The idea is that a new business that needs start-up capital issues bonds. Like other bonds, they have an expiry date an an interest rate, or the like.

But you have no other rights. Even if your bonds fund 60% of the business, you get no say in how it is run. You don’t get discounts, priorities or rewards.

If the business fails, you become a debtor ranked according to the terms, and typically you only get something after those who supplied goods and services are paid.

The bonds can be traded.

It rolls together early-bird funding, angel investing, crowd-funding and an IPO into one, for the ease and convenience to get a small venture running.

Without the upside angel investors can usually hope for – exponential returns – the bond must return a rate of interest unobtainable from safe investments. Say 30% after 2 years.

The business might have some reverse re-investment clause. Like, at the 2-year mark, bond holders can extended the end date, for a higher total return, but lower relative return.

The post Non-participation bonds appeared first on Unism.

Debt has been a very useful tool for growing the economy and society, and has been a fundamental aspect of capitalism. The downside of debt it is that it increases inequality, and that needs to stop. It is also crippling to many people in pandemics and recessions.

I have written a lot about future versions of capitalism that can free us of debt, but they don’t help existing debt. How can we get rid of it?

In historical times there was the concept of debt jubilees. In the Bible (Deuteronomy) it says that every 7 years debts should be forgiven. And in modern times we know that many impoverished countries have had their debt forgiven. Bankruptcies are bad for the entire economy and should be avoided.

Joe Biden has to some degree been forgiving student debt, and it has been suggested that he do the same with medical debts. In both cases the debts are excessively burdensome for many people, and if the debts are forgiven, few would accuse those people of gaining something unfairly / ripping off the system.

Biden can forgive such debts because he can just print the money to do so. Via modern monetary theory, any country that issues its own currency and do that, as long as they don’t put so much extra cash into the economy that inflation occurs. We saw that with the COVID pandemic…

So for many types of debt, government intervention works beautifully. Effectively the burden of forgiveness is spread across all taxpayers (people and corporations) fairly evenly. And when we are talking about capitalism failing 30 years from now, the forgiveness can be done slowly.

Debt is a type of investment, but not the only one. When debt is forgiven via the government, the debt holders receive cash to replace that debt. What they do with that cash is up to them, but typically it needs to be invested.

Removing debt increases the capital value of where the debt is removed from. If your mortgage is forgiven, then the net worth of your property is a lot more. Here’s a simplistic scenario showing how debt can be replaced with ownership.

Ron owns a house worth $100K, has a mortgage of $20K – his equity is $80K. The government forgives all mortgages – people will fully own their homes and banks get paid off with government money. Suddenly Ron’s home equity rises from $80K to $100K, and the bank now has $20K in cash instead of the $20K mortgage.

Ron would like some cash, so he sells 20% of his home to the bank for $20K. They are essentially back to square one except that Ron now has $20K in his pocket, from the government. And the bank has partial ownership of a home, and no interest payments.

Debt is lucrative, essentially unfair, and a driver of inequality. Those who used to own debts will no longer reap the same rewards. That has to be the way, post-capitalism. But they can still be rewarded, just not as as well as before.

For residential property, it is a good result. The bank still profits from the rise in property prices. If the house is rented out, the bank gets their share of that as well. But as long as the property is owner-occupied, bank profits are lower. That is good, as it will send us on a path towards more home ownership and less rentals – good for reducing inequality.

Come 2050 and beyond, when globally the population will start shrinking, there will be less demand for homes. The current system (get a mortgage) will no longer be viable, because the equity in houses is (on average) going to reduce year by year. No bank will lend if that is going to happen – they would never get their money back.

If we have ended mortgage debt by then, it won’t be a problem. People won’t lose their homes and become bankrupt. Banks won’t suffer losses. But we need to start the transition today, while the inevitable consequences for banks are less obvious. Their 20% share in homes will be OK (not as good as now) for homes that are still occupied post-2050. For those that are abandoned, that is a loss for banks.

