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Michael,
There is no proposal to replace
work. We only propose that all people should have income from
capital ownership, a basic income, if you like and you do as well. Social
Credit also has a basic income In all these cases people
will not be stopped from working nor will the need for work be
stopped.
As regards your detailed
proposals, I think they are in the same position as any other proposals
including those of Social Credit and binary economics i.e. instead of fighting
each other all the time, we should endeavour to create a broad movement whose
parts have much in common e.g. an understanding of the uses of interest-free
money; the need for some form of basic income; the desire to do something about
the narrow ownership of capital; a sense of economic and social justice; a
recogniton as to the way the international banking system battens onto the
poor throughout the world etc etc etc. Whose detailed ideas
eventually win through will be decided by others at the time the movement as a
whole wins through. A period of co-operation is needed.
You have raised many others
issues in your email and -- as you may have noticed -- I am doing a lot of
emailing at the present so please forgive me if I do not respond to
everything..
Rodney Shakespeare.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2003 5:03
PM
Subject: Re: Spam Alert: Re: [SOCIAL
CREDIT] Sun, cow, fish, machine, hydr=o=3Delectric
Rodney, I grant you the productivity of capital - and the need to
distribute its ownership. I simply quarrel with whether your proposed
method will work more quickly or more justly than those I have proposed.
It will never be possibly to replace all work, at least until you have
robot mechanics who can fix anything that breaks, both in the firm and in the
home. As long as you have the term "some assembly required" someone
always has to work.
It is a simple fact of human psychology that if someone has to work, they
will resent all of those who do not - as well as any system which provides for
someone not working.
As important as work is "control". Under capital homesteading,
larger families will be able to purchase more shares in the parental workplace
(assuming the worker toils in the private for-profit sector) or in an
aggregate or community fund where someone else works. In this case, if
you have two workers with differing family sizes, one worker - who works just
as hard - has less of say in the operation of the firm than the other, and
receives more of the profits as well. In effect, the worker
with more children owns (or controls) more of the capital equipment of the
firm than his fellow worker. Unless you provide for a separate payment
of stock to represent the productive output of labor, as well as capital, than
this system is exploitive of that worker.
Now, don't get me wrong. I am all for paying larger families
more. However, I would do so on the cost side rather than the profit
side. Workers would recieve stock, with each worker getting the same
amount each period - initially through the privatization of social insurance
but later on as a simple direct payment. Workers would receive a
separate wage premium for larger families, initally through the fiscal system
(as they do now to a lesser and inadequate extent) and later simply as a
matter of course, but on the cost side. In this way the distribution of
profits and control are separated from the problem of subsistence.
The first time I spoke with Norm Kurland on the phone brought up the
subject of the automated factory and the impracticality of 2 or 3 workers
owning the entire thing. I disagree with this example for a simple
reason - production is not the only activity of a firm. There are always
the very human processes of distribution and sales, which are mostly labor
intensive. Additionally, such a facility would likely be part of larger
conglomerate - so the case which Norm sited would never actually arise.
Finally, I am not at all unfriendly to the concept of increasing capital
financing through the creation of money. After the debt is finally paid
off, I agree that capital projects would best get financing through the
central bank. I would even say that employee-owned firms (either ESOPs,
Cooperatives, union pension funds or other forms of worker collective) should
be able to go to the central bank to raise funds to buy out the non-employee
stockholders. However, I would do all this on the collective level
rather than at the family level - and by collective I mean the company, not
the state. A family level capital homesteading program simply involves
too much paperwork - making local banks all the richer (giving banks 0.5% is
almost more expensive than the administrative costs of the Social Security
program, which are either at that level or at 0.2%). CH would make a lot
of people rich, but they would mostly be bankers. The employee-own
ership scheme I propose has NO ADDITIONAL ADMINISTRATIVE COST.
NONE. ZILCH. The activities required would be part of the payroll
system within firms. They would likely be programmed into the
software.
Look at my other comments on 21st Century Economics, which also include
employee-owned firms providing for home finance and payroll lines of
credit. You will see that if firms follow my suggestions, much of what
passes for banking goes away. Also, the implication is that
employee-ownership will also end most non-employee stock ownership - and much
more quickly than capital homesteading would (one of the objections to the
President's proposals would be that they would lead to the overwhelming of the
market by personal accounts held in index funds in fairly short order, see the
Social Security website for more details. The President's plan would
leave the corporate aristocracy untouched, since investment managers rather
than account holders would vote the shares - I would have employees vote them,
thus displacing the current aristocracy). In the end, my proposals would
lead to the end of most of the financial sector. Brokers, private
insurance agents, personal bankers, realtors - and the academics who teach
them - all gone. This would not be a mandate, it would simply evolve
from the proposals I offer. Many of the individuals who perform these
services might wind up in HR departments at ESOPs, et al. However, the
sector would be doomed. I have yet to see why this would be a bad
thing.
Michael Bindner
Rodney Shakespeare
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
John,
Binary
productiveness is an analysis of the PHYSICAL contributions
to
production. Fish breed and grow without human intervention and that is
a
physical fact.
