XPost: alt.politics.socialism

Someone noted that the current wars in the Middle East have been planned
for years, and decried how we can see it happening on our phones.

Years ago I made a computer program with which people could vote in a self verified manner. It was published internationally in Linux Magazine. My
goal was also that people could vote for peace, that they would have a functioning way to intervene against our evil ruling classes on a short
notice, which is otherwise not possible in a 4 year election cycle.

Instead people used their phones to make selfies, and they absorb the
local propaganda as fact, which is a vote for war because of the sick
nature of our ruling classes. I have nothing against making selfies or
engaging in all kinds of diversions, to have fun, however there needs
to be a sufficient amount of pressure and interest in general politics,
because you absolutely cannot leave politicians, super rich psychopaths
and an assortment of organized criminals to their own devices, and expect things to work out in the long term.

If you have a weak democracy and a dysfunctional economy, Plutocracy
is a certain result, and with that the worst of the worst are coming to
power. The system selects in the beginning for hard work, creativity and competence, as well as a client friendly attitude. All positive things,
if you set an economy like we have back to square one. Square one, what
exactly is that ? How many people even ask that question if they read
this ? I would posit that _square one_ is literally, everyone has one
square of the land, or if you prefer: everyone who wants a square could
get one, either for free or affordable amount of money. This _square
one_ situation did happen, after the Dutch rebellion against Spain and
the overthrow of the Monasteries and Catholicism. The land which was
conquered from the parasites was given relatively cheap to whomever
would buy. This matters because the kind of economy which was born in
the Netherlands, inspired on ancient Rome and probably elsewhere, is now
the norm everywhere. *It does not work.* It works for a while, but then ownership starts to centralize. The poor get poorer, the rich get richer.

The system starts selecting for a caricature of how it originally
may have started (which is in reality also far from ideal, because
you had to deal with a large load of bad people with too much money
already). American also had a form of _square one,_ because the land was
free after conquering it from the Indians. Perhaps you could say something
like this: the hard work which paid off in the beginning of this system,
where it is just you, the land and the market, then became the ability to
let others do the hard work for you - as the few assembled more and more
land and hired more and more people. The positive creativity to solve
immediate real problems of production, became the creativity to squeeze
more productivity out of the people. The competence and confidence in
the ability to do a good job, morphs into the audacity to go against the interests of the employees if there is more profit to be made that way,
and then the outright brutality to be more or less on a war footing
with the dispossessed, the landless, the desperate, the serfs. The
friendly attitude to the costumer of the beginning, changes into an understanding of how to manipulate the common man with advertisements,
lies and propaganda. After this we might imagine an even worse stage in
the development of a diabolical ruling class: no longer just manipulating
their own holdings, employees and costumers, but they could step up on
the grand stage, the political stage of society, engaging in all forms
of treachery. Not just the usual bribery and murder, but even to create
the events they might need to then lie about. The position "If only such
and so would have done this and that, then we could exploit that in our newspapers" can become "If they don't do it, then we will either entire
or force them into it, or do it ourselves wearing their clothes." At this level, society has devolved into having a criminal Government, as well
as being burdened with many very large businesses which are run by bad
people. This is not the end of the development, but more or less where we
are now. I'll leave the rest to the imagination: some sort of dystopian Tyrannical nightmare. First with a smiling Tyrant, and eventually not
even that. This is the natural development of a Capitalist economy -
as far as I can see, where land is sold _in perpetuity,_ as if it is a commodity, a product of human work, which it is not.

Technology is merely a tool, it depends on how you use it what you get
out of it. Humanity chose not to care for each other, not to listen to
each other. It is justice that this humanity will be ruled by a ruling
class who does not care about people, and does not listen to you. They
care about being perceived as caring, until they no longer need to. This
whole war we see now is made up. They probably need war because of the
National Debt scam imploding on itself, leading to hyper inflation,
leading to social unrest & Revolutions. This is why they want people to
kill each other.

it will get worse, and eventually I think it will become a full out
nuclear war, which also has depopulation as one of its objectives. While
that may be hard to believe, it is true that there are an extreme amount
of people on Earth, and it may be worth noting how Plato already wrote
about an ancient Oligarch before _his_ time, who wanted to depopulate
the poor (if I recall correctly).

