User:Red Shogun412/sandbox/EconLaw


 * Shepard supports a synthesis of neo-Ricardian, New and post-Keynesian, Georgist, neo-chartalist, distributist, and behavioral economics alongside theories on debt deflation and credit cycles; the Henry George theorem; balanced budgets following debt repayment; low debt-to-GDP ratios; demand-side economics with preference towards infrastructure-based development; full-reserve banking; a PAYGO system, except during recessions or periods of slowed economic growth when deficit spending is most effective; a land value and negative income tax alongside universal demogrants (to counteract urban sprawl, gentrification, and spatial inequality); nominal GDP (NGDP) level targeting; climate change mitigation and adaptation; economic democracy and worker cooperatives (democratic socialism); cooperations between the public-private sector; diplomatic, progressive, and pragmatic international and domestic policies; permanent standard time; campaign finance reform; restrictions on lobbyists; the term-limitation of all elected officials (Representatives to a 4-year term and Senators to a 6-year term, both limited to 3 consecutive or non-consecutive terms) and U.S. Supreme Court justices (a tenure of only 24 years after confirmation or until reaching the age of 78), a Second Bill of Rights, and increasing the apportionment of the lower house of Congress; rural-urban proportional representation and multi-winner preferential voting; democratic glocalization; reproductive rights; a post-scarcity steady-state economy; popular and progressive education; intergenerational equity; the separation of church and state; fair-trade globalization (to help end and succeed the neocolonial status quo); urban growth boundaries without gentrification; urban community- and development-supported agriculture and farmers' markets; mitigation of urban heat islands, carbon sequestration, slash-and-char, greater investment in algae fuel and seaweed farming, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, restrained ocean fertilization and solar radiation management; criminal justice and prison reform (ultimately supporting prison abolition and reallocating funds from militarized policing to social and community services), decarceration, and restorative justice. Shepard also supports the Kurdish, Palestinian, and Jewish peoples right to self-determination, thus supporting the founding of a sovereign Kurdistan and binational solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (both based on cellular-democratic confederations); Northern Irish and Scottish independence from Great Britain and the potential reunification of Ireland beyond ethnoreligious divides (believing Northern Ireland's continued dependence on – and recent calls for greater control by – Great Britain following the post-Brexit Protocol and Irish Sea border to be counterproductive and motivated by tradition and ideological cohesion); a greater usage of local currency and equitable international competition; and a commitment to the higher law of equal liberty (as opposed to egoistic legal positivism), libertarian personal autonomy, and a semi-direct and semi-parliamentarian good government (as opposed to and superseding contractarian bourgeois-democratic representative government).


 * In response to the European sovereign debt crisis and mounting debt-to-GDP ratios, austerity programmes, bank bailouts, and junk accumulation, Shepard believes a viable solution to the present Eurozone crisis is for trade-surplus EU countries (Germany, Austria, the Netherlands) to depreciate their currencies and raise real wages by initiating a price/wage spiral of nominal GDP (NGDP) level targeted infrastructure-based development and a land value tax - including universal demogrants - to increase the production and consumption of domestic goods and services, while trade-deficient EU countries (Greece, Spain, France) should prioritize export-oriented industrialization to lower domestic consumption and increase savings and competition, with these individual processes being viable without a shared eurozone, even if a fiscal union were to be established under contemporary circumstances. Shepard also supports organized worker cooperatives within a cellular democracy as a viable post-Marxist alternative to workers' councils as promoted by council communism, the Dutch-German current of anti-Stalinist left communism, due to a shared workers' self-management and the former transcending a delegate model of representation by making the producers of labour autonomous in deliberating choices for their collective interests, as opposed to an elected representative who may feel superior and possess one's own corrupting interests, so as to avoid centralization of the democratic process in a partisan, duopolistic and potentially authoritarian manner.


