Egalitarianism and Existentialism

Why should we believe in egalitarianism? Well to answer this we must go deep into the very nature of the universe, lurching our way through the essence that is existence.

So how do we even figure what the hell’s going on? Renee Descartes once embarked on just this question, he decided to start by doubting every single assumption that there is so as to build a view of the universe based only on what could truly be known. So let’s start there.

Nothing exists, there is only void, there is no proof of anything existing, now there’s a problem I am doubting the existence of everything, that action as soon as it’s taken, exists, so I a conscious thing capable of doubting existence exist. (go read Renee Descartes’ meditations yourself for more detail) So I who exist can also doubt the existence of other things which sets up a now two part universe, of finite concepts, which I doubt, and void, which is nothing.

now let’s go further into the darkness and see that all the finite things plus all the void would be infinite, so there are three parts a finite part, an infinite part and void, everything is in the infinite, everything is part of that one thing, it’s all connected conceptually and that’s important because there may not be any other type of connection other than conceptual.

Within the three parts let’s go a little bit further in to the cave of existence and check out two concepts, pleasure and pain, do I know if pleasure and pain exist? No I only know that they are concepts which can be perceived and doubted, but I can use them if I briefly assume they do exist, which they might, to classify all other finite concepts as good or bad. (This would be done by simply classifying all pleasurable things as good and painful things as bad, of course a more nuanced theory probably related to the works of Epicurus would be more effective and I do intend to go into that in future work, things like hangover theory from over indulgence in pleasure, short term pain for long term gain, etc. For now just check out Epicurus to figure out what I’m talking about.)

Now I can’t prove you exist, but I can prove that I should doubt that you don’t exist, And if you exist you may reasonably experience pleasure and pain, good and bad things might happen to you, we’re beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel eh?

Now let’s go back to the three part universe, you are not void because you might not be nothing, so you are finite or infinite, the two of which are connected because the one encompasses the other, so causing pain to you is also causing pain to me. Because we are, if you exist, deeply connected by the three part universe. I loose nothing if you do not exist and I treat you well, but I hurt myself greatly if you do exist, and I treat you badly. Because I want to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. 

And there we have the philosophical basis for egalitarianism. Based on this basic assumption of your possible existence, and the experience of pain and pleasure we can see the need for equity in the universe.

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Government

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Government- The Current Situation

            Government should be by the people for the people, since the French revolution in 1789 every government in the world has had to acknowledge that the people have power. Since that time governments have tried to keep as much power for themselves as possible while making sure the people don’t get rid of them. In “Western” nations this is often done by having periodic elections in which the people choose between two or more political parties who once elected run the nation until the people get a chance to either stay the course or pick a different party to rule them, despite this they are still being ruled from above, this is government justified by the people, not actually by the people, at best this system encourages but does not even ensure despotism in a nation’s government. In nations that don’t qualify as democracies there is not even an attempt by the government to justify its power based on the will of the people with the possible exception of some propagandist claims, such as those who claim to represent the will of the people because the people once brought them to power in a revolution.

Why is government by the people better than government justified by the people, or the alternative? If government is by the people, not merely justified by them, the government must be accountable to the people, that is, it must be accountable to itself in everything it does. As well if government is by the people then it is not separate from the people and is therefore better able to understand and meet the needs of the people.

            How can government by the people be achieved realistically? Well that’s what we’re going to discuss.

Government- The Councils

            Everyone has a right to self and elective representation in government, the easiest theoretical way of doing this is having everyone decide what to do in every legislative and executive decision a society faces, in practice however this is impractical. To account for this everyone should be given the right to meet at whatever location governing is done at and cast a vote according to their personal desires if they so choose, however this may be difficult for them to do if they cannot somehow bodily arrive at the place of governance, so they may elect an official to cast their vote for them on their behalf, someone with whom they generally share opinions, much like voting for the parties whose platform is closest to your own beliefs about government, however unlike a party you can take away your vote from the person you elected to use it at anytime if you feel that you disagree with them on issues or legislation currently going through the system of government.

            Let’s look at an example: there is a small island nation in the Caribbean where a recent rash of coat factories have sprung up working on artisan wages and power distribution. This islands government is also based on Artisanism but all of the decisions are made between the hours of 9:00 and 17:00 (5:00 pm), which means that everyone who works at one of the coat factories during the day shift can’t participate and most people on the evening shift would rather be asleep than go to tedious government meetings. Of course there are other businesses on the island but the coat factories dominate the island. Now everyone who wants to take the time to go to meetings gets to vote on issues as they come up, and those who can’t must find someone to give there vote to at least for the time being if they want their voices heard. This can be done in a simple contract.

