Yet Another Civil War Between Capital and Adaptive Culture?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

How many times must we needlessly repeat this war?

As long as the blind business of extraction - vs evolution - promotes Roll-Up strategies?

For Pete's sake! Gov is NOT akin to a household, any more than components are akin to a system, or teammates are akin to a team. Scale presents entirely novel options. It IS different to be a whole which is greater than the sum of it's separate parts.

Yet on this point, macro economics teaching is clearly and nearly universally broken.

Do university physics programs teach students that Quantum Mechanics & Relativity are akin to Newton's physics? Of course not!

Yet economics essentially does. It's a rare economist who's learned the simplest aspects of fiat currency operations.

How can anyone moral teach economics without teaching currency operations? By acquiescing to the banking lobby? THAT'S not pedagogy. It's cowardice.

And it's also not ...

How We Ended The Last Civil War Between Capital and Adaptive Culture.

We can't end a civil war by having both sides improve technique. Adaptive change requires improving training methods available to pre-combatants, until they recognize and start exploring better options than repeating the same, stupid war with no resolution. Teach emerging context, not just existing data?

Orthodox macroeconomics is a long-running sick joke, which never was funny. Why did the Ignorant Electorate KEEP hitting it's collective head with Civil War? (And who said we're not supposed to ask?)

There is a better way. Make progress, not frictions.

For the case of endlessly competing roll-up strategies, it's all a question of who's chasing whom. Rather than running from corruption on a treadmill .....

it's better to be trampling Luddites, on an ascending spiral.

Every time I think of this general topic, Joshua Chamberlain's words come to mind.

"We know not of the future and cannot plan for it much. ... But we can ... determine ... what manner of men we will be, whenever and wherever the hour strikes and calls to noble action."

To paraphrase Joshua Chamberlain for today's civil war: 

We cannot know what specific contexts the future may bring, and therefore cannot much prepare for them. 

We can, however, determine what sort of Adaptive Rates our aggregate can muster when those contexts strike. 

To better determine those capabilities, we can practice continuously re-mapping & RE-VISUALIZING all of our emerging cultural processes, so that we can maintain practice at making Rapid Adaptive Transitions throughout our own culture.

Google Does Interdependent Series ... Someday This (And Currency Operations) Will Be Routine For Jane & Joe Sixpack Too

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Google this.

Once the intricacies of infinitely expanding public Policy Space options becomes routine for Jane/Joe Sixpacks of the future, then maybe fiat currency operations will be trivial or at least pragmatic and straightforward again, rather like in 1933, and 1776, and 1729, and 1686 ... and ... (how far back?). Only the lineage of common sense knows.

Starting With The Basics ... Explaining Fiat Currency Operations To A DoD Lobby That Either Doesn't Understand .... Or Worse

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Our core task is to explain fiat currency operations to at least 10% of our electorate. Until we reach that stage ... does anything else matter ... any more than pissing into the wind?





The following article contains the tired old argument about "money."

"Retiring the A-10 fleet will save a lot of money, and these days saving money is a necessity, not an option."

Doing The Math: Saving A-10s By Cutting F-35s

As long as the proverbial TINA is still in charge of policy, how does one dig into the operational details, without first clearing the Pink Elephant from the room, to reduce the fog and get a bit more clarity on context? First things first!

For those who want "MMT" to go "farther," why not first solidify step one? First, get an adequate threshold % of the electorate - and the leaders they elect - to simply be AWARE of the most basic operational details of a fiat currency system? Say, 10% of voters? That's in the range of 15 million people familiar and comfortable with fiat currency operations. Until then, since data is meaningless without context, it doesn't matter how much data you dig into if you misread context from the get go.

The only thing worse are those Control Frauds who actually may understand .. but purposely mislead their fellow citizens. There's no doubt that such frauds also exist, throughout the K-Street MICC lobby, and also within Congress (and the electorate too - lets be honest).

Where to start? How simple can we make a prerequisite consensus, beyond which most discussions are premature? Here's one brief reiteration of what's been said countless times the last 9 years ... (since I 1st met Warren Mosler).

***

We've been on a "fiat" currency system since 1933.

