Let's Fix Our Reality

While it’s been apparent for some time, the recent corona virus situation has made it readily clear that our economic system has some extraordinary flaws, and needs a major overhaul. We need to design a new system that is able to respond to a crisis and that does not deplete the planet by forcing everyone into a needless cycle of labor and consumption.

Though we may not want to admit it, paring back to only the essential activities really helps illustrate that the work most of us do is increasingly non-essential, often useless, and in many cases actually harmful to the world, to society, and to others. We are slowly coming to understand that the vast majority of us can just stay home all day, and as long as we have a steady food supply, shelter, and essential medical care, humanity will survive just fine. If you account for the effort that it takes to produce and maintain these things, I would imagine that perhaps only 20% of us actually contribute to keeping us all alive. The vast majority of us work in “non-essential” fields like restaurants, entertainment, sports, finance, software, spa treatments, marketing, public relations, tourism, middle management, bureaucracy, ticket scalping, writing phishing emails, day-trading, making pornos, guarding prisons, blackmail, engineering goods to fall apart, and the like.

See while a lot of what we do is nice to have, it’s not really needed for our day to day survival. And some of this isn’t even nice to have at all, but people do it because they need to have money in order to participate in the economic system, and because there’s just not enough good opportunities around for everyone to be able to do something useful… or at least not something that can provide an income. Sure, there are always plenty of pursuits that would make the world a better place but that don’t really generate money, so they end up not being really rewarded, like social work, teaching, environmental protection, or helping the poor and the homeless. Mostly, the reason for this is inequality. When only a few people have money, the only things that are rewarded are the things that benefit those few people, who generally already have everything they need anyway… so things tend to start getting weird.

Now keep in mind that when we work more than we have to, we wear ourselves out unnecessarily, and wear out the environment and the planet as well, using up precious resources as fast as possible simply in order to make more money. Or at least to keep the money flowing through the system just enough to keep us alive. See, money is like the blood of the capitalist system—it needs to circulate to keep the whole thing alive. However, money is not a real commodity in and of itself. It’s just an imaginary system we made up to try to distribute goods and services fairly. And it’s not exactly doing a good job of that anymore. Remember, once all the actual resources are gone, we won’t be able to eat the money we have left over. And those resources are running out fast.

So here is the irony; if we want to save our planet, mostly what we need to do is for a lot of us to simply stop working, or at least stop working at producing unnecessary material goods. Which means we need to prevent our economic system from forcing people to do unnecessary work. And to do that, we primarily need to ensure that their basic needs are always met.

Yes, we have all heard the tired old concern that if people’s basic needs were met, they would spend their time just sitting around being lazy. Well, maybe that’s true of a few people, but the majority of people I know actually care about the world and about others around them, and would love to use their skills and energies to help make it all a better place. If people didn’t have to worry about money, they would not be sending out dodgy spam emails, they would be helping feed poor people and brewing beer, and making music and art, building houses, or writing cool software that did something interesting. In short, (most) everyone’s altruistic side would be allowed to come out, or at least it would have room to shine.

So here’s the goal, a new system that ensures that everyone’s basic needs are taken care of, and then allows us as individuals to decide what to do with our time. I’ve seen plenty of articles out there recently saying we desperately need something like this, but I have seen shockingly little about what this would actually look like or how it could work. So I’m going to try to come up with a solution.

An Ideal World

So maybe we can start with a little exercise. Let’s put aside our current situation and picture what a perfect world might look like far in the future when we have solved all our problems. This will likely not be something we can just jump right into from our current situation, but it can help us to know what it is we are aiming for. If I could just wave a magic wand and turn this into my ideal world, it might look something like this:

