Why do We Still Need to Work?

A better option is 6.5*4 days or a 26 hour week (one third less), with a one-sixth decline in salary levels - but with a doubling of the minimum wage from 7.25 to 14.50 and a long-term unemployment insurance rate of 13.25 - with recipients required to be in school, caring for a child, or participating in a drug, psychiatric or physical disability rehabilitation program. This would result in a 82.5-65-100 deal, rather than 100-80-100. 

Manufacturing and service industries would have a two (or four) shift system - with a 43% bonus for second shift labor (working 52 hours in a week) or 200-130-200.  LTUI would pay 1481 per month.  Full time minimum wage would pay 1621 per month. Average Social Security would be 2494 (pegged to FT Min wage 40 hour work week).

Current min wage work is often for 29 hours a week, so real min wage job pays 904 per month.

COLAs are currently a fixed percentage of last year's wage, which causes inequality because prices chase wages at the 90th percentile. If they are granted on an equal dollar basis, management will give themselves the number of dollars that they need, with the understanding that everyone under them gets the same raise in dollar terms.  Managers and professionals will have to settle for less - and executives much less - but the economy would grow with less inflation (because it is excomp and professional salaries that drive up prices - especially for housing).

The 10 Biggest Myths About Our Economy

I am going to deal with each of these points in turn - with the benefit of hindsight on the first 6 months of Trump 47. I am going to try to get these in front of Bob, but if anyone who sees this can also forward them, I would be grateful.

1. The missing variable in the moral philosophy of economics is cultural theory. I am writing about that now. Michael Foucault, in one of his Paris lectures, addressed Homo Economicus and hit the nail on the head. Political Science has followed Economics into empiricism - so it is of little help. Moral philosophy, without cultural theory as a context, is anecdotal for all intents and purposes.

The rules of the economy are based in culture. Most of the working class behaves as obliged to by reason and threat, while the hierarchical culture gives its membership at least the appearance of due process. The former deals with sensory input, the latter by shared intuition.  As I discussed in a public forum with Gar Alperovitz, the answer to getting them to pursue change is a better mix of cash and prizes - not through trying to radicalize them with political proposals. In other words, some type of employer needs to offer a better mix of consumption, finance, housing, government - with libertarian socialism in some form - which eventually destroys politics - becoming the new paradigm. Until them, as Marx said, anything that capitalism does to make things worse makes permanent change more likely - unless government steps in to improve the cage workers are in.

2. The problem is capitalism. Saying it is corporations is tiptoeing through the minefield. Workers are property. The Libertarian assumption is that every day of work is a new contract freely negotiated, rather than an agreement for continued wage slavery. The JFK/LBJ 1965 tax cuts are what unleashed capitalists - who took what was given them and, because they now had an interest in doing so - pushed for more.

3. CEOs will set their own pay until employee-owners get the power to force CEO candidates to bid for their jobs in open auction and then vote among the bottom 3. As for intergenerational wealth, within three generations the management class takes control and nepo-babies drink themselves into an early grave or spend it away.

4. Campaign bribery is a function, not a cause, of capitalism. It also causes the rules to be changed to its advantage.

6. Global trade and the "free market" are bipartisan neoliberalism, which Bill and Hillary copied to get their share of the campaign finance system. The Democrats have now put the electoral game over governing. Also, bankruptcy reform happened with the full cooperation of Jim Moran - a Democrat.  The Trump trade policy has destroyed neo-liberalism. Be careful what you wish for.

7. Taxing the rich is social democracy. Socialism happens when employees elect their CEOs and/or make them bid on their salaries. Social Security is the most basic form. We do SD, but do it badly.

8. Our lack of purchasing power is a function of bad economic policy. Cost of Living Increases are granted as a percentage of current wages,  rather than as an equal dollar increase in all salaries. Prices change the median dollar, which is paid at the 90th percentile. Economic figures support this. If the minimum wage went up in the same manner, there would be little poverty. Democrats won't go all in on making the minimum wage permanent, as it is a better talking point than a change that would cost them campaign contributions.

9. Government spending on social programs, government contracts and salaries is first order growth. Private sector spending comes along as a second order effect, with plant and equipment spending is third order spending. All for a higher minimum wage. Biden did not do it, even with a majority.  Some degree of concentration may be helpful - as long as there are more than one libertarian socialist cooperatives - but vertical integration is essential. Prices did go up when the pandemic gave too many people in good jobs enough money to invest in Crypto, crap and bidding up the price of essentials. Again, costs change the 90th percentile. How we do cost of living adjustments cause inflation.

