I don’t know how relevant this is now, but here’s a link to another post where I expressed my thoughts on what kind of pitfalls you might most likely face – https://lemmy.world/post/36867409
By the way, what is this phenomenon on Lemmy? Let’s say people are reluctant to read and comment on old posts published just a couple of days or a week ago, but with new ones, it’s a completely different story. What kind of psychology is this? Or it seemed to me?
I have been workshopping a “Universal Ranked Income” concept, where UBI provides all necessities, while capitalism is used for luxury goods. For example, you get free generic shampoo and conditioner. If you want versions that are scented or have different properties, you spend money. All money is for getting upgrades to lifestyle - bigger beds, vehicles, houses, ect, but the state provides free but boring goods and services as a baseline. Capitalism has to compete against free.
The way I figure, doing it this way allows us to have the best qualities of capitalism, while preventing the hostage leverage that needing food, shelter, and general wellbeing that corporations exploit against people. By ensuring people have what they need, they can essentially unionize by default - the corporations can’t force them nor their families to genuinely suffer for refusing to work bad jobs.
Unfortunately, there are complaints about my concept creating ‘castes’, since I want absolute limitations on wealth, fixed incomes, and want each job to fall into a rank of income according to difficulty, education, and risk that is involved with that type of job. IMO, a national standardization of incomes and job requirements that employers can’t manipulate is key to egalitarianism.
That would effectively create a planned economy. In theory it could work. Unfortunately, the human element cripples it. How do you rank the value of doctors against cleaners? How do you rank bananas against bread? The core elements were tried with communism, and found to fall severely short.
What has been found, in Africa, with micro loans/grants is that people are a LOT more efficient at maximising value locally than a lot of applied rules. Giving them money (e.g. to start a business) is a lot more effective than giving them resources directly. It uses capitalism to optimise on the local scale.
One of the key things with UBI is letting people and businesses sort things out on the small scale. While capitalism has massive issues, it’s VERY good at sorting this sort of problem.
My personal preference would be a closed loop tax based system. Basically, a fixed percentage of money earned (e.g. 15%) is taxed on everyone. That is then distributed on a per capita basis. There would be a cutoff point where you pay more than you receive. The big advantage is that it’s dynamic to the economy. If the economy shrinks, then UBI shrinks with it, encouraging people to work more to compensate. It provides a floor of income, letting people negotiate working conditions, without the fear of homelessness. It also channels money from the rich, where it moves slowly, to the poor, where it has a far higher velocity.
The income ranking for comes from what I call ERK: Effort, Risk, Knowledge. Effort is how tough the job is. Crop pickers have to deal with the weather, lots of backbreaking labor, and so forth. Risk is things like when a lumberjack cuts down trees - their industry tends to have high fatality rates, due to unpredictable and heavy trees falling. A researcher needs lots of education to do their work.
What we will need is a council and research institute, that creates objective standards: How much continuous labor does a person need to do an effective job? Does their environment have things like AC and plumbing? Is there travel involved with this industry? What sort of education is required to make a capable worker? Is there a social stigma? All these factors and more have to be considered for each profession, then slotted into fixed income ranks. Of course, the standards used for ranking job types has to be public, so that people can contest the results if a job is implausibly ranked.
I am assuming this goes into a six-hour workday, alongside things like education being a paid job for students. The goal isn’t perfect fairness, rather it is to allow individuals to have enough agency to safely pursue a career, enjoy everyday life, and fulfill life goals without getting distracted by predatory capitalism.
However, we also need to constrain people in such a way, that they can’t become a fiscal distortion that can damage society. In that respect, I want people to eventually bow out of ‘the game’ at some point, because they can’t accrue anymore wealth due to absolute caps. This essentially forces people to reorient themselves on using their time on things that aren’t about money, such as raising family, creation, or being part of their community.
