Dana’s idea for voluntary basic capital
Dana’s idea for voluntary basic capital
Kyle Griffin Finally I meet a person who fully understands my perspective and disappointment with the US political class.
You’ve described exactly to Mark Larkento and others why I favor the technologically enhanced approach and why I have no faith in the US political system to solve big problems. The US political system cannot get a man on mars, cannot solve homelessness in the richest country on earth, cannot have the fastest broadband in the country that Invented the Internet and the personal computer.
Where do I see the most progress if I’m objective? I see it in Silicon Valley. Since all the progress in America is coming from the smartest geniuses of Silicon Valley and not from lawyers and politicians in DC why would I think problems can be solved in DC using the tools of lawyers and politicians?
I’m not saying no problems can be solved with a change of the law. Small problems of course can be solved that way but you cannot put in place complex systematic holistic solutions. You can only pass one law at a time and it can take a decade just to do that. The only sort of progress you can have via politics is on social issues where you have persistent loud special interest groups, such as civil rights, marriage rights, abortion rights, and other popular movements like perhaps marijuana legalization.
Basic income is not solution which can be built by law. It has to be built the way the Internet was built. Just like the Internet wasn’t built by politicians passing a law. The basic income which is resilient to political attack, will probably have to be implemented technologically for the same reasons that Bitcoin, Bittorrent, or the Internet itself had to be decentralized.
Once you separate basic income from the political class then it becomes trivial to implement it. It becomes a matter of building the experiments, testing them out, and measuring it.
We will see basic income implemented in micronations. We will see it implemented in virtual states. We will see it implemented on blockchains. We will see it implemented on seasteads. But we will not see it implemented nationally.
It is likely that basic income will be implemented on test populations who are selected and approved. It is likely to be an exclusive group or exclusive communities simply because you cannot scale basic income to the whole world at once.
The way to do it properly is to create basic income from the creation of “new wealth” rather than to merely redistribute it. For whatever reason the socialists and Democrats think it’s impossible to create new wealth and don’t even consider that you can create basic income in that way.
What are dividends? Dividends are called passive income. A dividend is the result of new wealth, new value being created, because the underlying asset is a corporation providing some value to society. So the best kind of basic income is the kind which creates and provides value to society, it’s a net positive.
The worst kind is just to take dollars and redistribute them. Doing that doesn’t increase the value of those dollars because the value of a dollar is based on what you can do with it. So if the buying power of the dollar goes down the basic income isn’t going to help. This isn’t to say you cannot do some temporary basic income in this way but only to say doing it in that way is not ideal.
So what is the ideal? The ideal basic income is a situation where every citizen of the United States is a shareholder in all the top companies in the United States, at least all the American companies, like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and whatever else.
If instead of taxing these companies to give American citizens dollars we instead told people who are starting businesses to reserve some percentage for the nation then you could make everyone a stakeholder in American big businesses, in capitalism itself, and in additional to that you can give basic income in cash as well.
So the ideal is citizens dividend paid in capital assets as best. Workers being paid in capital assets as best. Giving them ownership rights and possibly dividends. Combine that with cash as basic income and you can have the ideal.
Of course the cash would have to come from taxes. Corporations could be pay the taxes and that could pay basic income without raising taxes on individuals but none of t will work long term if the majority of Americans don’t own stakes or have any stake in the capitalist system or in corporations.
Why ? Because sooner or later corporations will become automated. There will not be a need for many workers. So it will eventually be automated corporations as software with shareholders. When it gets to that point then you’ll have problems so it seems smart to make everyone a stakeholder now or at least provide tools so if shit gets bad cooperatives can form, distribute shares to members, and then the community can build it’s own automation to supply it’s needs.
Increase access to passive forms of income via automation and you can have basic income without politics interfering.
People could be getting income for having tested Facebook as early adopters for example. The users of Facebook could receive passive income as shareholders in Facebook assuming the system was set up that way.
Basic income would be trivial to implement in a micronation context. You could do it like this.
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Create a national cooperative. Everyone is a member of the cooperative at birth. All jobs are distributed from this national cooperative. Everyone who works owns shares in the nation.
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Everyone as a member of the national cooperative is entitled to dividends for life in the nation. As shareholders of the nation if the nation does well and becomes rich their dividends increase which directly connects their basic income to the success of their nation.
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The national cooperative should seek to automate everything which can be automated to lower costs so that basic income can increase. The national cooperative shall pay a dividend to all citizens and anyone who isn’t a citizen isn’t part of the cooperative. All who start corporations outside of the cooperative pay a tax. Also a Land Value Tax is used.
If you do something resembling these steps you can have basic income. Whether or not it would be successful would depend on whether or not the nation has enough natural resources to either provide for it’s people using automation or to offer services to others to raise the share value of the cooperative.
The whole cooperative could exist digitally on a blockchain. So in theory we could see this kind of micronation where you have a blockchain as the central cooperative. Everyone in some form of fashion would work for the blockchain.
Of course people would say it’s state capitalism, socialism, or something similar, but it could also be accused of being fascism.
But what difference does that make? It could also provide a basic income and if everyone is living good like that no one will care what we call it.
Dana’s manifesto ^^^ 
Amon Twyman David Wood Zoltan Istvan
Michael Hrenka
It’s definitely not my manifesto but nice try. I actually don’t work with a manifesto and just adapt on the fly to situations.
The idea above is just one example out of many for experiments in basic income. I say try many approaches so that we can discover which approach best meets the needs of the demographic/constituents.
So if anything it’s proof that I’m in favor of micronations, seasteading, virtual nations and other experimental approaches. I don’t think you can do any sort of experimenting in the United States in this politicla environment so it would have to be in some micronation somewhere.
So we shouldn’t expect you to stand by your ideas.
Got that.
Well, imo, they are excellent ideas, worth trying, and worth further discussion with people who will work to test them.
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It has begun. Just like it should be.
Better? …
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