Newsgroups: alt.callahans

In alt.callahans, hgm@waikato.ac.nz writes:

>Animal Rights
>At first, I thought the government would set aside a share for other species
>efore 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.

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'. 

>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
Newsgroups: alt.callahans