d@w

I like the idea of getting all people involved in economic decision-making. But for this to work in real-time we would need to eliminate ‘money’. Money is at the ‘root’ of all issues as ‘human nature’ uses ‘money’ to advance one’s personal vision (often at the expense of the whole). The history of ‘money’ reveals that today’s cyber currencies are not real ‘money’. These units which get circulated within cyberspace are ‘imaginary’ units of nothing. Our Central banks merely ‘type’ these units into a computer screen and then call these units ‘legal tender’. Is this sound economics? We now need to eliminate ‘money’ from our marketplace. Robots produce most of our products today and people are left with EBT cards and money funny. D

If you read what I wrote you will see that I want real competition, with many parties, not just three or four. To use the economic example, real competition would not come from just creating a new start-up corporation to compete with, say Comcast. It would require a changing of the rules to allow any such start-up to compete on an equal basis with Comcast.

One more little party with no chance of ever winning is not a solution; it is more like a placebo. We need to change our electoral rules to allow more parties a real chance to take power. We don’t have that now and the root of that problem is our continued use of plurality voting – a voting system that makes new parties and independent candidates suffer from the spoiler effect and which also severely penalizes relatively unknown candidates.

By the way, Adam Smith did recognize the problem inherent in in Capitalism that capitalists (not a word that was used at that time) would be able to collude and use there economic power to eliminate competition. He devoted considerable space in his writing to examples of this phenomena and to suggestions for dealing with this danger.

I disagree with the idea of creating a new party.

That is much like saying that the problem with our economy can be solved by creating one new corporation. That just won’t solve anything even if the party or the corporation is wildly successful and succeeds in supplanting one of the existing parties or corporations. What would that solve.

Competition is a good thing and we need more of it. Traditional capitalism as described by Adam Smith appreciated the need for free competition and that was the basis of a free market – not freedom from government but freedom to compete. But capitalists hate competition and try their best to eliminate it. Politicians likewise hate competition and do their best to eliminate it. And those are forces that militate against a successful democracy and against a free market.

What is needed in both instances is more competition. Let’s have worker coops grow and compete against the existing powerful corporations but let us be careful not to forestall some even better alternative model that compete with worker coops.

Likewise, we don’t just need some new party to replace one of the major parties we now have, what we need is a true multiple-party system that will give voters more options on election day than they have now. Take a look at http://www.opednews.com/Series/Balanced-Voting-by-Paul-Cohen-140521-562.html to see some ideas about how this might be accomplished.