2024-04-01 What’s the plan?

@Shufei@mastodon.sdf.org asks what we'll do with all the billionaires if we survive the next decade, the next century. Like I said in that post about Israel and Palestine, it's worth imagining positive outcomes and then think about the intermediate steps. So, assuming we make it, what happened?

I think the long term change we would need is extremely high taxes as a an explicit redistribution mechanism. We'll look back and say, "during Late State Capitalism we nearly ended the planet but then we manage to curb inequality and raised inheritance tax to 80%, the max income tax bracket to 90% and the two-digit million wealth tax to 20%."

extremely high taxes

The goal would be a society with salaries between 50k and 200k per year and family, and wealth worth one year of salary. Health insurance paid for by taxes. Retirement homes paid for by taxes. Pensions paid for by immediate redistribution (i.e., taxes) instead of investments.

@Shufei@mastodon.sdf.org commented on this and mentioned land reform:

> Rentierism in all facets has virtually no restraints in most of the world. That is sometimes 2/3 of capital which a family could have put to family resiliency, instead going to landlords and investment epiphenomina like gentrification. I’m not sure oldschool petite bourgeois distributionism (landed yeomanry) is the big answer there, but under a “permanent jubilee” it might be workable enough to eliminate the scourge of landlordism.

I'm not quite sure what the plan is, though.

For urban planning it seems to be state-sponsored coop housing. As soon as the percentage of sponsored housing goes up, the other rents go down, while still leaving the option of more generous housing being built. This is a lesson that was somewhat forgotten in Zürich for a few decades and that seems to explain a lot about the high rents, here.

For agriculture, what seems to have worked in Switzerland (still not enough but a lot better than in the European Union) is protectionism, direct payment, zoning laws, government fixed pricing on agricultural land, etc. not a single thing but a whole set of interlocking mechanisms. And there is still room for improvement. But I’d defer to groups active in food sovereignty to better answer that question, I guess. Maybe Via Campesina has a plan, for example.

Via Campesina

@Sandra@idiomdrottning.org just posted two links, one discussing alternatives and one where she looks for the elements of the solution. Let's talk about them.

Alternatives argues for market socialism, as I read it. In a subsequent comment on fedi she disagreed with this take and said that it was by far the weakest alternative. But I'm not so sure. Planned economy doesn't work; small nudges is what we have and it doesn't seem to be working either; and the last option seems to be "utopias and sundry". That doesn't sound promising, either. I still think that in the given list, market socialism doesn't sound bad at all.

Alternatives

> Worker-owned cooperatives that trade with each other on a market. That’s it. That’s the whole plan.

Then again, none of the alternatives seem pretty strong.

I'm also not sure how market socialism would work in a global environment. How would we deal with local bad harvests and war? It's biggest benefit seems to be that it promises incremental improvements. No bloody revolution necessary. And that's already a plus.

> A big upside of this track is that it’s somewhat compatible with the other systems and with present-day market capitalism. This means that it can be implemented piecemeal wherever it make sense and I think that’s awesome.

My best guess at a climate solution is where Sandra ends with a call to regain influence in the media.

My best guess at a climate solution

> Making changes in our own lives is great (eat plants) but ideally we’d want politicians (and their overlords: mass media) to sober up and implement policies to steer industry and the rich.

Here in Switzerland (and elsewhere), the fascists like to complain about left-wing media and fight them and defund them until they have them under their thumb (remember Berlusconi's media take-over in Italy). So we need to fight them all the way: Decry their meddling and scheming and increase the funding. Demand that they drop the airhead programming and bring back material that helps lift people up, not drag them down. Education and information is key.

I'm not a media person, so I don't know how to do it. All I can say is that music programs that have interesting discussions surrounding the music work well for me. Podcasts work for me. Series seem to work for some. Just drop the quiz shows and reality-TV and all that order material that only serves to distract.

I guess that in my heart of hearts I feel that humanity’s main problem is sociopaths. These people are always there and they love their person gain and don’t feel other people’s pain. Therefore, the struggle is eternal. There is no solidification, no solution that will hold for generations. Every generation will have to fight this fight. All I can say is that it's a mistake to let a generation grow up in the belief that politics is not important, that struggle isn't necessary, or that the end of history has come.

That is never going to be true.

​#Economics #Politics #Philosophy ​#Politics #Philosophy ​#Philosophy

**2024-04-03**. I should merge a few sentences from this page into my Priorities page.

Priorities