The Other Side of Education

Our readers know that tosoc.org does not generally use typical left-wing terminology like "class warfare." We think many of these terms give the wrong impression. Yes, there is a lot of conflict, but it is not "warfare." Very little of it falls into a true life-or-death category. We think it is unfortunate that the natural language of conflict tends to come from our "war" language. We think that can lead to unnecessarily violent thinking and then to unnecessarily violent acts. Even worse, it can lead us to make mistakes. We should be careful how we say things and how we use our internal language to think about things. That is why tosoc.org tries not to use war language for economic and social topics.

Please keep this in mind when we say that the basic tool in conflict is denial of resources. When we talk about putting "the squeeze" on one another, that is what we mean. That is, getting between people and what they need so you can pressure them to do what you want. From an economic standpoint, this means using economic fear. Or using the threat of poverty. Austerity.

At our current worldwide technical level, for example, we could eliminate malnutrition. Enough food could be grown and the distribution systems could be constructed to feed everyone adequately. We can no longer blame mass starvation on natural disaster, lack of transportation, or just ignorance. It is no longer an unfortunate event. It is a choice. In fact, the vast majority of economic disasters today are man-made. They are "denial-of-resources" attacks.

That topic deserves a lot of work by itself, but here it is a lengthy prologue to our comments on education. Looking at it from The Other Side, the U.S. educational system is rife top to bottom with economic fear and denial of resources. Here are some hypothetical points of view to describe the current system.

Child: You have to go to school to pass the tests to get a degree to get a job to make enough money so you can live.

Parent: You have to send your kids to school to have time during the day to work at a job to make enough money so you can support your family.

Ambition: You have to make the best grades to show yourself superior to go to the best college to get the best degree to get the best job to earn the most money to make the best living.

Ambition: You have to get the best job to make the most money to buy the best home to get in the best school district to give your kids the best chances to make the best grades to ... (And so on. See Ambition above.)

School to Child: We stand between you and the job market.

School to Parent: We stand between you and your ability to work.

School to Ambition: We stand between you and success.

Grading Curve to Children: Most of you are second-rate. Or possibly, most of you are losers.

Rich: I am safe.

The basic lessons taught by our school systems have nothing to do with what most people think of as education. The basic lessons are about the fact that the educational system is given the power to assign the young to their places in society, meaning that educational opportunities and resources are distributed according to how well a child does in school, among other things. Except for the rich, of course.

Tosoc.org has a different vision of education. We would rather see a system in which the young actively seek their places in society rather than be assigned to them. We think that schools teach a certain passivity. We also think that the methods used to place students are somewhat artificial and unrealistic. Schools train students to be average students for the most part, not active citizens.

Tosoc.org's vision of education starts with these new hypothetical views.

Child: I am safe.

Parent: I am safe.

Teacher: I am safe.

Rich: I am safe.

This looks to us like the only equality that really matters.

When tosoc.org hears the word "competition," our natural reaction is "markets." Note however that a market is completely different from the idea of competition in nature. A market is a human social phenomenon in which humans can compete without destroying one another. A market is a place where humans can both compete and cooperate. In fact, as soon as humans stop cooperating and start destroying one another, there is no market.

If human competition best takes place in the context of markets, tosoc.org asks whether competition and education best go together, too. If so, then our relatively monolithic educational system is set up the wrong way even in its own terms. If we really want competitive education, then the educational system needs to be organized into a market (or markets). Let the markets place young people based on their performance in free markets, not based on distorted grades, transcripts, and standardized test scores imposed on a distorted market by a monolithic authority.

Tosoc.org however does not believe that education and competition fit together very well. Schools should not teach economic fear or use denial of basic resources for socialization, or justify them as tools that students can learn to use against other people.

In essence we believe that education and competitive social placement should be separate. The first lesson we would teach the young is that their basic needs will be met, but that they should want and work for more than that. Competition in human society should not be a life-or-death issue. Competition should begin at the next level above survival. The competition should be about how far the young can improve themselves and others and about how far they can improve not just their own lives, but also the lives of others.

Education is self-improvement. Thus it is a tool that is used in the competition. But getting an education should not itself be competitive. Making education competitive means that it becomes a resource that can be denied and it will be denied as a result of the conflicts that arise out of the competition. That is how the current educational system works.

