An Understandable Full and Equal Rights Economy in 170 Words

Posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago (Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 at 2:42 pm) by jwsmith

By J.W. Smith

Dear Dr. Smith, To me the work you are doing represents the highest expression of patriotism and compassion for humanity found on the planet today. Let me know how I can be of assistance to your efforts to create a sustainable, socially just world for all. Respectfully, Peter Lorenz, Editor, Peter’s Picks.

Summary of my one-hour-presentation at the UN General Assembly Hall

UN General Assembly Hall 03/05/2009, United Nations International Students Conference, UNIS-UN (see slides or view 70 minutes into the webcast).

• Visualize a fertile valley 10,000 years ago with fruits, nuts and vegetables growing wild along with lush thatch for building shelters. The new settlers have only to pick their food, build their thatch homes, and, once that home is built, relax most the day.
• A cunning cabal form and each lay claim to a part of the land. They make a pact with toughies that they will share the spoils if they protect their unequal and unjust “property rights.” The meek, mild, and law abiding now have to share the food they pick with those “owners,” have to build their houses, and provide any and all other services.
• The primary cause of poverty among plenty is uncovered. Those cunning go on to claim their unearned wealth on through history and those are the property rights laws, as applied to nature’s resources and technologies, denying others their rightful share of what nature offers to all for free, that is in place today.
• This exposes most current finance capital as unearned wealth. In the thesis below, take note how, even as taxes disappear and honest capitalism is fully retained, those rental values paid to ourselves will fully fund all the social services currently starved for funds.

The economic thesis to eliminate this unequal economic structure created by many many cabals over the centuries, and they claiming your and my wealth yet today, can be covered in the following few words:

An Understandable Full and Equal Rights Economy in 170 Words

By paying land (resource) rents to ourselves (socially collected) a citizenry is quintuply repaid through those continually circulating social-credits building roads, railroads, water systems, sewer systems, and electric grids (any natural monopoly) as well as fund governments, provide education, health care and retirement.

• Infrastructure and populations, not capitalists, establish the use-value of land and resources and their rental values provide the social credits to fund all essential social services (the community social-credit-process).
• Restructure to the just described honest capitalism and taxes disappear as your employed working hours and resource consumption drops by half as all enjoy a quality, secure, life.
• This requires sharing the “productive” remaining jobs and equal pay for equally-productive labor.
• Each region of the world, each nation, each region of a nation, each state, each county, each community, and each entrepreneur must have equal rights to their share of both created and saved finance capital (created money and savings). With those rights, entrepreneurs (private industry) will fill every niche within the production-distribution process.

You can follow those flows of money and commerce within this efficient economy in your head. Both the community process operating those natural monopolies and efficient private industry producing consumer products and services are fully visible.

Both taxes and poverty disappear even as our employed working hours drop by half and the pressures on our resources and the environment are alleviated roughly to the same degree.

Fifty percent of our labors and half our resources are wasted within the superstructures operating those monopolies we are told do not exist. This includes conspicuous consumption, the massive military, and their wars protecting this massively inefficient, unjust, and unequal social and economic structure.

We are all concerned with poverty, hunger, inequality, and global warming (or nuclear war) making large parts of this earth uninhabitable. This simple thesis, understandable by all, that has been kept from us for centuries by power and wealth protecting their power and wealth, can be the awakening that destroys their power, restructures the world to efficient economies and reclaims the stolen wealth which belongs to us all in relatively equal shares.

The ethereal world of high finance (massive sums of unearned money) and inefficient corporations are converted to efficient banks and corporations with all aspects of the economy locally, fully, and easily funded. This requires a dual currency system–each economically viable region creating their own currency spendable only within their borders and a digital world currency (it cannot be counterfeited) protecting the value of those regional currencies as it funds world trade.

Assuming economically viable regions throughout the world establish the honest property rights laws addressed above, most social problems will be alleviated or completely resolved. Funds are available for Universal Health care, retirement, infrastructure (roads, water and sewer systems, electric power), education, and funding governments, all social needs currently starved for funds. As further explained below, poverty and famines disappear and free time for family interactions are doubled or even tripled.

