I have been debating with a guy on my blog who appears to be from the Zeitgeist movement. He has been vilifying capitalism and libertarianism both of which I think he has no clue about. He sent me a supposed plan to end all economic problems. Read, discuss, critique.
“Here is the plan. It works, and I think you will find it will improve your life and the rest of humanity more than a libertarian world will.”
A Society Where Everyone Is Wealthy, Technology Liberates Us From Jobs, And The World Is A Paradise
Buckminster Fuller showed how technology enables us to have billions of billionaires. This manifesto shows how today we have the ability to instantly make all 220 million adults millionaires.
It is crazy, and totally unacceptable, that in the year 2010, where we have the technology and resources to produce a near unlimited amount of anything, that we still have jobs that pay less than what it takes to live a life of wealth and luxury.
It is totally unacceptable that we still have poverty, even the simplest financial struggle, unemployment problems, people without their own home, people without their own car, people who don’t have the ability to vacation and travel, people without access to health care or education, and a society where only a very small percentage of the population gets to lead the good life.
Things can be better.
We are going to show you simple changes that we can make so that we can have a society where 100% of the population, every single citizen, gets to live the good life.
It will create a society where if you work, no matter what you do, you get paid a high enough salary so that you can live an upper-class lifestyle. Every worker is wealthy.
It will create a society where we put an end to the job. The only work you do is the kind of work you would do if you didn’t have a job to go to. Everyone gets paid to do what they love. You get paid to do what you would be doing in your free time.
It will create a society where you have full control over your time and are not the property of some employer. You will have the freedom to work full time, work part time, work in your spare time or not work at all in order to volunteer, to raise a family, enjoy more leisure, or to just explore opportunities other than employment.
It will create a society where everyone lives in upper-class, state-of-the-art, five-star, resort communities, where the public spaces are great works of art and the homes are all private palaces with every modern amenity.
Here is a quick overview on how to accomplish that and turn society into a paradise:
- MAKE EXISTING 35% INCOME TAX AND 15% FICA TAX FAIR
- Everyone pays that rate, no deductions, no special arrangements
- You pay the 35% income tax and 15% FICA tax on 100% of your income
- Makes the rich pay the same rate the worker does.
- Warren Buffet, the world’s richest man, paid just 17.7% of his $46 million in earnings towards tax while his secretary paid 37.5% of her $60,000 in income towards tax.
- Ends the special treatment given to the wealth who pay just a 15% income tax rate instead of the 35% rate the rest of us pay
- Ends the special treatment given to the wealthy who pay the 15% FICA tax on just a small percentage of their income instead of paying it on 100% of their income like the rest of us pay
- Tax code goes from thousands of pages to a single paragraph
- Ends all the lobbying of people looking for tax breaks
- USE TAX MONEY TO MAKE EVERY CITIZEN WEALTHY, NOT GOVERNMENT
- Use tax revenue to pay every citizen a dividend
- The majority of your power in this world comes from income, not from having a representative in government
- Taxes should be used to fund your lifesyle, not some government bureau
- Using tax money to make every citizen wealthy, instead of making government wealthy, is a far more efficient and humane use of tax money
- PAY EVERY ADULT $20,000 PER YEAR
- Use tax money to pay every adult a $20,000 per year guaranteed, basic income that they get regardless if they work or not and regardless of how wealthy they are. It gets paid to everyone.
- Nobody ever loses the means to survive, enables us to eliminate every government welfare program.
- Enables you to have greater freedom in lifestyle choices
- It enables us to abandon the backwards policy of trying to create jobs and instead, pursue the more rational policy of trying to create technology that liberates us from jobs.
- All of our productivity comes from automation, being able to produce goods and services without labor.
- The more we can automate, the richer we get.
- PAY EVERY WORKER $30,000 PER YEAR
- Use tax money to also pay every worker an additional $30,000 per year on top of whatever salary they earn.
- Everyone who works, no matter what job you do, gets paid an upper-class income so that every single worker lives a wealthy lifestyle.
- GET PAID UP TO $365,000 PER YEAR AT WHATEVER JOB YOU DO
- The power of choice is what enables you to wield full control over the economy.
- You get to choose the food you want, the house you want, the clothing style you want, the car you want, the entertainment you want, even if the vast majority of people don’t want the things you want.
- The economy is designed to cater to your individual wants and needs.
- We are going to extend your power to dictate how the world serves you by giving you more than just consumer choice.
- You will also have the power to choose to live within a completely different economic system, if you think it will provide a superior standard of living and better quality of life.