Without trying to lay everything out at once, tosoc.org would take the competition out of schools. The primary purpose of schools would be to teach students about human competition and cooperation. (In other words, about free markets and the less-desirable alternatives.) If students understand where human competition fits and how it works hand-in-hand with cooperation, it should be obvioius to them why they need to educate themselves. Their schools are also there to help them accomplish that.

Tosoc.org would move the competition between the young out of schools and into markets. We are already promoting the idea of multiple exclusive currencies and markets, so it is not a stretch to imagine currencies and markets for the young. These markets would be designed to encourage and help students actively find their own places among their peers. The goal is that they will ultimately find their places in the broader society of adults.

Human society should not be a totally dog-eat-dog environment. We need competition to inspire us but we also need safety and cooperation to avoid the reinstitution of slavery and genocide. We need to be educated well enough to understand competition and cooperation. Tosoc.org thinks that the current educational system is really about competition and the use of economic fear in human conflicts. If we could change the system, we would make the educational system just about education and self-improvement, and move the competition into markets. A free market is the best tool to use to get the proper mix of cooperation and competition out of human beings.

The way capitalism should be.

Socialism for the socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.

TheOtherSideOfCapitalism (admin@tosoc.org)

Copyright © 2013 TheOtherSideOfCapitalism

-->

Tosoc Update

Sorry, we were not able to generate a regular blog post over the U.S. Memorial Day weekend, so here is a quick update.

 We are working on "The Other Side of Education" for our next blog post.

 As for current events, we see that a book titled "Why We Should Leave the Euro" by economics professor Joao Ferreira do Amaral is a best-seller in Portugal. (Sorry, we are not able to internationalize the spelling of his name correctly.) No wonder it is a best-seller. Experience is not showing that austerity measures are working very well as a way to economic recovery in Portugal.

The Other Side of Healthcare

Tosoc.org sidesteps all the Social Security and Medicare debates because we recommend that everyone's basic needs be taken care of and accounted for. Part of the problem in fact is that these are special programs for favored sub-populations rather than general programs to care for all the people. They are discriminatory by design and therefore are fundamentally broken. That explains why they keep failing and why we have to keep fixing them.

There will be no need for Social Security and Medicare in tosoc.org's vision of the future because everyone will get those benefits anyway. There will be no "work age" or "retirement age" because people will be encouraged and led to do what they can do no matter what their age. It seems likely that mental inactivity and physical inactivity lead to premature aging and death anyway, so we want to discourage the whole concept of retirement in the sense that people become inactive "lotus-eaters" when they retire.

With regard to healthcare alone, we can remove a lot of waste from the system by the use of exclusive currencies. Neither Medicare nor health insurance will be necessary any longer because everyone will be taken care of. By one mechanism or another, everyone will have enough internal money to pay for their healthcare.

In tosoc.org's view, health insurance – any health insurance – is poorly structured. For comparison, auto insurance is about accidents, but health insurance is about certainties. Individuals may or may not have auto accidents, and the accidents may be more or less severe. There is a lot of chance involved.

In contrast, it is certain that the health of every individual will decline over time, ending in death. Therefore "health insurance" is not really insurance, it is an attempt to pre-pay for the certainty of ever poorer health with age. This distorts the healthcare market because pay and fulfillment do not occur at the same time. That is the basic problem with the American healthcare market. Healthcare providers know how much is already "saved up" to pay them, so they have a negotiating advantage at the time of delivery. They charge enough to use up the "savings" and then charge a little more. Thus no matter how much we save for healthcare, we will always have to spend more than we save. This is the reason why healthcare costs keep going up.

Instead tosoc.org wants the people themselves to pay for their healthcare at the time of delivery. They will have enough money because their healthcare will be paid for in an internal currency. Even so, people will be more careful about what they buy when the money comes out of their account. It is money that they might otherwise spend on something else.

Under the tosoc.org system, doctors and hospitals will once again be directly responsible to their patients. Furthermore, they will not have to waste time dealing with insurance bureaucracies.

Another important element is time for the people to take a greater role in managing their own healtcare costs. This is related to what we already suggested in Life on The Other Side, that the people would be given more time to participate in the political process. Regarding healthcare, the people would be given time and help to deal with the healthcare market. The help is as important as the time, because many people will need help to decode their healthcare bills.

