Capitalism’s fundamental flaw is that it exploits and feeds people’s greed. It requires an external system of regulation to ensure that the vast majority of people aren’t left with so little that murdering the people responsible for their suffering doesn’t seem like a better option than continuing in the system.
One could envision a system that uses mutually aligned incentives to ensure that when you succeed, we all do better, and when I succeed, we all do better. What does that system look like? It looks like a flattened hierarchy, where it is practically impossible for one person to accumulate enough wealth to influence national politics. I think it likely looks like state that guarantees healthcare, education, food, privacy, housing, and a job if you want it. Why does it look like that, because all of those things are neccesary to a happy, fulfilled, and productive life. If you have more people optimally outputting, your economy has strength and resiliency. With a modicome of smart public investment, you can fiscally guarentee that in perpetuity. In order to achieve it you need a government worth trusting, we don’t have one, but we can build one.
If nothing else, the modern era of capital accumulation demonstrates that there are so many more resources in the world than people to use them. What if we just let them? Since the war on Iran started the US has spent more than 1/3 of what the UN estimates it would cost to end world hunger (37B/97B).
I noticed you said " and a job if you want it" are you saying that people will have like a UBI in this scenario?
I’ve always wondered how you would actually be able to find people to do jobs if no one had to work like surely non of the nurses working 20+ hour shifts or sewage plant workers working with waste all day would continue to do that if they didn’t have to.
Would you have to make it to where people volunteered every so often or how would that work? And who would work the government that picked the volunteers to do it would there be some incentive for doing that?
I want a utopia I just wonder if its truly possible because of that.
UBI is meant to keep you from being homeless and starving, it’s not meant to let you not work.
The problem people have is that under capitalism? We made being employed SUCK ASS. Jobs could be safe, fun, fulfilling, and well compensated; but all the capitalists by nature decided to do little of any of that as possible; and to make me sure you’re locked in, your heathcare is tied to your job. If you want to get ahead, you have to give your money back by investing, and if you don’t lose it all you pay a huge tax on it that was meant for controlling rich people but also takes from the little guy as well.
You basically get nothing u til you retire, and now they’re coming for that too. They wanna eliminate social security and they wanna fuck up our 401k by tying it to AI which they are trying to use to take over computing entirely.
If you ask me the government should pay for all of it, for everyone. 3 trillion for Israel to kill brown people, and they can’t even fix fuckin sidewalks in my town. Get fucked.
I may be naive, but a life a idle leisure is not satisfying long term to many. Even the wealthiest people today are not content to idle their days away on private islands. They work and take on projects and set themselves goals. I think it is intrinsic in our nature (not all, but a vast majority) to want to build, create, and improve our lives and that of those around us. The pursuit of happiness is tied closely to the ability to enrich the lives we hold dear.
I think that part of the reason idle languish seems appealing is that we are worked too hard and our attention stretched too thin. Every choice under capitalism about how to spend our time has to weigh a vague life and death decision about how to feed and house ourselves in perpetuity. There is no expectation that the welfare safety net will catch us (in the US).
There is plenty of good work that needs to be done, and with free education (including vocational training) there is no shortage of skilled labor. With a surplus of labor we can shorten working hours. So why not have a jobs guarantee? If you are aimless but want to contribute to society, society can put the pathway to build what it needs in front of you and give the tools to achieve it. If in a couple years you decide thats not what you want to do, you can retrain or simply go do something else.
I don’t feel like writing much today, so I will just put a basic concept forward: I think that there should be a formalized system for job income, and citizens without a job, should get a fixed income. When a citizen holds a job, their universal income is replaced by the job’s income, with the exception of schooling.
The amount of money cannot be negotiated nor set by workers nor employers. Each job is rated by the effort, risk, and knowledge metrics required for the role, and applies to everyone throughout the entire nation. Leadership roles have workers vote for who should be leader every so often, along with setting or altering the payment rank of a leader.
Examples of Universal Ranked Income:
Rank 0, gives $10,000. All citizens get this when without a job or not having retirement money.
Rank S, gives $0 to $10k, in addition to citizen income. Students are paid for learning.
Rank 4, $80k. Fire fighters, lumberjacks, doctors, battlezone soldiers.
Rank 5, $100k. Astronauts, heads of research, surgeons.
Absolute caps on wealth and assets also apply, so that people cannot become millionaires. For a citizen, I am thinking something like $100k for wealth and assets apiece, totaling in $200k. Residential migrants who haven’t yet earned their automatic citizenship, have a cap of $100k total.