• Money doesn’t exist.
• Everyone has some kind of housing that they own. There are no mortgages and no rents.
• The government exists mostly to ensure we are provided with food and medical care.
• Food production might actually be managed via some sort of one month a year shared duty that everyone contributes in.
• I’m not sure about medical care yet.
• Everyone is expected to do something useful with their time. What this is is entirely up to them. Most of the fruits of these labors would then be given away to whomever wants them. Things are not traded; everyone gives freely with no expectations.
• The thing you produce could be poetry, or it could be cleaning toilets, or it could be massages, serving in the military, wedding planning, or whatever the heck you feel you want to contribute to the world.
• This by no means needs to take up 40 hours a week. You are allowed to set your own pace, as long as you stick to some bare minimum of effort, which should be a fairly low bar. There is probably some transparent court that determines this, and if you are judged to be a “lazy-ass”, you are shipped off for an extra month of farm duty.
• You can only “own” one piece of land, and you are expected to use it as your primary residence.
• You are expected to be able to care for your dwelling. If you can’t keep up with the maintenance or managing the land or whatever, you can downside to an apartment or something and someone else can take over your property. Keep in mind that if you aren’t a shitbag that there will probably be lots of landscapers and carpenters around offering your their services for free.
• Oh yeah, the shitbag thing… since everyone is expected to give away what they produce, they also get to decide who gets it, so if you are a nice person, you’ll be fine. If you are a jerk, you may find life hard. Kind of the reverse of our current economic system. Also, this should prevent hoarding and hogging of resources. If you show up and want to take all the brewer’s beer, she can always just say “no, take a 6 pack”, or “fuck you, get lost”. So be kind and don’t be wasteful.
• Which reminds me, since there is no longer a profit motive, there is very little waste, as there is never any reason to produce more than is needed. It’s now actually a good thing to build a product that lasts forever, or to fix something that’s broken instead of toss it and buying a new one. Or to transport stuff in reusable containers. This is the critical solution to fix the planet.
• You could still start a company if you had a great idea and could convince enough people to build your idea. Everyone is working for free, so you are incentivized to treat your employees well… or your coworkers, more accurately. And remember, the goal of the endeavor is to build something that will make the world a better place, not to reap massive profits for the people at the top. So there isn’t really a need for complex things like intellectual property. Even if you have an idea and someone else builds it, your idea is now a reality, and that’s what you should be happy about.
• Ordinary jobs will likely be valued more highly. For example, the world will be full of tiresome and useless rock stars, but that guy that comes every week and hauls away your trash out of the goodness of his heart—god bless him!

Yeah, that’s about it for now. Things like cars might not exist, or maybe if enough people decide they want to spend their time working in auto factories and oil refineries they would. It’s all a matter of people being given the agency to prioritize what they want to see in the world. I expect you would see a smaller, more intimate, and more localized world as a result, but that’s not a certainty, and in any case, that still sounds pretty ok to me.

Ok, the down side? I did say it was the ideal world. Not to say that it is impossible or unworkable, but more that there is no way we can possibly just shift overnight from what we have now to such a system. It will be too difficult to change people’s mindsets so completely, too difficult to give up our addiction to money, and our many vanities over certain things–especially coming from an instant-everything world where I can just browse Amazon and order whatever the heck I feel like whenever I want. Also, don’t forget that right now, the western world doesn’t really make any of its own essential goods… these are (mostly) all produced in factories in foreign countries, so adopting a more localized economy won’t work so well unless we first start to build up more localized resources and a local manufacturing base, or if we find a way to keep trading large amounts of goods and services overseas. However, homemade pickles and collections of poetry probably won’t be enough to get much in return.

Also there’s that medical care thing I mentioned above. Sure, most farm work can be easily shared by many hands via some kind of civic duty, but medicine is a very specialized field, requiring a great deal of dedication. We are going to be asking these people to work a lot harder than the rest of us. Sure, a few people might be willing to take on the burden, but not enough to provide decent care to all of us. And yes, we may end up seeing a much healthier population overall due to increase in happiness and reduction in stress levels, but that still doesn’t fix it much. We may need to just find a way to incentivize certain types of work… like maybe give these people the better pieces of land and the better houses. I’ll keep working on it.

Also there is the matter of travel and tourism. I don’t think the entire world would ever move to a system like this at the same time, so that means that if we ever left our borders, we’d need to deal with money again, but we don’t have any. A couple thoughts on this…. First, I think “tourism” as we know it would be a less common thing, and that’s probably a good thing—it’s destructive to the environment and to communities and ancient sites and all that stuff. Plus, if you’ve traveled recently, you may have noticed how crowded it has become. It’s not even really enjoyable to go anywhere anymore; it’s just a money making scheme.

