Universal Basic Income? I've got a better idea.

I was mucking around in slashdot last night for no particular good reason. I think it has been at least a year since I last took a real look over there.

There was quite a bit of discussion of the concept of Universal Basic Income, and at least one article on some overly wealthy entrepreneurs deciding to try to test the concept.

Before I dig into this subject, I need to explain the concept of value that underlies my ideas about economy. I wrote a long general rant on the subject some time ago, and wrote a shorter rant on value in relation to commercial activities some time after that. Last March or so, I started work on an excessively extended rant trying to establish a simple economic system in which economic interactions would become easy to talk about and agree on. I don't think I succeeded. At least I did not succeed well enough to be able to justify continuing at this time.

Well, the short version is this.

By nature, people work. That's part of the definition of humanity. Healthy, functional human beings will work if they have the option.

I'm not saying they work for pay. I'm not saying they do the work that others demand of them. In fact, there is much activity that people pay others to do that would be hard to call work, and there is much that people don't get paid for that very much is useful and meaningful work. Likewise for things people demand others should do regardless of pay.

Work creates value. It may be value only for the individual doing the work. Or it may be something that another person values. It may be both. But it does create value.

Actually, this is a tautology, because I define work as an activity that creates value.

Value is very hard to convert to money.

This is not what you were expecting to hear, I suppose. We use money as a proxy for value. We use it as a communication medium to communicate about value, and we try very hard to communicate real value with money. We get into the habit of talking about money as if it were equivalent to value, and it is not.

Money is only a very poor proxy for value.

But it is the best general proxy we have for value in a pluralistic world.

Think about that. Pluralism means different strokes for different folks.

Pluralism is how we get along when your football is round and my football is shaped sort-of like an egg and my wife thinks football is a lot of bother.

Pluralism says I can be Mormon, you can be not really sure what you believe, your friend can be Catholic, my friend can be atheistically inclined, another, mutual friend can adher to principles of Islam, and getting together in the marketplace doesn't lead us to war.

Pluralism says I can spend my money building a room where I can dance and you can build a swimming pool, if we both have enough money.

Nobody values things quite the same, but money allows us to pretend our value systems are somewhat compatible -- even when they are not all that compatible.

That's how money is a proxy for value.

But money only tells us how much, roughly, at the moment the transaction occurs. No fine distinctions as to what induces the sense of value or in what context the value is established.

Maybe a pizza is worth fifteen dollars. But we don't know whether that is for Saturday night when we're watching football, or for Monday's lunch.

Maybe a twelve-pack of beer is worth fifteen dollars to you. It ain't worth fifteen dollars to me, even as a shampoo substitute.

Maybe a notebook PC can be sold for $1,500 because it has 16GB of RAM and 2TB of hard disk and 128GB of high-speed SD for the OS, 8 cores, etc. But if it has an Intel processor, I'd rather pay the $1,500 for a quarter the RAM and persistent store and an ARM processor, even with just 4 cores. And I'd pay easily more than twice that for a PC with a 2-core 33209 CPU. If I had the money. If the 33209 actually existed in real hardware according to the spec in my dreams.

My wife will pay twice the price for silk, because cotton is hard on her skin. I'll take cotton any day because silk is hard on mine.

On the one hand, the ambiguous nature of money as a proxy for value allows us to go to market without going to war.

On the other, it leaves a lot of important stories untold when it's time for the accounting.

So we get in the bad habit of conflating money with value, when it barely tells us the bare minimum about value.

We live in an entropic world. 

That means that the total available value decreases. This is the Malthusian argument, and is the excuse for inventing economics based on scarcity.

How does the world keep from running down?

We have a source of something that gives us value for free. It seems to reverse entropy. It's called the Sun.

The sun is the huge gravity sink, and we tend to misunderstand gravity. We think it accelerates entropy. (This is wrong, but that's what we think.)

But the sun is actually a huge source of free available energy. That energy can offset the entropic nature of our world -- more than offset it.