This is how we could achieve this slowly. As with many ideas like this that I have had, we need to use stealth. We cannot just announce that mortgages are going to end.

Many advanced economies have a perennial housing crisis, and every new government promises to fix it. Typically that is incentivising new home building, or building social housing. I suggest that government very slowly starts buying mortgages from people who are suffering financially, in exchange for equity. It is the same scenario as above, but government owns 20% of Ron’s home, not the bank.

Ron still has 80% equity in his home, but the burden of debt is gone. If he loses his job, the threat of foreclosure is gone. And we will be financially better off because he no longer has to pay mortgage interest. We would of course provide a mechanism by which Ron could buy that 20% from the government any time in the future, if he had the cash.

The criteria could be a based on a ratio of income and mortgage amount. If your mortgage is more than 10x your annual income, for example, you can ask the government to buy you out. This can’t be gamed, because you don’t gain. You’ve simply stopped the mortgage process at a certain point of time, which means your equity gets stuck where it is.

The criteria would be based on say the worst 1% of income/equity ratios. So perhaps only 0.1% of homes are involved in any year. And then, every so often, the criteria loosens a little. And decades from now, a big portion of mortgages have been removed from the system.

Stealth.

It can be sold as a way of making sure that people with tragic circumstances – job loss or an expensive health crisis – do not lose their homes. It should be an easy thing to sell to the public.

Next up: the sharemarket.

NOTE, not for the purposes above, but the Victorian government in Australia has a shared equity scheme, where they pay for 25% of your home at the time of purchase, and they own 25%. With time you are meant to buy them out.

The post Ending Personal Debt appeared first on Unism.

Here’s a hypothetical: smart phones become so good (and have actual longevity) that people increasingly decide to keep using the one they have, instead of replacing it every few years. And there are no new emerging markets.

What would Apple do? On average, every year, if they retain the same pricing and market share, they will sell less, and their profits will be lower.

• Increase market share via product. That means ramping up innovation or quality to be better than the competitors.
• Increase market share via price. Can work if a 10% price drop means a 20% increase in products sold. This would become a price war and a race to the bottom…
• Increase price. Test if the market is willing to pay more for the same thing. Unlikely to work outside of luxury brands.
• Decrease cost of production. This is already certainly been done to death, short of lessening the quality of the parts.
• Decrease other costs. Start with marketing. Or take risks around reducing support staff, or lawyers.
• Stop R&D. If the market has less appetite for new phones, stop developing them.

As you can see, while short-term measures could maintain profitability, long-term it is nearly impossible unless you have exceptional product development, you are luxury, or you have a eureka moment for cost-savings.

If profitability declines, share prices drop, and investors leave. A company like Apple, if they don’t do anything crazy to maintain profits (like developing a metaverse), could actually be OK. They have a lot of cash in the bank, profit declines will be gradual, and they effectively have no debt. Share price does not affect their ability to continue trading and passing on profits to their shareholders.

Most other companies are too leveraged to afford a continually dropping market capitalisation due to actual and expected reduced profits. So they collapse. Apple – in that environment – can do well in the carnage. But that’s an exception. Although a mega-corp of the last remaining solvent businesses could rule the world?

THE SOLUTION IS TO CHANGE THE MODEL

Remove debt. Starting now, actively strive to remove all of your corporation’s debt obligations, so that in 20 years from now there are no debts.

Take profits out of the mix. Have the long-term ambition to become a non-profit. State this now so that shareholders cannot sue you 20 years from now.

Become worker-owned or customer-owned. This models are available to anyone who thinks outside of the box.

Plan for reduced sales. Incorporate such expectations into business models, starting today, even though it is decades away.

Plan for reduced staff. This the hardest part. Even if society adopts a UBI (universal basic income), it is in our nature to want to work. How do you decide who to fire each year as needs for staff declines? Last in, first out, and voluntary redundancies would be the obvious choices.