Finally, the poor will not have to compete directly with the rich for healthcare because they will be in different markets. The rich can fend for themselves in the external, international markets. Government agents for the internal markets will also buy healthcare resources in the international markets, but in very large quantities and with collective purchasing power. They will be able to provide the most healthcare possible for the internal markets and at the lowest price.

Healthcare providers themselves will have to deal with the restrictions of exclusive currencies. They need to understand that from the start. Let us take the case of doctors, for example. Right now there are government programs to pay for medical educations in return for promises to practice in underserved areas. These programs do not work very well because it is hard to enforce the promises and the doctors are paid in international dollars.

These programs would be easier to enforce if doctors were paid only in an internal currency. Their ability to bypass the system would be reduced because they could not move their internal money into any other market. Exclusive multiple currencies prevents it.

In their favor, however, and somewhat in compensation, doctors would also graduate from medical school without enormous debts. Their educations would be paid for with an internal currency from their own educational funds. Provision for physician training would be part of the mandate of government agent buyers of healthcare resources. Internal-market medical schools would also be built and run, so it should be possible to train more doctors than the current system.

Internal-market hospitals would be funded the same way.

The buying power of almost an entire nation will be able to get much better deals for healthcare goods and services than we poor individuals, each working alone. Those savings will be passed on to us in the translation between the external currency and our internal currencies. The distribution of the internal currencies will be made in a way so that everyone has enough to pay for their own healthcare.

This is why we see the Affordable Care Act (the ACA, also known as ObamaCare) as doomed to failure from the start. (Note that we could only explain this after an introduction to our idea of The Other Side of Healthcare.) The provisions of the ACA will fail because they are chained by the single U.S. currency. The single currency makes the ACA a servant of the rich, not the poor, with new taxes that will make us poorer. Without collective purchasing power to get the best prices and without currency separation to pass the discounts on to the poor, the result will ultimately be less healthcare for the poor and ongoing exposure to business cycle extortion. The ACA sets up one giant hostage-taking organization (i.e., holding our healthcare hostage) that will be used to squeeze ever more money out of the government and the poor to the benefit of the rich.

It is time we understood that the concept of health insurance is fundamentally flawed. It distorts the healthcare market and encourages healthcare cost inflation. Instead we need multiple exclusive currencies and markets so that healthcare can be purchased in bulk for the many and the savings passed on to the poor through the distribution of internal currencies. Wasteful healthcare bureaucracies will no longer be needed. Those personnel can be transferred to new bureaucracies for large-scale healthcare purchasing and for helping the poor keep from being cheated on their healtcare bills (patient advocacy).

Doctors and hospitals will be directly responsible to their patients because those are the ones who will pay them. They will also be able to spend more time on healthcare because they will no longer serve giant bureaucracies.

This cannot happen without multiple exclusive currencies and markets because under one currency, the poor will always be competing directly with the rich for healthcare. It is time to "level the playing field" and make the rich compete against the collective poor.

The way capitalism should be.

Socialism for the socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.

TheOtherSideOfCapitalism (admin@tosoc.org)

Copyright © 2013 TheOtherSideOfCapitalism

Life on The Other Side

The first step on the way to The Other Side is to recognize that we are not wealthy. Americans buy into the idea that we are rich. We delude ourselves. The nation is rich. We are poor (most of us).

We are poor because we cannot defend our wealth. Each financial crisis shows how easy it is to take our wealth from us. Also, the decline of the fortunes of the middle class shows that the system is becoming more and more unbalanced.

Perhaps most Americans will find this concept difficult because they have bought into the mythology of wealthy Americans instead of understanding that we have a wealthy America and mostly poor Americans. It has become a matter of pride.

Another part of the problem is that so far, we are obviously wealthy compared to citizens of poverty-stricken states. Many of us look down our noses at impoverished people around the world and the pleas for charity. Some of us tell ourselves how great we are compared to them. Others just feel lucky.

However, the real meaning of it is that the American dream has failed miserably. After World War II, the American economy was something like 50% of the world economy. Most Americans naturally expected that the benefits of freedom, democracy, and capitalism would quickly spread around the world. They expected that the world would become more like America. Also, most Americans expected that they and their children would continue to gain wealth and leisure.

Instead America is becoming more like the rest of the world. Today the American economy is something like 25% of the world economy. Most of the nations that were poverty-stricken in 1945 are still poverty-stricken. The rich nations got richer and most of the poor nations went nowhere. Also, employees are expected to do more work for the same amount of pay. See The 24/7 Worker on tosoc.org. Economic downturns are so great for rich people that perhaps they want to keep the economy turned down. Most Americans have had to trade leisure for work in order to maintain their incomes.

