From: hgm@waikato.ac.nz
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Re: Rhetoric: Soap box
Date: 15 Apr 92 22:36:57 +1200
Organization: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand


>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.

What is a company but a group of people who gather to make a profit?


If people sign their resources over to a corporation in return for
profit, then the company has every right to use those resources legally
in any way it sees fit.  Unless you are going to make corporations
illegal or to limit the way that people use their resources, then 
you have to make allowance for the FULL legal transfer of those 
resources.  Unless you solve this problem, I suggest that your
philosphical search is not complete.


>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.

This is an interesting idea.  I do like the intent.  

>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.

I do not mean to be extremely harsh, but this is catastrophically short
sighted.  What if a man and a wife invest resources to improve their
lot, and the man dies.  The woman loses half of her investment.

What if a son and a father are in the same situation?  As Ryk pointed
out, and as should be obvious with a very little thought, this
provision will destroy any incentive that people have to plan
and build for a better future.  Reconsider this part of your plan
seriously!

Once you resolve this flaw, you may begin to see that your system
could very well degenerate into exactly what we have now.

>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.

I hate to Use an Ayn Rand example, because I really detest her as an
author, but I have not been able to discount her ideas about wealth
and production.  Say that a woman creates a new metal.  In _Atlas
Shrugged_ a man named Reardon creates a metal and then, in a flash
of typical Rand lack of imagination, calls it 'Reardon Metal'.
Anyway, imagine that this metal is vastly superior to all other
kinds of metal.  Would you make this a resource that everyone
has a right to?  If not, I promise you, you WILL have an entire
class of people crying and whining about how lack of access to
this resource is hurting them.  If it is not designated a resource,
these people will say that you are not being FAAAAIR.

This is the basis of my objection to the word 'fair' in an earlier
post by your son.  Fairness is a subjective concept, and no
matter how hard you try to address it, you will NEVER satisfy
everyone's perception of fairness.  That does not mean you should
not try to create system more equitable than the one we have, but
be careful about what it is you think you are accomplishing.

>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.

This is very strange and muddled.  You seem to be trying to stop 
economies that are based on consuption while at the same time every
incentive that you give makes it essential that people consume
all the resource they have in order to avoid inevitable inflation.

Not only that, but unless you are proposing a barter system, which
will not work for groups larger than a tribe, you will HAVE to have
some more general concept of resource representation unless you
are suggesting that every time I want to go an buy a book I have to
decide whether I am going to sign over the rights to a ton of coal
or an ounce of plutonium.

>> 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. 

In some cases this is true, but it is NOT necessarily TRUE in all cases or even
the general case.  You make a generalization that you have no way to
prove.  I am sure that we can trade anectdotal evidence, but why not
just agree that the reasons for being and staying poor vary a great
deal and that not every poor person in the world is poor as a result
of direct oppression. 

>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.

What I was suggesting is that your system will NOT repeat NOT prevent
men and women from getting control of large amounts of resource.
Your provisions for not allowing the legal transfer of resources are
ludicrous, and you will have to modify them if you expect your
system to have any chance at all to work.  Once you have the ability
to legally transfer the rights to resources, you have the ability
for aggressive people to gain control of large amounts of resource.

This control can be gained by swindle, or purchase at a very low price
or through governmental terrorism.  The methods of grabbing control
or resource will be only as limited as the imagination of the people
that want them. You need to do a LOT more legwork in order to
solve this problem.  The first problem you need to solve is what
government controls this system of resource redistribution, and
what method you would use to prevent local governemnts and gangs
from merely intimidating people into signing over their rights.

>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.

Bull.  You first have to get to the system.  That means a form of
government to administrate it.  Then you have to have provisions
for preventing siezing resources by local governments.  Then you
have to have lists of what are and are not resources.  No, you are
completely wrong if you suggest that the system needed to administrate
this will be free of corruption.  That does not mean that your system
would not be an improvement, but it certainly would not be a panacea,
and my assertion is that it would quickly reach an equilibrium that
is no more 'fair' than the system we have now.

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

>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.

But as I pointed out in an earlier post, I now DEMAND the right to
have a say about your reproduction since it DIRECTLY dilutes my
resource share.  That is not FAIR.  I say that you are limited to
ONE CHILD, and any additional children must be paid for by YOU
with a consumption tax.

