A modest proposal for transitioning the USA to a post-scarcity paradigm
Paul D. Fernhout
in part as a contribution towards Nathan's work on an open enterprise,
moving towards an open society. This is to support a transition to a
post-scarcity future.
It seems that, sadly, we can expect zero privacy in our personal affairs in
the USA between warrantless wiretapping and banks and ISPs rolling over for
any governmental request for any reason. The US government is now
underwriting all the major banks and the three major US car companies to the
sum of approaching about a year's GDP. And the Fed is now doing
"quantitative easing" which is Fed speak for printing money. This is all
very *radical* (and hypocritical) compared to the ideology espoused by most
political and economic leaders in the USA historically. We are now in
uncharted territory.
So, since privacy is history, and banks are now socialized enterprises, and
the main engines of US manufacturing (the car companies) are now run as
welfare organizations for all those US Americans who otherwise would lose
their jobs, and I could say more on what's going wrong but won't here, how
can we get something good out of this spirit of radical innovation by our
leadership by looking on the bright side? :-)
My suggestion:
* Close all the banks and have the US Social Security administration run a
single debit checking account with a card based on the person's SSN (plus an
additional PIN or other security measure like a physical token or biometric
or some combination of all three the user might choose). We have no
financial privacy anyway anymore, sadly, so the cost savings would outweigh
making it easy for the government to spy on anyone. Maybe make all transfers
part of the public record (especially that of public officials), or maybe
not. Make part of the public record who has looked at whose account
information. Maybe involve the US post office for PIN number resets where ID
is presented in person. The transparency of funds transfers may deter some
fraud and identity theft.
* All account holders have US$1500 a month deposited in that account. This
replaces all forms of government welfare. There is no needs test, so
everyone gets it, and this reduces overhead. This also replaces all forms of
public education (since a kid's money can be used for schooling if the
parents want it to). This also replaces social security for the elderly. If
people need more than this, tough -- charity can handle that. :-) It would
be illegal to borrow against future earnings there or to enforce any such
deal. This monthly amount would vary depending on Congress and price
fluctuations. Services might spring up to supply a good life on just the
basic stipend for intellectual types. Industrial productivity would go up as
no one who did not want to work would apply for a job. It is possible one
could phase in the amount in this account over a few years to give the
economy time to adjust. But maybe it would be best to just do it all at once.
* Medicare/Medicaid for all. Congress sets the limits similar to other
countries health care systems. People want more, they buy private
supplementary insurance. Nursing homes are available for all, but they
require handing over most of the monthly stipend. There might be government
plans for in home round the clock nursing care too (again, costing about a
monthly stipend); if you want something better, you buy private long-term
care insurance.
* Either one or both of a flat transaction tax (3%?) or a wealth tax (0.25%
monthly on balances and real property of any US account holder) to pay for
this all. The savings on bank operations and medical insurance companies
will also pay for some of this. If currency is needed to make it work, the
government just credits it as needed in a transparent way. The IRS would
still exist, but mostly to evaluate people's current net wealth.
* Huge infrastructure projects like currently planned just involve magicking
money into people's accounts, but without the overhead of the Fed and banks
and treasury bills. Roads, railways, subways, internet, green power, space
habitation, and so on would all be part of this.
* All current treasury bills are declared as no longer paying interest from
today forward, and are only convertible to a payment into the person's SSN
account, which again involves magicking the money. Federal debt goes to zero
today, and all interest payments go to zero. This also might be phase in
over a time period of a few years perhaps, but a clean break might be best.
* Maybe there still is some cash floating around, for a few percent of the
economy related to vice and the black market (cracking down would cost more
than to letting it go on).
* There are no longer any minimum wage laws. OSHA might also be able to
scale down, as people could more easily quit if workplaces were unsafe.
* Any investment happens through private arrangements. Islamic banking could
be a model here. So, while the Social Security Administration would transfer
funds around these accounts, it would not *loan* anyone money itself. There
would be no interest on account balances maintained in this system; intstead
there is a flat monthly tax as a small percent on any accumulated wealth
and/or funds transfers to make the system work.