Tell me. How, exactly, does one "save" fiat? aka, Public Initiative? And, should we EVER leave initiative unused?

If politicians are going to discuss "money," they should at least be aware of the operational details. You don't send soldiers into the field who can't disassemble/reassemble their weapons in the dark - precisely because they then know what operations are and aren't possible. Similarly, you don't let politicians set policy who can't understand the 1st thing about fiat currency operations. Good lord!

We set objectives, assign roles, and pay each other with "liquid" chits called our national currency. That allows a growing Policy Space and Agile Policy - things you need for national security and national resiliency.

The main responsibility is to avoid irrational levels of inflation (nowhere in sight) or deflation (a current reality). Oh .. and set Desired Outcomes worthy of this electorate. That, and don't allow extreme, class-based wealth disparity. That's like letting Generals hoard all the weapons .. and expecting a functional army (or economy).

Of course, to do that, we need an electorate that can select leaders who listen to all, enunciate Desired Outcomes, and NEVER TELL PEOPLE "HOW" TO DRIVE DISTRIBUTED INNOVATION.

***

While that terse approach may resonate with SOME DoD staff, the same message will have to be stated 1001 different ways, with different words, before the growing diversity of people in this electorate get the message. We clearly have over 14 million people to recruit .. just to get to 10%.

1959 US Fed Review Of 1957 UK Radcliff Committee Report On Monetarism vs Fiat Currency Operations. Fascinating reading.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Division of International Finance, Review of Foreign Developments, Nov 3, 1959, "Radcliffe Report: Monetary Policy and Debt Management Reconciled?" - Samuel I. Katz

Interesting parts commence half way down page 2, with curiously emphasized statements about what "the American, for example, KNOWS ... ."

There is far too much to comment on, so feel free to discuss. To me, the overall point seems to be that the presumptive rule of monetarism - and importance of bankers & plutocrats of the day - was abjectly disproved by experiences during the WWII years, then began to mount a furious backlash ... and is now once again seemingly dead & relegated to the second-level bleachers, even if it's defendants refuse to recognize that it no longer commands or deserves a 1st-class ticket at the policy-development forum. In fact, the banking & economic professions need to get the heck out of the way.

Closest parallel I can immediately think of in biology is oxygen tension across the capillary/tissue gradient in all parts of the body. Yes, oxygen tension affects oxygen diffusion & utilization, but appropriate countermeasures (capillary size, permeability, various "globin" molecules as transport & storage carriers [even fetal/adult subtypes of hemoglobin], and various tissue-specific catalyst factors that affect oxygen release from carrier molecules) .... all serve to allow oxygen demand (credit?) to smooth out & buffer the absolute magnitude of the "price" of delivering oxygen to different tissues.

In any system, if a given process is necessary, even if not sufficient, for aggregate system function & evolution .....then marginal return on process execution is a secondary - NOT a primary - factor for system operation. A way will be found, regardless of price.

Nevertheless, it's as if we have a irrelevant argument between bankers (the lungs) & other citizens (the other tissue types) over who "runs" the circulatory system, and entire physiology.  I've got news for the "banker-lungs" ..... there's this overwhelming concept, labelled "necessary but not sufficient" ..... . 

So the bankers claim of taking on godlike importance is grossly oversold. Careful, or we'll just replace you with a mobile phone app. The other humans are getting impatient. Banking functions may be necessary, but bankers as is sure as hell aren't sufficient anymore.

If War Is Too Important To Be Left To The Generals, Surely EVERY Single Process - Including Reserve Banking - Is Too Important To Be Left To The Presumed Process Owners?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




Warren Mosler:

Comments on Stanlely Fisher’s ‘Lessons from Crises, 1985-2014′

This is where Mosler really shines. He knows the functional details of reserve-banking OPERATIONS like the back of his hand, and can make it simple.

WHICH IT IS!

I read these comments and conclude what any biologist would. Why such a tempest in a straw man teapot? With the shrinking breadth of operational knowledge in today's orthodox economics ranks, the best we can muster is an intellectual, purely theoretical Teapot Gnome scandal? The cause is underwhelming, while the aftermath is worse - as we voluntarily constrain response to reality, based on pure theory alone, without the benefit of timely feedback.