And trees grow. That is a physical fact. And
automatic machines act
automatically. That is a physical fact.
And
Keith Wilde has conceded these matters -- see another email to this
lis=
t
in which, among other things, I point out that physicists,
chemists and
biologists generally have little difficulty in understanding
productiveness=
but economists (trained to maintain the present
narrow ownership of capital=
)
generally do not.
And the
hydro-electric dam? Do you still wish to ignore the fact of the
physical
contribution to wealth creation that the sun, weather, gravity,
water,
concrete and turbines make?
And it has been observed that Marx most
certainl y understood all this -- se=
e
pages 114-115 of the A/S
book.
As regards the independence of non-human things in phsyical
production,
consider first the human who is also an independent
contributor acting by
her/himself, or co-operating with others or
co-operating with things like
machines, seeds, trees, fish, mines, oil
wells etc etc -- non-human capital=
assets. You don't deny the
independence of human beings, do you? But that=
does NOT mean to say
that they cannot co-operate in a thousdand different
ways - with each
other or with non-human capital assets -- does it? And
it's the same with
the non-human capital assets. They do their work by
themselves, or linked
with other non-human assets or linked with humans in
thousand of
different ways. Like humans, their independnence is recognised=
by
payment for contribution to production -- although whether
present
recognition is an accurate recognition is another
matter.
You ask if it would matter if b.e.quietly dropped the concept
of independen=
t
productiveness. In response, I would ask why, if
people genuinely wish
substantial capital ownership for ALL individuals,
they feel an obvious nee=
d
to attack something which points out
capital's big physical contribution to=
wealth production. The answer
is obvious -- they attack the one thing whic=
h
defeats the present
line of conventional economics that nothing need be
changed and that it
does not matter who owns the capital. Yes, conventiona=
l
economics
has woven into it that it does not matter who owns the capital
(and on a
New York TV programme with me, Edward Wolff confirmed that).
Thus, in
practice, one way or another, most economists -- and you -- end
up=
in practice supporting the status quo. It happens becasue, all
the time,
they are subtly supporting the status quo arguments. You refuse
to allow
the physical contribution of capital to production and so play
the game of
the big capital owners who say "Oh labour does most of it, in
fact. does it=
all, and THAT'S why there is no case for wide
ownership...jobs and, if
necessary , welfare benefit are enough for the
ordinary people...."
And YOU are playing their game, John. You have
taken up their analysis and=
in practice, your will is weakened. And
who are these people you claim are=
deterred from supporting wide
ownership by the productiveness analysis? I=
f
it so upsets them, why
don't they just campaign for wide ownership? But
they don't do they? The
fact is that they pick on this, then they pick on
that -- and will always
pick on something to avoid supporting wide
ownership.
And do you
know why? It's usually becasue they do not wish ordinary people=
to
have the independence and everyday power which would come from a
degree=
of capital ownership. They will ALWAYS find some excuse to
deny capital
ownership to others.
So the answer is that without
the productiveness analysis the forces which
wish to retain the narrow
ownership of capital would no longer have any rea=
l
opponent and they
would sit back smugly and say "Yes, it's as we've always=
said...jobs
and welfare are enough for ordinary people....."
One last thing -- in
another email to this list which does not appear to
me, to have been
circulated to the list, I deal with binary economics and
Islam and give
some indication of the latest developments. You might like
to go to the
website I have mentioned and read the Foreword to Prof
Choudhury's
latesrt book and my Oman paper both in Articles. After reading=
them
it will probably occur to you that binary economics is making rather
more
progress that you are capable of imagining.
Rodney
Shakespeare.
----- Original Message
-----
From: "John M=E9daille" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>< BR>To:
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Social Credit"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 8:32
AM
Subject: Re: Spam Alert: Re: [SOCIAL CREDIT] Sun, cow, fish,
machine,
hydro=3Delectric
At 02:26 PM 7/22/2003 +0100, Rodney
Shakespeare wrote:
>And do not fish breed etc without human
intervention?
Does the fish have any economic value while it remains
uncaught? Have you
ever seen a fish jump out of the water, scale and gut
itself, and then jump=
into the frying pan?
> And trees
grow? Are
>there not automatic machines (even though they require
occaisonal
>maintenance and repair?). And is not the sun an
independent contributor
to=3D
>
>production (even though it
cannot be owned?
>And, frankly, if you do not understand that a
driverless lorry, (like a
>driverless train) really does have no
driver, then I cannot help you any
>more and I suggest, for the sake
of the others on this elist, that we end
>the subject.
I think
I just heard an admission that there is no such thing as
"independent
productivity." Rodney, your theory of IP has brought great
discredit and
ridicule on Binary Economics and made it impossible for
serious people to
take it seriously. It is no accident that its primary
economics texts are
written by lawyers. Not that that would a problem in
itself, but the
unwillingness to enter a normal dialog in normal terms has
consigned what
might be a useful theory to the realm of crackpots.
I ask you again,
what would change in BE if you just quiety dropped
Independent
productiveness?
John C. M=E9daille
"A dead thing can go
with the stream...
but only a living thing can go against it."
-G. K.
Chesterton
http://www.medaille.com/distributivism.htm
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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