Interesting. Debt and money have been simply accepted as reality since Marx had a crack at them, yet debt and interest are at the very core of the exponential, destructive nature of the economic system.
Debt demands exponential growth to repay compound interest, while interest grants money the special power to accumulate itself. The accumulation of money is the accumulation of power. The creditor has power over the debtor. Because money can substitute for everything, it permits ownership, which allows for further accumulation. The cycle of self-accumulation through interest and rent becomes differential accumulation, the more you have the more you get. Contract law is a particularly insidious manifestation of this power. The exercise of this power is an act of violence, and the entire mythology of capitalism, freedom and justice exists to conceal this fact.
Achieving a just and sustainable society will require nothing less than the destruction of the self-accumulating power of money and its value as a store of wealth; the total prohibition of usury; the nationalisation of all credit creation; and the decolonisation of ownership, so that ownership is only the entitlement to hold, use, and care - not to extract rent. All of these are prerequisites for the creation of an economics that is not dependent on exponential growth to prevent its own collapse under the weight of differential accumulation.
No form of capitalism can achieve this, and I can't see a form of socialism that can either. This must be a complete redesign, starting with ecological principles. Instead of asking what is, we need to ask: what do we want? What do we need?
Steve, of all the relationships you've cultivated online since retirement, the one with Richard may be your best work.
As a former banker myself, there is no way to tell Richard's story from inside banking.
Debit interest is bad? That will get you fired. Growth in debit interest is how commercial bankers are measured.
In 2007 Tom Hockin invited me on the expert panel. We were told cabinet was looking for ideas to reform banking. Whatta load.
Today. former Canadian PM Stephen Harper is schilling for a crypto exchange today. Same for Sheila Bair in the U.S. The correct term is: bureaucratic intransigence. It's epidemic in administration.
High office can't be about self-enrichment. But alas!
Looking back I honesty think the Harper cabinet was looking for some quick stock tips.
Cabinet is the country's top poltical and financial administratiive body. The important decisions, imvolving senior staffing, bailouts and setting interest rates, are made there first.
The actual finance experts and regulators are window dressing.
Until monetary and financial decisions are decoupled from government, forget it. Fix is in.
Housing is an ever-increasing
ante game because the casino wants it that way. Too many political careers are at stake unless skylines and highways back home are endlessly choked with cranes and construction. New buildings are great political theater and photo-ops.
Quick story: When my son was playing baseball in high school, I approached Surrey Parks and Recreation about aerating the senior diamond in Whalley. Water was pooling everywhere in the spring
The head of maintenance told me that he could budget few thousands for aeration in future fiscal years but not anytime soon.
It would be easier, he said, to get funding to replace the ballpark because in Surrey staff are instructed to ensure there's a ribbon- cutting ceremony somewhere in the city every weekend. All 52 weeks.
The boys and I hand aerated the diamond.
Happy to join Richard's election campaign any time he asks.
Warning: Everyone in leadership at Treasury and monetary authority is toast.
FDR tried to reorg the thing, I'll finish the job permanently.
This raises one aspect of MMT that I think is naive: the expectation that governments would use conscious knowledge of its money-creating capacity for good, when we have a political system that selects for narcissists, and is easily manipulated by political donations from big business.
Aug 15, 2023·edited Aug 15, 2023Liked by Steve Keen
Auditor General; Chief Electoral Officer; WCB; child and seniors advocates; Privacy Commissioner; Comissioner of Insurance; national broadcaster; court masters are just some of the agents or officers that report to parliament through the speaker.
We need to ask ourselves what is it about Debt that is most de-stabilizing? Its the combination of its definition as a burden to repay and the virtual monopoly power granted to the business model of private banking. So the exact expression of the current monetary paradigm is New Monetary Debt As In The Burden To Repay...ONLY.
As new paradigms are historically always in complete conceptual opposition to the current one (nomadic hunting and gathering to homesteading, urbanization and agriculture, monopoly control of the sacraments to the integration of protestantism and geo-centrism to helio-centrism) to fit that historical model the new monetary paradigm ought be Burden to Repay to Gifting and the break up of the virtual monopoly power of private banking by strategically integrating Monetary Gifting into the debt ONLY based system. The best way to break up that monopoly power is to utilize the exact same accounting means that the banks use in creating new money ONLY as debt, namely equal debits and credits that sum to zero. Thus the exact new monetary paradigm should be Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting and a 50% Discount/Rebate policy at retail sale is the exact and most efficasious implementation of it because everyone participates in retail sale and hence its economic and mathematical effects would be universal i.e. aggregative.
True. Thats why we require a mass movement that communicates the universal benefits of a new monetary paradigm to the general populace. Blogs and Substack/Patreon are inadequate vehicles. We need REAL activism. Thats how MLK Jr. and Ghandi did it.