- And choosing between economic systems will be as simple as choosing between McDonalds and Burger King when you want to eat hamburgers, you don’t need to start a revolution, overthrow the government, vote in a new system or impose your economic system on 100% of the population.
- One alternative economic system that we propose, is to establish a publicly owned, democratically controlled association of companies.
- This group of companies will compete with the existing private companies and Wall Street companies.
- This group will use all its revenue to pay employees a more equal salary.
- This will enable everyone who works, no matter what you do, to earn $365,000 per year.
- ELIMINATE INTEREST AND AUTOMATICALLY EXTEND CREDIT TO EVERYONE
- You will get access to your very own, personal Central Bank that will enable you to automatically and instantly get all the credit you want, from mortgages to credit cards, without having to pay any interest.
- Eliminating interest will eliminate the biggest expense in your life.
- Eliminating interest will cut the cost of homes in half.
- It will enable us to rebuild all our physical infrastructure and bring it up to date.
- It will enable us to turn our homes into palaces for the same amount of money we are currently spending on our homes.
- It will enable us to turn every neighborhood into upper-class, state-of-the-art, resort, communities.
- It will enable us to put an end to neighborhood blight.
To learn about the full economic plan, read the Manifesto below. It describes how every human being should be treated like royalty and command the same powers as a King. It creates a society where the individual is all powerful and the individual rules the world, not government, not business.
Granting everyone a life of nobility, and the wealth, power, and opportunity it gives you, is the secret to prosperity, health, relationships and happiness. It is the secret to a successful life.
MANIFESTO FOR A MILLIONAIRE SOCIETY
Empower The Individual, Not Government, Not Industry, And Create A Society Where Everyone Is Wealthy.
The purpose of this manifesto is to get you to vote. And make no mistake, this is a full-on, no-holds-barred, unabashed sales pitch to get you to embrace an approach to our economy that is different than what we have now.
What we want you to consider voting for is an economic plan that will raise the standard of living of everyone alive so that every adult IS AT LEAST A MILLIONAIRE and, most importantly, commands all the power, privilege and opportunity that comes with having wealth.
The best way to describe this plan is to call it the Individual Monarchy because it gives every individual the kind of lifestyle normally reserved for royalty, and it gives every citizen the actual capabilities of a King:
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It will give you the power to tax which will pay you an income of $50,000 per year in addition to whatever income you already earn. Our tax revenues are used to fund your lifestyle, not some government bureaucracy.
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It will give you command of a multi-trillion dollar worldwide empire that will enable you to earn up to $365,000 per year at whatever job you currently do.
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It will give you access to your very own, personal Central Bank that will enable you to get all the credit you want, from mortgages to credit cards, no questions asked, without having to pay any interest.
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And it will enable you, with all those new capabilities, to turn the “kingdom” you live in into a paradise where you retire from your job, spend your time getting paid to do what you would be doing if you didn’t have a job to go to, and live in a palatial, state-of-the-art home located in a private, 5-star, resort neighborhood.
A monarchy is a society ruled by an all-powerful King. In an Individual Monarchy, you are the King, and you will have all the power that comes with it. This is an economic program that is built on empowering the individual. It stands in stark contrast to the current status quo which is set up to empower government or empower industry.
We believe it is the biggest wealth opportunity in the history of mankind. We believe it will be humanity’s Emancipation Proclamation.
To command the power of a King, to live the life of royalty, to secure the benefits of wealth, to gain the opportunity to reach your full potential, all you need to do is cast a free vote for it.
A NEW ERA IN SOCIETY
Everyone Earns An Upper-Class Income
In this manifesto, we will lay out a unique economic plan which enables everyone to lead a life of great luxury and wealth, where the minimum standard of living is equivalent to that of a millionaire, and where everyone earns a high, upper-class income to acquire the absolute best of what is available.
Residents Live in Palatial, Five-Star, Resort Neighborhoods
It will create a society where low income, run-down neighborhoods become a relic of the past, along with the crime, struggle and hopelessness it breeds.
It will create a society where every neighborhood is transformed into upper-class, state-of-the-art, five-star resort communities, where the public spaces are great works of art that inspire awe and beauty and the homes are private palaces with every modern amenity.
The End of All Jobs
It will put an end to jobs. It will create a society where there is no difference between work and play. Work will become an opportunity for people to do what they would want to do if they didn’t have a job to go to. It will be a source of growth, fulfillment and well-being.
The goal of the economy will no longer be to pursue the backwards policy of trying to create jobs. Instead, the goal will be to eliminate them using the latest technology and automation so that people are free to trade in their boring, menial, monotonous jobs and the rat race of living paycheck-to-paycheck for productive lives of meaning, adventure, excitement, leisure and higher purpose.
