What would prevent this from working?
A large source of funds would need to be acquired somehow. Enough to start a few new companies, and run a tremendous, professionally funded advertising campaign through any media that would have it. I don't know how much it would take. A few billion? Less if we're more patient starting smaller and building into larger corporations? Perhaps Bill Gates or some benevolent billionaire would step up, or perhaps it could be crowdfunded over time and built one small business at a time. I don't know how it would pan out, but for the sake of discussion assume the revenue is there to do what I'm proposing.
Corporations have grown too powerful and have fueled a wealth divide? Use blockchains to beat them at their own game.
BitShares is a competitor to banks.
Build a competitor to Wal-Mart to supplement it.
But have it's leadership reach consensus, and store all funds on a publicly visible blockchain. Perhaps using UIAs and voting to direct the company and determine gets to vote in the decision making through issuance of shares through a crypto. Build some stores. Hire some people. Perhaps encourage bitUSD to be used in them, maybe that can wait for later.
Use all of their dirty tricks, pay people as little as possible, have an army of attorneys, hoard profits in offshore tax havens.
Make it a profitable competitor, so that you can fight fire with fire.
But wait. That's not so easy right? Wal-Mart is a goliath. A lumbering, fire breathing, tyranosarus rex of an entity. How on earth are you just going to throw together an advertising campaign and compete?
By getting the public's attention. Have the content of the advertising campaign tap into the discontent. Portray is as an outside attempt to combat inequality from the inside without stifling innovation. Leverage propoganda by telling the majority what they want to hear, and gaining their support, and their dollars. Perhaps buy a superbowl ad pointing out some ways that wealthy influences have subverted democracy, and appealing to people to visit the campaign website and give the idea a shot. Make it well known. Throw money at it!
The plan would be to convert all profits to bitUSD or whichever crypto shareholders decide on, and every expenditure of the company would be publicly visible and determined by consensus. All revenue would be routed through the blockchain and controlled by voters who hold the new company's token. However, as a condition of funding the creation of the company in the first place, it would be hard coded into the blockchain that a certain amount of profit, if not all, after everybody is paid and the business is grown, gets diverted into a separate DAC. It would be a substantial amount. This new blockchain would be designed to support the creation of a UBI.
This is what would make the advertising campaign work. State unequivocally to the people that if they want to support the creation of a new era of socially responsible corporations, they should support the businesses that are created under the stipulation that this new, private, free market consensus would be honored. Call it the "Socially Responsible Corporation," model or something.
Other businesses could be set up promising to honor the social good by programming a donation to the UBI program into their blockchain. Even if the business must be centralized, blockchain technology offers a new way of reaching consensus over how those businesses can be run. Then it would be a matter of people voting on which kind of corporations they would want to support using their spending money, instead of a rigged ballot system. A solution that conservatives should like because it leverages free market economics, and liberals will like because it addresses social ills and attempts to institute progressive policies.
If people supported it, then alternatives to just about every industry could be created, eating up a tiny bit more of the GDP, and continuing to grow the UBI fund until it's enough to fund its implementation for a year's trial. By which point, noticing that they've started receiving free money, people would support socially responsible corporations en masse, and the system would become self sustaining. Create more and more businesses with a socially responsible model to compete with the legacy dinosaur companies until they either succumb, or convert and start donating whatever percentage of profits the new social consensus dictates, so that people will continue to support them. Then just expand until theirs a socially responsible alternative for anything you might want, likely produced right here at home. Perhaps even a decentralized alternative to the higher education system! Imagine, all those education profits being rerouted into the common good.
I'm not saying that the leaders of these companies wouldn't get paid well. They would certainly get paid fairly. It can't be too hard to find somebody who is capable and willing to run a corporation for a million bucks a year. People would still be allowed to start businesses and get rich through capitalistic pursuits. Perhaps there could be a cut off that social consensus would dictate be the most amount of profit a corporation could make before being expected to donate to the UBI dac, lest they risk boycott and public scorn. Perhaps the amount that the biggest corporations would be required to donate would vary yearly based on public feeds of the Ginni coefficient. So that during times with inequality is at its lowest, shareholders and CEOs, and hopefully everybody would be free to take more profits, but years where inequality is rising could be offset.
A balance could be struck. There'd be little opposing forces could do if word got out and the system became popular enough, they would have to adapt to compete. Fire with fire.
Participating businesses would be the centralized entity through which the UBI would be distributed, and it could gather people's information, and use it to verify identities so people don't take their UBI private key twice. Then payouts would be made to everybody at the appointed address on a monthly basis.
With the right tweaking, people would still make profit, inequality would still exist enough to promote innovation, but not so much that it turns people into perpetual wage-slaves.
By organizing a campaign to boycott selfish forces, and slowly reroute value into more charitable uses we could create a privately funded social safety net, and usher in a new era of prosperity and opportunity for all.
Do you think the masses could band together and force the kind of change necessary using economic rather than political means?
Topic: Using blockchains to address inequality (Read 2192 times)
