To: A few friends, a few lurking innocents, many devious defenders of the status quo (DDotSQ), and assorted classic academics on several mail lists. Dear friends, Please accept my sincere apologies for wasting your time, and for putting your interest in my subject at risk, with my wholly unnecessary response to the Australian DDotSQ. He was only doing his job, and all too well, but my job went begging while I foolishly responded to his ad hominem attack. An attack which was "distinct from any legitimate sort of pertinent argument or refutation, and disallowed in debate," according to Aaron Agassi on list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. Now, back to promoting the general welfare, which is the special common denominator of several mail list owners who continue to distribute my posts. A previous post identified one of my favorite Christmas presents as the term: "noosphere" by way of Teilhard DE Chardin, Robert Theobald, and Paul Swann owner and moderator of list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. The term "noospheres" was not as helpful as I had hoped. It is a little flaky, and prone to be ridiculed by rednecks and libertarians. So I was doubly blessed to get, as a New Year's present, a more down-to-earth term: "thinking envelope of the Earth," also from Teilhard DE Chardin, but by way of Robert Wright, and Billy Grassie owner and moderator of list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> where my posts have been proscribed since 98-12-02. Author Robert Wright, a contributing editor at The New Republic, Time magazine, and Slate, has posted his new book, NONZERO: THE LOGIC OF HUMAN DESTINY, at URL <http://www.nonzero.org/app1.htm>. His theme is, that social development follows a "nonzero" path, rather than a "zerosum" path, and thereby assures a slow but ever upward trend for the complexity and quality of human society. This theme confirms again Spinoza's 1670 universal law of human nature: that people, when free to choose, will choose the lessor of the evils and the greatest of the goods which confront them, thereby slowly but continuously improving their general welfare. I don't remember what, if anything, DE Chardin said about Spinoza, but it is certain that Robert Theobald and Robert Wilson shared DE Chardin's vision of a "noosphere" or "thinking envelope of the Earth," a network which guides or regulates the activities of all actors, capital or human, in the society covered by the particular "noosphere" or "thinking envelope of the Earth." My own narrow experience of 75 years on this planet has provided insight into only two such regulating mechanisms. The first one is the hardwired time-error system for dispatching the production of electric power on the international power grid which is bounded on the West by Texas, on the North by Hudson's Bay, on the East by Cape Cod, and on the South by Key west, FL. On average, about half of the connected capacity will be unemployed, but 90%, or more, of connected capacity will be fully loaded when consumers present their peak demand. In real time, of course, demand is always at the discretion of the consumers of electric power and the function of the dispatching equipment is first to preserve the stability of the whole system and then to preserve the energy balance between demand and supply with a minimum fuel input to the power system at every level of production. Here is Adam Smith's "invisible hand" hard at work. From an airliner at 30,000 feet, the power grid, containing both the regulating intelligence and the product, is invisible. The plants are only barely visible on a clear day, and the consumers are spread over the earth like a coat of paint. Here is a real "noosphere," indeed. The second such regulating mechanism, of course, is the market price mechanism of every free society. This "noosphere" is a soft network of linkages between the actors, capital or human, in the society regulated by the applicable "noosphere" or "thinking envelope of the Earth" We should think of this "noosphere" or "thinking envelope of the Earth" as historically restricted in extent by local or national boundaries, but presently overflowing those geographical restrictions as globalization evolves under the influence of the Internet and other advanced methods of communication and transportation. This vision of a regulating influence gives a more hopeful meaning to the term "world governance," as meaning self-regulation by Divine Law, by the Twelve Moral Commandments, or by the Rule of Law. This is a more acceptable vision by far than the coercive meaning of World Government according to the New World Order. We should also think of this soft "noosphere" or "thinking envelope of the Earth" as a multitude of nested envelopes, with each envelope defining the price of a particular commodity in dollars per unit of value, just as the single hardwired "noosphere" above defines the price of one particular commodity, electric power, in dollars per kWh. Notice that the direct cost of electric power at a particular plant is exactly determined by test measurements of plant efficiency which are adjusted by fuel costs and cooling water temperature. To the contrary, the direct cost or earned income of a particular kind of labor is determined in a more democratic manner based on the opinion of all parties to the transaction. Each member of the workforce has the cost of supporting at least one dependent, him/herself, plus the cost of support for any additional dependents he/she may be responsible for. The cost of supporting him/herself is fixed, quite independent of how much work the worker is doing. Likewise, the cost of additional dependents is also fixed, and quite independent of how much work the worker is doing. Now it seems to me that the standard practice of our most capital intensive industry, electric power, the industry which defines the lifestyle of industrial societies, provides a powerful argument in favor of establishing a universal basic income, in four sections, for our human assets. The standard industry practice is to provide, from corporate revenue, the debt service on the cost of acquiring each plant in the first place, the expense of maintenance to keep each plant in good working order, and the expense of the no-load losses of each plant while each plant is unemployed but available for production when required. These three subsidies, from corporate funds to the plant, suggest the first three sections of a four section universal basic income for our human assets. The guiding principle here is to remove all fixed costs from the data used by the control system at the plant level, so that supply and demand can be matched at every level of production with a minimum fuel input o the whole system. Corporations obey this principle because it is the only way to make an automatic control system work reliably. Governments, on the other