So first idea: anytime a foreigner wants to come and visit our country, we charge them a fee in their home currency. Then, anytime someone from our country wants to visit another country, we give them a share of the money from that pool to spend while they are abroad. Not sure how that would get rationed out, but we can worry about that later. Idea two would be to make tourism into a much more personal event. Basically, in order to travel abroad, you would have to convince someone abroad to switch places with you for a couple weeks. You would live in their home and experience their community and spend two weeks of their money, and they would get to live in your home and experience living over here. Or maybe as part of this you can work for a week when you are aborad, thereby earning enough to cover your vacation.

Anyway, the main point is that it would be impossible for us to just transition from where we are now to this, so we would need some interim step. Maybe we could try this Socialism thing we’ve all heard about so much…

That Socialism Thing

So a lot of people are jumping on the “Socialism” bandwagon these days, and for good reason… it is designed to deal exactly with the kinds of economic inequalities we are facing in today’s world. However, classic Socialism is pretty old at this point, and doesn’t really have an answer to some of the larger issues that are bearing down on us in the very near future (namely climate change, environmental devastation, and ecological collapse), so I think in any case we would need to make some adjustments to it. But assuming we didn’t change it all that much, what would life under a socialistic system look like?

Ok, first off, let’s not get Socialism confused with Fascism. Socialism means the government does things to try to eradicate poverty and make our lives better. Fascism means the government decides what we can and cannot do, and generally takes away our overall agency, personal freedoms, and self-determination. You can have both, like the Soviet Russian system, the Chinese system, and pretty much anywhere that has implemented what they call “Socialism”, but in all such cases, the Fascism always seems to win out and the system ends up being hated. Let’s not do that. Let’s build a proper system of Socialism without taking away people’s rights to self-determination.

So first off, the essential core of Socialism is that the workers own the means of production. That means that if you work for a company, you have some share of ownership in that company, or most importantly, you have some say in how the money generated by that company is spent. How things work under Capitalism today, is that the guy at the top of the company gets to decide what to do with the all the money, and it definitely has dawned on him that there is nothing stopping him for just giving it all to himself and leaving just a tiny pittance behind to pay his workers and run his factories. This used to be mitigated by having a very high upper tax bracket, which functioned somewhat like a maximum wage, meaning at some point it was simply not worth it to keep paying yourself, making it pointless to try to hoard all the money. Instead, you had to do things like pay your workers a decent wage. But that all has gone out the window in recent decades, so we see CEOs getting paid thousands of times the salary of the average worker. And why shouldn’t they—they are the ones that get to decide. So Socialism is targeted at fixing that giant massive problem right there.

So overnight, Socialism would work by essentially giving all the working class people a massive raise. This would reverse some of the inequality that we are experiencing today and likely solve a lot of issues with things like dangerous working conditions or overworked employees (because it’s not just money that owners get a say over). With workers getting more pay, we probably won’t need as many people working… we can go back to having a partnership with someone who is a homemaker and stays home and takes care of the family and the household (and if we do it right, many of these people will be men). This will be a huge benefit in time, as having a reduced workforce means that unemployment will fall, and that people will no longer have to invent bullshit or useless jobs in order to find something to do.

So that’s classic Socialism. Not actually as bad as they say (unless you are a rich CEO). Also, we can add in a few things that have come to be considered a part of modern Socialism: free education, social security, and free healthcare. That’s a pretty good deal. If our choice was between our current system and classic Socialism, it’s a no-brainer—we should adopt Socialism immediately. But is that the best system possible?

Unfortunately, Socialism is still a for-profit system, so there is still an incentive to overproduce in order to make more money, and to make cheap throw-away goods in order to generate more sales. So while it may slow down the coming environmental catastrophe, it won’t hold it back for long.

Some of this can be fixed by things like “the green new deal”, which means a massive investment in renewable energy and environmental jobs which will help protect and even renew the environment at the same time that it provides lots of people with rewarding, important jobs. That’s a good thing, and we should do it, but it is only a short term plan. We need to have something more permanent in place when it is done.

Now, we like to talk about how in the future, robots will do all the work and we will be able to just sit back and enjoy life. That’s actually starting to happen. Every time we create some kind of efficiency that helps us produce faster or better, people lose their jobs. But how does that benefit the people who don’t own the robots? Is there some more modern system we can benefit from? Something more fitting to our post-industrial society? Well, yeah, there probably is.