You will no longer get paid to do some chore that a machine can easily do. Work is no longer a place where you don’t have full control over your time and are regarded as the property of some employer.
And it will create a society where entrepreneurs and people with ideas have access to even more resources and can earn even greater profits in this new, rich environment.
Human Nobility
It is good to be the King. And all the wealth and power that comes from it is extended to every individual member of society. Individual power is at the heart of our belief in Human Nobility. All human beings should be treated like royalty and are more than just a mere commodity of labor.
Granting everyone a life of nobility, and the wealth, power, and opportunity it gives you, is the secret to prosperity, health, relationships and happiness. It is the secret to a successful life.
By virtue of being born human, you deserve access to certain rights that provide a dignified life and the resources that enable you to reach your full potential.
The Beginning of Unprecedented Prosperity
It will create a society where in the face of disease, misfortune, life’s biggest questions, and an insatiable appetite for people to want only the absolute best for their lives, we will be armed with an ever increasing arsenal of progress to deliver a lifestyle even the richest today will gawk at.
That world is possible now, and it can happen immediately by simply casting a vote for it.
THE POWER TO TAX
Get paid $50,000 per year, tax free, in addition to whatever income you currently earn.
The first component of our economic program is the power to tax.
Giving you the power to tax means tax money is no longer used to fund a government that provides a massive waste of bureaucracy. Instead, we are going to cut out the government middle-man, and just send that tax money directly to each citizen.
Instead of having a 35% income tax and a 15% FICA tax paid directly to government, that tax revenue is going to be paid directly to each citizen. You are going to spend that tax money yourself, instead of having the government spend it on your behalf.
$20,000 Basic Income
By doing this, we will be able to pay every adult a $20,000 yearly income. That money is paid to every adult, regardless of how much they earn and regardless if they are working at all. It gets paid to everyone–rich and poor, employed and unemployed.
This guaranteed, basic income has been something advocated by American Founding Fathers such as Thomas Paine and iconic, modern-day free market economists such as Milton Friedman.
It ensures nobody ever loses the means to survive and never slips into poverty. This gives us the ability to eliminate every government welfare program which many people find unfair and unpopular. And it eliminates the need to have a social security, medicare and medicaid program which is the majority of what the federal government does.
It also gives people flexibility and greater freedoms in lifestyle. That income enables you to pursue opportunities other than employment such as volunteering, education, more leisure and raising a family. And it gives you the opportunity to pursue non-traditional jobs which may bring you greater satisfaction but less secure income such as writing a novel, doing scientific research or launching a business.
But most importantly, it will enable us to finally abandon the caveman policy of trying to produce jobs and instead, enable us to pursue the more rational policy of trying to produce automation that liberates us from jobs.
The End of the Job
Our productivity comes from automation. Being able to produce more goods and services using less labor is how we increase our wealth. Increasing automation and eliminating jobs is what makes us wealthy.
And automation improves our quality of life. It frees us from having to spend our limited time doing tasks nobody has any interest in doing.
The only work anyone should do is the kind of work they would do if they didn’t have a job to go to.
You should get paid to do what you love, what brings you the most satisfaction and what you would be doing in your free time.
The fact that most of us spend the vast majority of our brief moment in time in this universe working a job is a tragedy. We should use automation to eliminate every job that exists that people only do because they are getting paid to do it.
Work should be a source of growth and well-being, not a chore.
People should spend their time being productive in something that inspires them to live, not working some job like a piece of machinery.
We can have a world where there is no difference between work and play. We can have a world where everyone retires from their job. We can have a world where everyone looks forward to every day, not just the weekends, because they are doing something that they would be doing even if they weren’t getting paid.
The only way to progress, the only way to maximize our automation capabilities and the only way to put an end to the need to have menial jobs is if people are paid a basic income that they get whether they are working or not.
The need to have jobs, so people can earn an income to survive, holds us back.
The vast majority of jobs we do can be eliminated tomorrow with automation. It is no longer the 20th century. We live in a new world. The economy is now digital, powered by intelligent machines and no longer requires human labor to do most tasks.
We employ 3 million people in banking to do a job a cheap computer can do. We employ 15 million people in making all our products but then use 20 million people in trying to sell them.
100% of our physical wealth comes from just 35 million jobs in mining, utilities, manufacturing, construction, maintenance, healthcare. That’s just 1/5th of the workforce. We can switch to working just 1 day per week without any reduction in our standard of living.
The remaining 115 million jobs can be automated with existing technology (banking, transportation), are obsolete (retail trade) or are things people volunteer for (music, fire, police, education).