As a side-effect, Americans have less time to participate in politics. We are slowly being disenfranchised because the more we work, the less time we have to learn about political candidates and political processes. It is hard for some of us to find time to vote at all, much less know anything about who we are voting for.

The results are elections like the 2012 presidential election. The pundits knew from the beginning that Mitt Romney would be the Republican candidate because he had pre-positioned his political organizations in all fifty states. It gave him a tremendous advantage. No other candidate was wealthy enough to do that, so to a great extent, Mr Romney bought the Republican nomination.

The idea is that life on The Other Side would be quite different. Political participation would be encouraged. More important, most everyone would have more time and resources to make their choices. That is because most workers would be in national labor union organizations, and political participation by the workers would be one of the goals of those organizations.

The national labor unions would also make sure that everyone has a job. In return for our economic security, we all need to participate in the markets. Jobs will look different, however, because now the issue is not so much production, but matching buyers and sellers. These are both jobs, in a sense, and each person will have two jobs. One as an individual buyer and the other as an individual seller.

Second, as said above, life on The Other Side would be economically secure. Most everyone would participate in one internal market or another. National buyers would buy everything needed in the internal markets. As collective buyers rather than individuals, they would have the clout to get the best deals from both the internal and external markets.

Also, since the rich would use a different currency than the rest of us, comparisons of wealth in money terms would become meaningless. It would be easier to work on the gap between the rich and the poor if we were not tied to a single currency.

Third, there would be national sellers of goods and services. As collective rather than individual sellers, they would have the clout to get the best prices possible for our labor and the things we produce in the internal and external markets. They would contract with our labor unions to provide labor that they can sell.

This may seem confusing because how can our buyers get the best deals from us as producers, and at the same time, our sellers get the best deals from us as consumers? Is it not true that any gains we might have as producers are lost to us as consumers? The answer is that this view is an illusion caused by our simplifying language. After all, if you think about it, that is what we already do now. Each of us is a seller into the same markets that we buy from.

The trick is this. As barbers, we sell lots of haircuts to grocers, but we only need relatively few groceries ourselves. As grocers, we sell lots of groceries to barbers, but we only need a few haircuts ourselves. That is, individuals generally produce more than they consume. The purpose of the market is simply to adjust prices to reflect this underlying truth. In a reasonable market, neither discounts to barbers nor discounts to grocers grow so great as to impoverish either barbers or grocers.

Finally, workers in the U.S. have more in common with workers in other countries than either has in common with the international rich. The idea is that there will actually be closer relations with foreign workers on The Other Side than there is today. The nation is important primarily because the national government has the legal right to implement our proposals in its geographical area. Our national buyers and sellers will not be limited within our national borders, however. The goal is not some kind of national socialism with its attendant evils, but a regulated international capitalism. Their rich people will not be allowed to raid our wealth and our rich people will not be allowed to raid their wealth.

In these short blog posts, it is not possible to explain the entire vision at once, but we hope that you now understand that tosoc.org's vision is actually about greater cooperation among the workers of the world than there is today. To get there, we have to stop the raiding of the wealth of the nations by the international rich. Basic economic security must be seen as a right. After that, the multiple exclusive markets and the national buyers, sellers, and unions come into play. In America, that process can only begin when we stop seeing ourselves as wealthy and as some sort of auxilliaries to the international rich. We need to know that we are poor and that we have to work together to protect ourselves from the rich.

The way capitalism should be.

Socialism for the socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.

TheOtherSideOfCapitalism (admin@tosoc.org)

Copyright © 2013 TheOtherSideOfCapitalism

Leaders Go First

All leaders betray their people in one way or another. This is a simple fact of life that we must keep in mind when we talk about politics. Both history and current events demonstrate this. It is why we should never be starry-eyed about politicians. Doing so is a departure from reality, and reality always returns to us no matter how far we stray. The farther we move away from reality, the more unpleasant reality usually is when it reasserts itself.