A bigger hurdle is public perception that government debt somehow has equivalence to private debt. Of course this is fostered by parties of the Right who want to shrink government by shrinking it's spending capacity. it beggars belief that a crowd that is happy to sanction the outlay of 800-1000% of a households 'gdp' on a mortgage debt thinks that a govt debt of 37% gdp is an obscenity.
The run-up to the NZ general election is dominated by talk of "fiscal black holes" and the general public, having swallowed the right narrative hook, line and sinker will most likely elect a right-wing alliance that will inflict UK style austerity.
"Political system that selects for narcissists": 'Democracy deficit' is another issue entirely, and of course both main parties have a vested interest in the continuance of a 'team-sport' attitude to politics rather than an economically educated and engaged electorate.
We are doomed unless every economist and economic pundit quits fiddle faddling around with genuine but separate insights that are aligned with the new paradigm of direct and reciprocal monetary gifting….but are unconscious of that concept and precisely where, when and how to implement it.
Every data point, every reform, every preaching to the academic and chattering class choir moves us a thousandth of a millimeter closer to the goal of monetary freedom, economic stability and ecological survival.
On the other hand communicating the benefits to both the individual and enterprise of the handful of policies, regulations and structural changes of the new paradigm and building a mass movement that herds the political apparatus toward legislating and executing it would integrate the good intentions of all such reform movements and save us from our own apparent lack of survival instincts, and perhaps egocentric self interests in communicating one's separate theories and reforms.
Good to see you actually talking about paradigms. What is your best expression of the exact new paradigm concept?
Here is a post I just made to Mish Shedlock's blog that shows I try to encourage both sides of the liberal/libertarian dualism to perceive and imlement a new paradigm:
Admit it Mish you don't really want to end inflation. I've posted a way to forever end inflation mathematically and macro-economically here for years and virtually no one here ACTUALLY looks at it. A way that benefits every individual and virtually every commercial agent. A way that blows away all of the "free" market delusive theory and exposes the fact that the reason for the inability to resolve our economic problems is because the monopolistic monetary paradigm is the actual deepest reality that enforces alternately goosed and strangled financial chaos out of which finance always rises from the ashes and 90% of everyone else limps on unknowingly. Chaos is not freedom, its the lack of real barriers and the ability of the wielder of a monopoly paradigm to dominate.
You are smart about reading "the market" as much as is possible within the chaos it actually is. Are you honest enough to give up your libertarian beliefs and simply admit that we are in an advanced state of an anomalous monetary and financial paradigm...that can only be resolved with a new paradigm?
Interesting. Debt and money have been simply accepted as reality since Marx had a crack at them, yet debt and interest are at the very core of the exponential, destructive nature of the economic system.
Debt demands exponential growth to repay compound interest, while interest grants money the special power to accumulate itself. The accumulation of money is the accumulation of power. The creditor has power over the debtor. Because money can substitute for everything, it permits ownership, which allows for further accumulation. The cycle of self-accumulation through interest and rent becomes differential accumulation, the more you have the more you get. Contract law is a particularly insidious manifestation of this power. The exercise of this power is an act of violence, and the entire mythology of capitalism, freedom and justice exists to conceal this fact.
Achieving a just and sustainable society will require nothing less than the destruction of the self-accumulating power of money and its value as a store of wealth; the total prohibition of usury; the nationalisation of all credit creation; and the decolonisation of ownership, so that ownership is only the entitlement to hold, use, and care - not to extract rent. All of these are prerequisites for the creation of an economics that is not dependent on exponential growth to prevent its own collapse under the weight of differential accumulation.
No form of capitalism can achieve this, and I can't see a form of socialism that can either. This must be a complete redesign, starting with ecological principles. Instead of asking what is, we need to ask: what do we want? What do we need?
True. If there Is ever to be a sustainable civilisation in this planet, then a complete transformation of our monetary system is necessary.
Steve, of all the relationships you've cultivated online since retirement, the one with Richard may be your best work.
As a former banker myself, there is no way to tell Richard's story from inside banking.
Debit interest is bad? That will get you fired. Growth in debit interest is how commercial bankers are measured.
In 2007 Tom Hockin invited me on the expert panel. We were told cabinet was looking for ideas to reform banking. Whatta load.
Today. former Canadian PM Stephen Harper is schilling for a crypto exchange today. Same for Sheila Bair in the U.S. The correct term is: bureaucratic intransigence. It's epidemic in administration.
High office can't be about self-enrichment. But alas!
Looking back I honesty think the Harper cabinet was looking for some quick stock tips.
Cabinet is the country's top poltical and financial administratiive body. The important decisions, imvolving senior staffing, bailouts and setting interest rates, are made there first.
The actual finance experts and regulators are window dressing.
Until monetary and financial decisions are decoupled from government, forget it. Fix is in.
Housing is an ever-increasing
ante game because the casino wants it that way. Too many political careers are at stake unless skylines and highways back home are endlessly choked with cranes and construction. New buildings are great political theater and photo-ops.
