Yes, power is addictive and as Lord Acton said absolutely corrupting. The only business model that hasn’t innovated in some constructive way (their derivatives debacle in the GFC doesn’t count as constructive) is Finance. And think about it, Finance’s monetary paradigm of Debt Only as the sole form and vehicle for the creation and distribution of new money hasn’t changed for the entire course of human civilization no matter whether it was the Palace or the private banks that was in control. We live and labor under Finance capitalism afterall. But rather than get into the ubiquitous (false) duality of capitalism vs socialism, which Finance is happy to see us expend all of our mental energies on, why not try finishing Hegel’s dialectic with a true synthesis, that ups our analytic game from mere reform and theoretics to the level of the operant applied concept/paradighmatic level which is the core of the core economic problem. As Dr. Keen correctly said: “Neo-classical macro ignores money, debt and banks”. I’d only add that its the monopolistic monetary paradigm of Debt Only wielded by the private banks that is what desparately needs changing…because it keeps our deepest economic problems in continual suspension and enables them to rise from the ashes of their own folly like in 2008. We DO need to make competition and innovation not only alive but vibrant. Thats why in my book I suggest creating a new governmental department called The Department of Competition, Innovation, Boycotting and The Public’s Bully Pulpit where weekly press conferences would point the finger at CEO’s and corporations that try to game the new monetary paradigm, whose policies double everyone’s purchasing power, potentially doubles the available demand for every enterprise’s goods and service and ends price and asset inflation by of all things implementing beneficial deflation, and asks the question: Well Mr. John Q. Public, what are you going to do about these guys that are trying to undo the 100% increase in purchasing power the new paradigm just granted you, eh?

Yes the Musks of the world (every monetary conservative on the planet) are stuck in a false moral conflict which has been acculturated since the Sumerian empire which is “you can’t create new money in any form other than debt!” and “You, the individual, must pay full price, and repay full indebtedness of extended credit!” However, now that we have double entry bookkeeping and digital technology, instead of enabling Finance to dominate everyone and insure periodic economic crises, we could use these tools to free everyone instead. All you need do is implement a 50% Discount/Rebate policy at retail sale and a 50% Gift of Interest/Debt Jubilee policy at point of loan signing. This DEMONSTRATES with equal debits and credits that sum to zero the incredible benefits every individual would experience and would resolve the deepest economic problems we are apparently chained to. All you have to do is ANALYZE ON THE CONCEPTUAL LEVEL INSTEAD OF ONLY ON THE SYSTEMIC LEVEL, i.e. the current monopoly monetary paradigm of DEBT ONLY IS THE MOST BASIC PROBLEM and STRATEGICALLY INTEGRATING MONETARY GIFTING INTO THE DEBT ONLY SYSTEM BREAKS UP THAT MONOPOLY AND ENABLES TEMPORAL UNIVERSE AND MENTAL RESOLUTION.

By the way, Mosler, Keen, et al, get full credit for RE-awakening to the way our money is created, but C. H. Douglas of the world wide Social Credit movement between the world wars knew that “money is most basically accounting” 70 years before them.

Now even new paradigms need additional analysis to enable their full beneficial effects and workabilities. For instance helio-centrism actually was less accurate in predicting astro-physical movement of the planets then Ptolemaic geo-centrism until Kepler discovered that planetary orbits were elliptical instead of perfect godly circles. Then the truthfulness and accuracy of the new concept became apparent. Similarly, C. H. Douglass was culturally bound to the classical economic theory of equillibrium. Thats why his very smart policy of a compensated retail discount remained a palliative that could be easily gamed instead of enabling all the benefits of a complete paradigm change…like my 50%+ retail discount which compels universal participation by commercial agents and creates beneficial abundant monetary disequillibrium.

MMTers: If you want to dispell the mental and moral conundrum of the words “national debt” and “deficit”? Then strategically implement the new monetary paradigm of Gifting.

RS: I’ve read most of the relevant MMT writers (plus New Dealers and Keynesians) so I agree with the idea here. But as someone who was a blue collar worker for 30 years, wave numbers in front of me and I start to freeze up mentally. Worse if accompanied by arcane econ jargon.

Remember, most of us were repelled by math as school kids. As adults we are expected to defer to our betters, even when we realize they’re idiots, because they have the power. The corporate lite Dems abandoned us decades ago; we’re suspicious of political authorities. Especially since their main function seems to be enabling the rich to grow richer.

Therefore alt. econ must be presented as making sense intuitively and emotionally, not merely as just more off-putting numerical abstractions. Perhaps visuals and graphics would help. Experienced educators would know.

Me: I agree that dems are simply reps lite. Thats the clue that you have a non-resolving duality that requires an integrative thirdness as in trinity/unity/greater oneness resolution…which is the signature result of every historical paradigm change and is also why wisdom has always been associated with “the third way”. Thats why I titled my book Wisdomics-Gracenomics.

Trinity is all over the place if you look at it like Hegel’s thesis, antithesis and synthesis and chemical synthesis which takes two separate compounds and by combining them creates an entirely third compound.

Duality is the apparency of life and trinity/unity/oneness is the actual reality in life.

The natural philosophical concept of grace/graciousness as in love in action and as in its personal experience is the ultimate intuitive message for anyone who has loved another and felt the powerful emotional unity thereof. Its also the greatest GIFT (aspect of the natural philosophical concept of grace) our evolution and the nature of quantum reality bequeaths us…if we choose to look at it and apply it to the money system and the economy.

Visuals and graphics depicting the new monetary paradigm is an excellent idea also.

Me: Wisdom is wisdom…and you’ve contemplated it to your great credit and enhancement. I congratulate you. I would only add that viz trinity all realities are real its just that some are more completely real than others….and that duality is the anatomy and definition of problems and trinity is the signature and accomplishment of solutions.

