Now that the last election is behind us, and it’s still a little while before the ’06 midterms, and since this site is worlwide progressive rather than straight up Democratic anyway, I thought it might be a good time to put aside electoral pragmatism and dream. What is your ideal governmental organisation and policy? Put another way: If you didn’t have to worry about suburban moderates, how would you write the party platform?
For that matter, feel free to get more expansive and think about the governmental structure of the whole world. I’ll post mine in the first comment (unless someone beats me to it).
[This is, like any socialist proposal worth its snuff, ideally meant to be applied worldwide; and its survival in a “wolves den” of capitalist countries could not be guaranteed.]
–Employment (like education and health care) guaranteed to all at a living wage, but no welfare for able bodied and able minded adults, except for mothers of young children. If people refused to work for no good reason, they would not be permitted to sleep on the streets, or to panhandle. But there would be basic barracks type shelters they could stay in, with lockers and showers, and three squares a day (nothing too gourmet though).
–No one would be able to earn more than a certain maximum, but unlike the pure Marxist doctrine, there would be variation in wages allowed, to provide incentives where needed.
–Petit bourgeois (“mom and pop”) businesses would be the least radically affected.
–Large businesses would be fully or partly nationalised.
–In areas of consumer products where it is significantly more efficient to have a monopoly on design (such as with HDTV and I would argue computers), there would be one standard, but there would be bonuses and other incentives to maintain quality and efficiency while innovating creatively.
–In other consumer areas, multiple state owned enterprises would compete against each other to take advantages of the good aspects of competition without (one hopes) the nasty, predatory elements. All books would be open to auditors to ensure a fair playing field. Basically, if you have an idea for a dynamite new breakfast cereal, or you’ve invented something cool, you’d have the opportunity to pursue it as something you’d direct but not actually own. Still, if it’s a hit with consumers, you’d get to earn that maximum wage–and earning say $80K looks pretty good next to a minimum of maybe $25K.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
if you tried to take control of my government I would come at you with knives, guns, and bazookas.
Thomas Jefferson said, in the “Declaration of The Rights of Man and The Citizen”, that “Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.”
If you try to fuck with my right to profit from my brilliant new breakfast cereal, I am going to go Patrick Henry on your ass:
BRAVO….you go Boo…you go
If you tried to take control of my government I’d strew rose petals at your feet.
Unlike Booman I’m not a fan of the 18th century agrarian model of good government š
So why keep their idea of the protestant work ethic? Food isn’t the constraint these days. Employment is the constraint as you indicate by making it a right. So why force people to take a job for basic survival needs that someone else might have wanted? This seems inefficient and counter to progress which is towards dissuading people to work, or getting them to work less to make up for increased productivity.
Besides which if you have a dole / social security for qualified or entitled citizens (such as the elderly, or the young / students) only then you need a whole bureacracy to get in people’s faces and calculate how much they need and why they qualify for this and that “deserving” status. You never know who has slipped through the cracks which encourages panhandling.
There are people who want a lot of stuff and people who don’t. Why force the latter to compete with the former for a job? In a modern socialist society you will have to feed and house these people anyway – even if it’s in jail – so why be inefficient and punitive about pweople who are doing your society a favour by reducing average work hours?
just equate the concept of liberty as defined by Jefferson with an antiquated vision of ‘good government’?
or
did you just equate the right to profit from an idea for breakfast cereal with bad government?
I’m going to go for the first choice!
It may be all very well in theory but in practise figuring out what makes one person’s actions screw up another is quite hard and just making a bunch of explicit laws criminalising certain actions isn’t going to cut it any more – maybe it did back then, I don’t know.
you have a point about the difficulty of creating good laws that protect people’s rights.
That’s why you should have a damn good reason before you pass ANY laws.
If your business creates toxic fumes, or threatens the quality of water supplies etc. then it is consistent with good government to regulate your business.
However, that is an entirely different matter from anything Slacker proposed. He just recommended trying out the Soviet system again, but doing it without the corruption. Or something.
My breakfast cereal idea rocks, and if you leave me mostly alone, I will create so many jobs that you’ll have to name a town after me.
