@ Neil

“Economies need to have high levels of internal cohesion within the political zone and low levels of coupling with other political areas. Then they will be resilient and can pursue policies for their own people that may be quite different from other political areas.”

Precisely. This is actually a description of the concept of subsidiarity which is the only kind of globalization that can be of benefit to the individual of any nation (internal national cohesion) and not become an enforced tyrannical one size fits all ideology like either socialism or finance capitalism.

“gov’t employment programs are unworkable”

This is simply an arbitrary statement. The correct statement would be that they are workable and better than austerity, but they are a palliative and incomplete policy most basically because the productive process/economic system itself is inherently incapable of creating an equilibrium of total prices and total individual incomes with which to moment to moment liquidate those prices…by injecting money into it/an enterprise first…and hence what the economy requires are monetary policies which go directly to the individual first and which also do not incur a cost to the individual or to the system. In other words the actual solution entails the distribution of an ongoing gift of individual income, a universal dividend, and then (because as Steve Keen/Hyman Minsky correctly observe) price wise “the fundamental tendency of capitalism is upward” …so you also need to have a policy which deals with that price inflationary fact, and preferably proactively reverses that upward flow and effects actual price deflation, in other words a retail discount to the individual which is rebated back to participating merchants. The consequent increase in purchasing power from such dividend and discount policies would be to largely do away with the necessity for consumer finance in order to have a satisfactorily middle class lifestyle. As finance is a 5000 year old problematic business model…I’d say such “financial smalling up” policies are way over due.

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@ Nicholas

The price anchor is the retail discount mechanism I described above. In fact it is a price deflater which still fits seamlessly within profit making systems because it is rebated back to merchants.

As for “How does work get done?” it gets done the same way it gets done now….only better…by robotization and AI. If there is more demand is there any doubt that production will be willing and able to absorb it? Also, if free sway is given to technological innovation and AI is there any doubt that more production will be available per unit of resources? The fact is technology and AI are trying to free us, but rigid economic orthodoxy like the insistence that “only employment can be utilized as a policy to solve the problem” foolishly inhibits, but will not be able to resist that freedom. The job of the future is a positive and constructive purpose/purposes. What government should then focus on (and as it should now) is acculturating and encouraging the plethora of positive and constructive purposes other than work for pay.

@ Kevin and others

“progressive taxation and government direction of real resources to
tackle shortages and regulations to inhibit profiteering are better price anchors”

I disagree. Number one retail sale to an individual as I have mentioned before is absolutely the terminal end to price for any unit of service or product making it precisely the place to implement and direct policy. Number two profiteering within the productive process by industries leading up to and including retail sale could be monitored and graciously but definitively dealt with if it was serial and just flimsy accounting hiding profiteering. And again, even if some costs leading up to and including retail sale do go up the discount mechanism looking at and using the correct metric of the ratio of total costs and total individual incomes is there to reduce it. And don’t forget the discounts are fully rebated back to participating merchants so they are not harmed and can make more profit because businesses always make more profit when demand is readily and steadily available. Finally, the discount mechanism is a true macro-economic tool and is correctly placed at the terminal end of the productive process at retail sale…thus it can actually greatly reduce retail prices to consumers/everyone without harm to any traditionally productive enterprise. I mean like by 30, 40 maybe 50%. Why not? It’s rebated back to merchants after all, and discounting by these higher rates will simply better free the individual economically and also greatly reduce both the individual and businesses from the truly problematic part of the economy, namely Finance. Then, implement my trinitarian model for Finance previously posted…and the system flows gracefully and prosperously for everyone…even for the smalled up model of Finance. The motto again needs to be Transformation first!…rational and ethical regulation right along with it! Government needs to be sovereign but gracious, patient but adult and real, philosophically and ethically hierarchical and yet structurally obeying and reflecting the concept of subsidiarity.

Understanding the above is made easier when one “breaks through the sound barrier” about the most basic disequilibrating factor in economics which is that, as a flow, there is a continual scarcity of individual incomes created by commerce/the economy itself in ratio to total costs that need to be liquidated. In other words A will not pay for A + B. One has to actually decide to look at the dynamic flow of cost accounting statistics where depreciation costs and a host of other additional and extraneous costs will reveal that truth, and then do the calculus on the relevant data. That is the non-blinkered, non-orthodox and scientific way that reality is best deciphered. But one actually has to be willing to look at the data. I’ve tried to get the Austrian/Libertarian blogger Mish Shedlock and his forum members to actually do that for like 8-9 years. Nope. Orthodoxy gets in the way. Surely liberal progressive theorists can’t be that stubborn and orthodox.

