How to Re-Organize Society From The Top To the Bottom

Chapter 14

First, we look at the property relationship which we have stated is a major source of power in most societies and has given us a major source of inequality in American society.

With this notion  we would change the relationship of the super rich to property.

”Every citizen and especially corporation would self-assess the value of assets they possess, pay a roughly 7% tax on these values and be required to sell the assets to anyone willing to purchase them at this self-assessed price. This tax would raise enough revenue to eliminate other taxes on capital (such as on inheritance, corporations, capital gains, property and so forth), significantly reduce income taxes and pay down much of public debt, while at the same time funding a large social dividend (of roughly $24,000 for a family of four in the United States.)”

Note here that the proceeds would be come back as dividends to the general population of roughly $24,000 for a family of four.

Since we live in perilous times, ideas like this may have a chance to be adopted if the super rich could be made to understand the consequences of not allowing for change of this kind.
Let examine this idea a bit closer.

First, we already have in place for years an idea very much like this in Alaska, where revenue from oil proceeds are paid out to citizens of that state.
Norway has a similar scheme for distributing its proceeds from its oil production. It
is not really a new idea, and in many ways this an update from Henry George, a thinker whose ideas around political economy, were popular for over thirty years in the last century.

See the youtube video cited below.
Copy the citations below into your browser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGRt0OD9gI8

See also:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOyk_FrvMQ


A variation of this idea is where in North Dakota a state bank has been in place for over 50 years were the Bank of North
Dakota bank proceeds are used to reduce mortgages, loans and other financial instruments in their costs to its citizens.
Other profits are plowed back into housing, infrastructure and the over-all needs of that state.

Credit Unions in this country were started with a similar idea where profits and proceeds were to be invested back into the community, eliminating the profit motive or reducing it, skirting the stock holder model where some impersonal investor demands profit margins which may or may not meet public needs.
An example is currently present at places like Google where ads are auctioned out to companies where they bid for auction space in Goggle searches.
The auction model is currently used to sell the privilege of using our public airways by large companies like NBC, CBS etc.
These are not unfamiliar models which we work from and what would be new is to apply them to private property and ownership of a public or private property.

It would easily work for corporations where the cost of a given share is publically known. The difference here is that one must sell that property if a bidder matches that price or exceeds it. Then, the proceeds, in this fashion could be returned to consumers and the public in the fashion noted above.
A public dividend is then established and the process is established as described above.
This is a model we currently use but it is suggested to extend to other types of properties.

Can it work? Yes, it can. It is a economically feasible way in which change can occur in our society without bloody revolution and a peaceful means by which the super rich can be made to pay their fair share of the costs of society.

We will come back to look at this idea in more detail tomorrow