So rather than fix this house of cardsup we are going to tear it all down and build 'er anew. A whole different set of assumtions and principles on which to found our finances and our society.
Who's with me?
/polevaults over the flip
How to save humanity and the world in five easy steps. OK, they don't seem easy, but three hundred years from now schools will teach that the great tradgedy of the 20th and early 21sy Centuries was that these things were not accomplished 50 years sooner.
Part One: Negative Interest Currency.
This was done, successfully, on small scales as early as the Depression, but was crushed by the banks, who saw their profits vanishing. In short, your money declines in value by a small but steady percentage at regular intervals, such as weekly. This means it is no longer possible to get richer merely because you have money, and means investments will be made in real things -- commodities and technology. Banking is still possible as people and organizations will still need loans, and will still need ways to put money aside for future needs. Things like tree farms and eGold will be the prime means of saving.
Part Two: Socialized Medicine.
Let's not dance around with fancy dodges like Universal Coverage or Single Payer. If you are a doctor, you work for the government and get paid a flat rate based on your location, specialty, and experience, with bonuses for making your patients healthier. The highest paid doctor would be a GP in the inner city who sees all of his or her patients at least once a year. Dentists the same. Nurses the same. Co-pays would be low and fixed and used to maintain the offices, equipment, and staff, and doctors could pool together to get grants for things like MRI machines etc.
Part Three: Work.
With a twenty hour workweek as standard, people would have the time, energy, and money to do those things that stimulate the economy, and help the society -- volunteer, recreate, garden, go to shows, whatever. If you look at the great wage freeze that in large part precipitated the current crisis (I won't show graphs etc as they have all been presented here at DK by people much smarter than me), part of the problem came after WW2. When the GIs came home, they found a workforce already in place. What we ended up with, by the time everything was said and done, was twice the workers making money for businesses and no one minding the hearth. I am not saying that women are not equal or shouldn't work -- I am saying that in a family with two parents one of the parents should not need to be employed outside the house, not which one it should be! In a single parent or childless household, people should not have to spend the best, most creative, most useful years of their lives waitressing or watching the centrifuge go round. Telecommuting should become the norm for any job not requiring the physical presence of the worker.
Part Four: Meat's a Treat.
Meat. The American diet contains a buttload of meat. Meat should be a treat, a flavoring ingredient, an occasional splurge, not the foundation of a lifestyle. If most of the farmland currently used for meat production (including feed) was used for direct-to-human foods and other agrarian uses (hemp for fabrics and pharmaciuticals, high-cellulose grasses for ethanol production, you name it) not only would starvation become a thing of the past but we would be able to put a lot of environmentally damaging processes behind us as well. Small farms could once again dot the landscape where now corporate logos gaze from the silo towers like the dark eye of Sauron. People could grow heirloom and genetically diverse crops, free-range their chicken and bison, live from the farm and still produce enough overage to sell to those who choose an urban lifestyle.
Part Five: A New Space Race.
Want to stimulate and transform the world economy? Move mining and industry to orbit. Stand up in front of the nation and set the goals of the nation, that within five years the space station will have permanant residents, in ten years the moonbase will be processing asteroids for metals and volatiles. At this time in human history, we have the resources to step out and away and let Mother Earth heal herself. In another century, we might not.
Are there other ways to survive as a species and as a culture? Probably. These five, to me, are the simplest most critical changes to be made.