10. Air pollution, etc., is regulated in the U.S., but we offshore much of it to China and other developing nations by sending them our trash or our trash producing industries. They will soon collapse because of population loss and party infighting. Authoritarians tend to eat each other.

Global warming's processing is not generally known, although in the northern hemisphere, people are starting to pay attention due to the fact that we passed the point of no return in about 2016. Actually, it was more like 1990. Here is how it works. Since 1958, people had lots of cars and warming really started with vigor. Pacific warming sent wet winds to the N. American west coast, where the water was dropped and the warmth carried over to the Atlantic, picking up much more water and even more temperature. See the work Seager who explains this - under the heading of why Europe is warmer than America at the same latitudes. As Sigurd Lind has found, much of the warmth has made its way to Barents Sea. According to measurements started in 1980 - which likely represent what happened since 1958 IMHO - warm the Sea by 7 degrees F a decade. Over 7 decades, that one bottom of water has increased 50 degrees Fahrenheit. No other place has caught so much climate change. The answer is to ban gasoline powered cars -as this produced the problem - and replace them with tethered electric vehicles that can drive themselves home. To get this kind of thing adopted, people abandoning the South and Southwest is the necessary condition - along with more employee-ownership - or corporate employers in individual cities banning cars or uniting behind such a change as a workforce issue.

BONUS. Agree that conditions led to Trumpism, but it is also a result of Democratic Party politics - mainly women voting on a pro-choice ticket when they don't need to mention the issue. Other women get it. Also, Dems don't really make changes upending the neo-liberal status quo. Trump has - as promised. Oops. Some say that undoing Neolib consensus was necessary anyway because China and other Asian nations are collapsing under population decline - for either economic or environmental reasons. We need a new paradigm. Until we do, we get grievance, which almost always leads to a fascistic response.

2025: The end of our world as we know it | Peter Leyden

AI needs to be AC (artificial cognition) which includes group or individual sensory  information, general knowledge or specific reasoning, group or individual paradigms or plans and group feelings or individual values. See Jung.  

80 or rather 84 year cycles are one orbit of the planet Uranus through the zodiac.

Clean energy needs to embrace nuclear - especially small modular and salt reactors, not just solar and wind. The anti-nuke activists have long died out.

Hopefully we can one day get an at-home model meat processor - or one that can be used by a cooperative employer or ESOP. The social change that needs to go beyond capitalism is employee ownership of the means of 1. production, 2. finance, 3. housing, 4. consumption 5. human services, all based on a standard labor hour system rather than cash denominated capitalism. Any bonus for education and experience is distributed in the pension system rather than a higher return for labor. I have a book about this. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QN7WCW8

Michael Watkins: You can’t afford to be a dinosaur | Big Think+

Jung identified four cognitive functions: thinking (reasoning to make decisions) feeling (decisions on values), intuition (group agreement on concepts or values - and creativity) and sensory (individual perception). AI needs to have at least three of these working together, with thinking doing non-creative fact checking, feeling is a reaction to sensory information and seeks authenticity - deliberate bias where norms can be programmed - but must be able to change based on both individual sensory information and group intuition/creativity, sensory is easy for external input - but it is blind to personal sensation other than diagnostics, while intuition is where generative AI comes in. 

These functions exist in combination - and also include internal and external foci.

 For example, thinking/creating is a group activity with organized and specialized knowledge. When one of these functions is extraverted, the other is introverted. For example, intuitive thinking (deep dive into problems) is paired in humans with external intuition - contributing creativity to the larger system. It can also have a broad base of knowledge for the purpose of imposing a plan (rather than offering solutions).  Knowing a lot and offering a lot of options is socially inconvenient - and is the problem with current generative AI. Internal analysis for internal aggrandizement is Skynet.

Thinking can also be paired with sensing. For example, seeking reasons and storing the information (in order to offer options to clients or other machines), or seeking sensory input from the outside to take a deep dive in solving problems (and then coming up with a single answer).

Individual feeling is based on morality - and is paired with extraverted sensing - either hedonistically or by drawing from a range of data points in order to provide a single answer to the group based on a broad set of facts. External feeling is reading the room and is paired introverted sensing - recording group values in memory (and using these to solve problems with focus).