OR… SOCIALISM

Rather than socialism by design, we could end up with socialism by necessity.

Smart-phones, for example. Say nothing above works, and all phone companies go broke, people are out of work, and factories are empty. The government moves in, and nationalises one of the companies, to ensure that this much-loved (needed?) product continues to exist.

We will end up with a hybrid model (kinda like China), where state-owned enterprises emerge due to capitalism falling apart, but many private businesses will still continue, especially small + local businesses.

The post Scaling Down appeared first on Unism.

The ridiculously rich are more analogous to the Gray Goo, a science-fiction concept where a self-replicating organism subsumes all around it until the entire universe is gray goo.

When you reach a certain level of wealth, in general, you cannot stop.

Someone with $2M in the bank might get an income of $100K from it (at 5% interest if that ever returns). They probably own their own home, so that would enable a comfortable life without working. They might save a little, or they might spend it all.  

Someone with $10M in the bank has more options:

• Outrageous lifestyle – spending $10K per week is hard otherwise
• Saving it for no real need
• Reinvesting and getting richer

The latter is the choice of many – they use money to make money.  With that level of wealth, their life changes from one of leisure to one of greed. Whether they use a “family office” to make “investments” or if they actively choose where they store their wealth, their life is now different. They have a purpose of becoming needlessly richer. 

They can still have an outrageous lifestyle, but there will be money left over, nagging them… If it cannot be spent, it needs to be put somewhere.

Just as I have proposed determining a new minimum income by which anyone can live with dignity (albeit poor), I am suggesting that an upper limit should be determined, where an average person might consider that they have more wealth than they could possibly need.  Such a limit could then be used to decide  taxes of constraint, rather than arbitrary numbers like $100M or the 1%.

It can be determined like this:

Make a list of the most expensive year-round travel costs, the most expensive mortgage repayments, the most expensive food and clothes.  And for each, remove the top 1% (cost-wise) that is available as being obviously ridiculous.  A $100M apartment is not twice as good as a $50M apartment.

That income can be a point at which extreme taxation kicks in, and quite likely it won’t deter the greed, but simply spread the wealth. We can also have a wealth tax (to cover any trickery) where the wealth limit is the income limit times whatever a typical investment return is for the middle class.

It is a brutal idea but it can be softened a little, towards the insanely rich using their money for good. Seed investment (like, really, really, seed), charity (not museums and the hospitals/universities of the rich), and infrastructure (get a road named after you because you built it all).

Once a set amount is determined – it can be debated, different models can be used, but there will still be a range – we can ask the maniacally rich, why do you need more?

The post When Wealth Feeds Upon Itself appeared first on Unism.

One big cause of inequality is from property ownership versus renting. Especially where people or businesses own multiple properties. They gain from increased property prices that they do not earn, and get richer still (relative to poor people). While I could prove it with statistics, it is self-evident – wherever rich people invest is where they get the most returns, and the greater relative advantage.

While a lack of affordable housing is common throughout the world, it is especially bad lately (in the AirBnb era) in touristed areas. So we can start there. Any house owner who does not reside there, must pay for a permit for that luxury.

We start off by telling house-owners in the area that such a permit, that has an annual cost, will be coming soon. And the intention is to eventually make it costly enough that some of them will sell. Presumably a resident home owner will buy it, seeing as they don’t have to pay for an ongoing permit.

Every year the local council/authority will increase the permit cost until home ownership starts increasing.

The permit proceeds go to the local council/authority, and can only be used for creating social or public housing. The permit fee will be based on assessed value, the same as property rates and taxes.

The methodology will be similar to self-reported income tax, in that the government will have ways of checking on people.

Obviously any property owned by a company will require the company to disclose the details of who owns the company if they wish to try and avoid paying the permit. Checks could also be combined with the state and federal tax systems – wherever the beneficial owner of a property claims tax deductions, and ownership records can be checked for the same name owning more that one place. International travel records could check to see if they are ordinarily resident. And so on – many ways of making sure people are compliant.

