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It is rare these days to hear any serious consideration of freedom or fairness in public discourse. To my way of thinking, these things should be front and center. As animals, freedom is our natural state. As people, fairness maximizes freedom throughout the population, preventing one person or group's freedom from denying freedom to other people. In a more perfect world, freedom and fairness would form the basis for all societal systems.
A financial world based on these ideas would be great, but that's not what we have. Our monetary system was designed to maintain artificial scarcity of dollars. Outside of government spending, private interests control where the money flows through the economy and where it does not flow, in part by relying on a credit system that exemplifies structural racism. Wealth doesn't move through this economy fairly. It flows perpetually from the poor to the rich.
This transfer of money out of communities and into the hands of a powerful few represents what former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calls an upward redistribution of wealth. Since the pandemic, corporate price gouging has kicked this upward redistribution into overdrive. The neoliberal position is to break up corporate monopolies and to increase taxation of the rich. Conservatives want to cut taxes and deregulate everything, letting the chips fall where they may.
Both approaches would further enrich a small group at the expense of everyone else. Neither course of action would make society more free or the economy more fair. From my perspective, a better way forward would involve a few key components. First, a universal wealth tax in the neighborhood of 5 percent. Second, Universal Basic Income and universal healthcare funded by this tax. And third, an alternative financial system underpinned by blockchain token markets.
The scheme I envision would eliminate capital gains, social security, and medicare taxes. It would also eliminate expensive government programs like SNAP and HUD subsidies. With free healthcare and guaranteed income, people would be free to do whatever they wanted. This could only work if UBI amounts were tightly coupled to market prices, such that inflation automatically and commensurately inflated benefit amounts.
The universal wealth tax I favor would be truly universal, encompassing all legal entities and all quantifiable forms of wealth. Every person and company would pay 5% of their total holdings in tax every year. Total holdings includes all cash, securities, and other property. For assets like real estate that can't be divided or easily disposed of, the government could essentially put liens on the property, tokenize these liens, and sell the tokens on the open market to raise dollars for its budget.
Benefit amounts would have to be sufficient to pay for a real average cost of living. Receiving a UBI, millions of people would quit their jobs. Many of these would find or create better jobs. Others would travel or explore the arts.
Freed from the constraints of wage slavery, large numbers of people might become more politically involved. Instead of spending their days on the clock, they'd vote, campaign, and lobby, giving new meaning to the term populism. Of course, not everyone would be so productive. Lots of people would probably do very little.
An alternative financial system underpinned by blockchain token markets isn't as far-fetched as it first sounds. These markets are coming into existence already. The underlying tech is widely available. Right now, regulator attacks are slowing the growth rate of this sector in the US. But a single overseas exchange could easily bypass US regulators to make these markets more accessible.
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