Sixteen profiles are based on having one ability be strong and its ability week, with the other two balancing and the prime function being either internal or external.

The beauty of machines is that you can have all four functions balanced, so there can be two basic functional sets depending on whether senses are for external use to yield on answer for the group or storage of data to provide a variety of options.

White Shirt Video - More on Tariffs

Over the past few weeks, I have been writing about the tax aspects of tariff policy - how because we do not have a Value Added Tax, we need either a generalized tariff based on the amount of VAT that is zero rated by exporting countries or a specific tariff to match the rates our trading partners have. Germany has a 13% VAT, so we need a 13% tariff to establish equivalency.

To make VAT, Carbon taxes and tariffs available, as well as life in general, we need a subtraction VAT on employers which they can offset by paying $700 or so per child or non-working parent per month - or more (whatever amount they pay to Social Security dependents - with wages or on top of any basic benefits paid by government (from UI to a potential long term UI that is no fault and would replace disability insurance and would be equal 75% of full-time minimum wage work -which also needs to be raised to $13/hour).

There is another reason to do tariffs. It is because standards of living vary for workers from country to country. In many cases, comparative advantage is really comparative slavery. This gives us a hint as to why we have a trade surplus with Europe. Their standard of living for workers is better than ours - much better if you include social benefits. They give us Euros to get stuff made by our workers.

In a cooperative economy, employee-owned firms would pay all workers the same wage in terms of standard living, even if they take a loss on the transfer price. This is probably illegal now, because it trades worker justice for fiduciary gain.

The tariff, therefore, must provide overseas workers and suppliers with the same standard of living overall - as productivity differences between goods should even out. If they do not, the tariff must fill in the gap.

This type of adjustment is what Donald Trump is unconsciously attempting, although if he thought it through, he would see it as socialist (because it is socialist - or at least anti-capitalist. This type of tariff adjustment is the ultimate cure for the neo-liberalism that populists hate. 

Let's do it - and if we don't do it, we should at least calculate and publish the difference between standards of living of workers in similar jobs and how that calculation interfaces with both tariffs and currency prices.

East Russian Infrastructure

The vast majority of Russia has no infrastructure. Neither does Alaska or northern Canada. Cities have roads, but are not interconnected. There is a reason for this - no people.

Russian and Chinese population figures are not honest. They don't have the same census infrastructure found in the United States - and overestimation is endemic. The only obstacles to freedom for Russia Asia is for the ethnic Russians to leave (the inevitable result of the war on Ukraine) and the expense of food. If American style lab grown meat and Dutch green house technology is developed from the Urals to Greenland, this obstacle is overcome - provided resource extraction income is adequate until an independent economy is developed - which takes people to do. Lower food prices will mean more population - especially if jobs are created.

South Asian Russia, which is Muslim, needs to be set free for Turkic and Persian nations to absorb. Inuit, Mongolian and First Nation peoples can reunify to an ethnically similar nation, provided they are allowed a fair share of extraction income. They could be the Saudis of the north. 

Trump Ends Neoliberalism

Trump has broken the back of neoliberalism - as his voters wanted. He mimics their social biases (which he does not believe privately - except the racism) and has essentially thrown the wealthy and upper middle class under the bus. 

He has also created industrial policy, with tariffs which, with correct support, can be used to provide what his voters want while making prices rise for everyone else. He has also created conditions for value added taxes. The question is whether he or a successor adopt this solution and the extent to which exemptions and exclusions from the VAT are allowed and, if so, who controls them. The Congress cannot really do the fine work on doing this fairly that the executive branch can - like tariff policy.

The question is whether or how to give more money to the bottom third of income holders - which is about 77% of the population - either through a higher minimum wage & higher child tax credits - distributed through wages rather than either the IRS directly or indirectly through individual tax filing.

Also, the financial assets that hold pensions are not doing poorly. The speculative side is losing money. His voters don't care. I don't either. The bottom 77% of households have tax free income (and if they are invested in speculative assets, they are getting what they deserve) or are temporarily poor because they have had business losses - including those carried over. Switching to a VAT economy eliminates these advantages - especially if an ASSET VALUE ADDED TAX allows for employer based taxation of high wages, dividends and interest and ignores individual capital gains and losses. The latter can also lead to employee ownership - an essentially cooperativists concept that libertarian socialists support.