This is not the only solution – just a different and perhaps a new one.

People who are leveraged will suffer the most/quickest because such a permit could mean they start losing money. But even rich people who own many properties freehold will be affected, and they might consider that selling their properties and investing in something else would be more appealing.

The post Non-resident Property Permits appeared first on Unism.

We begin by categorising everything, I mean everything – from sub-atomic particles to galaxies to fleeting thoughts and complicated concepts – according to two binary factors. Mutability and regenerative-ness / replaceability.

Mutability is binary, with a sub-clause. Mutable means prone to change, and immutable means unable to be changed. These aren’t quite binary because in the middle are things not prone to change but able to be changed.

• Gold cannot be destroyed, but can be dissolved, where it loses its primary uses.
• Diamonds can be burned and they become coal.
• A mountain can be destroyed with enough time and explosives.

So we need to be careful with this definition, and introduce the concept of care. Gold, diamonds and mountains are immutable as long as we care for them – which is the opposite of purposefully destroying. Mutable is M and immutable / non-mutable is NM.

Regenerative / non-regenerative. Or replaceable / irreplaceable. We need a word that covers both…

This is not about whether something can be reproduced/regenerated, because being a precise copy does not matter, as long as the function remains the same. Yet replaceable lacks the notion of being able to regenerate an exact copy, if that is what is needed, for example a poem, once it is gone.

The idea is – if we lose the thing, the instance, is it a tragedy, or can we replace it with something functionally the same? Replaceable / regenerative is R. The opposite, as in non-regenerative, is NR.

The universe – physical, imagined and in-between – can be categorised in 4 ways:

NM+R

Diamonds are an example, and a good example of how categorising something can change with time and technology. A diamond is famously immutable, yet it needs care (we can turn it into coal). And it is replaceable – we can these days create an artificial diamond.

NM+NR

Gold is also immutable (with care), but as alchemists have discovered, we cannot replace it. Well, not yet anyway.

M+R

Water is mutable and regenerative. We could make it, and it recycles itself well. Carrots are also mutable and regenerative. They will rot, we can eat them, yet it is easy to grow more back. We don’t need that same carrot in our lives, any will do.

A Picasso is M+R. Without care, the painting will eventually fall apart. But, for its functionality, a forgery or print will have the same use – it is replaceable.

M+NR

This is where we get to the commons, and where care matters a lot. A volcano is, by definition, mutable. It is likely to blow itself up, to some degree. And we cannot recreate a volcano – to this day we haven’t even built another massive stone pyramid. But we can destroy a volcano, with explosives and time. We need care (in terms of being the opposite of wanton destruction) to keep it extant for a while.

But, considering nobody has every destroyed a volcano, and nobody is planning to, it is not part of the commons. It doesn’t need our protection at present.

A good M+NR example that qualifies for the commons is a person. In our society, people need care (even if it is self-care), and individuals cannot be replaced (not even with clones).

Language is mutable and non-regenerative. Languages easily disappear from lack of use, and then they could be gone forever. It is M+NR and it needs care, so it belongs to the commons.

Care

Care is what decides which M+NR instance belongs to the common or not. Does it need our care (or restraint from wanton destruction) in the real world (not conceptually) to continue in its current form, value and usefulness? If yes, it is in the commons.

Replaceable vs irreplaceable

If I am at a supermarket and choose to buy a 10cm long carrot instead of the 11cm long carrot next to it, the world will carry on in the same way. While they are different carrots with different attributes, whichever one is chosen makes no difference.

Whereas Einstein’s parents could have each had children with someone else instead. The result would still be humans with different attributes, yet the particular one called Einstein made a difference.

We Already Have Digital Examples

You may have heard of the Creative Commons. It is a modern version of the commons concept, but applied to the digital realm and copyright.

