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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (8118)	12/28/2005 5:22:25 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 542044

Thanks for breaking it down. We can talk about parts of the overall idea without getting them mixed up with other parts. 1) I think the complete history of all economic transactions isn't very likely but you might get many even most transactions with time if there is a major sustained political force behind it. I wouldn't be a supporter of it, but I don't think it is either totally impossible or ruinous, just difficult, expensive, and from my perspective unwanted. 2) Elimination of negative number barriers in economic ownership In a sense they are already eliminated. You can owe more than you have. To the extent that this would actually be a change it seems to be a combination of eliminating bankruptcy and #3 "Full economic inheritance. Am I accurately reflecting your point. 3) Full economic inheritance, as much as possible, both positive and negative. I have a problem here. Mainly I don't see the parents, and their kids, and their kids ect. as a unit. They are, and should be separate individuals under the law, esp. once the kids are no longer minors. I think there are some practical problems with negative inheritance, even more with an unspecified negative inheritance, but most of all I just see the basic idea as unjust. I see inheritance as mainly just a way to distribute your assets. Depending on the specific law in your country or state/province/district you might not even be required to give you wealth to your kids, or if they are due a share of your estate you could give your wealth away before you die. Or as Karen says you can bury yourself with your wealth. I imagine you aren't going to allow people to do that with debts, obligations, and risks under your system? 4) Temporal decay Interesting and possibly useful idea. Even if I somehow accepted that a son somehow had responsibility for his fathers debts (either the standard type or the "negative economic legacies" that you propose) it would be even harder to argue that his decedents 100, 1000, or a million years later should have to pay for what their distant ancestor did. OTOH this isn't something your really pushing, just "willing to accept", and it is not a central requirement of either your idea itself or any implementation of it. So I don't think I'm going to put any further effort into analyzing or debating it. 5) Free market trading of all economic legacies. If such economic legacies are to exist I don't have any problem with making them tradable. I think the actual market in such legacies might be fairly illiquid, and many legacies will not trade at all but I'm not against the idea as an idea. 6) Assignment of risk/reward ownership based strictly on a) fractional ownership, b) responsibility, c) reasonable compensation, and d) using best available science. This is the one where I think there is the most possibility for misunderstanding. Any way you could develop this a bit further, or explain it in a different way? You give general criteria for the assignment of "risk/reward ownership" (Is this another name for the "economic legacies"?), but you don't give an actual mechanism for their creation. You mentioned lawsuits before and in this post you do again, but I don't think more lawsuits can add up to your grander vision. Esp. since I don't see how you can make a "positive suit". For example, I don't see how the US is ever going to successfully sue Canada if all the oil we burn creates global warming which turns out to be positive for Canada. Do you even have an undeveloped idea for what a positive/reward mechanism might be, and do you have any ideas for negative/punishment mechanisms other then more lawsuits? I know that 6) above is your hangup Well I have some problems with it, and its possible that I don't fully understand it, but I have a bigger problem in principle with 2 than 6. 7) Elimination of most regulation, since it has been replaced with the above consequences of all actions. Interesting. Getting rid of the costs of all this regulation gives an upside to your mechanism and allows for an increase in economic activity to compensate for the decrease from increased risks and more lawsuits. However I'm not sure how well this works. As much as I am not a fan of overregulation, what do you do about the person who is willing to take big risks for big rewards, and doesn't care about what his children inherit (maybe he doesn't have any)? Tim