* Payments to and from outside the USA system would use a different account
number tied to a subaccount with money put in it specifically for foreign
transactions. This helps prevent fraud and also makes spying easier. Various
limits might be imposed on these exchanges outside the network. These
external dollars might be denominated as kilowatt hours, or maybe are still
fiat dollars or are backed in some other way.
* Throw open the borders and invite anyone to become a US resident,
receiving the monthly stipend. Non-citizens would have to be residing in the
USA to receive the stipend (although this might be relaxed at some point).
For some inspiration about this controversial point:
"Statue of Liberty National Monument -- Emma Lazarus’ Famous Poem"
http://www.libertystatepark.com/emma.htm
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" (excerpt)
* Negotiate with other countries (like Iraq) to have them join the USA as
states if they want this system to extend to their entire population. Maybe
even let entire continents join eventually, like Africa. :-) This would be
only the tiniest reparations for slavery and other interference in those
cultures.
* Create extensive regulation of pollution by any manufacturing process, and
place a huge tax on anything that is not designed with a cradle-to-cradle
lifecycle in mind or which increases public health expenses.
* Greatly reduce the scope of all copyright and patent laws in order to
promote innovation. Musicians, writers, and other digital artists could
easily live off the stipend and do their work for free.
Essentially, this is all a contemporary US variation of the "Australia
Project" proposed here:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
His proposal there includes the idea of giving up privacy and also trusting
to a big system. For good or bad, that's where the USA is right now.
Related, see the proposal at the end of this video:
"Money as debt"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279
Anyway, just trying to get something good out of the current mess. If
privacy is history anyway, and Congress has turned radical, why not at least
get something good out of that all instead of just watching all the money go
to the already wealthy through bailouts? :-)
It would be nice to advance open manufacturing code and content to the point
where we could simulate such a transition over and over again with different
options to see how to do this transition in the most compassionate way and
to understand the risks. (Although maybe we are in such a simulation already
ourselves? http://www.simulation-argument.com/ :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Kevin Carson
> So, since privacy is history, and banks are now socialized enterprises,
Except for the lack of any control rights. The only thing socialized
was the losses. Paulson went out of his way to avoid purchasing any
voting rights with the equity, choosing preferred shares for just that
reason. Because voting rights, by God, would be SOCIALISM!
--
Kevin Carson
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Anarchist Organization Theory Project
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
Paul D. Fernhout
--Paul Fernhout
Richard Schulte
proposal'?
such an overly centralized socialist system would not do much for
resilience in this day and age...
Bryan Bishop
> so this is a satirical joke, right? like johnathan swift's 'a modest
> proposal'?
That's what I thought, but then I wondered what the consequences would
be if it wasn't, so maybe it's best to just let it die. It didn't
really sound like it would help the situation.
Paul D. Fernhout
Well, I believe in eventually moving beyond currency to a gift economy, but
the preamble essentially says it all: we now have a centralized socialist
system in the USA with no privacy -- but what do we get out of it in the
USA? Why not use an Aikido-like philosophy and just go with the flow but
make some other demands towards realizing Marshall Brain's "Australia
Project" vision? :-)
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Or at least a U.S. Basic Income Guarantee :
http://www.usbig.net/
Besides, how is this proposal really any more centralized than banking funds
transfer systems like MasterCard and Visa are now (and related cards,
including VISA logo debit cards, and checking accounts)? What is the real
difference from a set of banks governed by the Fed and standard lending
policies? It is easy to mistake have a few interrelated choices for diversity.
Again, from Manuel De Landa:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of
data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to
promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that
may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common
data-structure may make possible."
So, I'd suggest my proposal to centralize currency transfer through the US
Social Security Administration would actually *increase* economic diversity,
by supporting more free efforts of a variety of themes coupled to
individuals interests. :-) So, I think we would see a greater diversity of
products manufactured, and they could be more open, because many people
would not be so concerned about profit-making or acquiring money for the
future. And thus, that economy would be more resilient.
Anyway, Manuel De Landa suggests that this issue of centralization and
decentralization is much more complex than either-or, because at the very
least there are layers to systems, but he goes further than that (suggesting
meshworks and hierarchies coexist and turn into each other regularly).