The enemy will then try to use the crisis to worsen their grip on
power. If the humans remain as politically absent as they now want to
be, this evil plan could succeed. There is still a little hope however,
because hardship changes people. The lack of involvement of people in
their own political / ideological beliefs is so bad, that this could add decades of suffering and death to a problem which might otherwise have
been resolved in years. It is still probably the best chance that after
this war, humanity will choose to learn the wrong lessons ("humanity
is violent and therefore so should we, nothing can be done about it,
maybe we didn't make the Empire big enough yet, ...") and continues to
make the same mistakes. Sooner or later, the potential for human self extinction seems to start looming large, or worse.

It is theoretically possible for Capitalism to stay healthy, however
this requires a keen interest in the people to decide, buy and give
things away not just based on their own selfish needs, but with the
greater wellbeing of everyone in mind. If a so enlightened attitude
pervades a people, the land ownership might never centralize because
those with too much will _redo_ this above mentioned square-one
situation on a smaller scale, and that can in principle keep the whole
thing healthy.

This means that if someone has bought land from a poor person who saw
no hope but to sell, for example, so that he now owns twice more than
the average person, that he will just as easily divide has lands in two
again, and cheaply sell or even give for free his land to someone who
seemed to need it or just want it, someone who has no land or less than
the average. To constantly keep the economy on this square-one, keeps
the whole thing healthy. You could also do this out of self interest, if
you are wise and caring enough to project your own behavior into
infinity.

The question has clearly been answered as to if this attitude exists in humanity. The answer is no. Capitalism is a Utopian system, which can
only function with a high level morality in the population, extremely
far beyond what humanity seems to be able to do. Furthermore, there is
no good reason to have a system like this to begin with, because the
lands (the Earth) is not produced like other commodities. It does not
belong in a market like goods and services do. A people wise and moral
enough, will take the additional step, and organize a system which
cleanly keeps their economy at this square-one situation forever. It is
natural (similar to how the lands where broadly open for the individual
even down to the distant past), and it fits with a (IMHO) good and
modern understanding of economics, which implies the understanding that
markets function because it is ultimaly *effort* which is being traded,
and should not be about positions of power (monopolies or crime).

These things should have been naturally developing themselves over the
last 6 000 years or so (the start of farming), but they have not. This
means humanity has about a 6 000 years of backlog to make up for,
regarding all the things they failed to do and learn. This makes the
shift into a healthy economy harder, but on the other hand we now know
what not to do, and what the consequences are of our mistakes. The
suffering of a reasonably well executed transformation of the econom is probably going to be marginal compared to the misery which was eventually created by Capitalism (or Communism or the Feudal system).

Given enough time and finesse while keeping an eye on the people who get
hurt by it (and I don't mean rich people who after loosing 99% of their
wealth are still rich), this transformation of the economy should be
possible.

Ideas I would propose to these ends include:

- Certainly at first, do nothing. Make a good plan, give people time to
hear the plan, and have their impact upon the plan. Make a plan which
taks it's time. Society is incredibly large. No person can really get
their mind around what even 1 000 people really means. The brain
simply cannot cope with all the details. Everything will naturally be
simplified in our brains, and this creates errors and problems. We
can lessen the problem of our own stupidity, by making a plan which
is slow enough, so that we can add more thinking every step along the
way.

(This is not necessary if the lands are unoccupied and unused,
in which case you probably should immediately enact a correct economy
upon it, and then start settling and using it correctly. Here I
assume modern society is operational upon the land.)

- You may want to start with a laws, so that the situation may not get
even worse, such as:
- Forbidden to centralize even more wealth and power, by combining
even more land and combining even more employees under one boss.

- Think about a safety net. Make sure nobody will die. Make sure nobody
will get sick and hungry.

- Everyone who is using the land right now, many of these people are
engaged in either useful or even essential productivity. This new
type of economy would allow everyone to own their land, but there is
supposed to be a market in land *rent*. This is the way in, to just
change the ownership papers of existing land, while allowing the
people who are using that land to go on as they did before. The more
of a merely paper change this is, the better for them, and therefore
it should be easier to do, leading to fewer problems, and to more
focus and attention being given to those instances where problems do
occur.

To facilitate this, I thought of two mechanisms now. (1) The more
difficult mechanism is that the user of the land will find people who
want to rent that lend to him. Because he can choose who wants to
rent to him, he can choose people who offer him a cheap rent first.
It is also noteworthy that many if not most people will probably not
know what to do with land anyway at first, and so they would then
have the choice between not using that land profitably at all, or
renting it to someone who can use it or is already using it, while
the person who is already using it has the option to stop using some
part of his land and this puts the potential person who rents the
land to the user in a loosing situation, which can push rent prices
down. Hence there are some mechanisms here which can help make this
go relatively smoothly.

