From: hgm@waikato.ac.nz
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Rhetoric: Soap box
Date: 10 Apr 92 23:15:26 +1200
Organization: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

An immense pile of soap boxes appears. Standing on them is a woman in her
mid-forties who is reading from a sheet of concertina computer paper as long as
the soap boxes are high. No-one can hear her as she is too far up. When she has
finished she immediatley disappears again. The computer paper drifts to the
ground. If anyone picks it up it instantly copies itself so that there are
copies for anyone who wants to read. The paper relates to the ideas Stumpy has
been promoting, it reads :-

Animal Rights
At first, I thought the government would set aside a share for other species
before calculating the human share. I then decided this is too big a decision to
leave to government. How much you think should be set aside for other species
is essentially a cultural or ethical decision. The majority opinion of a poorly
representative government cannot justly be imposed on minority cultures. I
think this should be left to individuals donating to non-governmental
organisations who will thus be able to lease resource quotas to set aside
reserves where they and their supporters deem appropriate.

Companies and governments
Only people have rights to resources, only they get income from leasing this
right. Any legal entity can use resources and must pay the licence fee for the
resource they control the use of.

Oil
There would be different oil resource categories according to the difficulty of
extraction. The share would be of the resource in the ground. Contrary to my
previous belief, I now see that you must pay the license fee for all the oil in
the field you have title to. If the oil reserves are large compared to the
demand for oil the fee will be very low. A conservation group could get title
to an oil field and raise sufficient funds by donations from individual
conservationists to prevent the field being exploited. If the demand for oil is
high compared to existing reserves the price of conserving it will rise. You
can't be a conservationist without paying for the privilege. Your conservaton
values have to be compared to other people's use values.

Kuwait
Kuwait's income before or after the exhaustion of the oil will be, just as
everyone else's will, the value of one share of all economic resources
multiplied by the number of people, minus
the value of all the resources they own plus any economic profit they are
making because they are using the resources they control more efficiently than
other users of economically equivalent resources.

Kuwait will not build up big reserves of money while the oil is there, unless
they are outstandingly efficient at extracting it. When the oil is gone we will
all lose the resource value of the oil. Kuwait will still receive the value of
all other resources for each of its population so they will not need to live
for as long as they can on their savings (and then what?). They will be in a
position to contribute to global wealth by providing services or use their
modest resource income to buy raw materials from other countries and add value
to them.

Inheritance
Your right to a share of resources only exists while you live. You cannot pass
that on but your decendents automatically get their own share from birth or
from conception.

You have absolute right to the products of your labour. If, for example, you
are a landowner and have fenced and fertilised your land you are entitled to
the value of the labour you put into that. You will still have a title to your
land. That will give you first option to lease the resource share use licences
corresponding to the land. You may sell or bequeath this title. Since the
licence to use has extracted the resource value of the land the price you can
get for it will represent the value of the labour you have invested in it. If
you bequeath the title your inheritor will have to pay the resource use
licences to be entitled to keep it, if they can't or do not wish to do this
they can sell the title and extract the stored value of your labour which you
left to them.

Money
Money as my son so rightly says is not a resource. Money is primarily a store
for the value of labour. You can exchange it for labour but because of the high
'tax' on resources they will have no monetary value. When you buy title to a
resource you will only pay for the labour that has been added to that resource.

People can accumulate stores of money but the system which puts the price of
resource use licences up if more people want to use their own resources will
ensure that if the stored money is used to compete for the consumption of the
products of resources there will be inflation. The stored money will lose its
value.


> If you think that there would not still be rich people and that 
> the poor would not work for them to survive, you are displaying
> an amazing amount of naivete.  I do not care what system you 
> propose, ambitious men and women will climb to the top of
> it and collect wealth.  Other men and women will be content
> to sit at the bottom and cry about their lot.

See under money above. Money, derived from labour, will not be able to buy the
right to prevent others having access to resources. People who are sitting at
the bottom crying are doing so because they have no access to materials to
apply their labour to. Without access to materials you cannot make the material
necessities of life. You can only sell your labour to those who control the
materials so that you can by their products. If they hire you to make a machine
which makes them independent of your labour you are out of luck.


> Deepvoice says, "Ah, this is why I brought up the concept of "natural rights"
> in my original piece. I would say that the right to life is inalienable
> based on the fact that every civilization has had some
> form of law or edict against murder of members of one's own group; this is

My test for a 'natural right' is equality: if we all have a right we must, in
any condition of the universe, all be able to exercise it at the same time. 
It is quite possible that we will arrive at a time when enough unpoisoned food 
cannot be produced to maintain everybody's life. The food there is will be
partly the product of someone's labour. We cannot all have a right to life.
Those who labour to produce food have more right to it than others, providing
that everyone had a chance to share in the labour of producing it.
The 'right to life' you are talking about is a right to freedom from being
murdered. This we can have as a natural right. I consider that, since the
existence of rights depends on equality, if you do not recognise someone else's
right you lose your own. This could be an argument for capital punishment which
is an example of societal agreement not to recognise an absolute inalienable
right to life.

Corruption
There are virtually no decisions to be made in the resource compensation system
so less scope for corrupt decisions. Creating extra persona or electronic money
will be no easier or harder than at present.

Clay
Just because I don't know how to make bricks and don't want to does not give
you the right to all the clay. I may want to use it for a mud-bath or to
conserve it for the creatures who live in it. If I want bricks and you are the
only one who knows how to make them I will provide you with my clay and pay
you, no doubt an exorbitant amount since your skill is in such short supply,
for your labour. 