            Now, some enterprising islander is sure to realize that people will pay for a representative in government to advocate their interests as it would be very difficult to be in the government full time and keep a job. This enterprising individual would of course have to set their own prices for their services and therefore would be making a profit and qualify to manage themselves, and if they were to get an organized party of advocates together, they could manage themselves just the same way as any other business. Of course this doesn’t give this person any more power in government than anyone else because at anytime the people who gave them their votes can take them away or show up themselves and oppose the entrepreneur’s political decisions.

            This form of government prevents the shortcomings of government justified by the people; it even avoids costly and wasteful elections while giving the people even more power.

Government- Legislation

            What does the government do? That should be simple the government exists to protect the rights of its people, as well as make sure that those rights are in the interest of the people, which is much easier when the government is controlled and made by the people. To do this the government must be able to uphold the rights of the people, and agree on what those rights should be. How each right of an Artisanist society can be upheld will be dealt with in the explanations of what they are, right now, we will deal with how rights should be agreed on.

            The councils of a society should exist as legislative bodies which can make additions and changes to the rights they uphold. To do this legislation should be proposed, debated, and voted on, at which point if it is not passed the person who proposed it may well make changes and propose it again, and if it is passed it can be upheld.

            How exactly does this process work? Well let’s go to the example of the small Island in the Caribbean. On Tuesday Mr. Hugh Beris finishes writing a proposal to make Marijuana consumption, sale, possession, and production legal on the island, basing his proposal on the existing right to religious and intellectual freedoms, as well as the impracticalities of enforcing unpopular anti-marijuana laws. That morning he goes to the council and when it’s his turn on the floor he makes his proposal briefly and puts the document in the file of proposed legislation, a superficial yay, nay, vote is held, from that point each side nominates and elects an advocate who is then given a standard period of time, let’s say a week, to research the issue at hand. A week later on Tuesday again after a morning of proposals and a break for lunch debates are held in the afternoon on the proposals made last week, each sides advocates are given as much time as possible based on the number of proposals to be debated that day, one side makes the same points about legalizing marijuana’s relation to the right to religious and intellectual freedoms and the practical implications, while the other side points out the bills relation to the right to safety as it is detrimental to an individuals health. At the end of the debating time the actual vote is held and the proposal becomes legislation or is blocked, and Mr. Hugh Beris goes back to the drawing board.

Government- Taxation

            Regardless of what one might like, for a government to have power and uphold the peoples rights it must have finances this has been done for hundreds of years by taxation, if there can be a fair wage then there should be a method of fair taxation, unfortunately tax is inherently unfair as it is forcing people to pay for things they might not want. However it is also unfair if people do not have their rights upheld, so a balance must be struck, luckily when government is by the people, it doesn’t fall to the same corporate or corrupt personal interests, and so the people can agree on how much tax they should be paying and they all take part, in deciding where that money goes. It’s like pooling some money with friends and family members so you can afford the lease on a building downtown so that you can all open and help run a café there. How taxation is structured should be decided by the people, but hopefully the people understand that the less they pay in taxes the fewer services will be freely accessible.

Government- Regions

         How big an area should a single government have power over? The best size for a governmental region should be based on the idea that the farther away geographically the place of government is from the extent of the area it affects, the less able it is to allow self representation to those living far away. So, smaller is better, having a big region with a powerful centralized government isn’t good. It is better to have many smaller self governing regions, the other reason for this is that in a democracy majority rules and in a big region if an issue is very sensitive and almost split down the middle in terms of support for one side or the other than the rule of majority may leave a very large amount of the population dissatisfied, and chances are that they will not be spread evenly across the population, chances are that there will be small regions which, if they were self governing would not have to live under the heel of the majority.

            On the other hand regions must be big enough to financially support themselves and provide for themselves, so ideally the size of regions is a balance between those two factors, and that would be different in every situation.

Exploitation

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The Current Situation

            This is just a little thing everyone should know. Don’t worry about the numbers—you don’t actually have to do math, and yes I know enough about economics to know these numbers are inaccurate and there are a bunch of other costs, this is all just a simple example. Before the industrial revolution, when you bought something like a coat it was made by one person, a tailor usually. They alone would have paid for all the things needed to make the coat, and would put all the work into fabricating it. When someone bought it, the tailor would have gotten all the money the coat was worth. This is fair, because it was his labour that created that profit.

