David wrote (my quotes are out of sequence): > Dystopian desperation is a couple systems away....
> That was 400 years ago, but > the memory is reasonably fresh, along with the maxim "don't try and starve > people who can kill you with nuclear weapons." This is an almost > unimaginably rich society; spreading the wealth around isn't that much of a > hardship. To put in bluntly, social security as a means of internal security. That will work to a degree, but sooner or later a secure and educated middle class will start to ask questions who really holds the strings. Both desperation and leisure can lead to revolution. Consider: a dividend of $50k per year plus life support, health, and education for the kids should be worth $2M or so, depending on the long-term interest rate. Any citizen gets the chance to earn that much over an 8-year National Service period, for a whopping $250k per annum. But some people are selected to earn $375k per year (the 1.5-share guys, the 2-share deal is only $333k per year), and to get a free college-plus education as well. Can one come even close to that on the regular job market, unless one was picked for the free education tracks? And even if you get the extra share (and the extra vote), there are economic incentives to sell it -- a resident would get the dividend plus life support etc. while a citizen would get only the extra divident and the vote, so it has a higher annual cash value in the hands of a resident. The self-interested citizen would sell that extra share and invest the money elsewhere. Has some clever agitator noticed that mechanism yet? > I'll point out the welfare payment really is a distribution of profits. I wrote 'welfare' rather than welfare, but how does the dividend compare to normal wages and prices? When every citizen gets $4k per month for free, how do you motivate them to take hard and boring work for less than another couple thousand? The TL10 equivalent of a waiter, or a baker, or a hairdresser will demand 'real money' to get out of bed, so prices for everything should go up, and suddenly they NEED the dividend to play Junction prices. > It's set > at an amount less than the per-outstanding-share profit, to allow for > variations in year-to-year performance, and to allow the corporation to have > substantial capital available to spend on things it thinks will improve its > future performance. The dividend has been suspended before, and is subject > to being reduced. (One of the things they spend the surplus on is buying > shares, when they start to get too concentrated among the rich.) Who votes on that, if shares (votes) start to get too concentrated? The poor one-share-guys, who really need the money (see above)? _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