From: Elizabeth.Mccoy@bbs.oit.unc.edu (Elizabeth Mccoy)
Subject:Re: Belated greetings, and other topics (was Re: Rhetoric: The...)
Date: 8 Apr 92 22:42:00 GMT
Message-ID:<1992Apr8.224200.23092@samba.oit.unc.edu>

> "Anyway," she says, looking mournful as only a feline can, "how are you
> going to define computers? They're silicon, which is basically sand,
> right? And sand is pretty cheap...  If I have a PowerBook and a
> non-luggable/portable Mac, do I have more than my fair share? *I* don't
> think so! 

No, I don't think so either. The resources 'taxed' will be only those whose
economic value, when we all get a chance to have an input into this, is
sufficient to make them worth taxing. I doubt silicon would come into this.
There would probably be an allowance set of an amount of any resource that the
average household has and this would be left out of the calculation when
defining shares. If my house is made of bricks and yours is made of wood it is
quite likely that I have much more silicon than you do even if I don't have a
personal computer. Most of the value of the computer is in the labour. You are
perfectly entitled to exchange your labour for someone else's labour and since
less, if any, income tax will have been charged on that labour your next
computer may actually be cheaper.

>	"I'm married -- what if I have less than my 'fair share' and my
> spouse has more?  What if we have kids?

Your rights are quite individual. You both get your resource dividend from the
agency leasing your resources for you. If your husband is using more than the
excluded allowance of any NATURAL RESOURCE then he will have to pay to lease
the right to use them. Remember we are not talking about the full value of all
assets. Unless he has land, or a resource intensive industry, I doubt he will
have to lease rights. 

Your kids have rights just the same as any one else. I think these rights
should start at conception, but that is another issue. They will have an income
from the agency leasing their rights. You can nominate a guardian for them.
This could be yourself, your husband or a special agency which might be set up
to provide health and education insurance for children. There would probably be
some minimum standards of provisions for children's needs which everyone(maybe
95% of those on the electoral role voting in a referendum) had agreed to.
Provided these conditions were met the guardian would be free to manage the
child's income as they saw fit. If the child's agreed minimum rights were not 
provided for the child would be taken into state care which would be paid for
by the child from their resource dividend.

	"Is intelligence a natural resource? Considering how useful
inventions can be, I bet some people would think this.  Does this mean I
can't have my spouse? Or do we go for the lobotimies so that we don't
have more sense than the 'danes?"

Intelligence could be considered a natural resource and there could be an
argument for making us pay for any intelligence we have above the average and
compensating those who have less than their share. Since intelligence is
impossible to define or measure and it is disputable whether it is 'natural' or
a product of someone's labour (I consider my son's intelligence to be partly
the product of my labour), I think we have to allow you any advantages your
intelligence may give you. 

	"I think that some jobs ought to have the same financial worth
as what my VSO does <computer stuff> -- maybe teaching, if you can make
sure that it goes to the *teachers* and not the 'teachers.'"

Since the system will give MUCH more economic power to women, especially if
they are the guardians of the children, I believe there would be a massive
change in the relative payments for different kinds of labour. 

	"Further, if no-one has more money than anyone else, how do you
build space shuttles?  Can you *really* get that many people to agree on
how it should be built -- enough so that they'd pay for it?"

They don't have to agree on how it should be built. A few people would get
together and come up with the idea. They would advertise it and solicit
donations or pledges. They would control the use of these funds. I don't see
that the state has the right to take my hard earned money compulsorily for
something I don't value at all. If some guys want to build a space shuttle they
should be able to convince me of its value. That is real accountability.

	"How do you *keep* things in balance?  I mean, people are going
to have bad luck, pay too much for something, etc.  Do you give it back
to them?  What if somebody *wasted* it gambling?  What if they don't
have enough because they keep *breeding*?  What if they keep splurging
on RPGs/computers/model airplanes?  What if the person can't work? What
if sie's crippled? What's the difference between someone who can't work
and won't work? I think cats deserve food and shelter and care -- I'll
spend my money on that if I know that I can!"

Your choice. People can spend their money on gambling if they like. Their
choice. Pay too much, well I think the state has a role in regulating the kind
of information which must be made available. A contract in which relevant
information is withheld by one party should not be valid.
Breeding, this will not severely affect them as each child will have its own
income. It will affect everyone as the amount of our share of all resources
will be reduced. Resources will become more scarce and the value of resources
compared to labour will be higher. I do not favour state intervention to
restrict breeding. I believe that a combination of increased affluence and
increased equity (which are the variables which correlate best with reducing
rates of population growth), social pressures and a cultural change brought
about by eventual realisation that although you get more dividends the more
children you have each one is worth less as population grows. I would allow the
earliest culture with living members in any geographical area and those they
had granted residence to, to control immigration into their area. They would
still have to pay an increasing number of resource rentals for their excess
resources but the rewards of having a culture which encourages low birth rates
would be that you end up with more space. This concession is hard to justify
fully but I think in practice people would prefer to stay in their own country
provided they were getting an income from the resource they did not have.
Cultures have developed with high birth rates for good survival reasons and I
believe that when these reasons are removed they will gradually adjust.


	"Yes, you're talking to someone who went from 'struggling' to
'comfortable', and who is unwilling to give up much!  Come up with a
system that I don't have a vested intrest in disliking, and I'll be a
lot happier!  I don't *want* people to have less money than they need to
live, or teach their kids, or support cats.  But don't steal the
possibilities from my unconcieved children, either."

I think that unless you have 6 cars and a 'lifestyle block' (do you use that
term in your part of the world?) you will be at least as well off with resource
compensation as you are now.

Helen Marsh


Newsgroups: alt.callahans