchase them. The problem can only be solved by the issue of new consumer credits which do not incur new costs upon issue but which are available to cancel previous costs.  The problem becomes aggravated as we replace human effort with automated technology and can only be resolved by ensuring that earned incomes are supplemented by non-earned incomes paid in respect of machine charges.  Machines incur costs but do not purchase ultimate consumer goods.  Only humans do this and they must have sufficient income in total to purchase the entire output of industry—not a shrinking part of it.

We have essentially solved the problem of scarcity through modern production but we have not learned how to distribute the entire product, allowing consumers full access to available consumer goods and making possible the liquidation of all business financial costs, simultaneously.

Sincerely
Wally

Keynes had a good mind alright, but his analysis was incomplete both policy-wise and philosophically. His contemporary Douglas was one of the first to recognize the creditary nature of money, and being an engineer by profession (as well as a cost accountant and the modern equivalent of an efficiency expert) looked directly at commerce, its monetary empirical facts and then the mathematical implications of those datums. Starting from those engineering, scientific and calculus roots came policies that would have transformed modern economies. Keynes once referred to Douglas as a private, not a Major in economic reform (Douglas was referred to as Major Douglas). I’m afraid it was the other way around. There have only been three modern economic philosophers, Smith, Marx and Douglas.

In these three are the dialectic expressed:

Smith/Capitalism/Thesis

Marx/Socialism/Antithesis

Douglas/Social Credit/Synthesis

Yes, a nice psycho/cultural/historical analysis of post war Europe and the EU. I read several blogs (not this one) where well meaning reformers get off on tangents about “the cartel” “the deep state” etc. The fact is that Capitalism generally and Finance Capitalism specifically are so riven with the psychology of power, profit and control that there isn’t really any need for conspirators to be evilly slavering over some vector analysis board consciously manipulating nations and regions…all that is required is to let leader’s psycho/cultural/historical biases compete for power, profit and control. Having said this, there undoubtedly are Gordon Gecko and Dr. Strange Love types out there, but again the underlying psychology of the paradigm/zeitgeist of PP & C is what must be dealt with if Mankind is ever to flourish…or even survive. All the more to contemplate Wisdom and its pinnacle concepts, and then apply them as policy in our systems.