The Civilisationist Noticeboard
- Philip Feinstein – a volunteer music teacher – has established music classes for children and adults inside immigration detention centres and could do with your help. Please websearch: music for refugees.
- CDO Founder seeks paid-work (please reply to this email).
August 23, 2022
Hello
Systems affect minds; infrastructures (i.e. systems that are societal-wide/universal) affect minds most of all.
National campaigns disproportionately impact citizen-minds.
For instance, amongst campaigns past, one got most, to wear a seatbelt.
Hence, regarding the upcoming ‘Jobs + Skills Summit’, The CDO – as the peak-body for cross-societal Coopetition (representing competent bureaucrats, educators, health-professionals, not-for-profiteers, politicians, businesspeople, trade-unionists, economists, think-tankists etc.) – advocates a national campaign to ‘ubiquitise’ the system of ‘Coopetition’.
Coopetition is defined as ‘Cooperation first & foremost and Competition the treasured second’ – such as in:
- Sport – i.e. Cooperation in the form of agreement on the rules, playing-field, umpires and, broader, ‘spirit of the game’ understandings then, within that context, all-out Competition;
- Civil-debate
- Democracy.
Regarding human-rights, Coopetition uniquely inherently encompasses both its full-spectrum and full-magnitude – i.e. it systematises universal empowerment (including minority rights and women’s rights) in a manner infinitely more effective (because it’s natural) than any stand-alone law or sets of laws including a Bill of Rights.
Regarding The Jobs + Skills Summit, our economy needs Coopetising.
A ‘Coopetonomy’ is an efficient economy – i.e. one that ‘exclusively efficiently empoweringly produces and distributes the goods & services citizens need/desire’.
In contrast, our current economy is an inefficient ‘Squandonomy’ because, with the labour-market as our principal income-Welfare mechanism – i.e. dig-a-hole-then-fill-it-in and, so long as someone is paying for it (even the taxpayer), the zeitgeist is in bliss – it is characterised by:
- Jobs-for-jobs’-sake paid-work
- Increasingly-excessive-business-regulation.
A Coopetonomy is pleasurably achieved via ‘The USI-Reform’ of trading-in our Universal Minimum Hourly Wages (UMHoW) system for The Universal Subsistence Income (USI), which is Subsistence-Income-Servitude (SIS) abolitionist – imagine, all slavery eradicated.
The USI is pitched at:
- $20,000 per year for all non-incarcerated in-country adult-citizens under 67
- $25,000 per year for all non-incarcerated in-country adult-citizens 67 and over
- $5,000 per year for all n-i i-c child-citizens [to their guardian/s].
[Note: The disabled also receive a ‘top-up’ from the Health budget as per their health needs, which, because it’s minus The USI amount, has far less onerous application requirements – for example, instead of it being say $25,000 per year, it would be only $5,000.]
Amongst other things, The USI-Reform is a PUSCHE-eradicator – i.e. it eradicates Poverty, Unemployment (and Underemployment), Stigma (‘the dole-bludger’ narrative including its racist and disablist variants), Corruption (particularly, Developing World relevant – with a USI of just 40 USD a month [miniscule compared to the Coalition’s failed military costs], the Taliban wouldn’t be celebrating their first anniversary), Harassment (‘mutual obligations’) & paid-worker-Exploitation (PUSCHE).
[Note: UMHoW (and other business regulation) causes all Unemployment, which is defined as ‘those who want paid-work at the going wage-rate but cannot obtain paid-work’. In our system, the minimum going wage-rate is UMHoW, which is currently $21.38 per hour – too high for the labour-market to clear so we have Unemployment – i.e. even if a business has a vacancy, there will be people whose labour is not worth $21.38 per hour to the business.]
While it’s often said we need wage-rises; what is needed is income-rises.
For instance, a full-time paid worker on UMHoW earns around $37,000 per year (after tax); however, with The USI, their income would be: The USI + their wage = $20,000 + $37,000.
As indicated, there is no workplace-Exploitation because, with no Poverty and no Unemployment, citizens can choose to live a subsistence lifestyle (including in order to focus on gaining Skills) or, far more likely, choose to obtain societally-contributive paid-work (i.e. the current swathes of non-productive and counterproductive jobs will automatically be eliminated).
