After reading the previous postings on The Other Side of
Capitalism, perhaps you more or less agree with the points we made.
Perhaps you are asking yourself what comes next. Let us do that.
Rather than listing directives toward a specific plan right now, this
will be more of a discussion. It is time for you to engage your minds
in thinking about the future and its possibilities. Be like the rich
and spend some time working on your visions of our collective future.
Here are some thoughts that may help.
Most important, the goals must be "good." We must spend
our time and resources as best we can toward ends that expand human
minds, encourage everyone to improve themselves, and encourage
everyone to participate freely in the markets, as both consumers and
producers. We must deny our time and resources to ends that diminish,
dominate, and exploit others. If you are someone who seeks to
dominate others, then you are by nature an opponent of The Other Side
of Capitalism.
While we are imagining new futures, however, we should remain
grounded in reality. It is so easy to lose touch with reality. Great
wealth can even amplify the problem because people can only indulge
their delusions until the money runs out. Rich people can indulge
their delusions for a long time.
To keep touch with reality, we must work with people the way they
are, not as we wish them to be. Communism failed in part because it
had a rigid but simplistic and incorrect view of human nature. Since
"re-education" does not really work, in many cases
communist policy devolved into simply isolating or killing those who
did not "think right." North Korea is still in this phase
now with its gulags, starvation, and even outright killings. After
the historical evidence of the last hundred years, those who are
still communist today are holdouts from reality. Communism does not
work. Give it up and join the other side of capitalism.
The reality is that to get what we want, we work and get paid, and
we want an environment in which we can do that. Then we spend our pay
in markets that offer what we want.
The key individual determinant in this process is whether
individuals can earn more than they spend. Whether they can produce
more than they consume.
Some produce nothing at all. Others produce some, but not enough
to support themselves. Still others produce enough, but not much
extra. Those who have a lot of economic strength produce a lot of
extra wealth, over and above the amount they need to support
themselves.
It is only natural that energetic and productive people control
more resources than those with less economic power. That does not
mean that they should control all resources, however. History shows
that freedom for the few and slavery for the many, total wealth for
the rich and only subsistence at best for the rest, make weak and
poor societies.
The key point about markets is that individuals have to have
wealth to participate in either the buying or the selling.
Subsistence dwellers cannot participate. Shortsighted leaders make
policies that drive people out of the markets, often under the
mistaken impression that they are gaining wealth. They need to change
their thinking. The size, strength, and energy of their free markets
is their wealth. Damaging their markets to try to make
themselves richer or in some perverse fantasy of dominating others
simply damages themselves.
This is a greater danger if a society feels that it has peaked and
that the future at best will only equal the past. If we reach a
summit, the only way forward is down, and perversely our leaders will
be just as energetic taking us down as previous leaders led us up. It
is not clear that we are in this position today, but there are signs.
The journalist Tom Brokaw famously memorialized "The Greatest
Generation," those who lived through the Great Depression and
then "won World War II." It makes for great publicity and
politics, but in reality Mr Brokaw set off a destructive bomb in
American psychology If there really was a "Greatest
Generation," then the rest of us are doomed to mediocrity and
decline.
If you are prone to feeling that the future will be worse than the
past, then you should work to get over this "decline-and-fall"
mentality. It is not helpful. We should look and walk forward into
the future. We will only stumble if we look backward and walk
backward. It is wise to learn from the past, but not to invest in it.
So let us forget about "greatest" generations and other
"Golden Age"-style mythologies. Let us get to work on the
future.
Earlier we were making the point that it is in our leaders'
interests to seed the public with wealth and encourage market
participation. U.S. leaders have done that more than others around
the world. We think that is the main reason for the enormous wealth
in the U.S.
Even individuals who consume more than they produce can help
energize the markets. Therefore it is wise to subsidize them rather
than complain about them. We should not ruin them or drive them into
ruinous debt. We should train them as best we can to improve their
skills and increase their market participation.
To some extent we already do this in the U.S. with a variety of
programs including food stamps and student loans. However, these
policies are not effective enough because they are bound up in
archaic prejudices, concepts, and laws. Food stamps have a slight
advantage over student loans because they are grants rather than
loans and in some senses they are a different currency from the
dollar.
Student loans are worse than food stamps because they are
denominated in an international currency and, because of politics,
there is no escaping them. Bankruptcy will not save the borrower from
unreasonable amounts of student loan debt. That is not to say that it
will be impossible for borrowers to get out from under impossible
levels of student loans, but that it will be a political decision,
not an economic one. This raises the spectre of a serious movement
toward a political economy rather than a capitalist one in the U.S.,
one in which individuals must submit to domination by political
patrons in order to survive. Tosoc.org has already commented on the
folly of this path.
Despite their faults, these programs show the way. Food stamps in
particular could be turned into an internal, exclusive currency, and
the program could be expanded to include most of the people
(excluding the rich). This might be the first logical step toward our
goals.
There are several other logical steps we might take. Let us list a
few here.
Another logical step might be to create a political movement. It
is probably worthwhile to start down this path, but it should be done
carefully. It would be very easy to overpromise and then fail the
people. It will take a lot of political capital to make these
changes and we cannot afford to waste any.
Third, it might be possible to merge with an existing party. This would be a fast-track to political
influence and should be seriously considered.
Finally, it might be better to demonstrate results in a smaller
venue first. There are many ways to accomplish this.
Perhaps a smaller nation than the U.S. would try it. We have
already suggested that a possible way out of Greece's economic
problems would be to bring back the drachma as an exclusive internal
currency. The same is true of Cyprus, but there are other nations
such as Venezuela or Argentina that might benefit from multiple
exclusive currencies and markets.
U.S. states, individually or in groups, could try the tosoc.org
ideas, too. This would require some national support because the U.S.
Congress regulates the currency. There may be a precedent in that
U.S. food stamps are already distributed by the states and to some
extent the states administer them.
Alternatively, multiple exclusive currencies and markets might be
tried first by private business. There are already multiple
electronic or digital "currencies" being tried online, such
as bitcoin. Right now the volume of transactions is low so the
regulatory interest is also low. It is not clear how these will be
received by Congress if large numbers of people start to live by
them. Even so, there is a precedent in the U.S. for corporations
providing a living for individuals that is outside the
dollar-denominated markets, so the possibility of corporate
sponsorship for tosoc.org's ideas is possible.
We expect that it would take a major corporation to attempt it,
perhaps even multiple major corporations working together with
multiple retailers. The idea is that seigniorage would make the
system profitable for the corporations and maintain corporate
interest. With enough employee producer-consumers and their
dependents in these markets, it seems likely that the markets would
be large enough to give these ideas a try.
We suggest that financial firms, including insurance companies,
consider organizing such a trial. These companies might find it
easier than other types of businesses because the business of these
companies is money and also participation in the businesses of other
companies. Organizing other businesses around new currencies and
markets seems like a natural extension of their existing work.
There are many ways that the ideas presented by tosoc.org could be
put into practice, both public and private. We hope that this
discussion has inspired readers to have their own ideas and think of
their own possibilities. Done properly and well, we believe that
these concepts will prove to be a benefit to society, so we are out
to recruit as much help as we can get.
TheOtherSideOfCapitalism
(admin@tosoc.org)
The way capitalism should be.
Socialism
for the socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.
Copyright
© 2013 TheOtherSideOfCapitalism