The waste and inefficiency trying to keep this ancient system going is criminal. We are wasting tens of millions of human lives and talent. We are wasting our most important and most valuable resource.
We have real problems that need to be worked on like curing disease, developing the next generation of energy, and figuring out why we exist in this universe and how it all works.
Instead, we have people wasting their lives driving around in polluting trucks, kids in the mall selling jeans instead of in college and an army of tens of millions of office employees doing nothing more than shuffling around paper.
All these jobs should be eliminated now using existing technology and intelligent systems so we can get on with living the good life. We can have a better, more rewarding life and, more importantly, we can begin using those people to work on real issues.
$30,000 Worker Bonus
And in addition to that $20,000 basic income, we will also be able to pay every worker another $30,000 per year on top of whatever salary they earn.
That is a total of $50,000, tax free, in additional income you will earn every year. And since these incomes are based on GDP, they will grow as the economy grows.
In our current system, 94% of all the workers in this country will never earn a six-figure, upper-class income. But with the $50,000 tax bonus, we have just raised the average worker earnings to a six-figure, upper-class income. And we are just getting started.
Individual Wealth
Making every citizen wealthy, instead of making the government wealthy, is a far better, a far more efficient, and a far more humane use of tax money.
All power comes from income. End of story.
So using tax money to empower the Individual instead of using it to empower Big Government or Big Industry is a key component to our economic program.
Income determines how nice your home is, how nice your neighborhood is, how much crime there is, the quality of your education, the quality of your health care, the clothes you can wear, the car you can drive, how often you can vacation, where you can vacation, what job you do, whether you like your job, how responsive public and private institutions are to your needs, what opportunities you will get, and how useful you are to society.
Your income rules with an iron fist over your life and dictates your entire standard of living and nearly all of your entire quality of life.
The money you gain from the power to tax will nearly triple the average individual’s income, nearly triple their purchasing power and as you will see shortly, contribute to giving you a six-fold increase in your standard of living.
Tax Calculation
The $20,000 basic income and $30,000 worker bonus is based on three assumptions.
Our current GDP in 2010 is about $14.5 trillion. The total $50,000 tax revenue is based on the assumption that the National Income is $18 trillion which we will reach in about 4 years. If this program were implemented today, the $50,000 income would be about 20% lower.
The second assumption is that it is based on a flat tax rate without any deductions. Everyone, no matter what you earn, pays the 35% income rate and the 15% FICA rate on their entire income.
Although this will be an increase in the tax you pay, since this money is getting paid back to you and not to the government, you will get an increase in your take-home pay no matter how much income you earn.
Whether you make $15,000 per year or make $1.5 million per year, you will take home a greater income than you do currently.
And the last assumption is that the $30,000 worker bonus is based on zero unemployment. As unemployment increases, the worker bonus will increase because it will be divided up among less workers.
If 100% of the 150 million person workforce is employed, the worker bonus would be $30,000 per year. But if, for example, the number of people employed dropped to 100 million, the worker bonus would increase to $45,000 per year.
Government
Paying federal tax revenue to citizens instead of government does not mean an end to the federal government. It just means an end to the vast majority of what they do. Most of the federal government’s budget goes towards Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. They no longer have to provide any of these services or any other social welfare program since the entire population will always have an income to take care of themselves.
The few remaining programs such as Defense, NASA and HHS can be paid for with existing excise taxes, existing user fees, existing tariffs and a small 2% tax.
And this does not affect state governments. The vast majority of services you get from government such as sanitation, fire, police, streets, utilities, or education are from state government and they will all remain unchanged.
ACCESS TO YOUR OWN PERSONAL CENTRAL BANK
Do all your borrowing from your own personal Central Bank without having to pay any interest.
The second component of our economic program is access to your own, personal Central Bank.
This bank will lend you money whenever you want, for any purpose, and not charge you any interest. And it is all done instantly with the simple click of a mouse. No loan officers. No bank applications. No credit checks.
Computers have made banks obsolete. What we propose is to replace the entire archaic, multi-trillion dollar commercial banking industry with a simple $1500 computer connected to the internet that everyone can access. In today’s digital age, banks provide absolutely no value whatsoever.
Banks were necessary before we had computers. In the past, money was not digital; it was something physical. So banks provided a way for you to store your physical money. And when you wanted to borrow, the bank was able to match a borrower with a lender.
Now that money is digital, the entire banking process is no longer necessary. You do not need a physical building with a bank vault to store a digital number. You can “store” an infinite amount of money on a single $10 chip.
And you do not need banks to process payments. Processing a payment is just a simple digital increase of a number in the seller’s account and a digital decrease of a number in the buyer’s account. It costs virtually nothing for a computer to change a number.