Universal Services give things like free healthcare, a free kei car, fuel, basic food, shelter, and so on. Money is used for buying luxury goods, services, bigger housing, and so on.
I have been thinking along similar lines, especially with respect to compensation rates. But I feel like hard caps run into a lot of issues especially over time. They entrench class divides unnecessarily. They should be adjusted to address local cost of living, inflation and probably some other things.
What if instead taxes on income (and assets) are based on a s-curve formula that keeps everyone’s hourly rate (or total wealth) within 3x or 5x of everyone else? You work more hours, you still get more money.
The asset limits are so low that no can own a house. Asset limit should be at least 7x the top wage earners annual salary.
All of this assumes that no one needs to privately save for retirement, because food, shelter, housing, healthcare are already guaranteed. But there should also probably be a social security equivalent based on number of hours worked over your lifetime, regardless of compensation rate. Just make sure its funded as an investment, rather than immediately paying out from what’s paid in.
One thing to note before proceeding, is that I assume the traditional American dollar would be dead, along with its inflation, if people are willing to allow these kinds of reforms to happen. As such, we wouldn’t see the same currency values for things.
However, on top of that, is that money is an optimization device. It is a fictional construct that we use to simplify our lives, so we aren’t trying to constantly figure out whether a giant chicken is worth four piglets at checkout. The values are based on what society can agree stuff is approximately worth…
…so I figure, assuming everyone within the nation operated within fixed wealth caps, the pricing of goods will adjust to what money people have. So things like houses will be priced to assume no individual has more than $100,000 to spare for a house, and the pricing will be lowered so that migrants can afford a home within their own $50k cap.
What I am asserting, is that wealth caps adjust inflation. Whether they do so in a helpful way is unknown, since we haven’t tried them.
000000
Anyhow, I have more writings on various things within the Universal Living ecosystem that I have been cobbling together. When it comes to retirement, I figure it goes like this:
Every day worked, you get 1 day’s worth of benefits. Employers pay the benefits, unless shuttered, in which case the government takes over. Benefits are accrued over a person’s career, and when given out, replace a person’ Universal Income when they are jobless.
Say that someone has $2,000,000 in retirement…
They receive $100,000 annually. In effect, the retirement is structured like job income.
By doing it this way, people can have plenty of money to work with, and strange distortions like millionares can’t exist.
000000
Accountability, to prevent corporate malfeasance such as killing a company to remove liabilities like retiree benefits, is the biggest issue. I figure that people who hold or held leadership roles should suffer a personal penalty when a company goes under while it still has obligations.
This can potentially work, because under Universal Services, no one can die of starvation, a lack of shelter, and so on. So we can totally penalize abusers by removing all of their luxury money. So an executive who earned a $200,000 penalty, will have all of their job and Universal Income totally consumed by it, working towards paying it all off.
Not kind, but as proven by the executives of our day, we shouldn’t hold back.
0000
While I do have writing on taxes, I am out of energy for much explanation at this moment. I will be very brief: The taxation of individuals isn’t about paying the government, but rather to encourage individuals to participate in society. The taxes are earmarked by a person to go towards things they value - for example, fixing potholes along a street they use regularly. It is basically crowdfunding, designed to engage people into thinking about their community and cultural interests. That is more important than the money itself.
Corporate taxation is where government gets the bulk of their money. By incentivizing government, we can make them heavily observe corporations for corruption, and using assorted measures to ensure government gets its due. The federal and state governments can assign a rotation of book-keepers for companies, so that the government can track the holdings of a company and ensure that taxes are reliably collected.
The problem is the capitalists become the government officials that should be the check.
This is true in other systems too btw, the only real check has ever been the power of the people to stand up and reset the corruption.
It’s a cycle that’s incredibly old, we’re just at the elite looting stage before the revolution.
Whether we end up with capitalism again or something doesn’t matter, what we really need is something new that encourages civic participation to hold elites accountable. I have no idea what this is, but I know blaming capitalism alone is only a convenient scapegoat, it’s not a true root cause.
Capitalism can work fine when subject to the pressures that keep things reasonable.
The pressures were removed. The system broke.
Republicans now believe capitalism is the problem, completely ignoring the fact that THEY FUCKING BROKE IT.
Capitalism isn’t perfect. It’s not even great. But it can work if you fucking let it.