Creative Commons have a variety of licenses, and the one that fits our purposes best is:

CC BY-NC-SA: This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. 

What this means, for the wider commons, is that nobody can own anything in the commons, and nobody can profit from ownership. You may recreate the original in a new form, as long as you acknowledge the original, the original is unharmed, and any new version continues with the same obligations.

For creatives, this license means that the art/software can be enjoyed without cost. For the wider common, this means enjoyed, without cost, as long as no harm is done, because non-digital instances can be irreplaceable.

For example a lake. It is owned by the local community, and the wider society/country, and also the whole world, to varying degrees. But rather than owned, we should say looked after by custodians, and we have a right to use it.

Nobody can profit from owning the lake, but it is looked after and qualified people can use the lake as part of their enterprise, so long as no harm comes to it. Anyone is welcome to create their own lake, but the original lake(s) must be acknowledged and the same rules apply.

And a lake cannot be harmed. Unless you are going to harm a lake, and then create another in its place, in the same place, that is exactly the same, with all of the plants and creatures and microbes exactly the same as before.

The Commons Formula

There are a gazzilion things/instances out there and I am concerned that simplistic rules won’t cover everything, so that is a challenge and remains to be seen.

To belong to the commons, a thing / concept / instance / entity / substance needs:

To be mutable – it will degrade/lose function/disappear naturally, or through lack of care from humans, or through wilful harm from humans.

To be irreplaceable – creating another of it, that has the same qualities, value and usefulness, is not possible today.

To require care – a volcano is mutable and irreplaceable but we cannot care for it. A library – think of the Library of Alexandria – needs our care.

The License

The ancient concept of the physical commons can be merged with the modern concept of the creative commons:

• Anything in the commons (mutable, irreplaceable, needs care) is in the custody of all humans.
• The custodians should be primarily, but not necessarily, local and invested. Some things/instances are global in nature and should be taken care of globally.
• Anything in the commons can be enjoyed or used by any humans, subject to permission from the custodians, according to the rules of the custodians, and as long as the thing/instance is not changed in any meaningful or permanent way.
• Nothing in the commons can be owned.
• Anything in the commons can be reproduced exactly, or reproduced and modified, but the same license applies. The original remains as it was.

A List of Common Instances

Nature: air, water, DNA, endangered species
Community: playgrounds, libraries, accounting standards, money
Culture: language, religion, jazz, open source software

Who Is In Charge?

For common instance there should be a controlling body, and for each instance how that is determined and organised could be different. Ideally there is a mix of stakeholders involved, and that includes commercial enterprises at least being able to put their cases forward.

However, it would be good to have a meta-supervisor, an independent body with government funding and oversight, that makes sure that every common instance is appropriately looked after. This body can include arbitrators, data collection, investigations into which instances are not looked after (there will be a never-ending list of instances to keep them busy), and a think-tank looking into new ways of looking after the commons.

At the top layer, a statement regarding the commons should be in the national constitution, or equivalent, so courts have something legal to base decisions on.

Care Costs Money

Without a doubt, commercial enterprises cannot touch existing commons unless they enhance or improve it in some way. Or at a minimum, cause zero harm.

As we identified, the key to inclusion in the commons is the care factor. Either the instance needs care to maintain it, or care to protect it. This brings up the question of what to do when that care becomes too expensive? The answer is that a lack of money is never an excuse. Followers of the Modern Monetary Theory know that more money can be printed to provide government jobs, and that should be the case here. A lack of care because of monetary restraints is not an option, and governments must prioritise the commons above all else.

Leaving the commons and into the hands of a commercial enterprise is not an option. If a library lacks funding, and Amazon wants to buy it and rent out books for a fee, that is never an option. Neither is closing the library. The only option is to find the funding. The over-arching commons body can make a ruling around where the funding comes from.