We don’t specifically price bananas. Presumably, the government buys the ‘blemished’ fruits, veggies, and so forth, that are perfectly fine, but otherwise get tossed out for not being pretty. Grocery stores can focus on delivering the premium versions of food. For example, the government allows anyone to order generic Jumbo Corndogs #1 for free, but capitalism sells Pancake Corndogs by Krustez. People value individualism and variety, which is where capitalism excels. We just don’t want capitalism to dictate a person’s wellbeing, because it simply isn’t suited for that.
As to taxation, I figure that the bulk of the government’s discretionary tax money should come from corporations and immigrants. When it comes to taxing individual citizens, my design intent is a bit different: they should be used to cajol individuals into funding society, by allowing people to tag specific projects with their tax dollars. For example, an map app of roadways and infrastructure, where a person can tag particular bits of roads that they think needs to be maintained. By assigning their taxes to that section, they communicate to the government that upkeep needs to be done. Ditto goes for proposals to build schools, parks, and other social goods.
In addition to an individual’s ‘Social Tax’, they also get a ‘Cultural Tax’. The latter is that they can assign a portion of their taxes towards cultural projects. Say that a studio needs funding to create an anime, and needs money. Individuals can assign their Cultural Taxes towards that project. They won’t receive any goods or privileges from doing so, it just encourages the creation of cool stuff. No one individual can fund enough money for cultural projects like that, but when you have a thousand or so people contributing, it becomes possible. Be it churches, books, or music, people have a portion of their income dedicated towards funding things they think are neat by default.
Essentially, individual taxes are treated as a form of enforced crowdfunding. I feel that by having people directly earmarking their taxes towards specific things, their bond with society will become stronger - they think about how their neighborhood should be, or what new exciting things are on the horizon.
Just hard a read through, and there are a lot of problematic flaws in your concept.
In the first section, corruption will be a HUGE issue. The groups deciding on pay rates will have insane power, which will attract bribes etc. E.g the powerful pushing down wages in their field of interest for short/medium terms profits.
On top of that is the inefficiency problem. Very few jobs are equal. E.g. a sawmill worker, working on the outskirts of a big down will want different compensation to one working completely out in the sticks. There’s also no system to adjust for changing demand. If you’ve not got enough builders, tough shit, no pay increase to pull in talent.
Trying to cover these will create an insanely complex and problematic bureaucracy, that will grow rapidly out of control. It’s basically a version of what the USSR and communist China did. Reading up on how they failed could be enlightening to you.
On to the second point. You’ve again got massive inefficiencies. Often the blemished bananas etc don’t go to waste. They are used to make things like banana ice-cream or banana bread etc. You also jumped straight to processed foods. There is no accounting for making something better from cheaper, but higher quality ingredients.
It’s a LOT more efficient to just work out the cost of feeding a person (in a particular location). If it costs $X to feed a person for a month, then just give them each $X. They can decide how to most efficiently use that money. Some will buy basic meals, others will cook using higher quality ingredients, still others will add to it to cover take away each night. All get fed, and efficiencies get maximised on a local level.
As for taxation. It’s a good idea in principle, but would have problems in implementation. It’s already a problem that unphotogenic causes get underfunded. Your idea would be equivalent to America using “Go fund me” to cover medical costs. It works, ish, but is horribly unfair.
A better solution might be a donation match system. You pay $Y and the government diverts $Y of your taxes (up to how much you paid) to a cause of your choice. The UK government does something like it already. Gift aid allows UK tax payers to donate to a charity. The charity can then claim 25% of the amount from the government. E.g. a £100 donation becomes £125 to the charity.
Your ideas are a good leaping off point. A few useful bits of advice.
Check to see how an idea can be corrupted.
Check if it’s been done before, and how it worked/failed. Also look at how inefficient your idea is.
A large amount of inefficiency can be worse than unfairness. A split where some get $300 while others get $100 looks unfair. However, if the fix leaves everyone with $80 then the unfair version still wins overall (everything else being equal).
Keeping people in grinding poverty is an essential function of capitalism tho.
Instead of downvoting, maybe explain how i am wrong? Open to hearing it.
The Nordic model is a capitalist one.