Capitalism’s fundamental flaw is that it exploits and feeds people’s greed. It requires an external system of regulation to ensure that the vast majority of people aren’t left with so little that murdering the people responsible for their suffering doesn’t seem like a better option than continuing in the system.
One could envision a system that uses mutually aligned incentives to ensure that when you succeed, we all do better, and when I succeed, we all do better. What does that system look like? It looks like a flattened hierarchy, where it is practically impossible for one person to accumulate enough wealth to influence national politics. I think it likely looks like state that guarantees healthcare, education, food, privacy, housing, and a job if you want it. Why does it look like that, because all of those things are neccesary to a happy, fulfilled, and productive life. If you have more people optimally outputting, your economy has strength and resiliency. With a modicome of smart public investment, you can fiscally guarentee that in perpetuity. In order to achieve it you need a government worth trusting, we don’t have one, but we can build one.
If nothing else, the modern era of capital accumulation demonstrates that there are so many more resources in the world than people to use them. What if we just let them? Since the war on Iran started the US has spent more than 1/3 of what the UN estimates it would cost to end world hunger (37B/97B).
I noticed you said " and a job if you want it" are you saying that people will have like a UBI in this scenario?
I’ve always wondered how you would actually be able to find people to do jobs if no one had to work like surely non of the nurses working 20+ hour shifts or sewage plant workers working with waste all day would continue to do that if they didn’t have to.
Would you have to make it to where people volunteered every so often or how would that work? And who would work the government that picked the volunteers to do it would there be some incentive for doing that?
I want a utopia I just wonder if its truly possible because of that.
UBI is meant to keep you from being homeless and starving, it’s not meant to let you not work.
The problem people have is that under capitalism? We made being employed SUCK ASS. Jobs could be safe, fun, fulfilling, and well compensated; but all the capitalists by nature decided to do little of any of that as possible; and to make me sure you’re locked in, your heathcare is tied to your job. If you want to get ahead, you have to give your money back by investing, and if you don’t lose it all you pay a huge tax on it that was meant for controlling rich people but also takes from the little guy as well.
You basically get nothing u til you retire, and now they’re coming for that too. They wanna eliminate social security and they wanna fuck up our 401k by tying it to AI which they are trying to use to take over computing entirely.
If you ask me the government should pay for all of it, for everyone. 3 trillion for Israel to kill brown people, and they can’t even fix fuckin sidewalks in my town. Get fucked.
I may be naive, but a life a idle leisure is not satisfying long term to many. Even the wealthiest people today are not content to idle their days away on private islands. They work and take on projects and set themselves goals. I think it is intrinsic in our nature (not all, but a vast majority) to want to build, create, and improve our lives and that of those around us. The pursuit of happiness is tied closely to the ability to enrich the lives we hold dear.
I think that part of the reason idle languish seems appealing is that we are worked too hard and our attention stretched too thin. Every choice under capitalism about how to spend our time has to weigh a vague life and death decision about how to feed and house ourselves in perpetuity. There is no expectation that the welfare safety net will catch us (in the US).
There is plenty of good work that needs to be done, and with free education (including vocational training) there is no shortage of skilled labor. With a surplus of labor we can shorten working hours. So why not have a jobs guarantee? If you are aimless but want to contribute to society, society can put the pathway to build what it needs in front of you and give the tools to achieve it. If in a couple years you decide thats not what you want to do, you can retrain or simply go do something else.
I don’t feel like writing much today, so I will just put a basic concept forward: I think that there should be a formalized system for job income, and citizens without a job, should get a fixed income. When a citizen holds a job, their universal income is replaced by the job’s income, with the exception of schooling.
The amount of money cannot be negotiated nor set by workers nor employers. Each job is rated by the effort, risk, and knowledge metrics required for the role, and applies to everyone throughout the entire nation. Leadership roles have workers vote for who should be leader every so often, along with setting or altering the payment rank of a leader.
Examples of Universal Ranked Income:
Rank 0, gives $10,000. All citizens get this when without a job or not having retirement money.
Rank S, gives $0 to $10k, in addition to citizen income. Students are paid for learning.
Rank 1, $20k. Waiters, cashiers, desk workers,
Rank 2, $40k. Middle management, (trained, insured) police, librarians.
Rank 3, $60k. Lawn workers, crop pickers, safezone soldiers, warehouse workers, mailmen.
Rank 4, $80k. Fire fighters, lumberjacks, doctors, battlezone soldiers.