I do feel the proposal is potentially workable and better than what we have.
The money supply would be a fixed amount easily controllable by government,
not an amount that oscillates up and down with purchaser confidence and
taking on debt (the current cause of the economic boom bust cycles we see in
the USA). But it's more important to just give another model to think about,
as we consider our assumptions, for example, about this question of
centralization vs. decentralization as above, and so on.
But if one wanted to go further, one could think about such a system in a
smaller space habitation, and consider how all sorts of resources would be
balanced (energy, tools, materials, time, services, computing cycles, etc.)
by different forms of currency interchangeable to various degrees.
Anyway, I hope when one looks at my proposal at the very least one can see
how broken the current economic system is both *practically* and
*ideologically*. So in that sense, I see open manufacturing and some sort of
related open economics an not just as a good thing, but as in some sense a
necessity, as the economic system starts shuddering from its own internal
conflicts (for example, those car manufacturing jobs probably are for the
most part not coming back, even with endless bailouts).
As Marshall Brain suggests:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
"""
There is no mystery -- the jobless recovery is exactly what you would expect
in a robotic nation. When automation and robots eliminate jobs, they are
gone for good. The economy then has to invent new jobs. But it is much
harder to do that now because robots can quickly fill the new jobs that get
invented. See the FAQ for additional information.
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-faq.htm
"""
If we bring toy making back from China to the USA, are we are not going to
heavily automate it (compared to the Chinese currently)? So, those toy
making jobs are mostly gone for good. Our current economic system is just
built on completely unsustainable premises like (as the Triple Revolution
suggests) linking income to increasing automated jobs.
But, as I said at the start, I think eventually any economy would transition
beyond currency as we know it, even though it may still have internal
accounting for various reasons (and maybe someday much more detailed
accounting than we have now, down to molecules of water used in a glass of
water or something). Who would have believed fifty years ago every large
piece of fruit you ate would have a sticker on it? Fifty years from now
maybe you'd be able to link that sticker to a video of the entire handling
of that fruit, from planted seed, to tree, to flower, to fruit, to
transportation to your home. So, a vast amount of accounting, just for fun. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Nick Taylor
>> resilience in this day and age...
>
> Well, I believe in eventually moving beyond currency to a gift economy, but
> the preamble essentially says it all: we now have a centralized socialist
> system in the USA with no privacy
The (generally held) American understanding of socialism has been warped into a catch-all bogey, which is quite a long way from the understanding that the rest of the world has (or even pre-Reagan America had). If you do a quick google for Lakoff and then Powell Manifesto, you'll get a vague idea of why there's this disparity, but this is (fortunately) OT, so I'll leave it at that.
Nick
Paul D. Fernhout
>>> such an overly centralized socialist system would not do much for
>>> resilience in this day and age...
>> Well, I believe in eventually moving beyond currency to a gift economy,
> but
>> the preamble essentially says it all: we now have a centralized socialist
>> system in the USA with no privacy
>
> Really? I wasn't aware that taxing the population and giving the money to
> the aristocracy was socialism?
Good point, and I generally agree. Still, regardless of the *reality* of
what is going on, the *justification* for bailing out the banks is to give
credit to all the mom-and-pop small businesses so they won't go bankrupt,
and the reason for bailing out the banks is so a couple million US Americans
can still have the jobs (that they often don't like) to pay their mortgages
to the banks and buy stuff from the mom-and-pop small businesses. (This also
all ignores that people often really buy stuff from Walmart that is made in
China, of course.) So, that's why I raise the issue that we have the bad
side of socialism in the USA (the taxes or inflation, likely soon to come as
the deficit becomes unsustainable, and the government centralization and
reduction of choice) without the good side of socialism (the social benefits
like universal health care, a solid public infrastructure like roads and
libraries and museums, and social safety net for the unemployed, and so on).