Now let’s say for a moment that you own a coat making factory after the industrial revolution. You have to pay $10 for enough material to make one coat. You have to pay $1000 for the equipment to make coats. And, of course, you need people to actually make the coats, so you hire 10 people at $8 per hour and they work eight hours a day, and with the equipment you bought they can each make about one coat in an hour. Now you sell those coats at $40 a piece, so when the day is over, 80 coats have been made and you have made a net profit of $3200. But, of course, you did have to spend $800 for materials, $1000 for equipment, and $640 on those people you hired, but that still leaves you with a respectable $760. After the first day you don’t have to pay for the equipment anymore, so you make $1760 a day. Pretty nice eh? But think about it—you just bought supplies, you didn’t do any work. The people you hired did all that work that earned you $1760 and all they got was $8 an hour ($64 a day). Is it fair that they did all the work but you made $1696 more than them?

This is of course how almost every product in the world is made, from your shoes to your doorknobs. Is it fair?

Fair Wage

            So what is fair? Well, let’s look at our coat factory from a consumer’s perspective. Each coat costs $50 (there’s a $10 mark up by the retailer). Where does that money go? Well, first, $10 go to the retailer. Another $10 goes to pay for materials. $10.21 per coat purchased is used to pay for the equipment, and $8 goes to the people who made the coat. That leaves another $11.79 that goes to the factory owner. Where does that $11.79 come from? Is it the materials? No, they were $10. Was it the equipment? No, it cost $10.21, and again, the retailer only gets the mark up of $10. So it must come from the labour.

            As you can easily figure out, the more people working, the higher the profit is, and yet the workers still make the same amount of money even though they’re creating a larger and larger profit. But, you say, without the owner the factory wouldn’t exist and no one would be making any money. That’s right, but that doesn’t mean he deserves to take the entire profit for himself, he has organized the factory and paid for materials, equipment, etc. But he hasn’t created the profit, he has only catalyzed it. In fact, unless he hires more than 5 workers, he isn’t going to make a penny. So if they create the profit but the owner is the reason the factory exists, what’s to be done?

Pay everyone at the company a fair wage based on the profit they create.

 It is easy to measure how much profit each worker creates in this circumstance, but it is much more difficult to find the profit created by the manager. A general standard of labour value at the company must be created.

Let’s look at the coat factory: A $2400 profit is created daily after the equipment is paid for (labour cost isn’t being counted because that’s what we’re calculating). In a day each worker puts in 8 hours of labour making the coats and the owner spends about 6 hours working out a deal with the retailer, doing taxes, lining up repairmen, advertising, etc. a different type of work but still work, so 86 hours of labour went into creating that $2400 of profit. Everyone at the company made $27.91 worth of profit for each hour they worked. Therefore, each worker has made $223.28 and the owner has made $167.46, in this example. That is fair based on the profit they created.

Distribution of Power

            Now, if people are being paid fairly, what changes? When people are being treated equally economically it makes no sense to treat them unequally in the distribution of power. A company must be run by everyone involved in making the company work, that’s everyone getting paid. So hiring and firing must be done democratically. Let’s go back to our coat factory example.

            Mr. Doe one of the workers has been slacking off and hanging around the factory. He’s been avoiding punching out for as long as possible, thereby decreasing profit by not helping to create it and decreasing every ones wages by “working” longer hours. Instead of having the manager simply give Mr. Doe his 2 weeks’ notice and hiring someone else, this should be done by everyone his slacking is affecting, i.e., everyone who is working. So in the group of 11 people, if 6 agree that he has to go, then that’s the way it is. And of course they would have a say in who gets hired in Mr. Doe’s stead, hopefully someone who is going to do their job. This, of course, extends beyond dealing with slackers or people you just can’t stand around the workplace. This decentralization of power means that all these rules extend to management as well as labour. So owners now have job security no higher than the workers, who can now fire and replace their bosses as well as each other.