And since everyone is plugged into the same central banking system, filled with digital money, you no longer need banks to match lenders with borrowers.
Charging people for banking services is the same as the post office charging you for every digital email you send. It makes absolutely no sense because everything is done digitally for free.
Digital Banking
In our economic plan, every citizen will be given a free, digital banking account that enables you to digitally receive money from any person or business for free. Today, if you want to receive digital payments from someone, you actually have to fill out an application, get permission and then pay a percentage of your transactions for a visa or mastercard merchant account. This adds up to thousands of dollars for a digital transaction that costs nothing to do.
Your free banking account will also enable you to digitally send money to any person or business for free. Today, if you want to send digital payments to someone, you actually have to fill out an application, get permission and then pay some bank for a credit/debit card account or bank wire. This is a digital transaction that costs nothing to do and should be offered for free.
And since all these transactions are digital, you should be able to get a real-time report on all the money you ever received, all the money you ever paid, a history of every item you ever bought and have all of those transactions properly categorized so they can be displayed to you in meaningful ways without having to spend hours inputing it manually into Quicken like it is 1995.
But most importantly, your free banking account will enable you to access a line of credit, for any loan, without having to pay anyone an interest charge or ask anyone for permission. It is a free, digital feature of your new, modern banking system.
If you want credit, no matter whether it is for a mortgage or credit card or anything else, you are automatically given it, instantly, with the click of your mouse. You don’t have to seek out a lender, you don’t have to fill out an application, you don’t have to pay a bank and you don’t have to pay interest. It is done instantly by a computer for free just like any payment transaction.
Interest Expense Insanity
Before we explain how we are able to lend without interest, it is important to point out how much havoc interest wreaks on the economy and the finances of every individual. Eliminating interest will eliminate hundreds of thousands of dollars that you currently waste on interest expenses. It will significantly reduce your cost of living.
You will most likely spend more money on interest in your life than on any other thing you buy. You will spend more on interest than on your house, your car, your education, your healthcare, your electronics, your vacations, everything.
And what you get in return for buying the most expensive item of your life is absolutely nothing! It can all be done digitally, for free. It is the biggest rip-off in history.
You will spend more money on a digital transaction that can be done for free than you will spend on your house.
Let that sink in.
If you buy a home and get a mortgage with just a 5.5% interest rate, that means half of the money you pay every month goes towards the purchase of your house. The other half goes in the pocket of some banker as an interest fee.
If you buy a $400,000 house and get a 5.5% mortgage, you are actually paying $800,000. You are paying $400,000 for your house. And you are paying another $400,000 to some banker to do a digital transaction that could have been done for free.
That is a colossal waste of money. It is a rip-off of epic proportions.
Banking is a parasitic sinkhole that robs 10% of this country’s wealth every single year, gouges the public for trillions of dollars every single year and provides nothing of value in return. It performs a digital transaction that can be done for free.
Eliminating interest will cut the cost of your house in half. By offering a mortgage for free, everyone is able to get twice the house they were before.
100% of your monthly payment will now go towards the actual home, instead of half going to the home and half going to the banker.
Zero interest mortgages are more important than any other credit you will get because it will create an unprecedented boom in housing construction. We will be able to rebuild our neighborhoods and turn them into the resorts we deserve to be living in. And it will enable us to build the palaces we deserve to be living in.
The average American neighborhood looks like a ghetto compared to the paradises they are building in the Middle East. This doubling of our home purchasing power will enable us to upgrade all of our physical infrastructure and turn the country we live in into a modern, high-tech, five-star, work-of-art. We will be able to rebuild our homes so that they will once again be the envy of the world.
Zero Interest
In order to extend credit, you need to know two things. You need to know if the borrower can repay the loan. And you need to know how much money is available to lend.
Determining if the borrower has the income to repay a loan in a digital banking system is a simple data lookup. It does not require a human to look over an application. It does not require a credit check. Your financial profile is already digitally available. When you want to borrow money, the computer will just check to see if your current net income is greater than the monthly loan payment. That can be done instantly and digitally for free.
If you have the income to cover your monthly debt payment, you will get approved. If you do not have the income, you will get denied.
The second thing you need to do is to see if money is available to lend. However, bank lending does not work in the way you probably think it does. Our current banking system uses fractional reserve lending. That means banks actually lend more money than exists in deposits.
Banks are able to lend out ten times more than they have in savings. They get this additional money by simply creating it. Today, money is digital. Creating money is just a simple keystroke on a computer.
So you do not need to take someone’s savings and use that as the money you lend. The money for loans are mostly digitally created.
