Utopia.

Sounds like quite a nice place. But how do we get there? Well unfortunately it doesn't exist. But it can be made to exist, and it is our duty as human beings to make it exist. So what's to do?

Beaurocracy - the Enemy
Oh yes. Beaurocracy. Lump it or loathe it, you can't like it. It is, to put it bluntly, an arse. Ok so we need at least some paperwork, or everything would just go out of control, but we certainly don't need quite so much as we have at the moment.

This is what our journey to Utopia consists of -- Reduction of Beaurocracy -- and it happens in five stages.

Here is a map of the economy as it is at the moment:

Oh dear. That's rather complicated, isn't it? I call this picture "National capitalism". Let me explain what all the various parts mean.

The yellow arrows: The arrows represent the direction of the flow of money. Don't take too much notice of the width of the arrows, it's only a qualitative diagram. Every one of those little yellow arrows represents a big fat lump of beaurocracy. These are what we are trying to get rid of.

The "dividend" arrow represents dividends paid on shares and also includes interest paid on bank balances.

Workers: The Workers box represents everyone who has a job.

Scroungers: This box represents everyone who doesn't work for a living. This includes incredibly rich people who can afford not to.

Companies: This box represents private business and industry.

Services: This box represents state funded services such as education, police, and the health service.

State: The state is our country's government. This represents just the mechanism of government, not actual politicians. Note how there is no "wage" arrow from state to workers. Government employees are considered to work for the services.

Ext.: This represents the rest of the world, that is, other countries that we trade with.

Note that some boxes (notably the Companies box) will have lots of little arrows inside them. We shall ignore these for convenience.

Step 1: Globalisation

Globalisation is the abolition of the nation state. All nations should join under one government, with one army and one currency. This way the Ext. circle disappears, along with the import and export arrows.

This also has the advantage of getting rid of people who make money by trading on the international currency markets. These people don't actually do anything useful, they don't make any product or increase the overall wealth of the world. They're capitalism parasites. Moneysuckers.

Our economy now looks like this:



I call this picture "Global capitalism".

Step 2: Full Employment

The next step is to get rid of all the scroungers. We can do this now, since with no international currency market, we don't have to worry about "what the neighbours think". However, we can't just go about distributing this new money willy nilly. If we increase the amount of money in the world without increasing the amount of valuable stuff in it, we're going to get inflation. If everyone ended up with more money, companies are going to think they can get away with putting prices up. We have to use this new money to pay the previously unemployed to work and make things. The more of something there is, the cheaper it gets, so we have to make sure that the amount of extra stuff that gets produced lowers the prices by the same amount that printing extra money raises them.

Actually, we don't even need to print enough extra money to completely cover the costs of doing this, since we don't need to pay out benefit anymore. We could also use some money we don't need to spend on defense anymore.

The economy now looks like this:



I call this picture "Global Rich Capitalism"

Step 3: Socialisation

I call this step "socialisation" rather than "nationalisation" to avoid confusion with a return to a world of competing nations. Socialisation is the taking over of private companies' functions by the state. This allows us to abolish tax.

The economy now looks like this:



I call this picture "Global Rich State Capitalism"

Step 4: Absorption

Now since the government is essentially just an administrative body, it can also take on the administrative functions of the services department and ensure democratic principles are applied to those areas that were previously the domain of the corporate executive. If the services department does not lose or gain any money overall, subsidy will exactly balance with returns. The state does not actually need exist on its own, since it is merely a mechanism for distributing money to the services. Therefore we can combine the State with the Services to give one Administration department.

The economy now looks like this:



I call this picture "Global Fiscal Socialism".

Step 5: Abolition of currency

Now since there is no net flow of currency between Admin and Workers, we can just deduct their spending from their wages before we give it to them. In effect, we don't pay them, we pay their bills. But since all bills come from Admin in the first place, that just means admin is paying itself. It needn't bother.

(NB. the Admin box represents only a mechanism. The people who work for Admin are still included in the Workers box.)

The economy now looks like this:



I call this picture "Global Altruism".

Oh that looks a bit like communism, I hear you cry. Not quite though. The communists kind of had the right idea, but they just took it that little bit too far and thought you could get away with abolishing Admin too. You can't. Most people are stupid enough not to know what to do unless someone tells them to.

Some similarities with communism exist though, so you could perhaps also call this picture "Pragmatic Communism". Perhaps. I prefer "Global Altruism" though.

Global Altruism: Utopia


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[18.5.2000]
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