The only way that socialism will reign over profit making systems is if current economic orthodoxy remains while technological innovation and Artificial Intelligence continue to do what they inevitably and inexorably will do which is increase productive capability and efficiency while simultaneously and ever more rapidly destroying individual incomes. Such ironies abound when orthodoxy has gone on too long and hence pervades almost all analysis.  The solution under such conditions is the discovery of a thirdness, a new paradigm which integrates and unifies the fragmented, apparently unresolvable dualistic condition of opposing theories that has frozen both thinking and action. Trinity-Unity is the signature of integration, resolution, wholeness, newness, completeness, self awareness and consciousness.

Grace/Consciousness is beyond orthodox proscription. It can be described, but generally not adequately to elicit its experience as the experience itself is transcendent by nature. It can occur both spontaneously and after a great deal of contemplation of its various aspects, but perhaps the most important mental stance assisting its experience is a willingness to be open to it.

The Cosmic Code, Trinity-Unity encompassing an integrated Duality  [ 1 X  (1 X 1) ], is a formulaic expression of the a priority of consciousness and yet the simultaneous validity and reality of the apparent duality of Man and the physical universe.

The value of our heritage of past and presently increasing productive potential needs to be monetized. It is a true communal inheritance that the financial system and orthodox economists are denying every citizen thus forcing us to “re-invent the wheel” continuously.

http://www.sott.net/article/303686-Ranking-the-peasantry-China-introduces-citizen-scores

If that is an actual plan it is truly disturbing, and imbecilic from the point of view of freedom. Centralization is not the answer but rather, subsidiarity. Humanity must discover Wisdom and its pinnacle natural expression Grace, or an evil integration of 1984 and Brave New World awaits us.

Me:  Hmmm. So we sacrifice already rapidly dwindling employment for some paltry billions in a single area of infrastructure repair…and allow the repatriation of corporate revenues that never reach the vast majority of individuals. That is a Hobbesian bargain if I ever saw one, and is precisely the kind of idiotic non-integrative compromises that hypnotised, unimaginative and bought politicians can actually agree on…and foist upon a confused and apathetic populace. Let us all become the guy who turns the stop and go sign on interstate highway infrastructure repair sites for a (short) season so that we can have the much lower number of autonomous self driving cars that millenials supposedly will embrace so they can continue to be distracted from distraction by distraction by messaging while they ride in them instead of having to actually be and bother with present time!!!??? Meanwhile the disruption of the automobile and related industries as well as nearly every other economic sector increases by the minute.

And sufficient dividend and discount mechanisms are not the solution to MERE economic orthodoxies?

wisdomicsblog.com

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On thread entitled  “China introduces ‘citizen scores”

Yes, competing for dominance while being ignorant of what is truly at the root of economic instability is IMO the most likely actual scenario for what is going on. Not that there aren’t people completely and religiously sold out for economic and financial dominance, like the Koch brothers and their ilk internationally, but ignorance and unconsciousness is probably more the root problem. Occam’s razor and all of that. And yes Finance is the keystone in the edifice of this Matrix like coalescing storm. And integrating Public Banking and the philosophy and policies of Social Credit is the best and most comprehensive solution for it.

Poster:  Unfortunately, “scoring the peasantry” IS here too…or coming soon.

Me: Screw such intrusive nonsense and screw the lending ONLY paradigm of Finance. Gifting is the structural and paradigmatic solution for both.

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Me:  

Ah yes CAFRs. By the way what ever happened to our insightful friend Walter Burien? I hope he’s okay and not hiding out in deepest, darkest, hottest Arizona some place.

As taxes are an extraction of money from the circular flow and re-investment of them into CAFRs which return a paltry fraction (if that) in return, that makes them aspects of “the gap”. Those “tens of trillions” of dollars salted away via the inefficient idiocies of socialistic RE-distributive taxation could/should all be spent on infrastructure and/or returned to the individual in the form of a Distributive dividend…and then government financing could be gifted their budgets year to year by the Public Interest Central Bank and have it distributed through a Public State or Local Public Bank with a few gracious but ethical strings attached so that some ambitious politician doesn’t hop in bed with a construction company with “global reach” and try to build bridges to nowhere or some other wasteful and unwise usage of funds instead of actually needed things.

