[ExI] The system

[Tom Nowell]

People have made various comments about "the system"
(in its many varieties) and whether they hope it will
change, or whether the system is fact amazing. I
apologise in advance for the length of my post -
however, given the entire news articles and pages of
James Joyce people have been quoting, I feel in good
company. Because I've got a fair bit to say, I'm
breaking what follows into three parts:

1) About me (so you understand where I'm coming from):
when I first posted to this list, I was trying to
encourage people to get their British friends to sign
my online petition asking for our National Health
Service to commit to offering stem cell and genetic
modification treatments as soon as they were proven
safe in humans. As you may guess from this, I'm
British, at least semi-socialist, and interested in
healthcare.
 Age 18, first year in college, studying to become a
doctor, I was swept away of wave of radicalism. For a
couple of months I hung out with student members of
the Socialist Worker's Party, tried to read Living
Marxism and went on protest marches. We were OUTRAGED
at the actions of THATCHER'S MINIONS (this was under
John Major's government) and their DESTRUCTION of our
right to education and their THEFT of our civil
liberties. We were convinced the SYSTEM and all its
evil doings must be SMASHED and replaced with a fairer
system. (Among the huge changes of the Criminal
Justice Bill, we were mostly upset about two changes:
less rights to protest, because we loved protest
rallies, and cracking down on illegal raves, because
we were teenagers)
 We were young, thought we might make a difference. As
time went on, politicians supposedly more left wing
than the bunch before increased the cost of higher
education and reduced our civil rights. This has
caused many of my generation to be a little cynical
about politics and whether anyone without the cash to
bribe - sorry, effectively lobby - politicians could
do a thing.

2) The system: we all like to visualise "the system"
as the way the world works, in ways that our society
is familiar with. However, "the system" does change
over time. I may be a subject of Queen Elizabeth the
Second, but she doesn't lead our armies into battle
like monarchs of old, and I get a vote in our
elections while she doesn't. The Tsars were swept away
by communism, which went through Stalinism and finally
faded away with perestroika, to be replaced by
unfettered go-go capitalism for a few years, now to be
replaced by autocratic Putinism. France has had
several republics in the same period of history that
the USA has only needed one to fill.
 In the 1930s, FDR's "New Deal" made America more
socialist than it had been previously, and Britain's
"Welfare state" wasn't invented until after 1945. Our
grandparent's "system" and ours are radically
different.
 Now, people have been posting about whether "the
system" works in several areas. With respect to
healthcare, many deplore how the USA has so little
care for the poor while spending so much on healthcare
overall, while Spike admires the amazing technology
developed by the profit motive.
 For everyone in Europe, while it is a shame that so
many individual Americans have to suffer, we should
appreciate the free ride we get. US drug companies
research a lot of drugs. For a few years, American
consumers are milked for all they're worth until
another company discovers a similar enough compound
that gets around the original patent, and then
competition brings down the price a little.
 Meanwhile, the Canadians and europeans with their big
healthcare systems negotiate a price they think is
reasonable. The big drug companies can either agree a
price, or they can face having very few customers in a
given country. The cost to people outside the US is a
good degree less. Our new drugs are subsidised by our
US friends worrying about the huge premiums on their
health insurance.
 We also get other free rides - everyone who's wearing
cotton clothes, thank Uncle Sam for his generosity.
Huge subsidies paid to US cotton farmers make the
world price of cotton ridiculously low. Farmers in
west africa, trying to pay people a dollar a day, have
difficulty competing with American farmers who get
bribed by US politicians hoping for a friendly vote.
Thank you for my cheap T-shirts, American taxpayers.
Of course, sometimes this works the other way -
subsidies for bioethanol from corn has driven US maize
prices up, which in turn increases the costs of
tortillas in Mexico and corn meal across the world.
Still, we should be thankful that the US's experiments
in unrestrained healthcare capitalism can provide us
with useful products.

3) A radical change in "the system": looking about
transhumanist websites, you get to see many viewpoints
on the world. Some with a socialist bent talk about
technology being applied to help the masses. Some
libertarian ones advocate massive econominc changes
and sweeping away legislation. One particular
combination that people keep proposing is the
combination of flat tax and minimum income.
  I remember first reading about flat tax rates in
some godawful Piers Anthony "Bio of a space tyrant"
novel, and I'm sure I read it in at least one Heinlein
book. The idea is simple - remove all the complexity
from the tax system, and charge everyone income tax at
one flat rate and remove tax deductions. Everyone
knows exactly how much of every paycheque they get to
take home easily. The more you earn, the more you take
home in a linear fashion (unlike banded tax systems).
Proponents say it's much simpler and encourages people
to earn more as they can see the exact benefit to
themselves.
 The first good example I saw of minimum income was in
"Visit Port Watson!", the finest piece of Utopian SF I
ever read. Set in the remotest islands of the pacific,
it's a fictional travel guide to an imaginary
republic. The ruler set up an offshore banking and
finance centre, and divides the profits up amongst the
citizens so they can all have an income from the
state. The idea when extended to western civilisations
is to give everyone a handout sufficient to cover
their basic needs. This replaces welfare, pensions
schemes, sickness benefits, etc.
 The combination of the two has been advocated by some
libertarians as allowing people to earn what they
want, while also given people freedom from being
forced to work. If someone's idea of life,liberty and
the pursuit of happiness is sitting down watching soap
operas all day, they can. This combination also works
from a socialist view - "From each according to their
earnings;to each to cover their basic needs", while
allowing eager capitalists to earn extra cash and
allowing the profit motive to exist.
 Say this particular innovation gets adopted by a
political party in a developed economy, and is
implemented one day. What will happen?
 People will probably do one of three things: some may
want to earn as much as possible to add to their
minimum income. In the US, people work more hours than
they did in the 1970s, but the amount of stuff they
own is much greater than their 1970s predecessors. In
France, they've achieved a 35 hour working week, and
people working longer hours each week get time off in
lieu. The French equivalent of the wall street banker
gets 45-50 days paid leave a year in return for
working so hard during the week.
 A second group of people will give up working. As
Spike said, there's many people in the US motivated by
a fear of not having health insurance who would
otherwise retire early. Likewise, people who currently
claim unemployment benefits might just give up looking
for work.
 A third group of people might take this as their
chance to do what they really want to do with their
lives - pursue hobbies, practise arts, perform
academic research into what really interests them,
work for charities. These people would no longer be
limited by the need to pay the rent. 
 The unanswerable question is to what proportion
people will fall into these categories. We could try
doing surveys, but people may not answer particularly
truthfully. We can try predicting from national trends
(ie we'd guess the US would have more type 1 people
than other countries, but I couldn't tell you what
extent).
 The trick would be to have enough people in the first
category to generate the cash to keep the other two
groups going. Huge numbers of people would fall into
category two. If the third category was big, it could
trigger a renaissance of unimaginable proportions. 
 Natasha has alluded to these possibilities when
talking about her papers on "Homo Ludens". People are
starting to look at the concept of a life without the
need for work seriously. With the increasing
automation of many jobs, do we need to keep finding
new ways for people to add to the economy? Will those
old predictions of "in the future, robots will do 90%
of work" come true? Would the cutting down of human
work be the start of a golden age of civilisation, or
our first step in becoming decadent lotus eaters?
 I'd like to see a nation try, just to help the rest
of the world prepare for the future and consider other
ways of living.

Tom


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