Stanley Fisher "notices" that every aggregate selectively shields SOME it's components - somewhat - from their distributed folly. Wow! Where have he and his profession been all these millenia?

There's a simple logic revealed in that ancient observation, involving distributed exploration and feedback-based imposition of incrementally learned, aggregate policy.

Well Duh! We've known that for ~3.5 Billion years? Here on planet earth alone? It's like modern economists & bankers never heard of autocatalytic-aggregates or even social species, despite being part of one! Did they all go to school in a barn?

You couldn't make this up.

Bankers & economists are GROSSLY under-educated and isolated, to the point of being an insult to their own electorate.

If war is too important to be left to the generals, surely EVERY freaking process imaginable is too important to be left to it's naively presumed process owners?

Ya freaking THINK? Isn't that the very definition of "teamwork?"

This is exactly WHY aggregates share data, use widely distributed feedback, and leverage flexible inter-dependencies with constantly INCREASING aggregate agility. Social species succeed for a reason. This is NOT rocket science ... and it is NOT new!!!

Yet with orthodox economics and banking, we've been steadily shrinking and constraining and trying to ignore even the minimally required distribution of feedback, interactions & inter-dependencies. It's like sending Catholic Priests along with the soon Greenland Vikings, to constrain their adaptations to changing conditions.

There's nothing wrong with economics & banking that a slightly more liberal education wouldn't have prevented. US citizens used to absorb the key lessons of their own history - and ability to recognize obviously changing context - by the time they graduated from high school - or sooner. Not anymore.

Now you can apparently get a PhD & Nobel Prize in economics while never having even discussed biology 101, or looked up the definition of a @#$%^&! Social Species, let alone grasped even the most superficial implications of distributed teamwork, democracy & the shared, coordinated, rights of citizens.

And we send OUR youth to die in foreign lands, to preserve the narrow interests of bankers hiding behind "economic" policy advice? Are you #$%^& KIDDING me?

@#$%^&! ... ON A @#$%^ ... +*@^%~#$$!!! Auuuuuggghhhh! It should be primal scream time for the US electorate. Yet for whatever reasons, they're still waiting to inhale, let alone waiting to let loose & exhale.

Note to electorate: Please send some people OTHER than functional illiterates into politics at all levels. Perhaps people who can scout aggregate context, AND sample ALL available feedback, AND then simply do what's easy & obvious for an aggregate - QUICKLY? In short, stop trying to kill your own, distributed Golden Goose (the resilient Middle Class of a functioning Democracy), and instead, just let it feed itself? This is NOT difficult. Just stay the hell out of your own way, and demand that your public servants stop asking you to over-tax and under-fund YOURSELF!

Note to politicians "representing" their electorate: Appoint some damn Fed & Treasury political appointees who are NOT functional illiterates. Maybe a few who understand net reality, and aren't restricted to the fantasies of the orthodox economic religion? Out of 320 million citizens, surely there's SOMEONE like Marriner Eccles floating around today - who is not restricted to being just an economist, but an actual thinker and innovator? You have thousands of professions to select from! Just start leveraging a wider spectrum of available feedback, interactions and inter-dependencies? It might save your country.

Excuse me while I go pound my head on a local wall, to alleviate all the distributed stress triggered by living downwind from Teapot Gnomes Fishering into the wind.

A Lesson in POLITICAL OPERATIONS: Who Runs the Pentagon, & By Default, Much of The Treasury Budget

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Those interested in Fiat Currency Operations would be well advised to learn more about POLITICAL OPERATIONS from the likes of Chuck Spinney (who forwarded this article) and other members of the legendary Pentagon Reform Movement (PRM). And also from their associates. People like Winslow Wheeler.

As with fiat currency operations, there are subtle simplicities to the basics of Political Operations. Those who refuse to dig into actual political operations end up, just like Deficit Terrorists, making life harder for themselves and all others, by uselessly adding frictions where there are already more than enough.

The PRM peaked in the 1980s, and was largely ignored by younger activists, but the key members never stopped working, even in retirement.

