The Master Plan

THE MASTER PLAN: The goal is for all people to have a high standard of living and real freedom. This means the freedom to spend all of our time as we choose so that work itself is optional. Certainly there is much work to be done, but not nearly enough to keep everybody working forever. And much of the work that we're doing is just a waste of time to make rich people richer, except we do it because it pays the bills, just barely.

What if we only did the work that was truly necessary to give us a pleasurable life, or the work that was personally satisfying? How much work would there be? Instead of the goal being full employment and everybody having a job, what if the real goal is for everybody to have complete freedom and enough money to live healthy, comfortable, safe, intellectually and emotionally enriching and growth-filled, happy lives? How can we do this?

If we apply all of our scientific knowledge, food and material production and distribution expertise, and bring our most advanced networking and computing tools to bear, including our mobile internet and GPS-enabled smart phones, I'm confident that we can figure out something that will allow us to bring this about in the very near future. I have faith in humanity's ability to make big things happen. But that's when the scientists are running the show, not the bankers and politicians. We need to make some big changes around here if there is to be any hope at all, and finally a light at the end of the tunnel.

It really is time to start looking at alternatives to the present way of doing things. 35,000 people die each day of starvation. Billions of people are living in poverty. Many of them don't even have clean water to drink. All the while, in America, an obscene abundance of government-subsidized corn and grain is rotting away in silos. Manufacturers of agricultural and industrial equipment are laying off workers because there is not enough demand for their machines, while they are in desperate need of farming equipment all over the world. Billionaires are playing the stock market for the sheer fun of it. Trillions are being spent in wars to fight an endless supply of ignorant people, many of whom don't even know how to read. The rest that do become literate are forced to read only a single ancient book with ruthless and primitive rules and laws. More of these angry fighters are being made each minute than we could possibly hope to kill.

Our environment is being destroyed before our eyes. Proven technologies that can solve these problems and help these people are being ignored and put on hold simply because there are still profits to be made by keeping things the way they are. Somebody has got to put an end to this. We all need to put an end to this. Today, right now. We have to join forces and put our collective foot down and say enough is enough. No more. We're done. Game over. It's our turn to play boss now, as a team.

The secret to resolving these problems is to end consumerism and for-profit banking, and to encourage conservation so the each person is not a bottomless pit of consumption. We really do have enough natural wealth and bounty to go around, if we can get the waste out of the system and restore some economic balance and reason, so that 1% of the people aren't holding more financial wealth than most of the rest combined. We truly do need to level out the economic system. It's in the best interest of our whole species and of our whole planet. This means designing things to last forever, instead of designing them to wear out and be replaced.

There's only so much "stuff" a person in the developed world can accumulate before they should eventually have enough to be happy and finally reach a relatively steady state. Except right now most people are not truly happy mainly because they are not free. We live stressful lives slaving away to get by and one of the only joys we have in life is buying new stuff. This is by intentional design of the architects of our society in order to make bankers richer and richer because they earn interest on the debt we accumulate in the process of us borrowing money to buy all our stuff. The more stuff we buy, the more we have to slave away to pay back the bankers. It's an endless cycle of misery filled with little temporary material rewards that don't last. One very simple fix for this is for the people to become our own bankers and for us not to charge ourselves any interest at all, so that we're not always in debt. Then we need to be free so that we're not always miserable and don't always want so much. This means we need to change the values that we've been programmed with by The Powers That Be.

The primary advantage of wealth is to have freedom. Given a choice, I would bet that the majority of people would be satisfied just to have the freedom without the wealth as long as they can live comfortably in modernity with enough resources to maintain their personal health and to have comfortable shelter, modern amenities, advanced communication and computing tools, and the means to travel and move around freely. I'm speaking from personal experience. If the majority of people feel the same way, here's one way we could do it right now if we choose to: Consolidate all the banks in the world into one private global nonprofit online bank that is connected to all the existing credit card infrastructure. Give all the citizens of earth one nontransferable voting share each. Forgive all commercial and public debts and start over. Let all commercial banks fail and transfer all deposits on the books to this one nonprofit bank. Let everybody keep their homes, cars and possessions free and clear without mortgage payments. Buy out the landlords so renters can live for free. Eliminate all taxes and all poverty too.

Since all the world’s money will be available at all times to all the world’s people, budgets for expenses that serve the public interest are unlimited. All the money that is spent is eventually re-deposited back into the same bank, so it just sits there recirculating over and over as an engine of commerce helping people to cooperate while getting good things done as time marches forward. If we avoided physical currency the money would never leave the bank, but instead it would just be bits of data in a computer moving between accounts for the sole purpose of helping society keep score so that producers can be rewarded.

We can even have two types of currency. One that is persistent and can be saved, and another that is temporary and just gives us short-term operating money to cover the basics. It is a closed system where money simply helps us all to get along and provides a mechanism for fairly allocating finite resources and maintaining peace. This would keep all the money in the system working for the public good at all times instead of being stagnant capital reserves that are not in use. This is how banking should work. As long it's virtual, it can be a positive sum game, as long most people agree to play by the rules, the main rule being get what you need and maybe a little extra for fun, but stop the endless consumption.

Entrepreneurs can still get rich - except for all the bankers, insurers and financial services professionals. We need to reward those that produce tangible goods and services that truly help people directly, not those who simply move money around between accounts and institutions to create wealth for the rich while skimming a percentage for themselves. Those guys really aren't adding any value to our world. They just create bubbles that eventually pop. All that stuff is just a giant confidence game of smoke and mirrors that the rich use to get richer.

Once we do away with the banking, insurance and financial services sector, we can provide Universal Health Care. We can upgrade infrastructure worldwide to help bring the poor into modernity in a way that is compatible with their own cultures. We can provide the poor, unemployed and retired with a basic income guarantee. There's absolutely no reason we should have inflation if we keep our money in one place. We use what we need to use to do the things we need to do for the benefit of everybody. The number one rule of the game is that everybody gets to play, so our money is just a social tool to be used at all times instead of something physical and finite to be collected and hoarded and coveted, like gold.

This bank will be global, nonprofit, fully transparent and democratically controlled by all. It will be, in fact, nothing more than a global database that keeps track of points, which move around between accounts. Insurance companies will no longer be necessary. Public utilities can be purchased and those services can be free if we choose. We will finally have the resources to upgrade the entire internet so that we all have fiber-optic connections to our homes. The infrastructure upgrade will keep a lot of people busy. We can fix our roads and bridges. We will have an unlimited budget for investment in green technologies and projects that benefit all of humanity, including scientific research. Jobs that really need to be done will be highly valued and those workers will be highly paid. The rest of the jobs that we all hate can go away. Eventually, we can stop keeping score and just live in peace. However, in order for this to work, we have to stop being a bottomless pit of consumption. We need to take our fill, get what we need, then relax and give it a rest while we enjoy our freedom. That's a future that is actually sustainable, and pleasant. Every now and then, we can reboot the game again and level the playing field.