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In good conscience, I the site author, Alan Selby, cannot be silent on issues of public interest. I will post concerns here with perhaps options, approximately correct, for their solution. Educational issues are discussed outside of this folder. Public Health Care (Fall 2008):In all forms of health care, there will be a lack of resources to do the most or best for all. For example, public health care in Canada was not too costly until advances in medical treatments meant more could be done. In the UK, local committees balance budgets between the needs of the many and the few. Yet private care in the UK retains an option for people with resources. But triage and disappointment in the availability and allocation of resources appears in both public and private health care. Yet some care, dental included, is better than none. Both candidates in the recent US presidential election miss the point. Insurance is not the answer. State funded health care is. With the dangers of more and more unemployment, more and more people will not be able to follow the insurance route.
Road Safety Question (1995?)
Three Strikes Law in California (1995?):In the United Kingdom of centuries past, stealing a loaf of bread might be punished by exile to a colony or worse. Juries had a habit of refusing to convict because the punishment were excessive - did not fit the crime. Today in California, the three strike law is sending people to jail for 25 years to life for petty theft or infractions of the law with no juries or common sense to prevent the resulting absurdity. The US supreme court is hearing the case of a man, now middle-aged, sentence to life for his last act, stealing video tapes worth about $134. The cost of the excessive sentence to California is $40,000 per year. About 2% of the US male population is in jail. That may be 1.5% too much.
Economic Ideas - Skeptically given (Fall 2008):
Economic depression and lack of employment threaten many people. Here are some ideas to consider - none guaranteed. Age brings on skeptism. (1) Lessening the Effect of Tough Times:For business and governmental lack of revenue, instead of closing or firing, share the net business and government revenue after expenses among employees, owner-operators included, in proportion to their nominal salaries or due. What that means is subject to negotiation and variation. But such proportionality might preserve jobs, business potential and avoid or lessen any depression. (2) Family Farm or Family Business Analogy:As with a family farm , the short & long term aim is not full production. It is sustenance and occupation to avoid idle hands, with care not to exceed proven resources. Would the governments provide incentives to for-profit and non-profit businesses whose charters aim for job generation in a viable manner. See the proportionality ideas above and the above Quote of Dickens. (3) Quality not Quantity:Security of income (quality) with care not to live beyond one means is more important than quantity. Quantity is only important when income is not certain. In developed countries, farm mechanization and energy supplies in the last century implied that 2% of the population in place of 80% could generate all the food necessary for the whole population. There is more than enough labor in most lands to provide all the services needed and to provide food, clothes, shelter, education, health care and production, essential or not. (4) Too many hands, for too little work B:The main economic problem is not distribution of wealth, but distribution & assignment of work in an ecological sound manner. People may belong to the flow of energy, money, bartering or local script necessary to purchases those goods and services in society that government services, when and where they exist, do not provide. Money has become a local, national and international mechanism to enable the exchange of goods and services. Yet local scripts in a deliberate make work manner could be deployed in in a region or small community with a surplus of labor and materials, energy included, could be used to test to protect and foster the local exchange of goods and services, and the development of production facilities. Economic units, large and small need to (5) Slowing Down with Style:Economies may surf waves of free market expansions and contraction. In times of growth and expanding consumerism, people find employment. No thought or planning is needed. Employment needs no protection. That being said, in the late 1800s and early 1900's, The government in each land has a responsibility to its shareholders, it stake holder, the inhabitants of the land and its cities. Times have changed. Production and consumption need to be limited to produce what is essential, but also to protect or reverse environmental damage. The full-speed ahead model of the economy, the need to encourage consumption, needs to be throttled. It needs to be replaced for the sake of sustainability by a slower pace of life in which work is distributed. The provision, distribution and protection of work is more important for the quality of life than efficiency or excess quantity and with that destruction of the environment or a speedier depletion of resources. There is no guarantee that resources will expand indefinitely, that advances in technology will provide answers. We may hope for that, and be happy if that transpires. But we should not count on it. The standard of living has advanced and retreated in lands around the world. So a little prudence may be advised. The question is how. (6) Channeling the Flow of Goods and Services:Governments at many levels taxes goods, property and services to fund the provision of further goods and services - health, education and emergency services included. Wherever there is a flow of energy (oil etc for transportation, sun light to grow plants for food and even fuel, and electricity to provide lighting, whatever the source) people may work to buy or produce food, shelter and services. Subject to checks and balances to be determined and change as well in response to changing circumstances, it is possible to combine a free market economy where ambition and energy are free to produce non-essential goods and services with multi-level government driven systems? Even in so called free market systems, government spending funds and dominates many areas of the free or not so free market. Further government systems services or systems provides essential services in the form of education, various forms of care and regulation enforcement (limits on freedom, so that people respect each others properties and the commons) in a manner that distributes work and so provide income to people not fully in the free-market. That needs to be done in a sustainable manner.
(7) Distributing and Generating WorkIn developed and developing countries, I suspect the efficiency of
production (not a bad thing in itself and much appreciated) leads to idle
hands and the problem of distributing work.
The foregoing quote of Dickens applies to individuals, to for profit and non-profit enterprises, and to departments in schools, hospitals, governments and companies. There is a need to live within budgets.
The size of a government department in which proportionality applies is not specified. Suffice to say in a small department where employers there may some resistance among existing employees to expanding their ranks due to wage dilations - for every ten percent expansion in employees, there might a nine percent salary or income reduction. Key employees, if their salaries are not protected, are not exempted from dilations may leave. On the other hand, some government departments may be created to distribute word and hence remuneration on a everyone is welcome basis. (8) Saving the Environment:An individual, company or region that cannot see alternatives will continue
in its ecological affects. Each and every human on being born affects
the environment and all innocence makes demands on it. If the only way to
sustain an economy is to produce and consume more and more in the hope that
employment will benefit everyone then the environment and human kind is
doomed. The economy needs to relax. The distribution and generation of
work in economy where due to mechanical advances in production, the needs of
the many can be served by the labor of a few, the needs of the many for
work and personal productivity need to be considered in a way that is
sustainable.
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