Problem & Solution



Number of problems we are facing in this day and age like technological unemployment, global warming, wealth inequality, fading democracy, and many other things are the calls for necessary changes of the system .

And, there are a few important question we all have to consider:
In the fully-automated system, who is the one who decides who has access to resources?
Who are the people who will get food when all production is automated and no one needs to work anymore?
What are the criteria for accessing food or clean water, when jobs do not exist?

And if you think that these things are not something that concerns you, think again, because your job robots may steal the next.

We need to make a change if we want to avoid sliding into the dystopian society

There are many solutions, and the best option would be if they could all work together. However, the biggest change that needs to happen must happen in the political and economical sphere.
In order to make that change, we are lacking intermediate steps that would help us to avoid sudden disruption. We do not need another revolution that will start a new cycle, rising like a phoenix from the ashes, repeating the same thing all over again. We need a fix for the currently malfunctioning system, and we need steps that will allow everyone to adjust and adapt to new requirements.

Many things are theorize and fantasize, like in the Star Trek science fiction TV franchise they often claim that their future Earth has abolished money. Unfortunately, they never explain how it may work neither what were the steps to get there.

This is the place we will try to offer that small piece of the puzzle, necessary to push us forward to a society that is based on direct democracy and unconditional basic income.

Do not forget: even when we get there, those are just temporary states.
At the end, there will be something that we have not seen before, but I am certain in one thing there will be no money.

How to get there?

Before, direct democracy was not possible, as technological means were not good enough to allow us to communicate on a larger scale in a timely manner. Referendums are expensive and time-consuming. In contrast, online surveys are cheap, quick, and easy. If we would use the online solution, properly designed, we could speed up debates by removing repetition of the same arguments. Nowadays, many existing online social platforms already have similar properties like that.

In the economic sense, crowd-funding platforms have the ability to join the resources of many people, in order to accomplish higher goals. In return, people who fund projects get some kind of reward. Following the same logic, government is one very large crowd-sourcing fund: it takes our money and invests it in the things that are important for society (most of the time).

What is wrong about this picture?
Similar to some of the crowd-funded projects, government can waste money. Sometimes, it happens because of corruption, but it is usually because they are not able to control everything in a way that would prevent misuse. Disproportion between the size of the government and the body they control can create a bottleneck, preventing them from carrying out positive changes they would like to do, thus creating unintentional issues. In order to fight frauds they created large number of bureaucratic procedure, but more procedures they created it was more difficult to carry out the work successfully. Most of the officials are not bad, as portrayed, but, instead, it is more the case of misguided intentions and technical limitations of the system.

Thirdly, there are years of bad capitalism that lead to the concentration of wealth into one small percentage of the population, basically jamming the system, and potentially risking large economic and political failures.

The way to solve this is by using Basic Tax Control funds, supported by online social networks.
Basic Tax Control means that a certain amount of money is given from the tax budget to each person of a certain age. Then, each person needs to invest the received money into the projects created by people, companies, or government for the public good. In return, those projects are given to public ownership, or a portion of the project's profits are given back to the fund, either as a percent of the profit or as a share in company's ownership.

Idea behind solution

The main idea of Basic Tax Control is identifying and fixing the real issues in the current system, instead of destroying the existing system completely and starting from scratch all over again.
Especially as starting anew does not guarantee that we will not repeat the same mistakes, and, as history has shown, that we have already done it many times, and it did not fix the things that were broken. What was broken back then is broken now, causing more issues than before.

A good analogy would be to imagine a car that has flaws. At some point, while driving those cars, we realise that there are flaws and that some of those flaws will appear only after we drive a certain amount of miles. Furthermore, the faster we drive, the more dangerous those flaws become, endangering our lives and safety. We get angry, and, instead of fixing the car, we get the revolutionary idea to stop, burn the old car down, and start from scratch building a completely new car. Now, building from scratch is a complete setback for our trip; we are not travelling, and we are wasting time repeating the same thing. Even worse, while building the new car, we use the same engineers who have the same mindset as the builders of the previous car, and even worse they use the same plans, at the end the only things they are changing are the colours, door knobs and driver. After driving the new car for a while, we will again realise that we have the same issues as before. However, it is even worse now, as we lost time building the new car we decided to drive as fast as possible, but, the faster we drive, the more those flaws become noticeable, and the more dangerous they become for everyone.

Instead, we could decide that we do not need to stop; we could just slow down a bit and fix the flaws while driving. Although this looks impossible, we need to remember that we invented open heart surgery, and we have practiced it for quite some time. Cars are far simpler than the human body, and, although no one ever tried fixing them while they running, as they do not have life and cannot die if they are disassembled, I am pretty sure that, if we needed, we could easily invent a similar procedure. Our socio-political structures have life like our bodies, but by the complexity there are more like cars. They are also far more resilient: they can withstand many changes without major society disruptions or breakings. We can replace many parts, and our society will still run as usual.

Basic Tax Control philosophy is fixing instead of rebuilding, evolution instead of revolution. Ideally, what we want is to modify and fix without affecting normal life, without causing major negative disruptions, destruction, or wars. Similarly as people were not hugely disrupted by the mobile phones; we just changed our habits and adapted to new.

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