Public Indifference

What happens if nobody cares. Here’s an example. Back in the 80s a local government body created a VHS library, seperate and distinct from other libraries. By definition, it is in our commons. But today, it has zero users – literally nobody is borrowing VHS tapes. So we need a mechanism that decides what is and ins’t in the commons, in a changing world. Another example is if sheep transitioned from being a commercial, renewal species, to an endangered one. It would then require inclusion in the commons.

Another example is dying languages. Keeping a language alive – with people actively using it – comes down to the will of the people. Some languages will stop living because of indifference, so we must allow for that possibility, combined with some serious archiving.

It Is An Ideal

The Commons License is a framework to help us move in the direction of an ideal result. Just as copyrights are abused by bad actors, the commons will fail sometimes.

It is widely acknowledged in advanced economies that equality is something to strive for. We have perhaps achieved the most with gender equality. Despite it being enshrined in law, there are gender characteristics which mean that women still end up with less, primarily because they tend to not work for periods of time when raising children (but also because they are more strongly represented in low paid work like child care). We will never reach absolute gender equality unless women are paid more at work, or paid to raise their children. Even then, we will never get the balance precisely right in a dynamic world.

So we must understand that this is an ideal to strive for. Especially when we are trying to protect nature and culture, there will be forces beyond our control, like hurricanes and war.

Not Getting Worse

The Commons License is a framework for working towards an ideal. The upper limit is that ideal, a perfect world of sorts. The lower limit has to be that we stop things getting worse. At the very least we protect the commons as they exist, with all the flaws.

The air is the purest physical commons instance there is. Nobody anywhere owns the air, the entire planet needs it, and harming it harms us all. For the most part, air pollution is an accepted by-product of modern society. Most chemical reactions cause something to end up in the air. Capturing such emissions is difficult and expensive, so we typically don’t.

Nature itself pollutes the skies. Forest fires are an easy example, and volcanoes can be the biggest contributor to climate change. Zero emissions from human activity would currently be unimaginable, as a lot of industry would shut down. So our starting point is that no individual industry, no individual polluter, can pollute more than it does today. If a factory wants to run more hours per day, to produce more product – even if there is less pollution per product – if the overall pollution rises we say no.

Paying for the right to pollute is not the answer, sends the wrong signals, and will not achieve our aims. The only way forward is less pollution – by improving methods and technology, reducing consumption, or finding alternatives. All of these can be funded.

Ending all pollution is an ideal, but not realistic. Solar panels are a godsend, but they require some pollution to be manufactured and transported. Ditto electric cars.

Nature Heals Itself

When I built a home on the edge of a forest, some native vegetation needed to be cleared for the building site. The small trees and scrub had no particular significance, not the sort of plants that people would protest the removal of. But here’s the thing, from bare land the house is now surrounded by all sorts of plants and trees that just arrived, naturally – transported seeds and rain was all it took. There is a book The World Without Us that documents when nature has taken over abandoned buildings and suburbs. The change is rapid and awesome. So we must include an understanding that nature can and will heal our wrongs with time. Not all of them (nuclear waste), but many.

Copyright

Where does art feature in all of this. We all agree that an artist who creates something that the public enjoys, should be compensated. The capitalist system works fine in that regard. The question here is how long a work of art remains in the capitalist system, via copyright. When first invented, copyright was for 14 years (with the ability to renew it once). Now, in the USA, because corporations are involved, it is 95 years.

I propose that we have a hybrid system. Transitioning from copyright to public domain (after a set period) is too harsh. I would like to see a middle phase that comprises of compulsory, low royalties that can be waived. Similar to the pittance received on streaming services today.

So, for 5, 10, 15 years, your copyright gives you absolute ownership of your work, do with that whatever you choose. Then for the next 20 years, it is under a creative commons license, with the original and all derivates paying a low royalty, like $0.001 per song stream, or $0.50 per movie stream. Then beyond that, open slather but the author/creator must always be acknowledged.

This would perhaps require a central digital depository of artistic works, and that would be universally useful anyway.

