From an article in the NY Times.
A Way To Share In The Nation’s Growth
Robert Schiller, who I greatly admire, recommends one step toward Capitalism v3.0. Why? Because investment in the productivity of a nation does not privatize wins and socialize losses, as does debt. It is gambling, but gambling by people who know what they’re doing, rather than simply impoverishing citizens for government’s incompetence.
I have worked on this particular theory quite extensively, and it appears that the worldwide impact would be positive and durable. The argument against it, is that it makes governments accountable. And the entire purpose of government seems, at least from the historical record, to be one of avoiding political accountability at all costs. Which is precisely why we need this particular solution.
Shiller: Sell Shares in the U.S., Not Just Its Debt
Thursday, 31 Dec 2009 09:09 AM Article Font Size
By: Julie CrawshawYale economics professor Robert Shiller says a new kind of government security is needed, one based on equity instead of debt.
“Corporations raise money by issuing both debt and equity, the latter giving investors an implicit share in future profits,” Shiller writes in The New York Times.
“Governments should do something like this, too, and not just rely on debt,” he says.
“We would sell shares in America instead of just debt of the American government.”
Shiller even suggests a name for the new security, which would be based on Gross Domestic Product: a “trill,” because it would represent one-trillionth of annual GDP.
Though GDP numbers still are subject to periodic revisions, “the basic problem has been largely solved,” Shiller says.
“Such securities might help assuage doubts that governments can sustain the deficit spending required to keep sagging economies stimulated and protected from the threat of a truly serious recession.”
If substantial markets could be established for them, Shiller notes, trills would be a major new source of government funding, issued with the full faith and credit of the respective governments — which means investors could trust that governments would pay out shares as promised, or buy back the trills at market prices.
“What the average citizen doesn’t explicitly understand is that a significant part of the government’s plan to repair the financial system and the economy is to pay savers nothing and allow damaged financial institutions to earn a nice, guaranteed spread,” Bill Gross, co-CIO of Pimco, told The New York Times.
“It’s capitalism, I guess, but it’s not to be applauded.”
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When governments no longer can justify violence, they resort to fraud. Debt at this level is either ignorance, stupidity, the replacement of wisdom with ‘hope’ which is a secular version of trust a divinity, or simple outright fraud. And it is not a question of political parties. The left destroys through it’s kind of policy debt, and the right though it’s kind of monetary debt. The only difference is that the right’s method can be corrected through a recession, depression, price adjustments and fiscal collapse. The left’s will require a bloody revolution, and destruction of the civilization itself. Between those two ‘bads’, perhaps, the ‘bad’ of the left is worse, but it is only marginally worse.
It would simply be better for all of us if government could not commit fraud on such a scale, ever, under any circumstances.
To prevent policial fraud we need methods and processes that are measurable, and to measurable they need to be calculable. Calculability is an extension of perception, and an extension that is necessary because our innate human perception is unable to make judgements without the aids that calculation provides for us. (Numbers represent consistent immutable categories.)
Accountability requires calculability. Capitalism 3.0 creates political accountability through plain old fashion calculability.
Curt