So, while I agree with you, in a sense, your observation is the starting
place for my suggestion. :-)
Interesting Google suggestions you had. What I found.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff
"For Lakoff, the development of thought has been the process of developing
better metaphors. The application of one domain of knowledge to another
domain of knowledge offers new perceptions and understandings."
http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.html
"Most notable about these institutions was their focus on [conservative]
education, shifting values, and movement-building - a focus we share, though
usually with contrasting goals. One of our great frustrations is that
"progressive" foundations and funders have failed to learn from the success
of these corporate institutions and decline to fund the Democracy Movement
that we and a number of similarly-focused organizations are attempting to
build. Instead, they overwhelmingly focus on damage control, band-aids and
short-term results which provide little hope of the systemic change we so
desperately need to reverse the trend of growing corporate dominance."
Well, at least open manufacturing might help with the last somewhat. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Richard Schulte
yes, i can see how it is very important to look into the
centralization/decentralization dichotomoy. there is much more going
on there than the average armchair economist might realize
i feel that the model which you propose could offer a powerful
transtion for the current paradigm. instead of a gross
decentralization and free-marketization of the market, a kind of
intelligent "pooling of resources" to build capacity for future
systems. the systems which would emerge as a result of these
centralizations would have to compete on a global market, and thus
things like real value, real economics and fair exchange would emerge
from the process *ideally*
about manufacturing, hypothetically, toys in the united states... we
must take into account something deeper than the veneer of production
in order to reckon with our consumption. many of those toys, as i
have seen in the past of my age group and of my neices and nephews,
are disposable and often arbitrarial products not designed for any
kind of legacy or broad value. not that there arent valuable products
out there, but our propensity to enjoy things more simple and to reach
more nuanced levels of enjoyment in and of itself are important.
here, we have the opportunity for craftmanship, and the concept
thereof, to be disseminated to our children. a toy as a labour of
love or skill could contain so much for our progeny to understand.
science recently has had to prove to us that familial relationships
and the joy of camraderie have more implicit value than our material
consumption during the holidays. here, there are some social and
cultural hurdles we need to overcome as a nation, and possibly taking
a long hard look at our consumption as it becomes less and less
sustainable.
yes, the system is quite broken, however has much potential to be
ameliorated. there are many intelligent people with a vast base of
skills out there, willing to take the chance to transform our
industrial situation. there is so much potential in open
manufacturing and p2p economics to realize a better economic paradigm
for ourselves. recognizing the capacities we have in our own
countries and regions is important for realizing where our future can
come from.
there is a lot of propensity for automation in localization. for
example, networks are needed for local food systems, wherin chefs,
market proprietors and individual consumers need their demand met by
farmers. (as sam rose is working on) and instead of assigning those
tasks directly, a template of capacity can be set up to meet that
demand, and automated systems can distribute agricultural production
with so many factors in mind that the average human could never
conceive of the concepts and capacities implict in these systems...
there is so much to talk about. and paul, you always have some
amazing economic concepts to lay out for our minds to feed on.
possibly a blog of emerging economic ideas, as related to open
manufacturing, is in order.
i have much to speak of with my republican conservative extended
family, here in cleveland ohio. many of them have turned to military
service for job security, and many of my old friends, with official
vocational training, are jobless in the onetime industrial hub of mid
america. there are some fundamental things we all can agree on, and
it is important for us to realize this common ground in the face of a
new economic paradigm. one can only hope that these transitions are
fluid and just, and that power and economic clout are not pooled into
the wrong hands. these are delicate times, and the lives of so many
rest on it.
Richard Schulte
Cleveland Ohio
Schulte Family Christmas (German Catholics = lots of good beer!)
p.s. (enjoy the holidays, everyone, and remember that the most
important human exchange is the heart to heart. these are volatile
times, and we must stay close to our family and friends. they are
your closest and most valuable companions, and they are often the most
understanding. sometimes it can be hard, but common ground is so
important these days. times are hard and we are looking for something
to agree on and move forward on. keep this in mind.)
On Dec 23, 2:17 pm, "Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfernh...@kurtz-fernhout.com>
wrote:
Nathan Cravens
It would be nice to advance open manufacturing code and content to the point
where we could simulate such a transition over and over again with different
options to see how to do this transition in the most compassionate way and
to understand the risks. (Although maybe we are in such a simulation already
ourselves? http://www.simulation-argument.com/ :-)