The Distributive/Gifting paradigm is where the agendas of both the left and right meet and actually end up resolving problems instead of creating the double bind chaos that characterizes politics today. Why? Because the Distributive/Gifting paradigm is an actual integration, and an actual integration which also just happens to be the process of Wisdom itself consists of (only) the truth(s), applicabilities, workabilities and ethically empathetic (tip of the hat to Chuck Watts) and rational intentions of opposing ideas. Thus the best parts of the agendas of both left and right….actually get expressed and made policy. Wisdom and its pinnacle concept Grace is not “pie in the sky” it’s actually the greater pragmatism and the greater Good integrated. Labor and Capital can fight it out for another hundred years and either not resolve their conflicts like they have failed to do for the last 250 years, or have a war over it so we can de-populate and re-build economies (there’s ethics and rationality for you) or we could do the third and unifying Distributive/Gifting paradigm and actually have less government, less taxation and more economic democracy with the trinity of Public Interest Banking and Social Credit’s dividend and discount mechanisms….and rapidly create more of the constructive intentions of leftists and rightists than they alone could ever even dream of accomplishing.

Wisdom, Wisdomics, Gracenomics, Gracientialism, Social Credit…the world desperately requires and will cry out for them…if we explain and proclaim them resonantly and thoroughly.

Me:   Best we cut through all of the disinformation/dis-disinformation and drive a stake through the heart of Finance by eliminating the keystone of their dominant paradigm of Debt ONLY with monetary grace the free gift/gifting.

I have tremendous respect for Bill’s and MMT’s intellectual breadth. MMT is financially evolved over present neo-liberal DSGE austerity nonsensical nonsense. There can be no denying that. However, it is still monetarily incomplete and also has the stench of orthodoxy hanging around its economic prescriptions. Employment, at least the 40 hour per week concept of employment is already passe…and is rapidly becoming more so by the minute. Combine direct monetary gifting to the individual at a rate equal to a near satisfactorily middle class lifestyle, a retail discount which creates actual price deflation and that is rebated back to participating retail merchants so that they can be whole on their margins and overheads and a 20 hr or maybe even a two day 16 hour work week….and you’d have an economy that stably hummed along on all 18-20 trillion cylinders and kept up with and even proactively lead technological innovation and AI’s disruptive economic and individual income effects so that we could all rapidly progress toward the ultimate goal of money becoming simply a ticket for the distribution of production. None of the above policies are unreal, impractical, not integrative of fully truthful aspects of current economic thinking….nor untransformative. They ARE transformative, and at the same time are cognizant of the necessity of incorporating rational and ethical regulation of economies as well. The new, OUR new monetary and economic motto must be: Transformation first! Rational and ethical regulation….right along with it! That is the fully integrative, ethic of completeness, full Wisdom perspective.

Mere economics is dead. Long live Wisdomics!

The thing that Social Credit/Wisdomics/Gracenomics/Gracientialism and the Electric Universe postulate most have going for them IMO are their integrative perspectives. The integrative process is actually the process of Wisdom which is always and by definition a fuller and more whole understanding of the truth of any particular matter. That and the fact that electricity itself is a perfect and naturally beautiful example of both the pinnacle of Wisdom and what is probably the most missed and/or maligned concept of all of modernity, and especially of modern science, and that concept is the NATURAL metaphysical concept of Trinity-Unity. Electricity is a + and a – charge interacting/integrating (that is it is an integrated Duality) with the third and resulting reality of electricity/electro-magnetism….and all three of those mutually valid realities….are a unitary whole. The modern conception of science is dualistic. However, the signature of good science and especially of scientific breakthrough is that of the integration of seemingly opposing ideas, concepts, physical and mental states….with a resulting or revealing third factor which invariably is an aspect of consciousness itself…and so the real signature of nature and science….is Trinity-Unity. Trinity-Unity is actually replete in nature if one just looks a little closer and a little longer at it. A tree is a trunk, its branches….and the roots from which it sprang. A leaf is generally two symmetrically reflective sides….and the stem between them from which they emerged and were nourished. Again, there are many, many examples of this in nature and in the history of science.