 * Regarding economics, Shepard believes in a cooperation between the government (using fiscal policy) and the central bank (using monetary policy) to mitigate bad inflation by lowering the money supply over an extended period of time (disinflation) and matching the supply and the demand, either by tightening the money supply and/or raising interest rates to lower demand (due to an economic bubble) or lowering import quotas and/or implementing contractionary fiscal policy to increase competitive supply (due to a trade surplus). By extension, he supports a synthesis of neo-Ricardian, New Keynesian, neo-chartalist, and behavioral economics, also seeking policies to avert and/or prevent contemporary debt deflation, yet, when it is inevitable, supports reflation alongside infrastructure-based development and increases in real wages (mostly via a price/wage spiral and universal demogrants alongside some redistributive progressive taxation) as a viable recovery method for the impending recession. Shepard also supports deficit spending and interest rate fluctuations during recessions to stimulate the economy (with a higher rates to stimulate a deflating economy alongside infrastructure-based development, with a NAIBER-derived job guarantee to reconcile any price/wage spirals and both demand-pull and cost-push inflation), but opposes both free-floating fiat currency alongside long-term import substitution and financial repression (inflationism), and monetarism alongside structural adjustment, austerity prior to the maximum tax revenue, currency devaluations and zero interest-rate policies.


 * Shepard contends it is the absence of a managed-floating fiat currency, full-reserve banking, a tax on land value rents and a citizen's dividend alongside nominal GDP level targeting and sufficient progressive taxation (a necessary evil under rampant economic inequality), and various smaller and regulated financial institutions, which sustains and perpetuates permanent deficit spending, sovereign and public debt accumulation, divergences in economic equity, currency appreciation enabling low inflation and trade deficits, and long-term overvaluation of the fiat currency. It is under this cycle, Shepard contends, that governments relegate the role of influencing the inflation rate and money supply to the central bank via (direct and indirect) quantitative easing and cutting interest rates (the Greenspan / Fed put), consistently displaying its unsustainability with soft landings and slow real GDP growth, and that the decline in economic-cyclical volatility from 1985–2007, alongside currency appreciation, historically low interest rates and financialization during and after recessions prevent national debt (including external and public) from being paid for by keeping the markets on continuous asset price bubble without actual gains in real GDP that would otherwise increase disposable wealth; all of which procures permanent deficit spending, substantial trade deficits, leveraged companies due to a corporate debt bubble, large increases in economic inequality and private investment, unwarranted asset price inflation, the erosion of good governance and civic participation, and a false sense of security in "full employment" as socio-economic inequities in both economic regions of the globe are perpetuated, notably by:

- Burdening the middle-class taxpayers in developed countries to pay for government spending despite lower wages, existent debt, and lower social mobility; - Lowering real wages as the domestic workforce is laid-off and/or outsourced (or replaced with automation), producing wage slavery, the commodification of education, healthcare, housing, and agriculture, the middle-class squeeze and elite overproduction (prompting elite aspirants to embrace populist leaders, for good or bad); - Increasing poverty, hunger, drug use, violence, and terrorism in urban cities (urban decay), prompting suburban exodus which perpetuates urban sprawl under the continuous real estate bubble (derived from the Fed put) and disincentived productive construction and use, which worsens urban decay and produces human capital flight in a positive feedback loop; - The planned obsolescence of goods and services internationally for higher profits at cheaper expenses, and the accumulation of financial capital and assets by a corporate capitalist digerati; - Promoting domestic law and order policies via police militarization and the war on drugs that produces mass incarceration, private, for-profit prisons, felony disenfranchisement, and the disproportionate presence of mentally ill people, women, ethnic minorities, and school dropouts in jails and prisons (the prison–industrial complex); - The decline of industry as the secondary sector of the economy; - Slower gross domestic product growth and increasing unemployment (due to job outsourcing and automation); - And a deteriorating social safety net and looming pensions crisis;

all of which worsens economic conditions for lower earning sectors in advanced economies and increases environmental degradation, contributing to illiberal regimes in many developed and developing countries, and the persistent inequitable relationship of Washington Consensus free trade in allowing developed countries to exploit developing and least developed countries by using government agencies and corporate interests to extract natural resources, capital and employment the latter countries would otherwise depend on for development, thus preventing them from reaping the benefits of free and fair trade.