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The other thing that we need to focus on is REGULATION, i.e. enforcement by the government of rules that apply to public goods and externalities. The above accounting can only happen if it is done by a "neutral" public entity representing the collective interest (i.e. the State or equivalent), and it can work only if all private interactions with such public goods are accounted for, i.e. are known, made public, and properly valued. Thus the State must police the use of public goods, must measure their use or abuse, and must enforce the rules that apply (i.e. make people or corporates follow the rules and pay the requisite fee/fine for use/abuse of public good) RUTHLESSLY. This means that regulatory agencies (and/or relevant government departments) must be funded well enough to do their job (defining the rules smartly and enforcing the law).
Linked to that is the regulation of the labor market, which should benefit from the same kind of treatment - i.e. ruthless enforcement of existing rules. While we're at it, I am personally favorable to an elimination of corporate taxes, and a simplification of personal taxes via a flat tax with a high deductible. while this may not sound lefty as a proposal, I'd like to argue that it is. When you don't work in that world, you cannot imagine the effort, imagination and ingenuity that is put to lower tax burdens on companies. With the current complexity of tax systems, there are always loopholes, advantages, breaks, tax give employment to armies of accountants, lawyers and bankers, to no obvious value added (there is value to the company, as it pays less taxes, but no obvious value to society to spend so much talent avoiding tax). All corporate taxes are passed on to consumers eventually. Taxes on consumption and revenue (to include capital revenues) make a lot more sense, and the VAT, with its self-enforcement mechanism, is very easy to police and costs little (relatively speaking) to collect. I also have the nagging suspicion that a very simple flat tax, with no breaks whatsoever, would make the rich actually pay more. If you put a decent exemption for the first mayer of revenues, you'd have a nicely progressive tax as well.
Of course, a number of these ideas run against the fact that they are useless if only applied in one country (you just handicap yourself while your competitors keep their old behavior without paying for their use of externalities), so there needs to be at least a continent-wide application of them, combined with some form or external tariff linked to these externalities (to be discussed in a later episode...)
I am thinking out loud here, so all comments, and critique, welcome... In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
[T]he whole World Values Survey, which grew out of the European Values Survey in 1981, is concerned with tracking value evolution across the globe, which is commonly seen as a two-step process. Though it is often simply referred to as "modernization," a more precise description differentiates between two stages. The first is modernization, which involves the transition from agriculture to industrial societies, dominated by increases in income that translate into increased well-being. The second is post-modernization, which involves a shift in emphasis toward quality of life, self-expression and self-determination. . . . The two-phase structure is very evident in the following graph of GNP and perceived well-being: which is schematized thus:
The first is modernization, which involves the transition from agriculture to industrial societies, dominated by increases in income that translate into increased well-being. The second is post-modernization, which involves a shift in emphasis toward quality of life, self-expression and self-determination. . . .
The two-phase structure is very evident in the following graph of GNP and perceived well-being:
which is schematized thus:
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