RS: I’d bet my blue collar co-workers would hear “Gifting” as scam; just another pol/econ ruse to continue trickle up. There has to be something concrete, some obviously achievable first step before we can trust any proposed alternatives.

Me: Thats mostly just present monetary and economic acculturation which Finance will be happy to have us argue over for another hundred years until 7 billion of us are gone from climate change and Finance and the rest of the oligarchy emerge from their bunkers to restart the process.

However I think acting out the benefits and temporal universe realities of the policies I suggest so that they actually see and feel their effects would convince and enthuse most people. As Hugo said: “If there’s one thing all of the armies of the world cannot resist, it is an APPLIED idea whose time has come.”

RS: Trinity works if you begin with that as a given. I can think that way, too, but don’t consider it the end of the story. To me, too close to the argument style of Friedman and the Chi School of Econ, mostly based on assertions from assumptions. Carl Jung said the symbol of trinity was incomplete; 4 is a symbol of completion. As for two as positive, how about Jesus as divine and human? I recommend the books of Jeff Kripal (Rice U.) on the metaphor of the human as two; his work on what he calls the Superhumanities. As an elder, I’ve found that I haven’t found the one definitive Answer to Everything despite, as my writing shows, I’ve really tried. Or even one single answer to anything.

Me: I would say that trinity characterizes time and process as in start, change and stop. And that what I call quadrinity is simply a reset/repetition of trinity. By the way time, process, flow, and perpetual repetition and continuity as in infinity are all aspects of the philosophical concept of grace.

RS: To be precise, economists must use professional language. Like MMT.

We fans may use whatever is helpful. Like Quantum Money Theory. “Quantum” can be faddish, but it fits here. Zero Point Energy (ZPE) means even at absolute zero temperature there are fluctuating quantum fields; the nothing from which everything emerges.

Me: Rafi,
IMO ZPE shows that the mystics have been right all along because they’ve all said that being focusedly but serenely in the present moment is the way to meet/have the experience of god. Its just that what they said got abstracted into various orthodoxies that confuse the map for the topogrophy.

Experiencing the present moment directly like a 1 year old child who hasdn’t learned words/abstraction IS the experience of god, but what you’re (nascently) experiencing is simply the electro-magnetic flux science tells us is going on all around us continually. The experience of it is utterly and basically natural and yet is simultaneously ecstatic. Just another trinitarian integration of opposites phenomenon.

RS: ZPE is as yet a tentative interpretation. To assert it proves the mystics correct is a disservice to both mysticism and empirical science.

Besides, which mystics? To assert we’re all the same is a misleading leap of faith that assumes a god-like position from which to judge Yes, I realize in some ways we are able to connect no matter what faith background; I’ve been in groups when that happened and even the non-mystics present saw it in us. Nor is what we experience limited to mystics. The are many ways…but speaking from a non-divine perspective, I won’t claim they lead to the same summit.

Defining god as that which is experienced in the present moment is only one way of experiencing the divine. Eastern religion tends to emphasize impermanence and the unreality of physicality. When I was a Tibetan Buddhist, I saw that way, too. Ultimately, I couldn’t deny the sheer diversity of biological life nor my responsibility as a labor activist to be involved with the pol and econ systems.

The west does have mystics like Meister Eckart and Blake’s “eternity in an hour,” but the tradition predominantly recognizes the flow of time. Leonard Cohen’s “And mind itself is magic, Coursing through the flesh And flesh itself is magic, dancing on a clock, And time itself the magic length of God.”

Summed up by the quantum physicist Niels Bohr: “The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.” In my 50s, I thought I’d stumbled onto The One Great Truth; I’d encountered the Trinity. Now in my late 70s, I know I don’t know.

Me: ZPE is a fact. Whether or not there is a way to technologically tap into and direct it is the question. Again I congratulate you on your search for and experience of wisdom, but it seems you’re in a kind of unmocking/unknowing mode about it. Intellect has a way of over thinking things. The ultimate epistemological state is knowing/knowingness and right below knowingness on the epistemological scale…is unknowingness. Combine this with the fact that the most basic action of consciousness is reaching (inwardly or outwardly) to know, and withdrawing in order to unknow and know something else. This dramatizes Bohr’s “The opposite of a great truth is also true.”

By the way money creation via accounting with equal debits and credits that sum to zero reflects the quantum flux where particles pop into and out of temporal existence from the zero point.

Unfortunately economists have not perceived the primary reason for inflation which is the human civilization-long monetary paradigm of Debt Only as the sole form and vehicle for the creation and distribution of new money wed to the largely delusional body of free market theoretics which is a complete misnomer for what it actually is which is alternately goosed and strangled and continually dominating monetary/financial chaos. The proof of this, which has been repeated many times historically according to Ms Kelton’s colleague Michael Hudson and others, is the great financial recession of 2008 where finance’s “innovation” screws up the economy and then they are bailed out while the individual is forced to “go scratch”.

A new monetary paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting strategically integrated into the Debt Only system with the same accounting operations the banks use to create money only as debt, namely equal debits and credits that sum to zero, specifically at retail sale with a 50% Discount/Rebate policy and a 50% Gift of Interest/Debt Jubilee at point of loan signing and the spell of finance’s monopoly monetary paradigm is ended while the individual’s purchasing power is mathematically doubled, chronic erosive inflation is transformed into beneficial price and asset deflation and the delusion of free market theorietics is replaced by universally abundant monetary free flowingness which is the goal of economic theory. A few more regulatory and taxation tweeks with real teeth, and the new monetary paradigm is a temporal universe reality observed and experienced by all.