Migeru:
I think we should realise that the banking system is central to planning function of society seen as a whole. Whether banking is public or private, it has the power to allocate credit and thus influence decisively who can or cannot carry out projects for which they don't have the resources at hand already.
And this:
ThatBritGuy:
The point being that if you're thinking in terms of social benefits rather than profits,you've already improved your collective prospects. But I still maintain that no one should be punished for bad ideas. It's more useful to write off mistakes to trial and error and to work at building useful predictive ability into collective intelligence.
The point being that if you're thinking in terms of social benefits rather than profits,you've already improved your collective prospects.
But I still maintain that no one should be punished for bad ideas. It's more useful to write off mistakes to trial and error and to work at building useful predictive ability into collective intelligence.
I think we could device a better system then todays. I'll have a go, and then you can find the flaws, m'kay?
So we need to allocate credit. We need to be able to handle small (small company investment/mortgages/car loans) and large projects (factories, shipyards), we want to allocate credit for projects that benefit society and we want to do it in a manner that does not centralise power.
I would propose scrapping the banks lending facility, and instead introduce a program where the government deciding the amount of public financed investment and the citizens deciding where it goes through each citizen getting to allocate their share of the public investment (practicly this could be handled through systems similar to Kickstarter or Flattr). The point is that you do not get cash, but a share of investment to allocate.
The investment then becomes partially owned by the state, perhaps in a contractual relationship where the person or organisation managing the investment can pay off it over a period of time through a share of income flow or such. So a self-serving conman would be stuck with the govenrment partially owning his con-investment and probably have a hard time convincing people to invest in his next project while the mistaken entreprenuer have to take a longer time to pay of his machine.
But a not profit-turning investment should also be allowed if enough people thinks it is worthwhile. The object of investment then stays public property. Like if an artist convinces people to fund his big-ass statue, where the big ass then daily can inspire passersby.
So how would this way to allocate investment be worse then todays? And how could it be even better? A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
Which means that
we want to allocate credit for projects that benefit society and we want to do it in a manner that does not centralise power.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
In the system I crudely draw up, if ABB wants to tap the public investment system for their new advanced factory thingy, they would probably run the numbers and see how many people they need.
Next step would be to market the investment in turn to employees (it is necessary for your jobs), owners (it is necessary for your profits), customers (it is necessary to produce the great products you want) and the general public (the world will be better with the products produced in this factory thingy).
So I don't see problems for technically sophisticated, capital-intensive production. I do see problems in marketing leveraged buy-outs to the general public, but then those are not a benefit to society. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