Although creating money digitally to fund your loans means you do not have to check to see if money is available to lend, it does, however, mean that you do have to check to see if all this new money you are creating is causing inflation.
Inflation occurs when the supply of money in circulation is greater than the amount of goods and services available to buy.
In our current banking system, how much money is available for lending is NOT determined by how much money we have sitting in deposits at our banks. It is determined by how much inflation exists in the economy.
When inflation increases, the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, which makes borrowing more expensive, which then cuts down on the amount of money being borrowed, which then cuts down on the amount of new money being created, and which therefore reduces the amount of inflation.
That is precisely how our proposed system will work. The amount of money available for lending will be determined by the rate of inflation. If inflation increases, less money will be lent out. If inflation decreases, more money will be lent out.
But instead of using interest rates to control borrowing, we will use the loan repayment term. Instead of changing the interest rate, the Federal Reserve will change the amount of days or months required for repayment.
For example, if you borrow $5000 and the current term is 50 months, your monthly payment would be $100. But if inflation begins to rise, the central bank may decide to cut the term on that kind of loan to 40 months. Now if you borrow that same $5000 with a 40 month term, your monthly payment would increase from $100 to $125.
That increase in monthly payment would in effect make the loan more expensive, which then cuts down on the amount of money being borrowed, which then cuts down on the amount of new money being created, and which therefore reduces the amount of inflation.
Decreasing the loan term has the same effect as raising interest rates-it increases the monthly payment and discourages people from borrowing.
Business lending will work the same way. Companies with investment grade credit ratings will get free automatic access to credit.
Of course, in this system you no longer will be earning an interest rate on your savings. But trading in the measly interest you earn on your savings in exchange for the enormous expense you eliminate from not paying interest on your borrowing is a deal worth taking.
You will pay far more in interest expense in your life than you will earn in interest income.
Just like you cannot expect to earn money for sending digital emails to people when it costs nothing to send a digital email, you cannot expect to earn money by lending digital money to people when it costs nothing to produce digital money.
However, if you want to earn a return on your investing, you can still speculate in non-investment grade bonds and gamble on equities.
COMMAND OF A MULTI-TRILLION DOLLAR WORLWIDE EMPIRE
Earn up to $365,000 per year in whatever job you currently do.
Today, we have the technical ability to produce a near unlimited amount of anything. We have the capability of making the entire planet wealthy. But financial struggle, unemployment, poverty, starvation, homelessness, and lack of access to goods and services exists everywhere.
We dont have a production problem. But we do have a distribution problem. Our economy produces lots of wealth, but it does a poor job in distributing it.
The wealth disparity is staggering. The overwhelming majority of workers struggle financially and live paycheck-to-paycheck while a small handful of people make enormous incomes. Half of all workers will never earn more than $33,000 per year. 94% of all workers will never earn a six-figure income. And 13% of the population lives in poverty, including 25% of all Blacks, 23% of all Hispanics and over 20% of all children.
And the wealth disparity is growing. Thirty years ago, the top executives at the S&P 500 made 30 times more than what their average worker did. Today, that has risen to 300 times what their average worker earns. The economy is growing. But the majority of that increase in wealth is going to the people who are already wealthy.
This is not the only arrangement that is possible. Things can be done differently.
So what we propose is a system where people can choose alternative economic arrangements. And these alternatives would have to compete with each other and with the existing system. People can continue to work for and patronize companies that operate within our current system. Or they can choose to work and buy from companies that operate within alternative systems.
The best system will attract the most employees and the most customers.
And one system that we propose is an alternative to the high-risk, all-or-nothing system of Wall Street. Like Wall Street, it will be a group of publicly owned companies. But unlike Wall Street, the stock ownership will not be concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires. All shares of stock will be issued to employees. And those shares give every employee ownership not just in the company they work for, but ownership in every company that is a part of the association.
And unlike Wall Street, the investment and profits of the companies will not be managed by a small, elite group of very rich investment bankers, who become billionaires by using trillions of the public’s money to make a small, elite group of entrepreneurs super millionaires and billionaires. Instead, the investment and profits of the companies in the association will be managed by a democratically elected Executive Board who then appoints Cabinet members for each industry sector and establishes the investment and compensation policies of the member companies.
So employees will no longer get to gamble their savings in a volatile stock market, speculating on whether the price they paid for their stock will increase in price, hoping it doesn’t drop 50% in value right before their retirement, and hoping they can squeak out a 6% return on their investment. Instead, employees get a job that pays them a salary that is as much as 10 times higher.
