On 01/11/2012 11:28 PM, James Bowery wrote:
The only way to get capitalism to work is to shift the tax base from
economic activity to the liquidation value of assets, and set the tax
rate to the interest rate used to calculate liquidation value.
But no one with wealth wants that to happen even though just about
everyone who has high incomes would want it to happen.
So, due to political economic considerations, capitalism cannot be
made to work.
This is not to say that socialism can be made to work, since in order
to do so it would require that the liquidation asset interest
collected by the government be dispersed equally to all citizens, no
"means testing". Socialists want to figure out how to spend your
dividends for you because they're so smart and all.
In other words: All fall down.
Maybe the solution is what Fidel Castro proposed recently: replace the
US president with a robot.
http://www.elcorreo.eu.org/?El-mejor-Presidente-para-Estados&lang=es
<http://www.elcorreo.eu.org/?El-mejor-Presidente-para-Estados&lang=es>
In spanish. Translation here:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.elcorreo.eu.org/%3FEl-mejor-Presidente-para-Estados%26lang%3Des&sl=es&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8
<http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.elcorreo.eu.org/%3FEl-mejor-Presidente-para-Estados%26lang%3Des&sl=es&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8>
I (along with Castro) am being sarcastic here, of course. But
nevertheless, the rationale behind Catro's idea is impeccable: given
that the western world is so advanced at the technological level,
perhaphs it should consider using that wonderful advancement to try to
advance also at the social, political and economical levels, where it's
clearly lagging behind the curve. In fact, technological advances are
usually being used to even recede in those areas.
The troubles with political and economical systems do not lie
necessarily in the systems per se, but in people. As long as people
refuse to look into their inner dark areas, to consider their evil
within, so to speak, nothing will change. We have come to a point when
we're talking about the benefits of nanotechnology, artifical
intelligence, robotics and free energy, and at the same time
threathening to use that knowledge to attempt to destroy the world. It's
insane, and it's because people usually don't look (and take a part of
the responsibility) for the contradiction.
My 1992 white paper
<http://mysite.verizon.net/res10kjcq/ota/others-papers/NetAssetTax_Bowery.txt> introduces
an early version of the idea. The impetus for it came from my work to
privatize government technology development programs in space
<http://www.oocities.com/jim_bowery/testimny.htm> and energy
<http://www.oocities.com/jim_bowery/BussardsLetter.html>.
Charles Murray of the CATO Institute later wrote a book on an idea
related to the citizen's dividend
<http://www.aei.org/press/society-and-culture/poverty/in-our-hands-press/>.
And, yes, this problem has been known well over a century.
On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
noone noone <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I am all for vertical agriculture, but I am totally opposed to
a global basic income. I do not support socialism or communism.
Socialism, communism and capitalism are all based on ordinary
people trading labor for money. In a few decades human labor will
be worth nothing. All economic systems will be obsolete.
See:
http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/
With cold fusion technology, the price of everything will go
down. Even a job at McDonalds will be capable of paying for a
nice house, nice cars, etc.
Even today we have automobiles capable of driving in California
traffic. That is a more difficult task than any job at McDonald's.
It is just a matter of time before all jobs such as this will be
done by robots. A robot the replaces a person (or the entire
staff) will cost McDonald's a few thousand dollars a year. you
cannot buy a nice house were nice cars with that kind of money.
The most difficult job at McDonald's is human language: cashiers
have to understand what the customers are ordering. Cashiers can
easily be replaced today by having most customers enter the order
by touchscreens, and pay with credit cards. This would be like the
self checkout lines at grocery stores. In the near future,
computers will understand speech well enough to take verbal orders.
McDonald's has not installed touchscreen ordering devices for the
same reason the US automobile industry did not install robots in
the 1960s. The government and labor organizations are putting
pressure on McDonald's not to automate. McDonald's is one of the
biggest employers in the US. Walmart is another huge employer that
could easily replace much of its staff with robots. I'm sure that
it will within 20 years. Robots capable of stocking shelves are
already available. At present people are cheaper for an
environment such as a Walmart store, but people are not becoming
twice as fast and far cheaper every few years. At places like
Amazon.com, and the newest university libraries that still handle
paper books, robots do the inventory work.
- Jed