A tariff policy favors workers (and by implication overseas workers) over capital. Because it (or VAT) can be manipulated by the executive branch, using them (or VAT exemptions) creates industrial policy that the Soviets and Chinese would envy. 

While Trump voters do not understand this, the Russian and Chinese systems where the connected have the power are the same as the old Soviet system. Oligarchs and senior party members have the some crony relationships with the supreme leader  (and his secret policy) in either case. For some reason, American conservatives don't get the joke. Too funny.

How The Finance Industry Destroys Economies

Capital is the stock of productive equipment. The capital your chart refers to is wealth. Wealth uses finance to allocate value. Wealth increases are under taxed in Trump world and his donors want this to continue. The way to overcome this is an Asset value added tax that can be adjusted to regulate the velocity of finance. 

The problem with the wealth I'm balance is the power the wealthy have over workers/consumers. The only real cure is the rise of a cooperative system that abandons finance by having worker controlled firms provide non-financial debt and democratic control of the means of consumption (make v buy).

Squatters' Rights to Skid Row

In the Kingdom of the Netherlands, there exists a right to squat in Amsterdam (if not the realm) to claim space in a building that has gone out of use. Whether this is granted by the sovereign or their government is immaterial. In the United Kingdom, the poor have a right to a dole - a place to live and a pension provided by His Majesty's government.

In the United States, especially in the original colonies, land is inherited from what was owned by the Crown with payment to the state every year fee simple - a dollar per year plus other taxes. In non-colonial states, the land is granted by the commonwealth, except tribal land which the tribe owns in perpetuity with the government acting as their agent - often badly - with use of such land permitted for grazing - as well as other public land. Public land can also be taken as a squat, which includes certain rights, hence the term, squatter's rights. I use the plural above because multiple people squat on skid row.

Rock Creek is behind me as I make this video, actually, the western branch inside of a regional, rather than the national, park. There is plenty of wood there and if it is not cleared, it is a fire hazard. I have purchased a book that shows how to do a house on such land for less than $50. I doubt, however, that Montgomery County would recognize a squatter's right to do so.

On Skid Row, in Los Angeles, a square block has been set aside for use by the homeless - mostly because no one wants to help these people and they have a constitutional right to refuse such help - and no one wants the infamy attached to forced removal - as such an action would be televised - both on Cable TV, local TV and the blogosphere.

That we let people rot in public is infamous. It is "a stain on any sanctity the society assumes for itself" (written, not said - feel free to repeat). The right to be unhelped should not be enshrined in law - however the law has other ideas. Instead, we give benefits to people who are disabled by mental illness because they are unable to work for people who are not as smart. Note to normies - yes, people who are either bipolar or schizophrenic are smarter than you - and if you make allowances - would run whatever enterprise you manage better than you would. So we give these people money to support themselves and supportive housing as individuals rather than putting them in a substandard asylum setting that would also invite infamy - or already did.

So, what can, indeed what must, we do about the squatters of skid row. The answer, of course, is to pay them off for the their squat. In human evolutionary history, if you squat on land, it is yours. The residents of that zone, and all the homeless, claim such a right to property and person. Evolutionarily and legally, they are not wrong.

Let's develop skid row, but the price to be paid must include a perpetual payment (with additional offer of services) for their squatter's rights. If housing is developed, then they must be provided with free housing plus the profit that would have otherwise been collected for that space - with that amount deducted from property taxes owed to the City and County of Los Angeles. If they agree to be located off-site - and must be during construction - they must still be given that payment, as well as the right to relocate. The right should not be perpetual or inheritable, but still be durable during the life of the squatter. If given locational residency, they must still abide by common rules, but will not lose their squatter's compensation. They should be hard to evict, as well, and if evicted provided with housing. 

If California ever creates a duty to be rehabilitated, then people must be compensated for agreeing to rehabilitation - in other words, pay them for seeking help through counseling and education, as well as paying the providers for doing so (as well as for case management). As a society, we can afford it. As moral agents, it is our duty to provide it.

So let's create such legal structures and clean up skid row, but in doing so recognizing the inherent rights of those who now live there.

Call it workable Georgism. 

Why NOBODY Wants To Work Anymore

I've written a few books on moving to a more cooperative economy, taking employee-ownership to the next level, to include consumption, finance, housing, human services and cooperating on local infrastructure with other cooperatives.

The Future is Calling: It Wants a Better Job

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QN7WCW8