this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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Economics
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I think that the fundamental flaw of our economies, is that they weren't created with rules in the first place. We just took the vague notions of trade and coinage, then began to add the rules after the fact. What if we did a hard reboot, but with an economic Constitution to guide the economic system?
For such a system, I believe we would want three things at the most basic level:
1: Transparent and simple rules. Ordinary people should be able to easily identify and troubleshoot the excessively wealthy.
2: Universal but boring benefits that guarantees survival for everyone, with a basic income. Money is for buying upgrades to lifestyle, not survival. Jobs are for affording to buy more expensive luxuries, like vacations to a foreign land, attending the theatre regularly, and so forth.
3: Absolute floors and ceilings on income, assets, and wealth. Beyond a specific point, wealth is taken as tax.
Understand that reality doesn't run on computer code; you can't hard reboot history, and you can't just hard code in universal rules that people are compelled to follow. Coming up with good rules for a hypothetical society is the easy part, it's the political problems that come with trying to implement them that is hard.
Your approach is called "Utopianism," and was tried in the past already by people like the Owenites. The problem is that you can't change a system by simply convincing people to adopt a better one, systems evolve and change over time based on material conditions.