>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. 

And so we take a firm step down the road to inequitable situations.

>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. 

Yes, in fact you create system where by breeding a GREAT deal, women
could artificially gather large amounts of resource through the
influence of their children.  Your system gives huge incentives to
consumption and overpopulation.  Catastrophic!!

Work on it.

>	"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?"

I cannot believe that you would suggest that noone would have more money
than anyone else.  If money exists as an abstratct, then it is a
simple FACT that it will tend to accumulate with people who really
WANT it.  Corporations will still be created and some will succeed more
than others.  Some people will work harder than others.  Some will
come up with clever ways to scam people out of their resource rights.
The bottom line is that your system will be no different than the
present one barring any fundamental change in human nature.
 
>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.

Here you suggest that you will allow donations and pledges and all the
things necessary to create corporations, etc.  This kind of goes
againt your previous suggestions that someone only has rights to
resources while they are alive.  If these resources are saved up, 
then they are transferrable as you suggest.  If they are transferrable,
then they will get transferred.  We have the beginnings of
an inequitable system here.

>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.

You are joking right?  How the hell are you going to draw the boundaries
and identify who was the earliest culture in any given area?  The
mere neeed to identify this will create opportunities for corruption.

And why should I hand my rights over to Native Americans?  Even
if I am willing to grant that western Europe raped this continent
and stole it from the Indians, the fact is that I did not do it and
I am now a native member of this land, and I have EVERY RIGHT  that
'native americans' have to determine what happens to it.  I do
not intend to pay for the sins of my fathers, and the sons of native
americans have no more right to this land than I do.

> 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.

Maybe.  Maybe not.

>	"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."

Japan, Korea, and many other nations have demonstrated that if the
will exists, you can compete in the modern world.  Successful competition
raises the standard of living of everyone in a country.  America
has demonstrated that.  Even the poorest people are much better off
than the poor of the third world.  I personally have my doubts that
capitalism as it is done now can work on a global scale, and hence
I agree that new ideas need to be put forth as to how to run the 
world.  I think you have good ideas, but they seem to be couched
in a lot of wishful thinking.  Human nature makes the world unfair,
and nothing you will do can change that, but I can understand your
desire to shift the bias of power and success more in your own
direction. 


doug
In article <122420046@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM>, daq@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM (Doug Quarnstrom) writes:
> In alt.callahans, hgm@waikato.ac.nz writes:

> I find it interesting that you use the words 'the government
> a couple times in this paragraph.  Are you positing a world
> government?  If so, I am quite amazed that you are as little
> concerned with my suggestion of possible corruption.
> 
> I am also a little suprised at the lack of any discourse on the nature
> and the path to this 'government'. 
> 

No, I don't think a world government is necessary. Any nation state can adopt
the system independently and then seek to use its influence to encourage other
states to do the same. The share available in these circumstances would be the
smaller of the global share and a share of the resource available within the
boundaries of the state. Resources which were within the boundaries of the
state in excess of the share of the individuals in the state would be available
to trade with other nations. Trade would be encouraged with states which had
less than their share of that resource by offering them subsidies on condition
that they similarly subsidised trade in the other direction of resources they
had in excess of their share.

>>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.

> 
> What is a company but a group of people who gather to make a profit?

Quite, right!

> If people sign their resources over to a corporation in return for
> profit, then the company has every right to use those resources legally
> in any way it sees fit.  Unless you are going to make corporations
> illegal or to limit the way that people use their resources, then 
> you have to make allowance for the FULL legal transfer of those 
> resources.  Unless you solve this problem, I suggest that your
> philosphical search is not complete.
> 

Alright, for philosophical purity, you may make FULL legal transfer of your
resources to a corporation. The actual amount this represents is, however,
variable (according to the population of the world) so it is only this variable
amount that you can sign over. At any time your corporation can only own the
resources of the individuals who have signed their share over.

If you sign over your rights for your lifetime without any conditions you are 
an idiot but I suppose you should be allowed that right. You will then be
dependent on charity if your corporation doesn't give you an adequate income. I
can see no reason why any compulsory deductions should be made from anyone
else's income to support you in these circumstances.

The point is you cannot consign to a corporation more than your share at any
given time or anything in perpetuity. You only have a right to a share of
natural resources while you are alive. You may bequeath the value of any
improvements but not the natural resource value.

