Saturday 25 June 2011

STEVIETOPIA - by Steven Dobbs

STEVIETOPIA - by Steven Dobbs

Its time to stop attacking how the world is run, and say how the world SHOULD be run.

State socialism, accountable local market economies with new energy backed currencies. 


Government
Constitutional Socialism - Written into the consitution will be legal requirements to maintain GINI index less than 25 with mechanism to appropriately force a general election if progress is not maintained.

Bicameral, A prime minister appointed by the upper and lower house. The PM has most of the time allocating in parliament to create a government program to be debated on.

The upper parliament should be directly elected and is to act as a double check on new laws, like the UK house of lords currently does.

Laws will always come from the lower house and the lord protector. The unique thing will be that the lower house is not elected. But it is selected by random selection of the voting public. On foundation there should be a referendum on if this should be compulsory political service, or from a volunteer pool. (both would be paid)

The reason to choose random selection is to make the government highly resilient to systematic corruption. Randomisation is used in jury selection for the same reason to check the unelected judges. It seems that low corruption is perhaps the most important variable towards prosperity and stability. The system is also known as Demarchy

Economy
We will adopt the € but create multiple internal currencies. The € will be upheld as our trade and reserve currency. We would expect that normal economic activity within the country would be in local currencies. But that trade would be in an international currency.

In all economic planning, we will remember what the true origins of wealth are:
1) Energy and then 2) Production Prioritisaties - in that order; that all else is trivia. Sometimes markets can ferret out what the best production priorities are, but will fail on the large and strategic scale which is where strategic socialism comes in.

It is worth subsidising companies in order to maintain a trade balance. If we're to be plumbed into the world economy, then what flows out, must flow back in tradable goods. Subsidy is actually enlightened approach. The alternative is penny wise, pound foolish: there is no opportunity cost to subsidy if you end up with a trade imbalance against you.

Knowing that Energy is the key to production; by command or by market, local economies within the nation will use local currencies hardened by being linked to energy. This will encourage local economies to come up with their own power generation in order to print new money without being inflationary. Being a hardened currency properly aligned with what is actually valuable in wealth creation - its expected that hardened local currencies may become traded against international currencies as well with increasing favour.

Metaphorically we see trade as a double edged sword - economies may bleed out their accumulated wealth in a sustained trade imbalance. The very pro hardened local currencies approach should create multiple internal barriers to trade. Of course if something is really good and valuable from abroad, then it should be imported. there will be more opportunities for niches.

Market Economy & Socialism.
Socialism empowers the people, in our demarchy-democracy. The strategic sectors of the economy and activities, if in the hands of the people (directly so with our random selection of representative model) then the big parts of our economy become properly accountable.

Maintaining low GINI will mean our economy will always be most efficient at providing for the needs of most people - median income should be near the peak distribution. This will eliminate the need of all benefits apart from a minimal safety net.

It is our opinion, that the necessity for redistributive direct benefits to uplift earnings is because the market economy fails to provide needed goods at sensible prices - and that is a side effect of allowing the nations GINI to widen - A nation with elites pushes prices up of ordinary goods and all goods in general, since ordinary workers compete against people with huge disposable incomes and consumption rates.

Sharing national productivity by maintaining wages at a more even level will therefore enable us to phase out income support type social spending which represents a huge outlay for some floundering western economies, notably UK.

small and medium enterprises will never normally be considered to be nationalised. Government exists to think big, to think strategically, not to micromanage.

Corporate Tax Policy
Should be designed to encourage retained investment (more than external inward investment) This means high taxes on profits and dividends. Under such conditions owners of businesses prefer to re-invest to earn more later rather than just pocketing dividends.


Worker Right changes to the norm.
To balance the selfish loyalties to shareholders of directors - there should be a director appointed from a trade union or workforce rep on the boards of all large companies. Companies will be taxed more for wider gaps between workers including agency staff and management/directors. Tax policy will encourage the emergence of more cooperatives. We will grow a worker owned democracy by changing the tax selection pressures.


Intellectual Property
We should lean towards eliminating intellectual property and patents. Though such laws are designed to protect innovation. It seems to be in practice useful only to super corporations. First to market advantage should be enough. And we avoid an unintended cost to existence of patent protection laws - that they can actually stifle long term innovation! Consider the format wars between two consortia, Sony's Blue Ray and the alternative Hi-Def format: A big cost to developing this new technology would be finance. The risk to the investment is that it completely fails, and the other side wins the entire market.

Risk raises the cost of finance.

By reducing or eliminating these barriers to free and normal cooperation we reduce the risk and therefore the cost of finance. This should let in more players to markets, and encourage greater communication between experts. There will be more open source development of technology and goods. Remembering that these current invented and arbitrary property rights are a restriction to the normal function of a market.

Its also anti-human nature: we're a species which communicates ideas. these policies act to dehumanise our actual behaviour.

Civil Liberties
Pro individual, but if individualism conflict significantly with social needs then social needs win every time.

Religion
It is a threat to the free democratic order. Must be watched.

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