Excerpted from Cooperative Capitalism
by J.W. Smith
Economics is complicated only because the powerful and wealthy within unequal economies do not permit anything threatening their power and wealth to be taught or practiced. Over time, unjust economies become so customary, and their rational[e] for existence within the education system and the media so complex, that common sense is unrecognized and instantly ostracized.
Visualize a fertile valley 10,000 years ago with fruits, nuts and vegetables growing wild along with lush thatch for building shelters. The new settlers have only to pick their food, build their thatch homes, and, once that home is built, relax most the day.
Selfish, greedy, cunning cabal[s] form and each lay claim to the best land. They make a pact with toughies that they will share the spoils if they protect their unequal and unjust “property rights.” The meek, mild, and law abiding now have to share the food they pick with those “greedy owners,” have to build their houses, and provide any and all other services.
Through that privatization process, the cunning turn social rights and human rights into their private rights, claim their unearned wealth on through history and those are the monopoly property rights laws, as applied to nature’s resources and technologies, denying others their rightful share of what nature offers to all for free, the legal structure of monopolies, that are in place across the world today.
The primary cause of poverty in the middle of plenty has been uncovered. The sheriff and the courts are enforcing today the very same unequal property rights the cunning figured out 10,000 years ago. Note how, even as taxes disappear and honest capitalism is fully retained, those rental values paid to ourselves (redirecting the flow of money) will fully fund all essential social services currently starved for money. The cooperative-capitalism thesis, exposing exclusive title aristocratic law, embedded in today’s property rights law, takes only the following 170 words:
Utopia: By paying land (resource) rents to ourselves (socially collected), a citizenry is quintuply repaid through directing those circulating social-credits towards roads, railroads, water systems, sewer systems, and electric grids (any natural monopoly), as well as funding governments, providing education, health care, and retirement. Infrastructure and populations, not capitalists, establish the use-value of land and other natural resources while their rental values provide the social-credits funding essential social services. Restructure to cooperative capitalism, as described herein, and taxes disappear as employed working hours and consumed resources drop by 70% and all enjoy a quality, secure, life. This requires sharing the “productive” remaining jobs and equal pay for equally-productive labor. With socially-owned banks, each region of the world, each nation, each region of a nation, each state, each county, each community, and each entrepreneur has equal rights to their share of both created and saved finance capital (created money and savings). With those rights, entrepreneurs (private industry) will fill every niche within the production-distribution process. Virtually all unearned monopoly values disappear.
Between 1979 and 1984, in only four short years, under socially-owned banks and socially-collected resource rents, “the number of rural Chinese living in poverty declined from more than 200 million to 70 million” [Jean Dréze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action, Oxford: Clarendon, 1989, p. 216]. So this economic thesis for full and equal rights for all by avoiding the privatization process, eliminating both poverty and war, has already been proven.
The Institute for Cooperative Capitalism Worldwide, cc@ccus.info http://peacephilosophy.org/?p=48
Reference
Smith, J. W. (2006, April 24). Cooperative capitalism: The missing ‘human face’ of economics. Concerned philosophers for peace newsletter, 26, Retrieved from “Cooperative Capitalism”
