We can’t keep using the same resource for industrial machinery that we do for food and housing. We may need a couple actually. And the sick thing is we’re halfway their with crypto-currency. Except we need to do the opposite. We need to super-centralize it and give it to any corporation above a certain threshold, such as a tax bracket. Any company that takes in tens of billions in revenue every year doesn’t need all that to support its people. After all, isn’t that what it’s all about?
The word “company” comes from Latin. Com-panis means “together bread,” and it comes from the first agricultural tradition of making bread from fresh grains, It is an arduous process that requires many workers performing manual labor for long hours. The mills were initially driven by hand, with someone constantly cranking a gear while another poured the grains in, and another extracted them to move to the next process. People figured that the best way to ensure everyone had enough to eat was to make everyone put in their fair share of labor, no matter what they did.
Are modern day C-suite execs any better than a middle school teacher? Absolutely not. Is a heart surgeon any more valuable than an erotic fanfiction writer? Absolutely not. Everyone is needed at different times in their lives for whatever skills they can provide, even if it’s sometimes just emotional, enjoying being around that person. Whether someone wracking their brain to sort through the Q4 P&L, another is working day and night to record the choreography for a new Broadway musical, and another is writing software for an app that will help people find a romantic partner. Everyone is valuable to someone at some point in time, all extremely and equally so for entirely different reasons.
As some first world countries are moving towards establishing a social structure that can support the final tier of Maslow’s hierarchy, America’s various urban and rural areas are widely diversified in what color of the pyramid their denizens reside.
The government should seek out those companies that achieve the capitalist goal and are now just seeking unlimited potential. In the next tax cycle, those behemoths of industries should be taxed 80-85% of their operating expenses. That money should be exchanged for a credit token of some sort, which the companies can then exchange for utilities, supplies, machinery, insurance, and all the minor annoyances that keep corporations from focusing on providing quality products and service. There would be less incentive for executives to hide personal expenses in their taxes to earn the deduction.
The next step of the government would be to subsidize all the smaller companies that support the larger ones. The 1-man mobile repair service who travels around the tri-county area, fixing cardboard corrugation machinery, who can talk and entertain for hours on end about various folding techniques and how they’ve been incredibly mastered through automation. Those types of businesses are the casualties to come. Then larger companies will slow down or stop entirely. Some unions may take the opportunity to fight back. But the result is the same. The economy will suffer another blow when the service industry fails, followed like dominoes down to empty store shelves and abandoned parking lots. Not enough contracts to gain, not enough jobs to work, not enough money to be spent.
The smaller companies who desperately need help so the owner can stop working 70 hours a week but can’t afford to hire anyone should be able to sign up for a government employee wage assistance program that matches 50-75% of the employee wages for up to 25-50 employees. This will only help the small businesses of the “Main Street” market, earning under $100 million in revenue per year. This would allow the owners of companies with 1-10 employees to take some time off and rest. (It’s a lot of stress running a business!) And the boards of the bigger businesses could afford to offer more pay and benefits to their staff, like a 4-day work week or less stringent family/medical leave. Maybe even personal days or vacations!!.
Our society is in the process of (trying) to grow into its next stage. However, the mechanism of capitalism, which has worked extremely well up until this point, has hit an issue with scalability. It’s essentially monarchic principles, but that’s ok on a small scale with just a handful of individuals who can all voice their opinions directly. It doesn’t work when the voices get lost. It doesn’t work when the single resource people need in order to eat, sleep, and stay healthy and happy is siphoned out from under them and held in off-shore accounts, with active benefits to literally NO-ONE, only a potential value based on the shared belief in a particular currency system and the combined world-wide record keeping of its exchanges. A lot of us realized as teenagers that it’s all made up. The systems that hold the people of the world in place, doing their thing, day in and day out, not moving or acting on their dreams for fear of giving up stability and security are all just enforced by people with authority saying it is. But even authority is constructed out of nothing except mind games. A powerful suit or a uniform, a certain way of speaking, standing, walking, all can communicate power over someone because of engrained social cues.
Let’s take this opportunity for reform to do it right. We don’t have to listen to the “authority” that held over us if it’s unjust, unfair, and contributing to our collective demise. It’s unethical to oblige. We need to make a plan and act on it. What should things look like in the end? Then, how do we get there?