> 
>>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.
> 
> I do not mean to be extremely harsh, but this is catastrophically short
> sighted.  What if a man and a wife invest resources to improve their
> lot, and the man dies.  The woman loses half of her investment.
> 
> What if a son and a father are in the same situation?  As Ryk pointed
> out, and as should be obvious with a very little thought, this
> provision will destroy any incentive that people have to plan
> and build for a better future.  Reconsider this part of your plan
> seriously!
> 
> Once you resolve this flaw, you may begin to see that your system
> could very well degenerate into exactly what we have now.

I do not see this as a problem. The individuals involved should arrange their
affairs so that the remaining person can still pay the licence fee to retain
title to the property. There would probably be insurance companies who would
take on this provision at least for the surviving spouse. Few people would be
using all their resources. The survivors might be able to use the income from
the resources they are not using to pay the fee for those they are using in
excess of their share. The son is entitled to the products of his fathers
labour but not the value of the natural resources involved. He can either
produce enough of what the market requires to pay the fee or sell his labour to
someone else. If they have built a factory he will inherit most of the value of
that factory with no death duties. I cannot see how this reduces the incentives
to build for a better future. All the products of your labour remain with you
instead of being taxed away as at present. The only disincentive against
accumulating more resources than you can use. I don't see anything wrong with
that.

> Shrugged_ a man named Reardon creates a metal and then, in a flash
> of typical Rand lack of imagination, calls it 'Reardon Metal'.
> Anyway, imagine that this metal is vastly superior to all other
> kinds of metal.  Would you make this a resource that everyone
> has a right to?  If not, I promise you, you WILL have an entire
> class of people crying and whining about how lack of access to
> this resource is hurting them.  If it is not designated a resource,
> these people will say that you are not being FAAAAIR.

Reardon is entitled to the difference between the value of 'Reardon Metal' and
the value of the natural resources from which it was made. I am quite immune to
people crying 'not fair'. A lot of people who have acquired absolute ownership
of natural resources in perpetuity through inheritance or through saving the
value of their labour think my system is not fair. If you don't agree with my
premises you will not agree with me however well I develop my argument from
them. My premises are:

Natural rights exist and are equal to all human individuals.
Therefore no one can have a natural right to
anything which cannot simultaneously be delivered to every human individual.

Natural rights include a right to the full value of your labour.

No group of individuals can have more rights than the sum of the rights of the
individuals in the group.

> 
> This is the basis of my objection to the word 'fair' in an earlier
> post by your son.  Fairness is a subjective concept, and no
> matter how hard you try to address it, you will NEVER satisfy
> everyone's perception of fairness.  That does not mean you should
> not try to create system more equitable than the one we have, but
> be careful about what it is you think you are accomplishing.
> 

Of course, I am using my definition of fairness.

>>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.
> 
> This is very strange and muddled.  You seem to be trying to stop 
> economies that are based on consuption while at the same time every
> incentive that you give makes it essential that people consume
> all the resource they have in order to avoid inevitable inflation.
> 
I don't see what you are getting at here. Are you confusing money with
resources? I can't envisage the meaning of an economy which is not based on
consumption. Where is there an incentive to 'consume' a resource?

> Not only that, but unless you are proposing a barter system, which
> will not work for groups larger than a tribe, you will HAVE to have
> some more general concept of resource representation unless you
> are suggesting that every time I want to go an buy a book I have to
> decide whether I am going to sign over the rights to a ton of coal
> or an ounce of plutonium.
> 

You still have money. At any given time the 'exchange rate' between money,
which represents stored labour, and resource value is determined by the 
licence fee. The products of resources will have this value incorporated in
their price. O.K. I was wrong to say the resource itself has no monetary value.
What I meant was that that value will not be incorporated in the price. The
natural resource value will be taken in taxes so you will not pay for it when
you buy the resource. You will only be buying the products of the sellers
labour. You will pay for it with money which is the stored value of your
labour. You will not have paid for the value of the natural resource and 
therefore need not be offended when the value of the on-going services provided
by that natural resource are taxed off you.

> just agree that the reasons for being and staying poor vary a great
> deal and that not every poor person in the world is poor as a result
> of direct oppression. 
> 

Right, certainly I do not propose to quote statistics, but I would say most of
them are poor because of the direct or indirect results of indirect oppression.

