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Laissez-faire? Free or Fair Markets? - The New World Economy - Part 6

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The .Time-Kill. Club
The .Time-Kill. Club
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In about two dozen years or so the great and accurate futurist and political prognosticator Ray Kurzweil
predicts that non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than us with Nanotech foglets capable of making food out of thin air and creating any object in physical world. In less than fifteen years manufacturing, agricultural and transportation are almost entirely automated and employ very few humans. Throughout the world, poverty, war and disease are almost nonexistent thanks to technology. Armed services will be largely obsolete.
So we must now consider establishing new forms of economics because the general pubic will not be denied the benefits of these developments but the market will collapse from want of consumer's ability to buy and humans will have lost one of their greatest games.

Fortunately, as we have shared in prior essays, we in the United States have historical precedents that strongly support guaranteed incomes and development of national wealth through participatory economy, regulated fairness in markets and representative government.

To keep such a world going, until the AI machines want to run it without us or just retire of us, or tire of us, will take a vastly enlarged consumer market with greatly expanded buying power that we can only create by steadily enlarging guaranteed annual incomes. Billionaires buying power today could be mere pocket change by mid century for most people if we are not well on our way to being cooked. That is going to be accomplished with much social upheaval and wide, participatory planning. It will require real national and world wide plans and options to be offered by political candidates if participatory, representative government is to continue.

Some of our politicians will probably not be able to make the change from today's two party football politics pitting the Well Healed against the Raggedy Anns where one side relies on all those dreamers of becoming Well Healed. They can continue to argue that benefits to the Raggedy Anns amount to social welfare encouraging lay-abouts who contribute nothing. The Raggedy Anns will respond and point to rich children flying off to safaris in Africa, killing defenseless animals and acting like useless bums on a Florida spring break. Even if Kurweils medical miracles results in a procedure where the woman reabsorbs the embryo, the "pro life till its born" politiciasns and platform would still rail against death of any fertilized egg although it is estimated that seventy five percent of those conceptions do not go on to represent a full term pregnancy. But, it continues to be a great way to criminalize women, make them second class citizens, and create culture wars to keep the sport going and give the talking heads of the media some sound bites to chew upon.

The fact is most people enjoy being active, some even enjoy hard physical work and would hate a life without purpose and nothing to do but lay on the beach, drink beer and fornicate.. So our new government must find, support and contribute, through all of its agencies, departments and programs, room for the active volunteers of all ages. It might have to expand or create a new volunteer department to help placement. Further there should be some reward for the volunteers, such as crediting them, at least at what ever is considered the minimum wage, for the hours they actively provide volunteer effort. This could be applied at the end of life to tax free gifts, bequests and inheritances. Social Security could keep a record of the hours and there should be no problem with storage considering our current ability at domestic spying. All people who have any mental or physical ability to contribute through voluntary effort, should be enouraged to do so to enrich their lives and their communities, regardless of age, so long as it is comfortably within their physical or mental abilities. Otherwise what ever they may have accumulated through life will be taxed at the maximum rate upon their death. We can build a more equitable and meaningful society. We are indeed now invited to become creative in designing for our future world.

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AB 1959 and JD 1963, University of Missouri, Columbia. 50 years active member of Washington State Bar Association, mostly civil and commercial office, trial and appellate practice and Superior Court Arbitrator for about 40 years or so, since the (more...)
 
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