Uhm, did I forget to mention that energy is the physical equivalent of value? Not money, value. Trust me. Energy does a much beter job as an exchange medium than money does.

Some people want to imitate that free source of available value by having our governments hand out a Universal Basic Income.

Huge logical errors. Governments are not God, and they are not natural. Man-made (artificial), often in the extreme. Money is not value.

Handing out money tends to inflate prices. Why? Because money is not value. It's a proxy for value, and when we pump more of the proxy in, we just inflate the prices of things that have real value.

How do we add value to the world? 

Work creates value. (Converts bound value to available value, actually.)

Does that excuse slave economics? Force people to work? 

That's the scarcity economics argument again. We want to think that only our allies can properly judge value, and we want to hope our allies will be in charge. But that's backwards. The more people we allow to judge value, the more of the available value there is that can be accessed. Variety increases value, especially variety in work.

What other things create value?

Entertainment creates a value substitute. Kind of like sweeteners are an energy substitute. A little bit is useful. A lot, not so much.

Education often converts bound value to available value. (Does that excuse enforced education?)

Religion sometimes gives people a reason for living. False religion produces false value. (That's a definition of false religion for you.) Religion is not a good universal source of available value, either.

What is the real purpose of this world?

I'll present this as a naked assertion, a proposed axiom:

Observe a junior high school class. Now go observe some company at work.

This world is here for us to gain an education. Not the artificial education dreamed up by our national education associations and such, real education. We are not here to just exist, we are here to learn.

If you have money to give away and Universal Basic Income was an interesting idea to you, I have a better proposition. 

Invent jobs. Well, no, don't just arbitrarily invent jobs. Look for jobs that aren't getting done because nobody seems to want to pay for them to be done right now with the current artificial fads of what's important and what isn't. Look at the work that your accountants won't let you account for, but you know deep inside that it's work that needs to be done. 

If people are doing those jobs anyway, leave them alone. Don't spoil work with money when you can avoid it.

But if nobody is doing the jobs, go hire someone to do those jobs. 

Don't give them money, give them jobs. Help them do the work they want to do, to create available value. 

Yeah, it takes more effort, more follow-up, especially when someone wants to do a particular kind of work but doesn't know how without creating a mess. But that effort you put in is work for you, your opportunity to add to the available value in the economy.

"My New President Says ...!" (Is the Shouting Match Over Yet?)

Family arguments this morning. No, the discussion wasn't American politics or the president-elect. It was just a normal argument about chores and who gets to tell whom what to do. And about listening instead of just throwing words into the air.

But I have work to do, and e-mail to read. (Bitter taste of irony in my mouth.)

I don't know how Twitter got me lined up with LGBTQ-whatever tweets, but they come in regularly, and I don't have the time to log in and go mousing around to see if I can change the settings. (But I do have time to write this blog post. Go figure.) Besides, I'm letting Googlemail filter twitter's junk into a "Social Media" folder (or whatever that is) with LinkedIn, etc.

This morning there's a re-tweet (essentially) of some media reporting (I'm guessing.) on somebody in Florida who attacked a man, claiming (with crude language) that his new president was excusing him in doing so.

(One of these days, I need to explain to the whole world just exactly what homosexuality means, and why the whole thing should be a non-argument. Not that anyone would ever listen to me if I did. Or, if the post got attention, I'd be targeted by both all sides of the argument for not taking sides with them. Yet another reason I'll never be elected president.)

And I find myself thinking that the last presidential campaign is an archetypical example of people talking (and shouting) at each other without listening.

Which is why we ended up with Hillary vs. The Donald. Ultraman's mother vs. The Incredible Hulk (or maybe it was Glenn Talbot) or something like that.

So, the problem is that we still aren't listening to each other.

Maybe I should start twitting pithy things now, like, "The shouting match is over, can we start listening to each other yet?" (But would that fit in a tweet?)