The Better Solution

So here is what I have come up with so far. It might take something like a revolution to implement some of these ideas, but that doesn’t seem so far off now, so let’s lay all the cards on the table. This is what I think we could achieve with a fresh start. My best attempt at a solution for late-stage capitalism:

• Everybody gets a home. And everyone owns their home outright. No rent, no mortgage, no debt. To start with, let’s say everyone just gets to keep whatever home they are in now, whether this be a mansion or a crummy one-room apartment; if it is owned by someone else, tough. Rich people will still end up with nice places to live, even if we take their real estate empires from them. If you don’t have a home, we give you a vacant one. If we run out of those, we start building very basic apartment blocks with small, efficient but private units. We should ensure we always have enough of these around so that anyone who needs one can always get a vacant unit.
• If you have a mortgage, we cancel it, even if that means your bank will go bankrupt. This will be disruptive, but disruption is what we need right now. I know this isn’t total equality, but that’s not really possible, so we are all going to have to make some compromises.
• You can still sell your house, but you can never mortgage it or take out a loan to buy a house. You are welcome to trade houses for free if you can find someone willing. If you sell or lose your house, you can always get a free basic apartment.
• Healthcare and education are free. Public colleges should ideally be included in this.
• Everyone gets a government bank account and $1000 a month (or some similar amount) for food and various other living expenses. If this doesn’t cover maintenance on your house, well, you can get a job, or you can sell your home and take a cheaper option. This amount of course needs to be adjusted yearly for inflation, and possibly regional cost of living. Oh yeah, since most banks will collapse once we get rid of mortgages, banking can be nationalized and we can provide basic banking services for free.
• If people want more than the bare minimum, they can get a job. Which should not be too hard, since they already have a home, food, medical care, and so on. If they don’t want to work, well they can just keep their entertainment budget low and keep their basic apartment. There is no need to try to squeeze the system in order to make money. If someone’s job doesn’t pay well enough, or if they are treated badly, or some such thing, well, they can just quit. We should not actually need things like minimum wage laws anymore, because nobody will need to work for an unsustainable wage if they don’t want to.
• People are now free to take part time jobs, or multiple jobs, or adjust their schedules to their lifestyles. This will work perfectly with the new gig economy, where people can work if they want extra money, but don’t actually have to work more than they want to. And things like healthcare are taken care of already.
• Since it might take 20 years for a poor family to save enough for a decent house, and since it’s better if their kids grow up in one instead of a tiny apartment, the government can provide home financing. This is not a loan; there is zero interest charged. As long as you have ten percent down and a stable enough income to make monthly payments, you can get the home. You can get up to a 20 year plan, and if you miss more than 3 payments in a year, you have to move back to a basic apartment, but the government returns all of the money you have paid for the home over the course of the entire term. The government can then lease the house to someone else, and if you ever get your financial stability back, you can get another one.
• Since everybody has a home and enough to eat, we are going to see a dramatic decrease in crime. Sure there will always be some crime, but the need for petty crime and crimes of poverty and desperation will be greatly reduced. Also, while we are at it, we should decriminalize drugs. Not necessarily make them legal, but make them legal to possess and to grow, but not to sell or profit from. This has been successful in other countries both in reducing crime rates and in actually reducing drug usage. Oh yeah, and we can legalize marijuana and tax it moderately. And then we can let all the non-violent drug users out of prison. This should make both the liberals and the conservatives happy… for government as an entity is actually going to get dramatically smaller.
• And remember that Socialism thing above? We can still implement something like that, which basically says that all employees of a company should have some share in how the money is distributed… the details of this can be worked out later, but basically management should always have less than 50% voting power over how salaries are distributed. Or maybe we don’t need it anymore… I’m not sure how well Marxian Socialism actually works in a gig economy. Maybe we can just make a rule like no employee of a company (aka the CEO) can get paid more than 50 times the salary of the average employee (including freelancers). (Or hell, maybe even 20 times). So that means if a CEO ever wants to get more money for himself, he is going to have to pay his workers more too.
• And finally, the environment… we need permanent rules in place to protect it. Primarily, we can apply some kind of a “carbon tax” to all transactions that involve some kind of environmental footprint. This can quite quickly turn into big government getting in everyone’s way again, so we need to be careful. Taxes on fuel of course are easy to measure, or bag fees. We have those here in Norway and people seem to be able to live with it. On top of this, I think we need a tax on developing any area of wilderness, and on harvesting any kind of non-renewalable material. And of course, strong tarrifs on importing goods from any country that does not meet our environmental standards. Also, a packaging fee would be nice if it isn’t too difficult to measure.

