14 Comments
Aug 1Liked by Rachel Donald

I looked up MMT and found the Wikipedia page - Modern Monetary Theory. I tried reading it but it made my head hurt. By the way Rachel have you come across Charles Eisenstein? He is into something called the Gift Economy - a pre-modern system where everybody just gives each other things if they can and the recipient returns the favour when they can. 'Paying forward' I think it's called.

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The existentialists, especially Simone de Beauvoir, believed that personal freedom also entails a responsibility to others as we all share the same human condition.

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Just get the billionaires to pay their fare share of taxes and use all that money to offer the freebies!

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“But surely a world in which more things are free would increase our freedom? “

When you write “free” , I read “paid for by taxes collected forcibly by government and distributed through the instrumentalist of government, without charge”.

Without money, work will have to be coerced by physical force.

This is feudalism.

Money is the social structure we use to set ourselves free from feudal systems of coerced labor.

We do need a new conversation about money. You are correct when you that money has become an instrument of market elitism.

We do need to set ourselves free from that elitism.

The path to that freedom lies through new learning about money that will inform innovation in the deployment of money to shape the choices by which we shape our economy.

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I am just in the process of reading and re-reading some of the works by Fred Harrison (Land Research Trust) and other followers of the 19th Century self taught economist Henry George.

Turns out there is such a thing as a free lunch and it is those who benefit from it that tell the rest of us that there is no such thing. (Un)Funny that!

Fred might be a good one to interview Rachel. He puts up a good argument for the corrupted taxation system being responsible for many of our problems. See his book/s #WeAreRent

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Regards renewables and mining.

Energy storage for renewables.

If the UK goes renewable, then we will need 18,000 gwh of backup energy, to allow for unreliable renewables (probably pumped storage systems). But at present we only have 10 gwh (the Dinorwig plant). .

But remember that Dinorwig was the most expensive power station in the world – because the Greeneys insisted it was built INSUDE a mountain. We need to cost in that missing 17,990 gwh of backup (which will cost £trillions), before saying renewables are cheap. And these backup storage systems will take decades to build. And where will we put them??

And if we run out of electricity and heating during a cold winter anticyclone, there will be no food, water, sew.erage, petrol, transport etc. So we will probably loose hundreds of thousands of people, just in one winter. And we will have ten or twenty of those devastating winters, before these backup systems are completed.

CO2 is not primary feedback agent.

Please see my peer review paper on ice ages.

This demonstrates that the primary feedback aged controlling ice ages, is dust on Arctic ice sheets, lowering their albedo. Strangely, this dust is caused by LOW CO2, which causes CO2 deserts, and therefore lots of dust. Thus it is LOW CO2 that causes interglacial warming.

Modulation of ice ages by dust and albedo.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987116300305

Ralph

ralf.ellis@me.com

Sent from my iPad

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Make more things free. That actually means there would still be things that are not free. Thus money is still needed to transfer assets and liabilities.

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