Easy as 1-2-3-4

the four essential components of a single legislative Act any nation could enact to transform the societal outcomes of its existing economic system

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Every nation on Earth has, as part of its economic system, a central bank. Any nation on Earth could therefore, via a single legislative Act, make its economy completely self-regulating while eliminating unemployment, poverty, and taxes/public debt (if total government spending were limited to its current per capita level) and at the same time increasing sustainability — all at no cost to anyone, without having to redistribute anything, without imposing any limit on income/wealth, and without requiring people to change their behavior in any way. A new Monetary Agency could be created to administer this monetary paradigm, but a central bank could certainly do that perfectly well.

There are options and stopping points within this paradigm — it is not all-or-nothing — but for any iteration of the paradigm, the Act would involve four essential components:

1. Authorize a permanent ‘quantitative easing’ (QE): money would be created as needed without involving the creation of debt. (Creating money without creating debt is what made ‘quantitative easing’ something new when it was invented as a response to the financial crisis of 2008.)
2. Choose the purpose(s) to which that money would be put. (To accomplish all of the above goals it would be used to create a minimum guaranteed income for citizens and to fund all government, from central to local, at the current per capita rate of total government spending.)
3. Establish the rules necessary to govern the creation and disbursement of that money so as to bring to fruition the choice(s) in (2.). (Since QE has already been invented, the only totally new thing for the economic system would be the way the money would enter the economy — its disbursement — which would be determined by the purpose(s) to which the money would be put.)
4. Close the monetary loop. (With a large, regular, ongoing flow of money into the economy, to prevent the accumulation of too much money in it there would have to be a limit on the hoarding of money, meaning some method would have to be established for returning money to its point of origin, i.e., the central bank — or the Monetary Agency—presumably, after people and business were allowed to accumulate plentiful pools of money, based on income, and which all people, however wealthy or not, could deal with by merely disbursing their own ‘excess’ money in any legal way: in that scenario an individual would really have to be very, very rich and completely oblivious or indifferent to have any money collected from him or her to be returned to its point of origin; any other scenario would be a matter of politics, not economics.)

A general statement of the paradigm, intended primarily for economists, is in “Paradigm Shift;” a more detailed rendering of a version of it is in “Same Economy, Way Better Outcomes for Society” (both here in Medium).