Note: this is a living document and will almost certainly change! But I own it, so I can do as I please with it, and the rules above do not apply. Yet.

The post The Commons Formula appeared first on Unism.

Regenerative

Thing is a bit lazy, so I will use instance instead (it is less tangible sounding). Regnerative instances are things that can be recreated.

Non-regenerative

Non-regenerative instances are irreplaceable.

Mutable

Change is part of its journey

Immutable

Change is unlikely, but possible by chance or the intent of another.

Examples:

Gold is immutable and non-regenerative. It is unlikely to change otherwise, but we can change it, but we can’t make more of it.

Water is mutable and regenerative. We could make it, and it recycles itself well.

A carrot is also mutable and regenerative. They rot, we can eat them, easy to grow more back.

A Picasso is mutable and regenerative. We can make copies. Note that these definitions may adjust with time, if technology allows something new to be recreated.

A person is mutable and non-regenerative. You can make another human, but not that one (yet).

Language is mutable and non-regenerative. Languages easily disappear from lack of use, and then they could be gone forever.

That leaves immutable and regenerative. Thanks to new technology – we have the example of diamonds. We can now make “fake” diamonds, but once made they are unlikely to change.

Replaceable vs irreplaceable

If I am at a supermarket and choose to buy a 10cm long carrot instead of the 11cm long carrot next to it, the world will carry on in the same way. While they are different carrots with different attributes, whichever one is chosen makes no difference.

Whereas Einstein’s parents could have each had children with someone else instead. The result would still be humans with different attributes, the particular one called Einstein made a difference.

Radical Gaia Economics

Possibly Gaia is made up of those 4 types. Perhaps anything mutable and irreplaceable is not allowed to be owned or transformed, by law? So arguably eating a sheep is OK (mutable and replaceable), but eating a human (mutable and irreplaceable, is not).

The commons

A good explanation for what the commons is – mutable and irreplaceable, that requires care, best handled by groups.

In the book Capitalism 3.0, it lists these are being part of the commons:

Nature: air, water, DNA, seeds, topsoil, animals, plants
Community: playgrounds, libraries, accounting standards, farmer’s markets, money
Culture: language, religion, jazz, open source software

All are mutable. All are either irreplaceable once gone, or harm to them makes a difference (but without harm they are replaceable). Water is replaceable, but water mixed with poison can make a difference.

Given that we regrow crops and forests, and our food animals easily replicate themselves, it is possible to live in this world without ever taking from the commons in a way that changes things in the long term.

I was drunk (and it was a lunar eclipse) when I came up with this. A much more refined version is here.

The post Non-regenerative instances appeared first on Unism.

MMT is complicated and hard to grasp, but in a nutshell, governments could print money to spend as they wish, as long as not so much is printed as to cause inflation. It is like stealing a little at a time so nobody notices.

Instead of investing that just-printed money on jobs in a Green New Deal, what if the government simply bought something?

The same approach is required – just a little, get away with it, without spooking things.

In general, governments aren’t particularly good at operating businesses, but surely there are opportunities from time to time…

Note: you can’t simply just buy a listed company. Typically most of the shareholders are not in the mood for selling. Typically you need to offer a hefty premium over the current share price to purchase a majority shareholding. But that is not hard if the money is “free”.

• Punishment: sometimes (well, often) corporations operate within the law but in unethical ways. Hiring security forces to shut down the rebellion of villagers. Buying smaller competitors simply to shut them down. Abusing monopoly advantages when the fine will be in the billions, but worth it.
• Nationalising (reversing privatisation): instead of complicated negotiations and politics, simply purchase the company you wish to nationalise
• Buying foreign competitors: this is an extreme idea, and probably would only work via a series of shell companies and so on

Of course once you start this way of thinking, then you have begun taking an authoritative path. I only suggest this as a possibility within strict guidelines and transparency. Perhaps only for punishing unethical businesses who operate within the law.

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