>>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 buy their products. If they hire you to make a machine
>>which makes them independent of your labour you are out of luck.
> 
> What I was suggesting is that your system will NOT repeat NOT prevent
> men and women from getting control of large amounts of resource.
> Your provisions for not allowing the legal transfer of resources are
> ludicrous, and you will have to modify them if you expect your
> system to have any chance at all to work.  Once you have the ability
> to legally transfer the rights to resources, you have the ability
> for aggressive people to gain control of large amounts of resource.
> 

They can control it but if my system is operating they will have to, either from
the resources or by selling their labour to someone else, pay the value of the
resource to those they are excluding.

> This control can be gained by swindle, or purchase at a very low price
> or through governmental terrorism.  The methods of grabbing control
> or resource will be only as limited as the imagination of the people
> that want them.

This is what we have now but we do have universal adult suffrage. We only have
to convince enough people to put in a government which operates my system to
remove the government terrorism we now have.

 You need to do a LOT more legwork in order to
> solve this problem.  The first problem you need to solve is what
> government controls this system of resource redistribution, and
> what method you would use to prevent local governemnts and gangs
> from merely intimidating people into signing over their rights.
> 

My system would make the laws about property rights right. Certainly 
implementing them is another problem but I do not see why you think it would be
 more of a problem than at present. More people's interests would be served by
cooperating with my system than are served by co-operating with the present
system. I envisage a similar police force and justice system as at present.
Paid for, in case you were wondering, by a per capita tax (a poll tax, shock,
horror!)

>>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.
> 
> Bull.  You first have to get to the system.  That means a form of
> government to administrate it.  Then you have to have provisions
> for preventing siezing resources by local governments.  Then you
> have to have lists of what are and are not resources.  No, you are
> completely wrong if you suggest that the system needed to administrate
> this will be free of corruption.  That does not mean that your system
> would not be an improvement, but it certainly would not be a panacea,
> and my assertion is that it would quickly reach an equilibrium that
> is no more 'fair' than the system we have now.
> 

How are you defining 'fair'?  What are these villainous local governments you
are so paranoid about? I see the thing being adopted from the bottom up, by
agreement. I suppose you are either thinking of your global government or about
federal versus state government. In the system any one has the right to add a
resource to the list. Before we realised that global warming was a problem we
would not have bothered to include the carbon-sink capacity of the lower
atmosphere as a resource now one of us would probably want to protect our share
so it would be included. We will know whether licences are required to emit CO2
and what price they are. It will be a requirement that we get full information
about how our resource compensation is made up. We will be able to see whether
the amount we are getting is the same as the licence fee. If the administration
fee is too high we can transfer the administration of our resources to another
agency. The amount of resource available is measurable as is the population of
the world. They are not easy to measure and as individuals we cannot do it but
they are fundamentally measureable not subjective and therefore the only
decisions are about the validity of the data and there are clear grounds for
challenge.

I say again, there are less decisions in my system so less scope for
corruption.

> 
> But as I pointed out in an earlier post, I now DEMAND the right to
> have a say about your reproduction since it DIRECTLY dilutes my
> resource share.  That is not FAIR.  I say that you are limited to
> ONE CHILD, and any additional children must be paid for by YOU
> with a consumption tax.
> 

It would not be inconsistent with my system for you to have compulsory
sterilisation after whatever number of children was deemed appropriate provided
that that applied to everyone. I do not believe such things should be imposed
on anyone unless there is at least 95% support from it in a referendum. Again
that is not essential to the economic system. I would not vote for such a
regulation. I do not believe it would be necessary. The option would be open if
at a later stage I and the rest of the voters were convinced that it was
necessary. It would certainly be preferrable to the present system where the
majority of people are not given any economic rights and therefore effectively
no right to life.

>>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. 
> 
> And so we take a firm step down the road to inequitable situations.
> 
Temporarily inequitable outcomes are fine. It is the inheritance of property
rights in perpetuity which prevent the majority getting an equal start. Your
superior intelligence does not prevent me doing as well as I can with my share
of resources. It does not make me worse off than I would be if I was peasant
farming my own share. In fact, since a cat may look at a king, I may observe
something which helps me do better.