Recently we read that some members of the U.S. Congress were talking about exempting themselves and federal employees from the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, a.k.a. Obamacare). That came as a surprise to tosoc.org because we thought that the ACA had already created a three-tier system, with federal politicians and employees enjoying the best healthcare, union members getting second best, and the rest of us getting the leavings. We apologize if we were mistaken. We also want to point out that these misunderstandings happen when "laws" become 2000+ page tomes that nobody actually reads until a decision has to be made.

This illustrates why we believe in the principle that "leaders go first." Politicians and bureaucrats are all too prone to grant themselves exemptions from unpleasant provisions that they want to impose on the rest of us.

It would be best to make them obey their proposed laws first, even before the laws apply to any of the rest of us. Societal leaders should have to lead from the front.

However, since they are the lawmakers and regulators, it is hard see how to use laws and regulations against their will. To align their loyalties with the interests of their people, they would have to agree to limit themselves. At the same time their instincts are about increasing their own power. It seems it would take very unusual circumstances to establish a serious "leaders go first" system using laws and regulations.

It seems more likely that we could arrange an alignment of financial interests.

That is why one of tosoc.org's proposals for multiple exclusive currencies and markets requires politicians and bureaucrats to use and own only an internal currency, or assets denominated in that currency. It is a powerful way to keep them interested in the value of that currency. If they want to be "international," so to speak, let them choose another career path. On the other hand, if they want to lead our nation, then let them link their financial futures with ours.

In this case, politicians and bureaucrats would only have to give up the possibility of abandoning the U.S. for greater wealth elsewhere. Since most of them so far want to stay in the U.S. anyway, it would not be much of a loss.

In return they would gain more stable wealth. Being tied to the international dollar is a problem for them, too.

Finally, it provides them with greater scope to do their own jobs and increases their areas of responsibility. Government implementation of tosoc.org's plans would require a great increase in laws, regulations, personnel, and equipment. It would be a trade off with advantages for both sides, and that is the kind of change that can work.

It would be nice if people in general would act in the general interest rather than their own, but often they will not and do not. It just does not work to try to force them to act against their own interests. Like trusting politicians, that is also a way to lose touch with reality.

Far better to work in everyone's interests, and that is what tosoc.org's proposals are designed to do. There is a lot to be done to create internal currencies and markets, and some of that work is just the thing for the government to carry out. For example, a whole new banking system (the internal one) will have to be created. These are things that politicians and bureaucrats should be happy to get into, and at the same time, they will be helping their own people.

The way capitalism should be.

Socialism for the socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.

TheOtherSideOfCapitalism (admin@tosoc.org)

Copyright © 2013 TheOtherSideOfCapitalism

Moving to the Other Side

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

Vote for The Other Side!

At the risk of inducing election fatigue already, we at tosoc.org believe it is time to start our political campaign for change. If you are not sure where we stand, just read our other blog posts to get started.

Here is our facetious campaign slogan – with a grain of truth:

Vote yourself some money this time! Vote for The Other Side!

Here is our draft platform. We are still working on it.  Here are four planks that we hope you find interesting.

1. We need a national lottery run by the IRS. This will be a numbers system based on taxpayer Social Security numbers. Enter the lottery by checking a box on your tax return. What an incentive to do your taxes! One million dollar prize, 1,000 winners per month, costing twelve billion dollars a year.  Pocket change for the U.S. Government and probably the spending would be made up just by people's increased interest in doing their taxes (to enter the lottery). The rules can be adjusted in many ways, such as excluding corporations and the rich. Another advantage – it makes the IRS more popular.
2. We need a national repository of American lives. So many Americans are marginalized and simply forgotten when they are gone. As a way to improve our national history, every American should have the opportunity to deposit writings and record audio, visual, and/or audiovisual statements in an official permanent record of Americans; our thoughts, comments, and opinions.
3. We need a national fiberoptic superhighway for communications. Every American should have access to high-speed communications. It will also be important in support of multiple exclusive currencies and their markets.
4. We need multiple exclusive currencies and their markets, of course. This is what tosoc.org has been saying all along.

For now we are simply listing these planks without a great deal of explanation. The 2014/2016 general election campaigns are far enough away that all we are really doing is expressing intent, anyway.

Until the next election cycle really begins, let us simply present some of our more general viewpoints and visions of the future.

Tosoc.org is about general prosperity and abundance. We see a worldwide trend today toward general poverty, scarcity, and exploitation. We see a trend today toward centralization of wealth – wealth for the few and "austerity" for the many. If this trend continues, then it seems that the worldwide vision governing our future is that the rich shall inherit the earth.