I’ll accept that I have to pay my employees a living wage, provided you don’t let my competitors (whose cereal sucks) get exemptions from that requirement.
Also, don’t go giving tax breaks to Kellogg’s or any other multinationals. Unless, you give them to me as well.
But if you tell me that the government is going to steal my cereal and give me $85,000 for it…I’m moving to Mexico.
Well firstly your example seems 18th century too because if you invented the cereal you are not also going to be the one manufacturing and marketing it. Realistically you would try to sell it to Kellogs and they wouldn’t want it.
But that aside, if you are ok with a minimum wage – which certainly violates the principle you quoted being a limitation on a free (supposedly) interaction between employer and employee – then why not a maximum wage?
The wider point is that the free market just isn’t compatible with the “not harming anyone else” idea. You’re always harming someone else but in a way that’s hard for a law to deal with and prohibit explicitly.
what you are ignoring is that the free market helps as many people as it harms. I would argue that it helps more people than it harms. But that is not my point here.
When the government steps in and says, “You must pay your employees x amount, you must give them rest periods, you cannot insist they work more than x amount of hours per x, you must maintain a safe work environment…
All of those things are an effort to provide people with a healthy workplace, that provides them with an above subsistence income.
Those regulations are not without consequences, however. Many people in Bangladesh, for example, would, and do, gladly forego such requirements in exchange for any income at all.
But I am not concerned with global worker’s rights here either.
The point is that basic worker protections and environmental regulations are aimed at human dignity and quality if life for all.
But what would a maximum wage be aimed at?
How would holding down income potential promote economic growth, innovation, investment?
And without that, why would you expect more and better jobs?
I can see some laws about compensation for CEO’s of publicly traded companies. But I can’t see any benefit to maximum wages.
And I don’t want 95% of the government we have right now. It’s tolerable if the right guys are in power…but they’re not (and there is no guarantee the bad guys will behave in the future either).
Your money and mine is being stolen from us and our children to wage war and torture people. That would not be possible under Jefferson’s vision.
I could go on…but the Yanks-Red Sox game is getting tight.
I was hoping to do better than “helps as many as it hurts”. You could say the same of burglary.
I don’t see that the maximum wage violates the principles you mentioned any more or less than the other worker protections and you son’t appear to disagree – although that appeared to be the basis of your original objection. Next you say that a maximum wage would be impractical and you claim it wouldn’t work. That’s a very different argument.
I guess I don’t see why someone would invent something and then say, “screw it – it would only net me $85,000 so I’d rather have nothing.” In view of the recent “revelation” that higher taxes don’t discourage people from working – possibly the reverse I guess I’d dispute your theory here.
he whole greed based philosophy of capitalism just doesn’t work out very well in real life IMO – it’s assumptions don’t work. People don’t quit their jobs if their taxes go up. Inventors won’t quit inventing and so on.
The Soviet Union beat America in the space race remember.
could do big things like building satellites or biological weapons, very well.
Their breakfast cereals were an entirely different matter.
I can tell you right now, that I would love to make enough money that I could hire some employees, provide them with health care, and a decent salary, and know that I helped them raise their kids and send them off to college.
If you tell me I can never make more than $85,000 no matter what I do, I can assure you that I won’t do a whole lot more than whatever it takes to make that amount.
But more to the point, I’ll never be able to hire more than one or two employees, and even that seems like a pipe dream unless you let me make say $200,000 and I’ll pay them out of my excess.
So, do you want the government to take over responsibility for creating every job in our economy?
I think you’re misunderstanding my proposal. A “CEO” could have lots of employees (though technically, they’d be employed by the state, a department of which you’d be managing), without having to pay them out of his or her personal income. It is the income that he or she gets to take home that would be limited.
As we were starting to discuss before, you’re definitely a lot more conservative economically than I am. And you seem to be attracted toward the philosophy of “small government” as well (“That’s why you should have a damn good reason before you pass ANY laws.”). You’re as much of a “maverick” (within the left) as I am, it seems! š
As for the USSR, I’d like to point out that Mikhail Gorbachev was never given enough time to implement his vision of socialism: one which operated “without the corruption” as you say.