Rank 5, $100k. Astronauts, heads of research, surgeons.
Absolute caps on wealth and assets also apply, so that people cannot become millionaires. For a citizen, I am thinking something like $100k for wealth and assets apiece, totaling in $200k. Residential migrants who haven’t yet earned their automatic citizenship, have a cap of $100k total.
Universal Services give things like free healthcare, a free kei car, fuel, basic food, shelter, and so on. Money is used for buying luxury goods, services, bigger housing, and so on.
I have been thinking along similar lines, especially with respect to compensation rates. But I feel like hard caps run into a lot of issues especially over time. They entrench class divides unnecessarily. They should be adjusted to address local cost of living, inflation and probably some other things.
What if instead taxes on income (and assets) are based on a s-curve formula that keeps everyone’s hourly rate (or total wealth) within 3x or 5x of everyone else? You work more hours, you still get more money.
The asset limits are so low that no can own a house. Asset limit should be at least 7x the top wage earners annual salary.
All of this assumes that no one needs to privately save for retirement, because food, shelter, housing, healthcare are already guaranteed. But there should also probably be a social security equivalent based on number of hours worked over your lifetime, regardless of compensation rate. Just make sure its funded as an investment, rather than immediately paying out from what’s paid in.
One thing to note before proceeding, is that I assume the traditional American dollar would be dead, along with its inflation, if people are willing to allow these kinds of reforms to happen. As such, we wouldn’t see the same currency values for things.
However, on top of that, is that money is an optimization device. It is a fictional construct that we use to simplify our lives, so we aren’t trying to constantly figure out whether a giant chicken is worth four piglets at checkout. The values are based on what society can agree stuff is approximately worth…
…so I figure, assuming everyone within the nation operated within fixed wealth caps, the pricing of goods will adjust to what money people have. So things like houses will be priced to assume no individual has more than $100,000 to spare for a house, and the pricing will be lowered so that migrants can afford a home within their own $50k cap.
What I am asserting, is that wealth caps adjust inflation. Whether they do so in a helpful way is unknown, since we haven’t tried them.
000000
Anyhow, I have more writings on various things within the Universal Living ecosystem that I have been cobbling together. When it comes to retirement, I figure it goes like this:
Every day worked, you get 1 day’s worth of benefits. Employers pay the benefits, unless shuttered, in which case the government takes over. Benefits are accrued over a person’s career, and when given out, replace a person’ Universal Income when they are jobless.
Say that someone has $2,000,000 in retirement…
They receive $100,000 annually. In effect, the retirement is structured like job income.
By doing it this way, people can have plenty of money to work with, and strange distortions like millionares can’t exist.
000000
Accountability, to prevent corporate malfeasance such as killing a company to remove liabilities like retiree benefits, is the biggest issue. I figure that people who hold or held leadership roles should suffer a personal penalty when a company goes under while it still has obligations.
This can potentially work, because under Universal Services, no one can die of starvation, a lack of shelter, and so on. So we can totally penalize abusers by removing all of their luxury money. So an executive who earned a $200,000 penalty, will have all of their job and Universal Income totally consumed by it, working towards paying it all off.
Not kind, but as proven by the executives of our day, we shouldn’t hold back.
0000
While I do have writing on taxes, I am out of energy for much explanation at this moment. I will be very brief: The taxation of individuals isn’t about paying the government, but rather to encourage individuals to participate in society. The taxes are earmarked by a person to go towards things they value - for example, fixing potholes along a street they use regularly. It is basically crowdfunding, designed to engage people into thinking about their community and cultural interests. That is more important than the money itself.
Corporate taxation is where government gets the bulk of their money. By incentivizing government, we can make them heavily observe corporations for corruption, and using assorted measures to ensure government gets its due. The federal and state governments can assign a rotation of book-keepers for companies, so that the government can track the holdings of a company and ensure that taxes are reliably collected.
…That is it for now. I got some Palworld to play.
The problem is the capitalists become the government officials that should be the check.
This is true in other systems too btw, the only real check has ever been the power of the people to stand up and reset the corruption.
It’s a cycle that’s incredibly old, we’re just at the elite looting stage before the revolution.
Whether we end up with capitalism again or something doesn’t matter, what we really need is something new that encourages civic participation to hold elites accountable. I have no idea what this is, but I know blaming capitalism alone is only a convenient scapegoat, it’s not a true root cause.