In a sense we are seeing the end of the American Dream.

Before there was a United States, there were educated and industrious Europeans who were dissatisfied with their own cultures. When the new frontiers opened up, they were willing to risk their lives to get away, be free, and direct their own destinies. For many generations they struggled and grew and spread throughout the new lands. They formed their own nations and their economies grew again with the industrial revolutions.

This frontier mentality is the basis of the American Dream of rugged individualism, constant growth, and ever more new lands to conquer – limitless resources. Liberty, individual rights, democracy, and equality before the law.

Now all the land on earth is occupied. All the resources are under someone's control. There are no more enormous technological breakthroughs, just a filling in of gaps. For a variety of reasons, outer space has turned out to be a boundary, not a frontier. The original American Dream is gone.

The only frontiers left are social. We see it in the rise of social media as the darlings of business investment. We see it in the aims of radical fundamentalists who view the people of the United States as a frontier of their religion, a place to be invaded and conquered. Finally, we see it in the growing disparity between rich and poor.

The old social contracts of the frontier society are going away. The struggle is over what will replace them.

Recall that just because some are capitalists does not mean their visions of the future contain capitalism. In the same way, just because some are populists or democrats or republicans does not mean that their visions of the future are about social justice, democracy, or even representative government. The question is which form of social organization suits humans on an earth with no more physical frontiers.

Different people will come to different conclusions, and that is just as true of the rich as anyone else. The historical record of bounded civilizations, however, points to a "Pharaoh future." According to legend, Joseph made all the people of Egypt slaves to Pharaoh in a classic economic squeeze play. In the fat years, he took ten percent of the produce of the people and stored it away. When the business cycle turned, the Great Famine came, and the people were starving. Joseph then used extortion. He made the people pay for the food that they themselves had produced in the fat years. He first took their money, then their animals, then their land, and finally their freedom.

This same sort of thing has been done in many times and places and it still goes on today. Tosoc.org has already described the business cycle as the "extortion cycle." We have already pointed out that the Great Recession has been used as an opportunity by the banks to extort enormous debt out of the U.S. government. They did it by holding the people hostage using the declining economy and the "credit freeze."

The rich have not created a Pharaoh and we are not slaves. However, it is also not clear that the rich will restrain themselves if these opportunities arise. That is not a chance that we should take.

If your vision of the future like ours is of a prosperous, bright, and industrious people living in peace rather than of dull-witted slaves of the rich fighting to survive at the subsistence level, then there are certain principles we all need to keep in mind.

First, we should not work to get rid of capitalism. Instead we want to preserve it within a system that is strong enough to support it. Our current system is failing to do that and capitalism is slipping away from us. Tosoc.org's new slogan is "Capitalism as it should be."

Second, we are not working to get rid of the rich. In fact, we want them to get richer. The difference is that we do not want them to get richer at the expense of the rest of us. This has become a lot more difficult now we have reached the limits of our physical frontiers. We all share in the pie, but if the pie is not growing, the only way the rich can grow their wealth is to take it away from the poor. The question is how to keep this from happening.

Third, we must abandon our Frontier Society ways of thinking. We have populated the earth. We see the limits of our resources. We know that there are limits to growth. It is time to modify capitalism so that it is not so dependent on overall growth. Our frontiers are social and our major gains will now be in the improvement of the human race.

Mainly, we need to acknowledge that society has the power of eminent domain over all major physical resources. This is necessary because both insiders and outsiders will take advantage of openness if they can. (We in the U.S. tend not to think about this because in general, we have so far been the outsiders taking advantage.)

There have been poor nations where the people did not really have enough to eat, yet the crops they raised were exported to earn hard currency – for the rich. Sometimes the rich have re-invested in their own societies, sometimes not. The point is that this should not be solely the decision of the "owners." Those who labor should also have a stake in what they do, and should be able to gain wealth from their work. Simply being allowed to survive at a subsistence level is not enough.

As best we can, we need to make sure that everyone in the world can accumulate wealth from their labor because what we allow to be done to the poorest will surely be done to us.

Fourth, some thoughts about population. On the one hand, tosoc.org believes that the universe would be meaningless without a mind to see it. In a way, each mind is a universe itself because it can see and appreciate the universe around it. In that sense, the more minds there are, the more intelligence there is, and the greater and more meaningful the universe is.