I really don't like the current implementation of social media. Anybody want to front me the bread to get it right? No? Well, LinkedIn is as close as we'll get at this point, in no small part because they are trying to design it to promote real conversation.

The shouting match is over. Can we start listening to each other again, yet?

An Awkward Proposal for an Amendment to Correct Election Processes

[JMR20200103: If you are interested in what I have to say here, you should also be interested in this post revisiting voter fraud: https://joel-for-president.blogspot.com/2020/01/revisiting-vote-voter-fraud.html.]

Amendments are extreme means. The travesty of the current presidential election rather calls for at least suggesting extreme means.

The president is not supposed to be king/queen for the day or for four years. He or she is supposed to be there to keep Congress in check and be the head of a limited executive branch. He or she is supposed to just be another ordinary citizen with what is supposed to be just a relatively ordinary job.

But now we have Congress holding court with their retainers, whom we call lobbiests and vested interest groups and political parties. When government was small, there was no reason for the retinue.

And we have the courts holding court with their retinue of lawyers, etc. When government was small, ...

And we have the presidential contenders holding court with their retainers -- the political parties and campaign committees, etc.

My wife is listening to the radio in the morning as usual.

The talk show host is commenting on the US elections, comparing the presidential race to AKB-48's popularity contests. My wife says the comparison is insulting to AKB-48. (My family is none of us fans of the idol manufacturing entertainment corporations, and AKB-48 often gets particularly critical evaluations.) I know the comparison is not unique, and it isn't even the first time Dojo has said it. And American pundits and commentators have compared this election unfavorably to American Idol, too.

But it's really bad this year.

I explained to my daughter that things are not supposed to get this bad.

Now, I personally think that neither Clinton nor Trump would be the worst president elected in the US.

Mr. Trump, if the ironic happens and the decoy gets elected, would have to pick a cabinet, the cabinet would have to be approved, and such a cabinet would help him figure out what a president really is allowed to do. Unfortunately, he would thereby be easily turned into a puppet of the power mongers who think they are the hidden aristocracy.

Ms. Clinton's approach to politics has improved a bit since eight years ago. But she definitely let's her mother's instinct for protectionism interfere with her comprehension of the general duties of citizenship. The e-mails thing and other such blunders I chalk up to the people she has gathered around her. And she definitely has shown herself to be manipulable by those power mongers.

Either way, there is likely to be some more unfortunate erosion in the Constitutional checks-and-balances.

And it is not the personalities that are the problem here.

It's the reinterpretations, the changes in traditions such that a particular Constitutional restriction really doesn't mean what it says any more, so that they can "accomplish" the "things" that their backers want.

We need to untangle partisan politics from all of the political processes, and one place to start is the presidential campaign.

We are told (by whom?) that the electoral college was intended to provide a buffer between popular opinion and the office of president.

I don't believe it. Maybe that was what some people thought.

My impression is that the electoral college was really intended to provide an organized way to get the results of the state balloting safely to the capital for this one office that has to be elected by all the states.

In the late 1700s, we had unreliable postal roads. (erk!) No TV, no telephone, definitely no Internet.

And the Constitution was not designed to bring all the states together into one homogenized nation. Each state has its own Constitution and its own laws. That includes election law.

So we had the problem of different election processes in each state, meaning that a citizen's vote in Virginia was not the quite same as a citizen's vote in New Hampshire.

The electoral college was intended as a way to let each state handle elections its own way, and then the states themselves pass their results up to the national level. It was intended as a protection against vote tampering.

As a convenience, it also provided for difficult cases such as statistical ties.

Florida's "hanging chads"?

Florida was a failure of the system. It wasn't the first time we'd seen that particular failure. Florida was a statistical tie. No way is less than one percent difference meaningful.

In plain words, neither Bush nor Kerry won Florida, hanging chads notwithstanding.

Elections are statistical processes. At the time the Electoral College was established, the methods and means for transmitting the results of the processes were not well established. Some of the statistical mathematics were also not generally understand.