So that’s the basics. The goal is to build a sustainable economic system that does not deplete the planet or slide into a cycle of ever-increasing inequality. For the first point, smarter taxes and preventing people from having to do unnecessary work is the key. For the second point, the free housing is essential, because otherwise, the money will always just endlessly cycle up to the landowners, meaning there will be one class of people who by nature of birth, can just sit back and collect rent, and one class of people who have to constantly pay to survive, and who end up having to do all the work.

And as far as the rest, I know what you are thinking… where does the money come from? Well, I think we can manage it.

• Let’s start with the United States. 300 million people times 1000 times 12 equals a yearly cost of 3.6 trillion a year. Since this would replace the existing social security system, that provides about 1 trillion of that amount. We could also increase this amount a bit by raising the income cap for social security, and then we could probably cut the defense budget by a good half trillion. That puts us about 2 trillion short.
• So on top of this we can reverse all those tax cuts on the rich we’ve made over the last 40 years, tax capital gains as income, and add a 1% fee on stock transactions. Oh, and because we will be greatly simplifying government as a whole, we should be saving a great deal of money there. Instead of paying for an army of government bureaucrats to harass disabled people and the poor, we will just be giving money to the people directly—cutting out the middleman. Let’s say we can get an additional trillion here from smarter taxes and decreased spending.
• On a similar note, when we free the non-violent drug offenders from our prison system and once crime starts to fall as poverty dries up, we can start shutting down our massive army of prisons. This will save a ton of money, not only on prisons but on the judicial and police systems that will need much less manpower and money now.
• While we are at it, we should probably claw back our money from all the billionaires out there hoarding it like toilet paper in a crisis. Most of this will likely happen anyway when we give away all their real estate, but there may be a few fleets of yachts left over. But we don’t want to be cruel here. Let’s set a cap of 100 million say, and if you own anything more than that, we take it back. This will be a huge boost to the economy, as all of a sudden all this wealth that was out of the system for so long is finally back in circulation. Like a blood transfusion for a dying man.
• Now keep in mind that when we give money to average people, they are going to spend most of it, unlike the billionaires that might be sitting on it, so that means that overall we are going to see more money come back in to the government in taxes. However, since there will be fewer people working overall in the labor force, that will likely offset the benefit here, but it’s hard to say ahead of time.
• Speaking of which, it may be time to greatly simplify the tax code. I think it’s fair to say the $1000 a month is your standard deduction, and everything after that is considered taxable income, which can be taxed in increasing brackets without any weird rules or complications. This should mean that paying taxes would amount to simply reporting your income and then either getting a refund or paying any tax left over. Or America can do it like we do it here in Norway, where the government does your taxes for you every year and deposits your refund into your account, and if you want to try to dispute it, you can file some forms, but otherwise, you can just simply do nothing and spend your refund when it comes.
• If necessary, we can adjust payments a bit based on age. For example, kids under 16 or so probably can survive on $500 a month, since they are likely not living on their own. And the payment should probably drop to $0 for every kid beyond one’s second… we are trying to save the planet, not just paying people to sit around and breed a bigger problem than we already have. And those over 65 might need something like $1200 a month, as they are less likely to be able to work if they need a little extra. Other adjustments (like for disabilities) should probably be avoided, as it would then require a large bureaucracy to validate people’s claims, and then we’d be back to where we started.
• Remember when all the banks failed because we canceled everyone’s mortgages? Yeah, well the government took over everyone’s saving’s accounts. So nobody lost any actual money, it’s still there, but now the government has it, which means it has much deeper pockets, and we can earn interest on it instead of the banks. This will help mitigate cashflow and ensure we can write checks without causing too much inflation.
• So will this be enough? I’m not sure, but we can always raise taxes a bit, or just inject more money into the system until there is enough to circulate back up in taxes in a stable flow. This will of course, create some initial inflation, which we might not want to adjust for in the first few years, so this means the $1000 a month might end up being more effectively like $700. Still that’s enough for food. Or honestly, so is $500, so maybe if it comes to it, we can pay people $500 dollars a month for starters instead of $1000. The exact number is not so important.

