Selling America To Ourselves

The more I think about this method of nationalization the more interesting it becomes. In a way, it is nothing more than accounting sleight of hand, but in another, it is a fair way to compensate holders of all the assets the nation possesses.

Think about it. In essence the government would issue a new kind of repayment bond. Something like $300 to $400 trillion in these bonds would have to be issued. From that point on, however, all other debt paper held between all citizens and corporations, as well as all debt between corporations would vanish as it would all just become debt that America Inc LLC would owe to itself.

All Americans would be given a share of these bonds as already indicated in the previous post. In essence becoming debt/value instruments held by us, for us. Payment on this debt would be instituted only when a citizen needed healthcare, or training, or supplemental payments to bring their wages up to what would be established as a minimum living wage (which would be treated separately from what a job might pay on it's own). Supplying any of these would retire a portion of that debt. Current large wealth holders would be given lump cash down payments initially, with further monthly payments if they decided they wanted to cash out of the arrangement altogether, but with forfeiture of further citizenship. And foreign held government bonds would be honored as they always have been.

As the government would then be a giant corporation it would no longer need to collect taxes, operating instead on over all entity profit (incentives to maintain same set up by a combination of salary caps set initially at, say, a half million a year for management positions, but with bonus payments provided when profit goals are met, that could push that to, say, a million a year in total), with, again, the extra funds transfers serving to pay down the bond obligation.

I set this up with the major portion of the bond share distribution going to the middle of American wealth holders, and I did that for a reason. These are the people who have created the majority of job supporting businesses across the nation. The small, to medium sized businesses, in retail, and manufacturing, that make up the bulk of American entrepreneurial enterprise. The question then becomes what could these people do with that extra allocation? They could use it to start new enterprise entities that would create more jobs; in essence making a proposal to set up this new entity and getting the funds to do so as a debt paydown. Not only could they then draw a new salary as part time manager for said entity, they could also receive a percentage of the profit as well (all of which might be allowed to surpass nominal salary caps).

Again, this is just me spitballing ideas off the top of my head. I am sure there are a lot of specifics that I am missing here, but that shouldn't stop us from gaming whatever scenario that might hold promise. The thing is, we are not only in desperate need of creative new thinking, but thinking that has to be way outside ordinary notions of the cash box, if we are to navigate translation to something better than the mutated monster we now call Capitalism. Something that can hold us over until we figure out how to organize things without the need for money at all; which can be done. Which must be done if we're to have any chance of addressing climate change, and an ever more immense global population.

A cost based economy, with all of its contradictions, and absurdities (like human skill still being a viable competing commodity, or livelihoods based on mass production and consumption) cannot hope to cope with the effort that will need to be expended to meet the challenges we all see looming over us. Our survival as a species, as well as the survival of the rest of the planet depends on it.