cheque in the mail 4
spook - MaPoSquid wrote: spook wrote: What would be the result if one day we agreed that henceforth corporations could no longer own any portion of America's vast natural resources and an individual could only own that portion necessary for personal use?
The vast balance would become assets of America Inc. and every American citizen would by birthright become a shareholder in those assets and receive monthly dividend checks. The corporations would be hired and fired to manage and exploit the minerals, energy sources, arable and habitable land, water and other considerable natural assets of the nation and generate the dividends to distribute to shareholder-citizens. A small portion of these dividend payments would be held back as taxes.
I believe they tried that in Russia for about seventy years. When it all fell apart at the end, some people got shares in Yukos, and other people got shares in the local dildo factory they worked in. Rather than cash, the latter often were paid in excess dildo production. Of course, Russian dildos aren't worth a hell of a lot, so they basically got screwed.
I wish I had a copy of the story about that Russian dildo factory, but this was Before The Web in about 1992, I believe in the Chicago Tribune, and the article discussed how these impoverished Russians would have to go door to door trying to sell their monthly dildo dividend so they could buy vodka.
In a communist system, the state owns everything and private property is outlawed. I'm envisioning an America run like a corporation owned by its citizens exactly as a capitalist entity with true share dividends and with true private property including zero income tax on income from employment. Rather than the Soviet Union, the state of Alaska is a distant approximation of what I'm talking about. I'm only talking about limiting private ownership of natural resources to personal use and common shares but it would be absolute ownership by birthright and not conditional ownership as in the U.S. today or meaningless communal "ownership" as in Marxist-Leninist states.
If the central idea is to go to the heart of the inequities which make poverty in even wealthy nations endemic and to come up with a solution which ends the inherently unfair indenturement of the productive class to the underclass then something somewhere else will have to give. It's just unavoidable and not necessarily the Trojan horse of repackaged socialism.
bob - A rich, technologically advanced economy should be able to provide at least the basic assurance of survival. Instead what we have is this nightmare compromise between the right who can't see that we are in this thing together and the left who thinks that money grows on trees.
The vast balance would become assets of America Inc. and every American citizen would by birthright become a shareholder in those assets and receive monthly dividend checks. The corporations would be hired and fired to manage and exploit the minerals, energy sources, arable and habitable land, water and other considerable natural assets of the nation and generate the dividends to distribute to shareholder-citizens. A small portion of these dividend payments would be held back as taxes.
I believe they tried that in Russia for about seventy years. When it all fell apart at the end, some people got shares in Yukos, and other people got shares in the local dildo factory they worked in. Rather than cash, the latter often were paid in excess dildo production. Of course, Russian dildos aren't worth a hell of a lot, so they basically got screwed.
I wish I had a copy of the story about that Russian dildo factory, but this was Before The Web in about 1992, I believe in the Chicago Tribune, and the article discussed how these impoverished Russians would have to go door to door trying to sell their monthly dildo dividend so they could buy vodka.
In a communist system, the state owns everything and private property is outlawed. I'm envisioning an America run like a corporation owned by its citizens exactly as a capitalist entity with true share dividends and with true private property including zero income tax on income from employment. Rather than the Soviet Union, the state of Alaska is a distant approximation of what I'm talking about. I'm only talking about limiting private ownership of natural resources to personal use and common shares but it would be absolute ownership by birthright and not conditional ownership as in the U.S. today or meaningless communal "ownership" as in Marxist-Leninist states.
If the central idea is to go to the heart of the inequities which make poverty in even wealthy nations endemic and to come up with a solution which ends the inherently unfair indenturement of the productive class to the underclass then something somewhere else will have to give. It's just unavoidable and not necessarily the Trojan horse of repackaged socialism.
bob - A rich, technologically advanced economy should be able to provide at least the basic assurance of survival. Instead what we have is this nightmare compromise between the right who can't see that we are in this thing together and the left who thinks that money grows on trees.
posted by david at 6:58 AM
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