Insurance, Retirement and Rewards

            Things are now bubbling along fairly well at our little coat factory. People are paid and treated fairly, everyone can support themselves and their family, and the people buying these coats haven’t had to deal with the price hike of “fair trade” goods. But what if something should go wrong like a fire in the factory, or a worker needing maternity leave, It’s for unforeseen events like these that a company fund must be created as insurance for the company, for the company members, and for benefits like a pension for those who work at the company for a particularly long time. 10-30% of the profit being saved daily would make sense for these circumstances, the amount should always be decided on democratically. This would mean a 10-30% cut in pay for everyone, but they’d still be making 3 or more times what they were before the reform, and there would be something to keep their livelihoods secure in case of the unforeseen. In fact, after 2 weeks, there would be enough in the fund to start an entire second factory.

            But before we get to that, we should deal with a driving force among human beings, greed. Even though people all make the same hourly wage based on the profit they all helped create, there’s nothing wrong with a few rewards for particular service. This would appear in the form of a pay bonus. What should be rewarded and how should the amount and duration be determined? It should always be determined democratically but for our example, let’s say the manager works out a new deal with the material supplier so that the factory buys more materials at a time but at only $9 for enough to make 1 coat, this creates an additional profit of $80 a day ($1 saved on each coat). That profit was undoubtedly created by his bargaining skills and so for 3-6 months it makes sense to give him the new $80 a day, until it ceases to be a novelty. Another thing to be rewarded is a chance that anyone can make the factory run greener and be more environmentally friendly, the 3-6 month bonus for which would have to come from the company fund.

Expansion

            What if the company decides that it’s time to expand? Let’s say it’s been about a year since the factory was started. 20 more workers have been hired and thanks to them the factory is working 24 hours a day making a profit of $7200 daily resulting in pay around $26.34 an hour, assuming the manager is working six hours a day and the company fund is 10%. After a working year (200 work days) of this the company fund should have about $144 000 in it, but of course some of that has to go to things like advertising, injuries, repairs, etc. so let’s assume it’s been reduced to $108 000. This is the perfect time to expand the company. So the manager can decide, keeping in mind he can be fired and replaced by the workers if he screws up, to start a second factory in a second city, so after buying the building equipment, materials, hiring the new workers, etc. some sort of new management structure must be found. A manager must be hired for the new branch and someone has to oversee both factories, so how does that change the pay structure? Well there are now 30 workers at each factory creating a profit of $14 400 a day and there’s also one manager keeping things straight at each factory working about 6 hours a day and now there is someone organizing both factories. How is this new position paid? Each factory is able to control its own finances for the most part, but taking the new position’s pay out of only one factory makes little sense so the new position should receive a half pay check from each company resulting in one full pay check, and if there were 3 factories it would be a third of a pay check from each. And to fire and replace this person fairly it would take a majority vote between both factories as opposed to the managers who can be simply fired by their own factories.

            Why would the company want to expand? Before the expansion wages were about $26.34 an hour, but now with the additional tier of management it’s $26.02 an hour because there’s another manager working, so of course it would make sense to just stay the course of one factory, but on the other hand the company fund now expands by $1440 daily instead of just $720 daily, so there’s more money for benefits and the like. It’s a give and take situation, so it’s very important that everyone at the company knows what they’re gaining and losing in an expansion so they can all decide together.

*Non-Profit Businesses*

Non-Profit Businesses would operate, much as they do today working continually in the red, depending on grants, donations and loans. Of course to keep up with other industries their costs would run higher, but with the economic kick in the teeth of a highly circulating economy, (the more equal a country’s distribution of income the better off it is economically in most circumstances), more money wouldn’t be hard to find.

**Inflation**

Inflation created by equality could be combated in many ways on the macro-economic level, one of the easiest ways to do this would be the reintroduction of a real gold standard.

What if it Happened?

            How does all this change things? This policy can be applied to any profitable group from Wal-Mart to a family owned diner. What if companies were normally run like our little coat factory, with fair wages and fair treatment? People would make more money in general, spend more, buy more, and in general move the economy around a lot more, this also means that to save up for retirement or start their dream job, such as owning their own restaurant, taking up sailing, or whatever, people wouldn’t have to spend as long in the jobs they don’t necessarily like to get the funds to pursue their vocations. Won’t that deplete production power? Yes, but there will always, always be those willing to take undesirable jobs if they see a personal profit in them and with fair wages that profit is very easy to see.

            Why then are people continuing to start companies if they can’t see themselves earning massive profits from their creation? Well people can always start them out of vocation, which is probably a much better reason than money to do most things, or small companies made by and worked by a single family or group could come into existence, and of course there’s the possibility of making companies based on investments such a bonds and considering paying them back as simply a cost of production.

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