I agree with proponents of market-based economies (like yourself) that an economy in which there is no economic incentive to do a good job or to innovate is doomed to stagnation at best (though I agree with Edward Abbey that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”). That’s why I advocate having fairly large income differentials. If you’re making $25K or less (like me), $85K is big bucks! Conversely, while the person making $85K already might not agree with that, surely if they suddenly had to live on $25K they would find in short order that it’s a lot different. So whether the motivation is positive or negative, it is there.
Frankly, though, when you look at the relative levels of wealth around the world, it’s a little decadent to complain about being limited to “only” $85K a year. The average income in the U.S. is significantly less than that, yet we already use far more than our share of resources and contribute far more than our share of pollution. Why should anyone have a “right” to earn (and thus consume) more than that?
Alan
Maverick Leftist
Why should I have any restraint put on me whatsoever by some entity that is supposed to represent me?
My answer is, because:
Now, where does this government that is supposed to represent me, get the right to tell me that they own me, and the fruits of my labors?
What is this state you speak of? And where does it derive its legitimacy?
Why do you assume that I will rip people off and overconsume if you let me create things of value in exchange for currency?
And why should I be told that I cannot employ people at a decent wage, my mutual consent, and thereby contribute to the betterment of our society…but that I have to work for the Dept. of Breakfast Cereals housed somewhere on Massachusetts Avenue?
I don’t understand why this is a good idea at all.
Now, as for this cap:
It is one thing to tax income at ever increasing levels, so that the more one makes the less one keeps.
It is quite another to completely remove the profit motive above a certain income level.
As for me being a maverick…I come from a long tradition of Americans that don’t want the government telling me what to do. They are a bunch of pukes.
You have to remember that our current predicament was only made possible thru the ceding of ever more power to the Federal Government, and then to the executive.
They can spend all the money they want without our permission, without even taxing us for the money they spend.
I might be cool with that if it went for medical care, education, and other worthy goals. But it doesn’t. And the system allows for this whenever one party takes over and is run by a moron.
Wouldn’t you feel far more comfortable if the President simply couldn’t wage undeclared wars with unraised cash?
Within the broader American electorate, your feelings are widely shared. But on the left, you are on the (economic) right, if that makes any sense. <g> That’s your right, just as it’s mine to have non-orthodox positions (again, within the left) on such subjects as military intervention and abortion.
But I just wonder if you cop to your economic conservatism. Did you take that political test someone posted about a week ago or so? If so, I bet you landed pretty close to the middle on the left-right axis, though probably pretty far “south” on the other axis.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
I’m for progressive taxation, for federal health and anti-poverty programs, for the estate tax, for stringent environmental regulation, open-spaces, blah blah blah.
I’m not for the war on drugs, the war on phantom terrorists, the war on civil liberties, massive deficit spending to finance massive war profiteering…etc.
But I also am totally opposed to communism in practice or in Ivory Towers.
But you know that already.
Insofar as I support federal powers, I support them for civil rights, and for national issues: like air, water, health, and other national resources or issues.
Whatever can be decided locally, I say keep local.
And we really need to curtail the powers of the executive.
Would it be more palatable to you if I instead proposed a 90% marginal tax rate for those earning over $80k?
Alan
Maverick Leftist
“”I’ll accept that I have to pay my employees a living wage, provided you don’t let my competitors (whose cereal sucks) get exemptions from that requirement.””
Well I personally prefer that you not only pay your employees a living wage, but a little more, like a share of the profits that the employee is working to make profitable in the first place. In your mythical company, of course.
Sears does this or at least did this when my mother worked for them, for every dollar she put into a savings plan, they put in two. So she had a nice tidy sum when she left. It was not contingent on any thing, such as early termination of employment, and in addition the money could be invested in Sears stock which doubled and tripled in the years she worked there.
What did I mean by living wage?
What I meant was this:
It’s possible that there might be some unskilled jobs my cereal company needs to fill that people are willing to do for less than minimum wage.