The Men Who Really Run the Pentagon

Sounds Like Switzerland Just Might Understand Fiat Currency Operations

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Rather than savage cuts, Switzerland considers “Star Trek” economics
"Switzerland will vote on giving every adult in the country a $2,800 check every month. How would that work?"

John Schmitt, a senior [orthodox] economist at the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research pooh poohs the idea as unworkable for the USA - largely because we're racists?

Thanks for nothing, John!

So one dumb economist says a particular option of any fiat currency system won't work here? So why are citizens who are actually closer to real operations on the street even listening to what one dumb [orthodox] economist says? Just because some media hack is touting ONE dumb economist as an "expert" that 315 million should listen carefully to?

Wow! The weight of the statistical sampling - let alone the subsequent verification - is suppressing me!

Listen, Josh [reporter on this story,] if you really want us to listen to dumb economists, just have 'em mumble incantations in Latin or some other extinct language, not just in OUR language, using their unique semantic definitions. Their semantics is 80 years out of paradigm. Citizens are going to catch on to the zany semantics - some day. Is that really a chance you are willing to take?

There's this thing called a thesaurus, you know.

However, if you codify the stupid in an extinct language, and put it in a ritual, then trusting serfs .. er, citizens .. often accept the message that some traditions aren't SUPPOSED to be understood, or ever questioned.

Then the self-fraud will never get old. Just institutionalized.  Capiche?

ps: It also protects the sanctity of the dumb economic priests in the hood, where they can have guaranteed ... discretely fettered ... access to young cultural options.  If you play your cards right, Josh, you might even get a guaranteed dispensation from the new institution. I'm sure you get the message.

ps: ps:  On the other hand, if the descendants of current hominids ever learn to wield fiat currency with increasing group agility, just think of the evolution that might yet await!

Is This All A Huge And DAMAGING Distraction?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

World economic group calls for global exchange of tax information to fight evasion

What? Yet another group urging us to worry about getting access to enough fiat? BMHOTK!

Hiding in plain sight? The 1% has us all looking for where THEY are hiding OUR fiat ... while all the while the REAL DAMAGE is that THEY are tricking us into over-taxing and under-funding OURSELVES! Nothing's missing except our ability to see what we're really doing to ourselves.

I mean, REALLY! Do you mind stopping long enough to spend a few CNS cycles on the supposed logic supposedly at work here? Are we humans, or are we marionette-mice, dancing around at the pull of mind-numbingly vapid propaganda?

If we're gonna listen to imagination, let's at least shoot for re-scanning the imagination of the entire 99% every year, and selecting the best from their output. Why settle only for Central-Planning-level imagination, from the few stiffs making up the 1%? Consider sampling enough views to assemble what we could call "Comprehensi-ganda," not just the Propa-ganda supporting the view of only one, arbitrary lobby. Central Planning, no matter how smooth talking, is still Central Planning. A pose, by any other name, will still stink as much as the failed outcome we're now experiencing. For our nation to survive, you, yourself might want to learn to routinely discriminate alluring enticements from actual outcomes?

As a start, imagine the following as at least one alternative.

Nearly all nations are operating in fiat currency systems, where their population's only goal is stay safely within national tolerance limits, roughly midway between deflation and inflation. Call it continuously "Right-sizing the National, Fiat Currency Supply."

How do WE do that?  What indicator metrics should we use? How about our Output Gap?  If you're initially outraged by this suggested logic, then please answer the following questions honestly. Do you ever REALLY stop to think about what "fiat" means, and what "fiat currency" means? Where does fiat currency come from?  Can we "run out of fiat? And, do we have to borrow fiat to get it? Seriously? And you've been talked into worrying about who ELSE to tax? To get more fiat?

Instead of worrying excessively about that fraction of either corporations or the 1% whose fiat ISN'T being taxed ... might it not be a wee bit logical to instead focus on the 99% of us who are ALREADY OVERTAXED AND UNDERFUNDED? Why not simplify, rather than further complicate things?

Instead of arguing over what complications to add, why not simply stop doing some of the existing stupid?