On the other hand, we wonder how populous the earth should be. Right now a lot of human minds are dulled and damaged by poverty and subsistence living. It is a painful yet valid question to ask whether it is better to have trillions of "extra" minds damaged by poverty or trillions fewer minds so that the remainder can be brighter, better-educated, and economically secure. We do not have an answer to that question.

We can predict one outcome of low growth, however. If growth becomes zero because we reach the true boundaries of the earth's resources, then depopulation is one way to simulate physical growth. The Black Plague of Europe was a horror but can also be interpreted as an economic boon for the survivors. The rich had to bid higher for the labor of the survivors.

This simply illustrates how important the question of the earth's population is. We can now control the earth's population without horrors, but the morality of it will always be ambiguous. Furthermore, we need economic changes to deal with the consequences. Consider the effects of the Baby Boom generation on U.S. economics.

It has been perfectly obvious for decades that the retirement of the Baby Boomers was going to be a problem for the U.S. economy and its social programs. As the Baby Boomers retire, they will be net sellers of assets, hammering the markets when they are down and inhibiting growth when they recover. Government income through taxes will decrease and no one knows who will take up the slack.

Furthermore, the labor force will decline at the very time that the Baby Boomers will need increased services. For example, who will replace the Baby Boomer doctors? It seems that fewer and fewer doctors will be working at the very time that the Baby Boomers will grow older and need more health care.

It is silly to envy the Baby Boomers with respect to retirement. They have paid higher Social Security taxes than their parents, then had their taxes raised again to pay for the "Social Security Trust Fund." Then they will have to work more years and have to pay more taxes a third time. Except for the rich, the Baby Boomers will never be able to retire like their parents did. In a way, the Baby Boomers will have to pay for their retirement three times. Once for their parents (Social Security is "pay-as-you-go.") A second time for the "Trust Fund." And a third time when they work more years than their parents did before retiring.

At tosoc.org, we see the Great Recession in some ways as an opening event in the economic effects of the coming retirement of the Baby Boomers. It will take decades  for this "lump in the snake" of the demographic charts to work itself out. This is yet another reason to strengthen capitalism so it can survive.

If your vision of the future is of a prosperous, happy, democratic people rather than desperate, subsistence-level, Pharaonic slaves, then we need to make some changes. Some of these changes are in ourselves. We need to care about others and care about the future, meaning that we cannot maintain frontier mentalities that no longer apply to the real world and we must be very smart and diligent about how we work for the future.

We must deny resources to psychopaths and sociopaths who would be our slavemasters. We must strengthen capitalism against its own self-destructive tendencies.

Naturally, as tosoc.org has been recommending all along, multiple exclusive currencies and markets is one of the tools we should use to strengthen our capitalist system.

First, society acts through government. The only way we know to keep the international rich from running the government for their own benefit is to align the economic interests of government officials with the economic interests of the poor. That is, government officials will only be allowed to gain wealth in internal currencies that they cannot use to escape the effects of their own policies. Their economic fate is bound up with that of the nation they claim to serve.

Second, we cannot allow the rich to trap us in another squeeze play. There should be internal banks and external banks, the one using the internal currency and the other using the external currency. If the external banks want us to save them, we can simply print the external currency to build up their reserves. The people of the U.S. cannot be held hostage and there will be no need to increase public debt. The value of the internal currency will only be loosely related to the value of the external currency because the purpose of the internal currency will be to represent and preserve national wealth without regard to the safety of the international rich or the national debt to international sovereigns.

Third, the division into internal and external currencies automatically gives us collective controls over how much of our national resources are used to enrich the external rich and other nations rather than our own people. "Free trade" is not free for the poor and if they can the rich will use it to take even more from the poor, as has happened already in Greece and Cyprus.

Our final frontiers are social frontiers. We need social solutions for our problems rather than systems and solutions that worked (at least as far they actually worked) for our society based on physical frontiers. The fact that our physical frontiers are now essentially closed should suggest to us that we need to re-think those solutions. The evidence suggests that the old economic solutions do not work any more. We need new solutions based on social principles, and that is what tosoc.org is trying to provide. Vote for us! Vote for The Other Side!

The way capitalism should be.

Socialism for the socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.

TheOtherSideOfCapitalism (admin@tosoc.org)

Copyright © 2013 TheOtherSideOfCapitalism