The Ideal Economic System
     We have more than enough physical resources in this world, more than enough labor power, and more than enough brain power to do whatever we want to advance humanity. Therefore, any problem we have with production and distribution of goods and services, therefore, has to fall squarely on the economic system we choose to utilize these resources.

The rest of this page is also under HEAVY construction...but I jotted down some thoughts to show you there is some direction. Click here to let me know what you think.

A co-worker of mine once told me that he would gladly pay 80% of his wages in taxes, if the government would provide him all the necessities of life (housing, utilities, food, etc.). There is a hidden meaning behind this statement that I believe many will find true - people are "working themselves to death" just to pay their bills.

     Wouldn't be nice if we could escape the control of the bean-counters and make truly wise decisions? Yes, doing the right thing may take a few more labor hours, it may take some upgrading of existing facilities, it may require retraining of personnel, but SO WHAT? "Well, the cost of the prudent item will be more than the cost of the non-prudent item, so people will choose to purchase the non-prudent item and those who produce the prudent-item will be forced out of business." But this is only true under the rules of our current economic system...what if we were to change the rules?

     What if we were to change our economic system to allow for wise decisions instead of being lead in all the wrong directions by the "invisible hand" of capitalism?

The necessities of life must be a guaranteed right for all. food, housing, transportation, communication, health care, and education enough to be functional citizens are not things anyone can be denied. Yet their must be enough things denied such that one is willing to labor to improve their status (possibly the quality of housing and food and transportation, etc).

THE WORKING IDEA: EVERYONE IS AN EMPLOYEE OF THE STATE.
If there was a truly representative government that could be trusted (see section on Rebuilding the Political System), the following scheme might work.

First, everyone is provided the basics of living (with the "quality" of the basics based upon service provided). Thus, ALL income earned is strictly "expendible" income. This will mean that wages will be drastically lower than they currently are, so earnings would have to also consider the value of the "necessities" provided for each service provider.

Wages will be decided by the people as a percentage of a world budget, and this percentage must add up to 100%. The people will also decide what "level of necessities" each service provider is entitled to.

People advance by going into those services which have been deemed as needed badly enough to be well rewarded. This will require a very fluid retraining system, but it can be done.

There is still private ownership of the means of production, but the stock-holders and management are still employees of the state, and their rewards for innovation and higher production will be determined by the people. (This will ensure that "improvements" in production are not at the cost of the people.)

This will be a strongly controlled economy...the people will decide what services are most important (eg rank these jobs in their order of importance to you). But there are features of a market system here, because the rewards for some endeavors will still be based upon consumerism. For example, actors, directors, etc. would have their level of wages raised or lowered based upon the number of people who go to view their work.

All transactions can be monitored. Any exchange of money requires the business to have a card reader and an identification code to get into the government database. The database is what will determine how much that business is to be rewarded based upon the number of people served, and to what extent they were served.

Instead of government owning the means of production, the government (eg the sum of all the people) controls the totality of the labor market and decides what is profitable behavior. This setup will need a lot of "tweeking", but the basic premise is strong enough to control any problem.

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