Instead, we have nearly all of our attention directed everywhere EXCEPT less FICA/Medicare/Income - and purely FIAT - taxes arbitrarily imposed on the poor and our disappearing Middle Class! And it's all done to supposedly get more of what we don't need more of! The whole approach of supposedly taxing to obtain fiat is an embarrassing oxymoron, folks. You've all been had. For 4 generations now. Yes, we need unlimited access to our own fiat, by free, fiat use of fiat currency. The solution is to use our fiat responsibly, not fraudulently. That is our challenge. There's no going back. We can't survive with slow policy in a world that demands more national agility every day.

So, back to the topic of even more "tax-recovery" programs.

Pardon me for being cynical enough to suspect that it seems curiously self-serving that colluding national and international bureaucracies should work so hard to convince the already (by fiat) over-taxed that the (by fiat) un-taxed should be taxed a wee bit more too. ESPECIALLY when any tax on corporations will simply be passed on as price increases to consumers!

Is this dissembling yet another way to trick the rubes into insisting on indirectly taxing themselves EVEN MORE? Ya think?

Divide, confuse and conquer? 

Listen. Even if all that bureaucratic stupidity is just Innocent Fraud and/or ignorance, it's still holding down the Middle Class, and maintaining our huge and growing Output Gap. Instead of wasting endless decades tuning what's not needed ... let's just stop the stupid?

Would y'all like an easier way to cut through all the verbiage from these Gordian-Knotheads? Here's one suggestion to chew on.

Simply cut taxes on the poor and Middle Classes, to the same OR LOWER levels granted to corporations!

Then let the 1% scream bloody murder about continued dilution of the 1%'s depreciating fiat by the 99%'s constantly emerging fiat.

Bring it on!

It's a fight to the fiat.

The 1% simply cannot rule the 99% if the 99% simply refuse to cede ownership of their own fiat.

"What," the 1% will scream? "Who will you Bond ourselves to, to get permission to access your own fiat?" Surely they joke? The answers to that are as brain-dead simple as they are diverse.  Here's one imaginative response - just to see if they can really think. Declare a Selective Service Overdraft, and require all citizens to register their fiat by age 18! :) While you're considering that, be sure to familiarize yourself with how fiat currency operations already work.

Meanwhile, what about the slow or disinterested readers who want their freedom but do not want to have to know about currency operations - any more than they want to have to know about proctology details? For those citizens, we can make up campaign posters, saying things like "Uncle ROC wants YOU - to support the ultimate showdown with the BureauCrock, and it's evil, leading social proctologist, Pete Peterson."

We could even have some fun - at THEIR fiat expense - while freeing ourselves from the social proctologists! How about these, as some slogans to use in a Comprehensi-ganda campaign?

"Treasury the OverDraft!" That might be our rallying cry.

"Tell Pete to stick HIS fiat where the sun don't shine! WE don't need to borrow it!"

"No interest in Pete's fiat. Got our own!"

"We have nothing to fear but fear of fiat itself!"

"Long live the Public Initiative!"

"Fiat, don't fail us now."

"Uncle ROC wants YOU! - in order to make a more perfect union!"

If the 1% want to tax anything, let them tax Occam's Razor until it wears thin, and gives THEM a close shave. For once.

Perhaps a few video caricatures would also help?

Life is like a box of fiat?
  It's useless unless EVERYONE opens their own box ...
   AND takes the initiative to select some for themselves ...
   AND actually leverages their own fiat - by making more of their own decisions ...
   AND compounds the power of their fiat by actually coordinating their fiat with the fiat of others.

Or, you can actually believe Pete Peterson's bonkers statement that we're all out of fiat, and have to BORROW HIS, at inflated rates.

Ironically, either approach is an option, depending upon YOUR use of your own fiat. You may choose, by personal fiat, to act as though your "box of fiat" were empty, and hence live your life as a fiat sharecropper to Boss Peterson, while getting progressively deeper in fiat debt to the Koch Brothers company store.

Or, you may select, also by fiat, to act as though you were born with fiat, to use and compound at will, while exploring the options which YOU choose.

Fiat is as fiat does?