And, what is more important, what might have worked well in one state probably would not have worked well in another.

Once again, as I understand it, the Electoral College was not to protect the office from popular opinion so much as it was to protect the transmission of the results.

What has happened now is that the two predominant political parties have essentially hijacked the election processes, establishing their own machinery (the primary elections being the most prominently visible parts) for state operated methods of choosing electors.

The most effective way to protect abused power is to hide it.

Can we get that through our heads?

Putin is a figurehead -- a strong figurehead, but he can not go against the real power holders if he wants to stay alive.

Kim Jung Un is so hard to decrypt precisely because he is trying to work the real powers in Korea against each other, and it's not really working the way he expects.

Obama wanted to do a lot of good things, but the limits he ran up against were not just Constitutional limits.

So, we need to break the political parties' hold on the election. That means that we need to change something. (And we'll have to revisit this question again in a few decades, I'm sure. Social engineers are always so blind to the results of their manipulations.)

So, I'm proposing:

An Amendment to Correct the Elections Processes.

[Except this is way too much detail to be made part of the Constitution. I really need to refine the ideas here a bit more.]

Section 1: Ballots used for national elections, including state processes for national elections, and the processes for casting ballots, shall conform to the following requirements:

The ballots shall be rendered in physical and durable form.

The ballots shall be directly readable by all who use them, including the person legally casting the ballot and the persons who, by law or judicial direction, count the ballots.

The ballot shall not change form in casting, submission, transmission, or storage except the minimum necessary changes to provide for the anonymity of the person casting the ballot.

The person casting the ballot may request help from a qualified voter of his or her own choice.

The form of the ballot shall provide anonymity in all elections except where there is unusual, overriding, pressing, and temporary need to identify the person casting the ballot with the ballot cast. In any case, elections for the President, House of Representatives, Senate, and any elected judicial office of the United States shall always be conducted in a manner which protects anonymity.

The form of the ballot shall also provide means of confirming that the number of ballots counted matches the number of ballots cast.

The content of the ballot shall be protected from discovery until after it has been separated from whatever means has been provided to confirm the ballot count, and until after it has been submitted and stored for counting.

Counting shall not proceed until after the polling area is closed for further ballots.

A person requesting a new ballot to replace a spoiled one shall physically and visibly destroy the spoiled ballot and return it. Destroyed ballots shall be kept separately from cast ballots at all times, and shall not be counted except to determine that the total count of ballots used matches the total count provided for the election.

All ballots shall be kept for the purpose of confirming both the process and the result until such time as determined by state or national law.

The methods and means for counting the ballots and transmitting the results to the respective government officers who by law receive them shall be open to review.

Casting multiple ballots in any national election shall be tried as a misdemeanor crime. Aiding and abetting the casting of multiple ballots in any national election shall be tried as a capital crime. Repeated offenses may be punished by temporarily or permanently revoking the privilege of voting, as determined by the courts for a particular case. [And I really need to work more on the language of this one, too.]


Section 2: The President and Vice President of the United States shall be chosen by direct vote of qualified citizens of the United States in their states of primary residence.

Each candidate standing for the office of either President or Vice President shall stand as a candidate for both offices.

The ballots shall provide for the choice of any of the candidates for President and Vice President, once as choice for President, and once as choice for Vice President. The ballots shall also provide for a write-in candidate, and for an explicit vote against all of the candidates in each office.

[Yes, I think that it should be possible to vote for one from one party and one from another, and I think it should be possible to vote for the same candidate for both offices, should one desire to do so.]

When counting the vote of a write-in candidate, it should be recorded and counted as it is written. 

A runoff election shall be held when there is no clear winner for either office, or when the combined count of votes against and votes for write-in candidates are the highest votes for either office. Also, a runoff election shall be held when one candidate receives the highest count of votes for both offices.

There is no clear winner when the highest count and the second highest count are within one percent of each other, one percent meaning one percent of total votes cast for that office.

