Chuck, for nearly 200 years there has been a sort of mini-industry of printing the books written by self-declared and usually self-taught geniuses, the core content of each being a "New and Original Idea for Keeping Capitalism While Eliminating All Its Bad Effects." I spent a good deal of time over about 6 or 7 years more or less mastering a very great but very nasty literary work which incorporates a good deal of that mini-industry, *The Cantos* of Ezra Pound. He arrived at the magnificent conclusion (in some ways not so crazy as it looks, but pretty crazy) that the logical manifestation of Jeffersonian ideas in the 20th century was the Fascism of Benito Mussolini. I mention Pound specifically because Pound and the "economists" he learned from (Gesell and Douglas) shared a similar but broader idea: that government as a whole could pay a dividend to its citizens. They worked the idea out very carefully and brilliantly.
I don't regret my time spent on Pound, because reading the *Cantos* directs the mind down marvellous side tracks and to caches of fascinating information, and his control of the cadences of the English language is unsurpassed. More important was it gave me what I believe is a very healthy suspicion of "originality," which except in very rare cases is a pseudo-originality, and more often than not a vicious one. Real originality (of which Marx was one of the supreme examples) tends to claim for itself only two or three very sharply defined perceptions encased in a deep understanding of the enmeshment of those perceptions in an immense mountain range of ideas and perceptions of reality which are *not* original to the thinker. This tends to be true even in artistic realms -- music, painting, drama.
Carrol