Quick story: When my son was playing baseball in high school, I approached Surrey Parks and Recreation about aerating the senior diamond in Whalley. Water was pooling everywhere in the spring
The head of maintenance told me that he could budget few thousands for aeration in future fiscal years but not anytime soon.
It would be easier, he said, to get funding to replace the ballpark because in Surrey staff are instructed to ensure there's a ribbon- cutting ceremony somewhere in the city every weekend. All 52 weeks.
The boys and I hand aerated the diamond.
Happy to join Richard's election campaign any time he asks.
Warning: Everyone in leadership at Treasury and monetary authority is toast.
FDR tried to reorg the thing, I'll finish the job permanently.
MR
This raises one aspect of MMT that I think is naive: the expectation that governments would use conscious knowledge of its money-creating capacity for good, when we have a political system that selects for narcissists, and is easily manipulated by political donations from big business.
Auditor General; Chief Electoral Officer; WCB; child and seniors advocates; Privacy Commissioner; Comissioner of Insurance; national broadcaster; court masters are just some of the agents or officers that report to parliament through the speaker.
A Chief Monetary Officer would be easy to add.
An essential idea, and one of a host of genuine reforms we need.
We need to ask ourselves what is it about Debt that is most de-stabilizing? Its the combination of its definition as a burden to repay and the virtual monopoly power granted to the business model of private banking. So the exact expression of the current monetary paradigm is New Monetary Debt As In The Burden To Repay...ONLY.
As new paradigms are historically always in complete conceptual opposition to the current one (nomadic hunting and gathering to homesteading, urbanization and agriculture, monopoly control of the sacraments to the integration of protestantism and geo-centrism to helio-centrism) to fit that historical model the new monetary paradigm ought be Burden to Repay to Gifting and the break up of the virtual monopoly power of private banking by strategically integrating Monetary Gifting into the debt ONLY based system. The best way to break up that monopoly power is to utilize the exact same accounting means that the banks use in creating new money ONLY as debt, namely equal debits and credits that sum to zero. Thus the exact new monetary paradigm should be Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting and a 50% Discount/Rebate policy at retail sale is the exact and most efficasious implementation of it because everyone participates in retail sale and hence its economic and mathematical effects would be universal i.e. aggregative.
True. Thats why we require a mass movement that communicates the universal benefits of a new monetary paradigm to the general populace. Blogs and Substack/Patreon are inadequate vehicles. We need REAL activism. Thats how MLK Jr. and Ghandi did it.
A bigger hurdle is public perception that government debt somehow has equivalence to private debt. Of course this is fostered by parties of the Right who want to shrink government by shrinking it's spending capacity. it beggars belief that a crowd that is happy to sanction the outlay of 800-1000% of a households 'gdp' on a mortgage debt thinks that a govt debt of 37% gdp is an obscenity.
The run-up to the NZ general election is dominated by talk of "fiscal black holes" and the general public, having swallowed the right narrative hook, line and sinker will most likely elect a right-wing alliance that will inflict UK style austerity.
"Political system that selects for narcissists": 'Democracy deficit' is another issue entirely, and of course both main parties have a vested interest in the continuance of a 'team-sport' attitude to politics rather than an economically educated and engaged electorate.
We are doomed unless every economist and economic pundit quits fiddle faddling around with genuine but separate insights that are aligned with the new paradigm of direct and reciprocal monetary gifting….but are unconscious of that concept and precisely where, when and how to implement it.
Every data point, every reform, every preaching to the academic and chattering class choir moves us a thousandth of a millimeter closer to the goal of monetary freedom, economic stability and ecological survival.
On the other hand communicating the benefits to both the individual and enterprise of the handful of policies, regulations and structural changes of the new paradigm and building a mass movement that herds the political apparatus toward legislating and executing it would integrate the good intentions of all such reform movements and save us from our own apparent lack of survival instincts, and perhaps egocentric self interests in communicating one's separate theories and reforms.
Good to see you actually talking about paradigms. What is your best expression of the exact new paradigm concept?
Here is a post I just made to Mish Shedlock's blog that shows I try to encourage both sides of the liberal/libertarian dualism to perceive and imlement a new paradigm:
Admit it Mish you don't really want to end inflation. I've posted a way to forever end inflation mathematically and macro-economically here for years and virtually no one here ACTUALLY looks at it. A way that benefits every individual and virtually every commercial agent. A way that blows away all of the "free" market delusive theory and exposes the fact that the reason for the inability to resolve our economic problems is because the monopolistic monetary paradigm is the actual deepest reality that enforces alternately goosed and strangled financial chaos out of which finance always rises from the ashes and 90% of everyone else limps on unknowingly. Chaos is not freedom, its the lack of real barriers and the ability of the wielder of a monopoly paradigm to dominate.
You are smart about reading "the market" as much as is possible within the chaos it actually is. Are you honest enough to give up your libertarian beliefs and simply admit that we are in an advanced state of an anomalous monetary and financial paradigm...that can only be resolved with a new paradigm?