(How is it possible that this coud be a win-win situation for the land
user and distributive owner who now suddenly rents land do the user
? We took away the Plutocracy, we took away the Bank. We took out
this parasitism system. This system will be on the loosing end, and
these systems may well go bankrupt, and often should go bankrupt. If
it concerns an important social organizations such as a pension fund,
this should probably be Nationalized and made whole by Government
decision and funding.)

The first step is to just take away ownership of course, because
the ownership structures which exist now are (in my opinion) wrong. It
is an economic sickness if you want to call it that. You take the
ownership away and first vest it in the State, and deal with the
fallout of that. People who had parasitic positions should just
loose, but not to the point that they die. Worthwhile institutions
can be nationalized.

Another mechanism which can help (2) is to create companies or State
organizations at first, who will manage all these rent contracts
first. So they could then go to a land user, and reform their land
ownership from for example one big mortgage at some bank or they
already own that land passively, so that it becomes distributed in
however many blocks of rental contracts it is. All the ownership
maximum size blocks should more or less have the same value, which
is depending on the total of land in that Nation for that use
(zoning), and how much population there is in the Nation. You can
certainly have smaller block rental contracts also: someone rents
half their land here, 10% there, and 40% over there, etc.

Overview: First the laws so that it doesn't get even worse with
ownership centralization. Then the existing ownership is taken away,
and the problems arising from this are dealt with. This for example
means that a farmer who is paying a Mortgage on his land, suddenly
does not pay a mortgage anymore and just has that land for free, or
the Mortgage payments no longer go to some bank or speculator but to
the State, possibly also restructured according to some policy. Then
you could try to do a sort of State administrative distribution of
all the lands into rental contracts. This might first be done by the
State, but conceivably might evolve to include the private sector. It
would be a service sector, helping people to deal with their land
ownership situation. It may be helpful to already divide the lands
into sectors, and give the responsibility to deal with this step to a
large amount of groups. Example: village X has Y land around it, you
compute it so that it more or less fits National size of zoned land
and population (the totals fit the National average), and then you
give one group to deal with a small village, or even 5 groups if it
is a larger village.

You could already bring land and people closer together with this,
because the National State is enormous these days. The National State
then sets the stage for this to work correctly, which could mean to
do the necessary zoning or ask local Governments to submit their
zoning for their own lands, take a hard look at the needs of nature
in the whole Nation as well, and start computing how much each person
deserves of land of every kind of zoning use (which broadly might
fall into two categories, being all forms of farming versus
industrial / build up uses). Personally I think the absolute minimum
would be: general land for probably farming, if that Nation even has
fertile soil, and smaller work-shop / shop / industry plots nearby
or even inside the villages / cities, for easy access. I imagine that
to work out a good plan might already take years, but who knows.
Therefore it might help if local Governments deal with their own
zoning, so that they can all work at the same time, and they are
already familiar with their area. There will probably come up some
difficulties as to how compare regions with different kinds of lands,
and different population densities. The National State would have to
step in here, to resolve these differences.

It seems possible that in this kind of economy, cities could become
smaller as people might want to travel closer to their land, as at
least some of them learn to make use of their new freedom. The
population might start to equalize itself out over the Nation,
according to where the lands have been set aside for them, and this
might resolve some of these problems. Example: a very densely packed
area of the Nation in one end, and then sparsely populated but
fertile lands elsewhere, and both under different local Governments.
The highly packed area would need to get much of the lands under the
control of the other local Government (is how I would see it), or
they would have to undergo a Nation Splitting, but this would
probably also have to entail the same, except on a different
administrative level. As usual, everything will probably be quite
difficult in practice, but keep in mind: if you get at least
something, that's better than the nothing you have. Those that loose,
they should be happy they had the benefit of an unfair system for so
long, and those that get hurt unfairly, they should appeal for
assistance.

Then once the land has been administratively divided into rental
blocks, and there might even be rent gathered on all these contracts,
the time might be there to start the next step: the land will
actually reach the common man. Here I would again do things slowly,
and also experimentally. Let's say the whole land has been divided,
but not a single person yet has their land as a right. All the
existing lands remain used as before, minus an amount of bankruptcies
(and anger) which undoubtedly will have occured already. On one
extreme you could choose one day, and hand every citizen their rental
contract, based on proximity of that land, optionally with a lottery
element to that as well. On the other extreme you could give one
person his land contract, and watch anxiously how it will work out in
the course of a year or two. I suppose wisdom is somewhere in the
middle.

