The Golden Laws of Prosperity

Oh God! I managed about two thirds of all that and it brought back memories of pontificating parsons and their eye-stabbingly tedious sermons based, and I use the oxymoron deliberately, on a non-existent reality!

(Ooops, sorry, I really didn’t mean to be rude. I wrote the above under the misapprehension that it was an extract from a blog/book/magazine called ‘Economics, How to Think’. I now realise they are your own words and I was about to delete my comment but then I read:

“Do great things, not because of the return, but because they are great.”

For that alone, alas, I must leave my comment standing whilst wondering when you first began writing the trite messages to be found in the more sentimental of Hallmark’s greeting cards?)

Never employ mercenaries (or contracted parties) to supplement or replace regularly employed military.

Never employ military upon credit (debt) unless engaged in war brought on by external forces.

Reserve the death sentence for those who abuse or usurp power and like treason, once engaged upon, there is no restitution to prior conditions for those afflicted.

Ian,
The merest of quibbles; “Keep the rich poor?”
Erm, could you expand a bit on your seeming oxymoron?
Cheers.

@Celsius — on “Keeping the Rich poor” this is my interpretation, not Ian’s, but keep the income ratio of the top 1% to the Median to a “reasonable” level (10:1, 15:1 or something like that) so the wealthy are truly wealthy but are not completed insulated from the reality experienced by the median. This would discourage the “lottery” mindset and the elite opt-out that Ian has talked about numerous times.

Use competition between the private and public sectors.

In what? Most of the areas where I’ve seen it used have not had socially good results. Military contracting? Prisons? God help those who are placed at the absolute mercy of profit-seeking organizations. Schools? The rich are enabled, as Steven Colbert said, to keep their children from getting poor all over them. And of course, society’s problem children with physical disabilities or difficult homes are left concentrated in the public schools. Garbage collection? Private firms can’t compete without public contracts that eliminate the public sanitation department. And then of course, you’ve got employees even more miserably paid than public sanitation workers and with no benefits; how much does the public save when the employees need food stamps and Medicaid?

The textbook theory is that competition produces better service. But when there’s a reason for a public service, it usually means that private competition will abuse whoever is powerless — employees, customers, the public purse.

How is a levy different than a licensing fee, then? And if an artist can’t keep a ‘monopoly’ of hir work, then how does said artist collect levies?

artist: “You owe me 50 cents for every time you use my photo!”
person selling tshirts: “Nuh-uh, I got it from somebody that gave you 50 cents already, so I’m putting it on tshirts and selling them; too bad, you don’t have a monopoly on it.”
artist: starves.

If it weren’t for Disney, people wouldn’t get all snitty about artists and intellectual property. Capping how much could be made from a single artwork or how long they can control it (which, again, Disney ruined it for everybody) would make sense to me. But making government the sole purveyor of art is just an awful, awful idea. The real intellectual property problems are a) patent law and b)major corporations/consortiums (Disney,RIAA). Oh, and c)genetic patents (plants and beasts).

@Mandos:

In my defense, all eBook protection schemes are trivially breakable, and anyone can “take possession” of most non-Kindle eBooks using a widely available Python script.

Well done, sir!

I see the Duff troll found your site.

“Make sure that the consumer economy has an alternative”

I think that ship has sailed. And this is at the heart of the economic/jobs crisis.

I loathe the contemporary copyright system. I run a very, very small business/hobby on the side and we release all our creative work under a Creative Commons license, which is much less odious. The thought that under current law something I create would persist in belonging to me long after I’ve rotted to dust in the ground is deeply obscene.

As for a better method to pay artists, I’d kill to see Dean Baker’s proposal implemented.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-artistic-freedom-voucher-internet-age-alternative-to-copyrights/

Ian:

Kobo Touch bought at discount from dying Borders. If I hadn’t left the USA when I did, I’d have gotten an even steeper discount. At those prices, I’d have bought a few as gifts. While it’s shrinking in the USA, it’s apparently growing in Europe through a willingness to cooperate with local entities.

I am relatively pleased with my purchase. It’s a sturdy device that does exactly what I bought it for, has reasonably good battery life, and is backed by a Canadian company that at least pays a little bit of attention to Linux users (in the sense of having an unofficial Linux version of the desktop client which is more than most companies do).

While it’s easiest to download from the Kobo Store, you are by no means tied to it (unlike Kindle+Amazon), and can load books on it from any Adobe ePub store DRM or otherwise—or just plain old PDFs, which it pans quite well, though it eats up battery faster. It’s very light which is important for me as I carry a lot of things in my backpack, which as you may have noticed I take everywhere. It plays well with the public library Overdrive portal (which is quite abusive but that’s not the library’s fault).