>>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. 
> 
> Yes, in fact you create system where by breeding a GREAT deal, women
> could artificially gather large amounts of resource through the
> influence of their children.  Your system gives huge incentives to
> consumption and overpopulation.  Catastrophic!!
> 
> Work on it.
> 

If women had more economic power and were therefore not dependent on men I
think they would be most unlikely to breed excessively. To a man a child is a
status symbol, evidence of his masculinity. To a woman a child is a lot of
work. In an economic system which values other work women do who on earth would
have too many children. I'm sure most women will have much better things to do
than breed excessively.

>>	"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?"
> 
> I cannot believe that you would suggest that noone would have more money
> than anyone else.

I don't. Those who work more for others will have more money. The only thing
they will be able to do with it is buy the products of other peoples work.
Those who work only for themselves and own all their own resources (unlikely
but possible) will have no money at all but they may if they are intelligent
and hard working consider themselves just as well off as the person with lots
of money.

  If money exists as an abstratct, then it is a
> simple FACT that it will tend to accumulate with people who really
> WANT it.  Corporations will still be created and some will succeed more
> than others.  Some people will work harder than others.

Yes, those who want money can accumulate money, much joy may it bring them. I
shall accumulate the products of my own and other people's labour. Things with
more enduring value.

>  
>>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.
> 
> Here you suggest that you will allow donations and pledges and all the
> things necessary to create corporations, etc.  This kind of goes
> againt your previous suggestions that someone only has rights to
> resources while they are alive.  If these resources are saved up, 
> then they are transferrable as you suggest.  If they are transferrable,
> then they will get transferred.  We have the beginnings of
> an inequitable system here.
> 

You cannot save up the services of resources. If you do not plant a crop this
year you cannot get two crops next year. If you do not use the air waves today
there will not be twice as much to use tomorrow. Rights to resources can be
transferred but not saved up. You cannot transfer your future rights because
you have not got them yet and do not know what they will be. You may have some
kind of futures trading whereby you transfer the risk to someone else. I think
in practice people would be unlikely to do this. Why do you suggest that rights
to something which only exists for a period cannot be transferred? If you buy a
slave you know that you will only have that slave for her life time. What is
your problem with transferring lifetime rights if that is all you have?

>>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.
> 
> You are joking right?  How the hell are you going to draw the boundaries
> and identify who was the earliest culture in any given area?  The
> mere neeed to identify this will create opportunities for corruption.
> 
> And why should I hand my rights over to Native Americans? 

If you ask them nicely they will probably acknowledge that you are a native and
you will become part of 'those they have granted residence to'. You are
right that it wouldn't be entirely consistent with the rest of my philosophy
and therefore should be abandoned. It arose as a counter to New Zealanders who
are paranoid about giving the Japanese and Indonesians rights to our excess
agricultural land. It makes the point that people here of european descent have
little more right to this land than the Indonesians. Can you justify the
current population of any area controlling immigration into that area? We would
like to be able to prevent ourselves being overrun by other cultures and
benefit from our cultures restrained breeding but can it be 'fair'. Perhaps I
should have the courage of my convictions and assume that given compensation
for the resources they do not have the vast majority of people will not choose
to leave the country of their birth.

> 
> Japan, Korea, and many other nations have demonstrated that if the
> will exists, you can compete in the modern world.  Successful competition
> raises the standard of living of everyone in a country.  America
> has demonstrated that.  Even the poorest people are much better off
> than the poor of the third world.  I personally have my doubts that
> capitalism as it is done now can work on a global scale, and hence
> I agree that new ideas need to be put forth as to how to run the 
> world.  I think you have good ideas, but they seem to be couched
> in a lot of wishful thinking.  Human nature makes the world unfair,
> and nothing you will do can change that, but I can understand your
> desire to shift the bias of power and success more in your own
> direction. 
> 

Apart from the fact that I am a woman you need not assume that I am not a very
priveleged person in the present system. 

Be careful how you use the word 'capitalism'. I am all in favour of competition
and a free market but I agree that capitalism cannot work on a global scale if
it means some can accumulate more than their share of natural resources. I have
nothing against the accumulation or accretion of 'improvements' on those
resources. I expect you could build Disneyland or a car factory with little
more than your share of any resource and good luck to you. Your inputs will
carry resource costs but you will have considered that before you decided to
build.

Helen Marsh