When a runoff election is held, all candidates whose count of votes for a particular office in the original election is within five percent of the highest count for that office shall be invited to stand again, five percent meaning five percent of the total votes cast. Also, when a runoff election is required, anyone who can reasonably demonstrate their claim to be a write-in candidate receiving more than one percent of the total vote shall be invited to stand.

Further, when a runoff election is required and votes against all the candidates exceeds ten percent of the total votes cast, new candidates shall be allowed to stand in the runoff election. Again, if there are less than two candidates to stand, new candidates shall be allowed to stand in the runoff.

The runoff election shall be held six weeks after the original election. All candidates standing in the runoff election shall register their candidacy in each state at least a week before the runoff election.

The runoff election shall allow for neither write-in candidates nor a vote against all candidates, unless no new candidates stand. If no new candidates stand, write-in candidates shall be allowed.

If a write-in candidate appears to receive the most votes for either office in the runoff election, a confirmation election shall be held to choose from among those who can demonstrate reasonable claim to being the winning write-in candidate. The states shall make no effort to prevent such demonstration of reasonable claim. This election shall be held three weeks after the runoff election. Those who stand in the confirmation election shall register in each state during the two weeks following the runoff election. The states shall not make unreasonable requirements for their registration. The ballot shall provide for explicitly voting against all candidates on the confirmation ballot.

If there is no clear winner for either office after a runoff election and any confirmation election, the House of Representatives shall as soon as possible choose by vote from among the candidates in the runoff and confirmation elections receiving more than ten percent of the respective total votes. If no two candidates have received more than ten percent of the vote, they shall choose from among the candidates receiving more than five percent. If no two candidates receive more than five percent, they shall choose from among all the candidates. A quorum of three fourths of the House shall be required, and they shall vote first for the President, and then for the Vice President.

Section 3: If this amendment is ratified within one month of a presidential election, it will take not take effect until that election has been completed.

If this amendment is ratified, it will be reviewed and either repealed or updated after twenty years.

[JMR20200103: Again, if you got this far, you should probably also read this post revisiting voter fraud: https://joel-for-president.blogspot.com/2020/01/revisiting-vote-voter-fraud.html.]

Why Do I Suggest So Many Constitutional Amendments?

I have suggested two, already. And I have at least three more that I am going to suggest,

• one to reduce the influence of the party duopoly on the presidential election, 
• one to make it clear that a noble class by any other name is still a noble class (and banned),
• and one to clarify and strengthen the original intent of securing the rights of authors and inventors to their work.

None of these should be necessary.

Surely, playing with the text of the Constitution is not wise?

Surely, it would be more appropriate to deal with the current problems with the law with ordinary legislation, having Congress clean up its own mess?

If only Congress would clean up the mess they call the US (national/federal) code.

But we have a deeper problem. Several of the amendments and a long string of reinterpretations that we once thought were expedient are denaturing the Constitutional balance of power.

For far too long time, we have ignored the fourth branch. We have forgotten that a people who will not govern themselves shall not be be governed to any good purpose at all. We have let the executive, legislative, and judicial branches take the ascendant position of power.

Worse, we have allowed the political parties to try to substitute themselves as the fourth branch.

And we have allowed the media to try to substitute themselves as the fourth branch.

And we have allowed corporations to try to substitute themselves as the fourth
branch.

Who else is trying to jump into the presumed vacuum left when the Constitution banned the nobility and laid the foundation of sovereignty on the people instead?

Religious groups are not the only dangerous partisans whose influence in government must be strongly counteracted.

If we can restore the Constitutional protections and balances of power by ordinary means, that would be wiser.

But we have to start talking about the problems before we can start fixing them. Talking about the problems is one of the ordinary means, really.

Raising the possibility of amendment is one way to try to kick the conversation out into the general forum of discussion.

Dangerous times call for pushing rhetoric a little towards the extreme.