In that scenario, I agree to pay people more than they will agree to work for. But you have to enforce the law and make my competitors do the same.
I’ll support raising the minimum wage to a living wage, but it has to apply to everyone.
As for creating better packages for my employees, many times it is a good investment to pay your employees a little more than your competitors in order to keep them and their learned skills in place. It costs money to train new people, and it hurts morale to lose people who are unhappy or grumbling.
The thing to remember is that the unskilled job I offer is a new job that didn’t exist until my idea for a breakfast cereal took off. So I am not the bad guy because the job only pays minimum wage. I am the good guy that created a job for someone and agreed to pay them more money than they were willing to work for.
That’s why I support the minimum wage, and increasing the minimum wage. It may cost a few jobs in a tight economy, but it provides human dignity for all employees throughout the economy, and it prevents expoitation.
I’ve put my efforts into multiple party systems, IRV, etc. In line with that, with checks and balances in mind, I’d like to see independents in positions such as governor, SoS and, yes, president. (In my ideal little world)
Glad to see someone else chiming in! I didn’t want this to be only about my manifesto. š
So when you say “independents” do you mean smaller parties, or completely unaffiliated?
I agree, btw, that IRV would be great, as would proportional representation. Then we wouldn’t have to hold our noses and pick the lesser of two evils!
Alan
Maverick Leftist
Ya know. . .while writing my last comment, I was afraid you were going to ask that question :-). Ideally, of course, it would be the third party candidate of my choosing. (IP candidate Tim Penny for governor in MN, Green Party candidate Andrew Koebrick for SoS, and John Anderson for President in 1980).
During my involvement in the MN IP, I had somewhat of an epiphany concerning checks and balances with the current two party system (as in – I don’t believe we have checks and balances in the current structure). Aside from the positions I mentioned, I think it would be beneficial to have a third party state auditor. Small third party or unaffiliated. (Which tends to be fairly synonymous.)
I understand the idea of an independent auditor. But why didn’t you like the DFL candidate for governor? Just curious.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
My first priority was that I truly supported Tim Penny without holding my nose. I admired his fiscal responsibility, along with his track record of respect from both sides of the aisle during his years in Congress. I felt quite good about the time, effort and money I contributed to his campaign. (I’ve mentioned this in other threads, but have you read his book “The 15 Biggest Lies in Politics”?)
I thought that Roger Moe – the DFL candidate – played a large role in stagnating legislation during the previous sessions, and I didn’t think he was straightforward concerning balanced budget/taxation needs. (And I knew full well that Pawlenty would hide taxes under fee-based structures.)
I like the idea behind FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights
Excerpt from President Roosevelt’s January 11, 1944 message to the Congress of the United States on the State of the Union
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people–whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth–is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights–among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however–as our industrial economy expanded–these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all–regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.
That’s the platform I’d run on.
I think that under a flat tax system, most of the unfairness of the ’86 tax act could be wiped from the books. A flat tax is actually a sneaky way to reduce the distance between the top and bottom tiers – absolutely no deductions of any kind for anyone. [As an aside, I would also collect taxes in as close to realtime as is technologically feasible].
Labor:
Health:
Economy:
Transportion:
That’s where I’d start. Sufficient wages to provide food, clothing and shelter; a marginal leveling of the class structure – call it a “correction” – which would produce a much larger middle; and a side-shift in transportation moving away from dependence on the automobile.
Energy is a no-brainer: invest in alternative energy production down to the house level, hybrid vehicles for transportation, and conservation mandated for all structures [commercial buildings skate on this one].
Governance is a more difficult nut to crack. At minimum, I would replace counties with regional governments, vastly increase terms of office for congress [3x current – two terms only], and increase presidential terms to 8 years, single-term.
Such a big subject. How long do I have to complete this assignment?
As an opening, though, I’d offer that my ideal would involve my own personal foundation belief that I’m a citizen of the world first, and that national interests would take a backseat to those of all people.
Diary it, whenever you’re ready. But drop me an email or something if I don’t happen to see it, would you?
Alan
Maverick Leftist