The primary benefit to this economic system is providing a much more sensible, a much more attractive employee compensation plan and better collaboration among the member companies. In this system, there will be no billionaires and there will be no executives earning $10 million per year. But 100% are guaranteed to get paid very, very, very well, no matter what job you have.
Pay will start at no lower than $50,000 per year and will peak out at $300,000 per year. But the vast majority of employees will be able to reach the top or close to the top of the payscale.
In an economy the size of the one we used in the above Income Tax section, where the national income is $18 trillion and the workforce is 100 million, and if our proposed association sets a policy to reinvest 15% of its income in retained earnings, here is how the payscale could work for the association:
- $300,000: paid to 20% of employees
- $200,000: paid to 20% of employees
- $140,000: paid to 20% of employees
- $ 75,000: paid to 20% of employees
- $ 50,000: paid to 20% of employees
When you include the additional income you get from your tax funded Basic Income and Worker Bonus, an employee that works for our proposed association will make anywhere from $115,000 to $365,000 per year.
In our current system, only 6% of employees get to make $100,000 per year. In our proposed association, every single worker earns over $100,000 per year. 60% of our employees will make $205,000 per year or more. And one out of every five will make $365,000 per year. Our employees will be the richest on Earth.
The household income of a couple who chooses to work for our association will be no less than $230,000 per year. Every single working family will earn an upper-class income and live a very wealthy lifestyle.
This association will provide an alternative economy for people to choose to participate in. It is designed to appeal to all lifestyles. You can work full-time, part-time, or on a temporary basis. Everyone who wants a job, gets one. And everyone who works, gets paid top dollar so that everyone can enjoy the benefits of wealth. Whether you are bagging groceries, serving food at a restaurant, constructing buildings or operating on patients, you are all partners in creating the highest standard of living in the world and you all live the good life.
Establishing An Alternative
The only way an alternative system can be established is if it is comprised of a mix of companies that rivals the mix of companies in the other systems. It needs to be large enough and diversified enough so that it has a company in every industry sector and so that nearly all the money spent by employees and by member companies are with companies that are a part of their system.
It needs to have everything from delis to restaurants to contractors to healthcare to manufacturing to utilities to services to mining.
In other words, it has to be able to operate like its very own independent economy.
That is no small undertaking. So unlike the other components of this economic program, this is not something that can be implemented overnight. But it can be built with the push of the government. One way the government can get involved is by having the proposed economic system put to a vote. If it reaches a minimum level of votes to support it, the government will then establish a system where companies and potential employees can register to launch the new system.
An alternative economic system will need to be the size of at least 20% of the total economy. So if a proposal gets 20% of the votes, that can be the standard in determining whether the proposed alternative should be pursued.
The association would then be launched by getting existing private companies to join, recruiting executives who want to start a new business for the association in their area of expertise and by the association issuing bonds to launch new businesses and acquire existing public and private businesses.
There are plenty of small, private businesses that would gladly give up their risk for the income opportunity of the association and being able to plug into the association’s vast resources and infrastructure, there are plenty of people who are more than capable of managing their own company if given the chance, and there will be absolutely no shortage of employees for any of the association’s companies.
The biggest challenge for this alternative model will be in getting started. But it will be worth it. We believe an economic model where all the companies are democratically owned by the employees and customers, and most importantly, has to compete within the same country with companies that operate in an economic model where all the companies are privately owned and managed, will produce far superior results.
Employees will be working with different incentives. They know they are getting paid top salary, so money is taking off the table and they can just focus on producing great work. And the success of the company doesn’t make some owner rich, it directly raises their own standard of living and the standard of living of every employee in every company of the association. Not only are your fellow employees your partners in success, but your customers are also your fellow partners in success as well.
The goal of the association will not be to maximize the wealth of a small handful of individuals, it will be to produce the highest standard of living for every employee compared to all other economic systems. It will be completely immune from problems of unemployment and economic downturns of the business cycle.
It will set standards which every company will be measured by, not just their profitability. It will promote the values of accountability, competition, innovation, service, and entrepreneurship among its member companies. And it will all be managed in an open, transparent and democratic manner. But most importantly, everything that every company does will be with the goal of making the greatest goods and services in the world, so that its members are the wealthiest in the world.
An End To The Economic Monopoly
Our current system has a monopoly on our economy. There are no alternatives. We know, however, that there is no more powerful ability than the freedom of choice. In a truly free society, which is truly interested in producing the best results, citizens should be able to freely choose between competing economic models.
The freedom to choose which economic model you support, with the simple change of employment and the simple change of what companies you purchase from, without having to resort to moving to another country or electing a government that overturns all of society by imposing a single economic model on everyone, even the ones who don’t want it, will produce an economy that provides the highest standard of living and the highest quality of life.