I don’t like the fact that it has only a touch keyboard (HATE), but I didn’t buy it to type with—that’s what my BB is for. It does not have 3G—you need to download books by USB or by wifi.

The Adobe ePub DRM is beyond idiotic. I couldn’t have thought of a stupider protection scheme if I had tried. Of course, any *stronger* scheme would be even more obtrusive to the user. For non-Kobo DRM books you need the Adobe Digital Editions software, which works with tweaking under Linux/WINE.

Publishing channels are engaged in a futile quest for survival. I’m happy to pay the author (e.g. C. J. Cherryh runs a non-DRM store with a couple of friends for some of their backlists), and perhaps there may be a way to enshrine editors. But the rest of the middleman business, well…

I think your list is incomplete in an interesting way: I do not see explicit Keynesian policies (I may be missing something) or unions.

“Creatives would self-register. The levy is charged on internet access, and divided amongst creatives.”

How would it be divided? It seems like the only fair way would be based on how many people “consumed” the artist’s work.

And how is it fair that everybody pays the same levy? Since these things aren’t that hard to track, why not charge people based on how much they consume.

And if you’re doing both of those things, how is this system any different from copyright, other than creating additional bureaucracy?

My addition (in some ways covered, but I’d like it expressed more directly):

“Make the economic prosperity of the bottom 20 % of wealth-holders and income-earners your benchmark of how well your economy is doing. You do this because history shows that they are the best indicator of economic health. When they do better, everyone else is taken care of as well. When they do worse, most of the population will get worse, given time.”

StewartM

Ian, I like it. It may be incomplete (what such list isn’t?), but it’s a great start. I’d second eliminating corporate ‘personhood’, and put much bigger restraints on the ability of large corporations to devour smaller companies.

How it fix the jobs crisis and grow prosperity (in advance of Obama’s speech…)

1. Lower the SS retirement age to 62, early retirement to age 60. Free up middle and upper management and lower positions for younger, healthier, less expensive workers.

2. Remove the cap on Social Security contributions to pay for new and future retirees.

3. Limit consumer credit interest rates to 15% max. This will reduce consumer debt and promote consumption without costing taxpayers a cent.

4. Lower the eligibility age of Medicare to zero. It’s an insurance (not a health care) program. Younger, healthier contributors will dramatically drive down cost and increase savings. Employers will be out of the health care business.

5. Rescind the Bush tax cuts immediately on those making over $250 and increase the rates on those making over $1M+ to Reagan era rates.

6. Rewrite underwater mortgages by “splitting the difference” between current market value and what is owed, (4% -30 yr. fixed) both parties take a hit, homeowners have incentive to stay and pay and banks are not stuck with vacant, non- performing assets.

7. Make all educational expenses tax deductible.

Problem solved.

“Sam,
Google ASCAP.
It’s very different from copyright.”

Funny that you should say that, since the entire legal framework for ASCAP is built on copyright.

“Do not allow the old to make deathbets.” What does that mean?

I suppose this Pollyannaish wish list could be possible under the benevolent rule of Ian the Magnificent, World Emperor. In an earlier post Ian stated that we need a leadership/managerial class to guide us and then followed that with the claim that this class becomes war criminals when they achieve positions of power.

This progression is confusing because it seems to infer that we need war criminals to lead us to a better future if we can’t find a benevolent emperor.

This. Oy. One of my bugbears. The fetishization of Apple iWhatever products by hipsteriffic liberal poseurs is one of the signs of the apocalypse, I swear.

They’re so busy running around in circles fatuously playing at re-fighting the late-20th century’s battles that they don’t even seem to notice that they’re being completely routed in all of the 21st century’s battles.

It seems to me that this is entirely by design.

(And it may in the end bring on the apocalypse, at that…)

This wishlist is what comes after the evils of capitalism has done the needed heavy-lifting to get us past the point where scarcity is the main driver of political economy.

What Middle-Class Canadians Need To Know – A Must-Watch, One Hour Economics Seminar
Robert Skidelsky

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgOhGexi1CY&index=55&list=PL6ED0A82B20435C39

Ian, I would love to know your thoughts on the video above.

Thank you, Stirling. I guess the meaning should’ve been obvious but for some reason it was not.

Ian,

You are right that much of it was done after WWII, BUT, with the rise of China and globalization, much of this had to be reversed so that the benefits of hegemony, and being the printer of the worlds reserve currency could be maximized. And, this also required that wealth become concentrated in the hands of the 1% (as this ensured that as little of it leaked out of the economy to buy goods from the likes of China and oil-producing nations). If everyone had been given their true keep, it would only have bid up the price of the manufactured goods and energy that the US was able to import (in return for IOUs that it has the ability to print the money to repay when needed). The benefits of hegemony would have been depleted quicker than need be.