hand, seem to think of society as a big bean bag, without regulating principles, which can be punched up in any desired shape by just passing a law. Our present condition shows that corporations treat their productive assets better than governments treat their citizens. If the power grid were operated under the same financial rules our government imposes on its citizen, the US would have a third world power system. The same standard practice is also a technical requirement for the efficient operation of the workforce. A free market automatic operation of the labor market price mechanism can properly regulate only about 70% of the total operation because the other 30% must be diverted to cover the fixed or sunk costs which, by definition, cannot play any role in achieving a "Pareto Optimum" dispatch of production from the available suppliers. In other words, over the lifecycle of any reproducible productive asset, human or capital, three subsidies must be paid from that part of corporate or public revenue (the gross margin) which is over and above the direct manufacturing costs of production. The first subsidy is for the cost of development, which is a sunk cost by the time the asset becomes productive. The second is for the cost of management or government, that is, the salaried workers as opposed to direct labor. The third subsidy is for the cost of maintenance and no-load losses while the plant is available for production, but not in production. For human assets, of course, there is an additional fourth cost for maintenance while in retirement, which presently gives this writer the freedom to say what he thinks without regard to zerosum employers or pecksniffian mail list moderators. Given the propensity of wealthy, healthy, intelligent, and powerful folks to "do whatever it takes" to survive and evolve to a better condition for themselves, how can we explain why the United Kingdom has remained locked in a public policy which generates 2-3 percent per year inflation and 4-10% unemployment, ever since the advent of industrialization in Adam Smith's day? Even more perplexing, how can we explain why the United States, after wining its War for Independence from England and its Civil War to remain one nation, reverted to the same second-best public policy after the advent of industrialization in the US in the late 1900s? The inflationary trend of this second-best policy is illustrated by the profiles of the price indexes for the two countries shown in their 1993 book, THE GREAT RECKONING, by authors James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. The unemployment levels of this second- best public policy, as two centuries of experience in the UK and one century of experience in the US confirm, are moderated only while the nations are at war. Surely this is a sorry performance compared to the stability and economic efficiency demonstrated by our corporations over the last two centuries, and by Japan, Germany, and the smaller European industrial nations during the three decades following World War II. Even if John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was accurate in his assertion "that not one person in a million can diagnose inflation," we should today have about 300 such persons in the English speaking countries: the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Is it reasonable to conclude that these 300 people remain silent because they are at the top of the heap and fear to disturb the status quo by addressing the general welfare of their respective nations in public? I think not. The silence must have a much more fundamental cause. Sally Lerner, owner of list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, has written often of the obstacles to getting a public debate started in North America on the need for a Basic Income, and has established list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> to get that debate started. In the UK, Kevin Donnelly, spokesperson for the Christian Council for Monetary Justice, recently invited my attention to a 1986 paper by Sir John Wally KBE CB. The paper entitled, PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN; A Study Of British Politics, traces the question of subsidies for families from Prime Minister Pitt's critique of the Spleenhamland System in 1795 down to today's "academic pressure groups who had no interest in the principles of income taxation, except to misrepresent its deductions for children as 'handouts' to the better-off." Clearly, there has not been a generation of English speaking people in the last 200 years without one or more prominent persons speaking in favor of support for parenting families. But the public is numb on the question. It is as if there were a powerful religious taboo in effect, but never articulated in the public debate, which proscribes all assistance to parenting families until they are unemployed and sink into poverty and dependence on public welfare. Much of the teaching of the Church of Rome has carried over, unmoderated, into the teaching of the Protestant denominations and the principle of "Subsidarity" is one such teaching which addresses the relationship between higher and lower levels in social organizations. I only recently noticed the s hift in emphasis over the sixty year interval between the following two definitions of "Subsidarity." Subsidiarity, 1931, as defined in the Papal encyclical Quadragisemo Anno, forty years after RERUM NOVARUM, on the condition of the working man: >> "It is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of right order for a large and higher organization to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller, lower bodies..." << There is no question about the ability of most families to provide adequate support and education for their children. We all did it. The proper question is: how did this practice affect the development of Imperialism as J. A. Hobson described it in his 1902 book of that title? Subsidarity, 1991, as defined in the Papal encyclical Centesimus Annus, Page 94, one hundred years after RERUM NOVARUM, on the condition of the working man: >> "Here again the principle of subsidiarity must be respected: a community of higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its function, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activities with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good." << Does this statement imply the Church's approval of a basic income for every person over their whole lifecycle? For children and students only until they enter the workforce? For retired people only, at the expense of families with children? The latter is all that the UK and the US have in place, two centuries after Pitt, the younger, proposed children's allowances as a practical alternative to the Speenhamland System. Think about it, and then talk about it. Its your future, not mine! Kind regards, Wesburt