A country with competing economic models is a country where ultimate power rests with the individual, not with government or with industry. It is not a radically socialist country where government owns a monopoly over the economy. And it is not a radically capitalist country where industry owns a monopoly over the economy. It is an individualist country where every individual has the incredible power to autocratically direct the entire economy, just like a King, by exercising their freedom to change jobs and change where they spend their money.
If an economic model is not meeting the wealth and lifestyle goals of citizens, someone will come up with one that does and make all others obsolete.
THE PURPOSE OF THE MARKET
The market should be a tool that we use to serve us. But today it is the other way around. The market rules and we are its lowly servants. The market has been elevated from a tool to an actual philosophy that we literally live and die by. It has become a pseudo-religion steeped in dogma, devoid of empirical results, immune from accountability and even comes with its own mystical being in the sky in the form of an invisible hand, named Laissez Faire, that guides us all to salvation.
Like sacrificial lambs, in order to maintain market purity, we allow human beings to die of starvation, homeless people to live in the streets, sick people to suffer in agony without medical care and millions in so-called wealthy countries to regularly succumb to financial devastation that leaves their lives in complete ruin. Life is difficult enough. People don’t need the added burden of financial troubles.
The worship of market purity does not lead to wealth or progress.
The purpose of the economy is to provide a forum for discovering what goods and services are wanted, to provide those goods and services and to constantly improve them. That’s all. The purpose of an economy is not to provide jobs or acquire money or generate profits or ensure freedom or teach lessons in personal responsibility or to be a creed to live by.
The purpose of the housing industry is not to provide a way for people to make money building houses or to maximize home construction profitability or to drive nails into wood. The purpose is to provide every member of society as high a quality home to live in as technically possible. The purpose of the energy industry is not to provide a way for people to make money selling energy or to give people the fun of drilling large holes in the ground. The purpose is to provide 100% of the people with 100% of their energy needs in the most efficient and cleanest way possible.
The same goes for every other good or service in the economy. The same goes for televisions, cars, hotel rooms, clothes, computers, phones, medicine, everything. The purpose of the economy is to provide the absolute best to all who want. And the only measure of success in any industry should be in its ability to deliver on that.
We should abandon the delusional and pointless goal of market purity and replace it with the goal of producing our desired results.
The market should be held accountable on its ability to deliver all that we want, in ever increasing quality. And the biggest step we can take, in making sure the market is delivering everything we need and working as an effective tool that serves us, is to remove the massive roadblock caused by people’s lack of income.
The only way for an economy to provide the most goods and services, so that everyone is wealthy, is to make sure every consumer is well funded. That is what this economic program accomplishes.
IMPLEMENTING THIS ECONOMIC PLAN
To implement this program and create a literal paradise on Earth, all we have to do is vote for it.
Normally when you vote, you have just two choices. You can vote Right, for the Republican Party, and vote to empower business and free markets. Or you can vote Left, for the Democratic Party, and vote to empower government.
The candidates who want to implement this economic plan are going to offer you a third choice. This third choice will enable you to vote, for the first time ever, to empower yourself.
These candidates DO NOT represent the interests of Big Government or Big Industry. They represent your individual interests and your individual interests alone. We call them the Big Individual candidates.
So when voters go to the booth, we want them to be able to choose between 3 choices:
- A Vote For Big Government - a Democratic candidate which empowers the wealthy career bureaucrats who love to wield power.
- A Vote For Big Industry - a Republican candidate which serves the interests of big business and the wealthy elite.
- A Vote For Big Individual - the candidate we want you to vote for which just empowers yourself and the vast majority of individuals who don’t have friends in powerful political positions or vast holdings of wealth.
We believe if people are given the option to vote for this economic plan, an option to vote to make themselves more wealthy and powerful, instead of industry or government, that people would vote for this in a landslide.
For the first time ever, people are going to have the opportunity to vote to fund themselves instead of voting to fund government or industry.
We think the chance to vote for your own direct, individual interests is something that appeals to all, no matter what side of the political spectrum you fall under.
Individualism is at the heart of the liberty movement on the Right. People should have control over their income and spend it the way they want. They don’t need a government spending their money on their behalf.
And Individualism is at the heart of the egalitarian movement of the Left. This program will not only eliminate poverty, it will also eliminate the middle class. It creates a society where everyone is wealthy without the need for welfare or government social services.
Voters who are truly interested in those causes finally have a choice that can make them a reality. Individualism will finally give rise to the ordinary, individual citizen. A vote for Big Individual will make you wealthy and give you all the power that comes with having wealth.