Meanwhile, business is only paying the paid-worker’s income’s wage-component (i.e. not The USI component), which means their costs have not increased, yet they benefit from:
- Increased demand (because incomes are up especially amongst the previously poor)
- Significant labour market deregulation, which makes them internationally superior
- A motivated workforce that wants to be there
- Their personal USI, which is likely to be particularly important for small-business
- Lower taxes.
Lower taxes?
The USI-Reform achieves an efficient economy with benefits including perpetual budget surpluses (and/or tax decreases, which further boosts business and paid-workers) as:
- Tax revenues surge including due to business being regulation-unleashed and an end to the obtain-paid-work-lose-income-Welfare distortion, which means, among other things, farmers will get their seasonal workers
- Government expenditure plummets because, in addition to replacing most of our present inefficient income-Welfare system (already about 45% of The USI transfer), there are vast savings in charity (there’s no Poverty and no alienation), law-enforcement (there’s universal empowerment), health (including mental-health – the Productivity Commission says it costs us over $200 billion per year), bureaucracy (Centrelink will be closed), natural-environment rehabilitation (the Squandonomy is no more) and the end to jobs-for-jobs’-sake paid-work.
Thus, via efficiency gains, The USI-Reform is, amongst other things: optimal for the Disempowered; optimal for business; optimal for the government’s bottom-line.
Returning to the proposed national campaign to ubiquitise Coopetition, it’s also relevant in solving humanity’s 4 Big Picture colossal problems, which are:
- Our Socio-Econo-Enviro-[international/natural] (SEE-in) problems – including, respectively:
- The Socio- – i.e. Disempowerment (for instance, Poverty, alienation & Harassment)
- The Econo- inefficiency – i.e. since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we have achieved potential Human-Organisation, Science & Technology (HOST) productivity improvements of around 10,000-fold yet Australians are only 216 times as wealthy as Burundians, who are poorer than the c. 1760 British, which means, for a comparative ruination of our natural-environment (i.e. without using any extra resources), we should be 50 times as prosperous (yes, if not for our wanton inefficiency, someone earning $100,000 a year would be earning the equivalent of $5 million) or just as prosperous yet causing 2% of the damage to nature
- The international-Enviro- such as Authoritarian-Illegitimates who are, most of all, Coopetition-defiers.
- The natural-Enviro- such as Climate-Change
- Our suboptimal systems, which, both, have systematically generated our SEE-in catastrophes and continue to worsen them – i.e. rather than being the result of happenstance, greedy corporations, psychopathic behaviour or corrupt politicians etc., they result from systems, which you and I are protecting for reasons such as the UMHoW-sentimentality and, though The USI is an Industrial Revolution inheritance, our ‘something for nothing’ disgust
- Our minds, which are being distorted by our suboptimal systems such that we are:
- Behaving in an uncivilised manner – for instance, each prioritising obtaining our (and our family’s) Subsistence-Income rather than being concerned that everyone has a Subsistence-Income, which means, of course, ourselves and our families are also okay
- Using Band-Aids for each specific problem (for example, jobs-for-jobs’-sake paid-work to ‘solve’ Unemployment), which worsens all our SEE-in problems (inefficiency) including feeding-back into the particular matter that policy is trying to solve (i.e. among other things, greater taxes and bureaucracy, which subtract from business and its capacity to employ people)
- Our ‘leaders’ – whether from politics, the media, bureaucracy, academia, the social-services, businesses etc. – who seem to prefer managing the existing UMHoW/income-Welfare system than leading debate on The USI-Reform.
Coopetition solves them all.
That is, consistent with the calls for “Unity” and pronouncements “We’re all in this together”, Coopetition infrastructuralises common-purpose.
Thus, a national campaign to ubiquitise the Coopetition concept would quickly, cost-effectively, universally and upliftingly focus citizen-minds on exactly how our systems need to operate.
Thank you.
Best regards
Paul Ross
Founder, The Citizens’ Dividend Organisation (CDO)