It is worthwhile to think about worst case scenarios, from different
perspectives. What are the borders of this, what could go wrong, how
would it go wrong and what to do about it. Is it possible a farm goes
bankrupt because people ask too much rent. Is that a bad thing. How
likely is it to happen. Once it has happened, what will happen next.
What does this all mean for someone who cares a lot, for someone who
doesn't care at all and will never make any decision on anything.
What does it mean for lower skilled people, for highly skilled
people, and so on. What does it mean for nature, for soil and water,
animals and plants. Worst case scenarios and recovery policies for
each one of them. Probably a whole bunch of independent research
groups should be active, and look at things from all sides:
financial, social, emotional, educationally, etc.

If the time exist, I think it is wise to do simulations and experiments.
This is something that can be experimented with quite easily, if you
have enough money to buy a sizeable amount of land.

Political reality seems to suggest: humanity in gheneral is not intelligent enough to understand these things. I know that doesn't sound nice of me
to say. Land reform has often gone wrong, and the wrongs of markets in
land are glossed over as if they don't exist. Fact of the matter is
however: people flee because they cannot even get land. I have family
who fled to Canada. There is no way in hell I can *ever* get any sort of
land bought. I will always have to depend on a lesser form of land
ownership, which is renting land at an allotment garden where I am
*prohibited* from selling my produce (!!!). This is not real land, this
is not real economics. This is merely a form of aleviating some of the
build up pressure within the Capitalist system, by allowing some people
a hobby but ensuring they will not interfere with the profits and
centraziation of wealth by the few. Still, I am grateful for it, and it
is a form of land distribution, but it is not effective enough to deal
with the problems of Capitalism.

Communism and the Feudal system are similar to the end stage of
Capitalism. All land is already centralized. In ideal Communism, the
State should have been extremely democratic and fair, but in practice it
seems to have become just the opposite. I think the problem is in the
fact that if the person, the individual, is not free on his land, he is
also not free to make up his mind in a representative system. If the
individual is choked, then it seems the masses as a whole are also
chocked.

This does not mean that all problems will be solved by doing this. I
think it is even likely that we will see a resurchance of old problems
of the anti-social attitudes of the common people. However, maybe not,
because the system is quite fair at the root, and this might inspire
people to have a fairer outlook to their fellow man, their neighbor.

We know what doesn't work: Feudalism doesn't work (protection racket), Capitalism doesn't work (infinite wealth centralization), and historical Communism doesn't work either (too much centralization of everything).
Land distribution is both logical, and natural. Incidentally it has been practised, and seems to have proven to be succesful. This doesn't mean
such a society could not become corrupt, but it should be slower.

Since most people don't want to get real on the economic question, it
seems there is no other option but to start a new Nation, a new
Sovereignty. If that is not possible, then a sub-sovereign experiment
would be the next best thing, meaning to acquire an amount of land
somewhere, and just start doing it. I wonder how that will go, and if it
will attract attention / infiltration from bad elements or not. Even if
it does, it should be capable of withstanding that. If it cannot
withstand that, it seems that experiment or larger group lacks the
maturity or capabilities to become a Sovereign Nation. In that sense,
there is no excuse for not trying, and failing cannot be defeat. It
should lead to learning lessons and retrying until succesful.

Needless to say, an effective system of courts and Justice will be
critical to the whole affair. Dreamy eyed people without will to do hard
work or make difficult decisions, or who lack discipline or the ability
to FORCE DISCIPLINE UPON OTHERS where needed, or to punish criminals to
the extend they are actually repressed and stopped ... I would be more
than hesitant to join with such people. This is not something for
hippies who want to smoke weed and hang around aimlessly, dreaming of
peace while the world fall apart around them. Violent and short tempered
people will also probably lead to a disaster. You need a combination of character traits, such as a willingness to work, a seriousness to
observe discipline and be loyal to decisions made, a mind humble enough
to listen to others and their needs, generous enough to care for the
common wellbeing, intelligent enough to understand technical issues, and
honest enough to populate a State system of sorts (even if that is
merely a chairman of a board and his or her secretary), and loving
Justice enough to punish crimes where committed, and wise enough to not
fall for too many lies. (Etc). Basically a life for normal people who
want an honest life, raise families and be happy, and that's it.

While the above emphasized the difficulties, an equal amount or more
could be written about how this makes things easier. That too is true.
It may seem hard, but in the end it should make things easier.

--
Economic & political ideology, worked out into Constitutional models,
with a multi-facetted implementation plan. http://market.socialism.nl

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