Oh, and unfortunately, there are a few other costs.

• The free healthcare can basically come from the same 1 trillion dollar budget we use for Medicare and Medicaid and the ACA and so on. Once we flush all the bureaucracy out of the system, this should probably be enough. Keep in mind that via Medicare and the like we are already paying for healthcare for the sick, the disabled, and the elderly. It’s only the healthy and the young that are not currently insured, so adding these people to the system likely won’t increase the costs that much. If we need more money, we can just simply extend the existing Medicare tax a bit.
• Public colleges are already mostly paid for by the states. Once we minimize the prison industrial complex and kill off all the various state welfare and disability programs and related bureaucracy (since we have our new universal basic income system), we can probably cover the rest.
• One other small snag… property taxes. Currently, most county funds and many state and city funds come from property taxes. Should we keep these? If so, having a home is no longer free. So we definitely should ensure our basic safety-net apartments are tax free. But the rest of it? Well, maybe we can replace these taxes with our environmental taxes for now. Local governments need funding too.

So can this all work? Probably. I mean, we know our current system doesn’t work, so we have little to lose in trying something new. But still, maybe there are a few too many ifs here for us to simply jump right into it. It’s kind of impossible to predict how the system will react when we change so many variables at once. So what about starting out with a halfway step here? Something a little safer than just trying to eat the entire cake in one massive bite. That’s going to be easier to do, is probably wiser, and doesn’t at all prevent us from going where we want to go down the road.

An Interim Solution

Here’s a subset of the system above that I think the numbers would support right now:

• Redistribution of housing and cancelation of all mortgages and rents.
• Free healthcare.
• Free education.
• A maximum wage law that forces companies to pay their employees better before they can increase their own pay.
• Nationalized banking and home leases.
• Roll back tax cuts on the wealthy and a 1% stock sales tax.
• Significant cuts to the bloated defense budget, and an end to endless war.
• Instead of a massive military, some sort of green jobs program (such as the “Green New Deal”) that directs people’s labors away from harming the environemt and into helping it.
• Strengthed social security, and a better safety net for the sick, the disabled, and those simply unable to find work (aka, unemployment and welfare). Really this is just cleaning up the system we already have by making it easier to get help when you need it.
• Decriminalization of drugs and downsizing of the prison industrial complex.
• Replacing property taxes with a set of new environmental taxes.

So there we go, a better world. Is it perfect? Unlikely; I’m just one guy with some big ideas. I am sure there are many more improvements out there we can make to this, but I feel this is a really good place to start. The key is to start talking about this and see where it goes from here. Everyone will have some good ideas they should be able to contribute.

How to Get It Started

So how do we do this? Well, take a look at that interim solution above. All but the housing redistribution is probably easily doable by simply restoring democracy to our exsiting system. And even the housing thing might be doable under the current constituion, but if it’s not, the constituion does allow for us to change it over time. So let’s start pushing for a constituional amendment that would allow the government to redistribute property that is not being used as the owner’s primary residence. We’ve gotten constitutional amendments passed before, so I see no reason we can’t do it again.

However, if things continue to move as swiftly downward as they are now, we may not have time to work within the system. But there is another way that could work nearly overnight: a national rent and mortgage strike. This borrows a bit on America’s rich tradition of unions, bringing all citizens together into a single union for a single purpose. And the solution is just as simple–if everyone simply stops paying their rents en masse, then we effectively already own our homes. In fact, this has already begun in NYC and other places where people can’t currently make ends meet. Things may be moving forward faster than we think.

And if we do start seeing massive sea changes in the political landscape, we may even get an opportunity soon to rewrite the constituion. If this happens, we should take care to make a few important fixes. It would be a shame to waste such an opportunity by simply replacing our existing failing system with something basically the same, just under the control of a different set of people.

In any case, let’s start the conversation, and see what the future holds. Start talking less about the problem, and more about the solution. Problems can divide us, but if there is a common and achievable goal in sight, we might be able to find some unity again.