Utilizing this legal structure, the developing world regains title to their resources, turns those finance streams to funding education infrastructure and industry, and establish an efficient economy within two generations.

A further explanation of these yet unrealized full and equal rights

While riding a bus to my hotel in New York to my presentation at the UNIS-UN Conference, United Nations General Assembly Hall, a fellow bus rider asked me to explain this further. I said, “See these huge skyscrapers we are going by? The value of the land they are on were put there by nature, roads, water systems, electric systems, gas lines, communication lines, etc, in short, society itself puts any and all value on land. Except for some improvement in farm soils, which is far less than the values destroyed by corporate farming, not a dime of that value was put on there by the owners of that land.

Society need only convert those exclusive titles to land to conditional titles paying those rental values to ourselves (society). They use that money flow to build and maintain the above described infrastructure (roads, water systems, etc.), run governments, pay for health care, education, and fund retirements.

Industry and consumers within this efficient economy, primarily local in nature, is funded by socially-owned local banks whose profits add to the social fund. Everything is local and visible and all need for the ethereal world of high finance, over half that currently financing the primary and secondary monopolies and 100% of that in the derivatives-credit default swap markets and other totally non-productive endeavors, disappears.

The massive trillions of dollars extracted from the masses and other nations have to be reclaimed by each economically viable region issuing new currencies spendable only within those regions.  The value of those regional or national currencies are then protected by a newly-created digital world currency (no bills or coins and thus cannot be counterfeited) financing trade between those economically viable regions.

This is the exact opposite of current world monetary policy where currencies of impoverished nations, and occasionally currencies of powerful nations, are consciously and intentionally destroyed so as to steal their wealth. And this is only one aspect of how wealth is stolen through Plunder by Trade. See also The simplicity of eliminating poverty and war will stun you.

A careful analysis of the above 170 word economic thesis demonstrates that far the greater share of today’s finance capital is unearned. Society should have followed capitalism’s rules and let those financial institutions go bankrupt instead of bailing them out to the tune of trillions of dollars.  A large share of that unearned wealth would have then been reclaimed through the larger share of those unearned funds simply disappearing.

The simplicity of eliminating the monopoly structure that President Barack Obama and his economic recovery team are avoiding

Exposing monopolies we are told do not exist, each in one sentence below, should alert trained theorists there are substantial shortcomings in what they are taught:

• The only labor-created values in banking is a little brick, mortar, and furniture. There is nothing else within that natural “social structure” to own except exclusive title licenses. Therefore, identical to land and other resource rents, the profits produced by that natural monopoly is properly paid into the social fund. Ellen Brown explains it clearly. This video of CommonGoodBank parallels this thesis a caricaturization of Robinson Crusoe.
• Even as their doctors are better paid, England provides better health care to her citizens for 43% the per capita cost as America where possibly 50 million essentially have no health care under “exclusive titles” to all aspects of health care. Germany provides equal quality health care cheaper through a Taylorist efficiency study eliminating the wasted labor and unearned profits we describe.  (http://www.casttv.com/video/pndmvy/sugar-the-bitter-truth-video and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM alerts us that the lifespan of Americans would jump 10 years if both transfats and corn syrup were eliminated from our diet through a total reform of the food industry and the Food and Drug Administration. Example, 44,000 died from Vioxx before an FDA employee could take it no longer, blew the whistle, and he said “five other drugs were highly suspect.”) The full story is an ongoing crime scene.

• Pay inventors well, place their inventions (technology) in the public domain, and 85% of the gambling casino’s called stock markets, where those exclusive title (unearned) patent profits are collected, disappear.
• Most insurance beyond life insurance is necessary and should be a social or human right. Establish a centralized office to automatically handle all necessary insurances and all those individual, exclusive title via license,  insurance offices and their unnecessary labors, wasted resources, and unearned profits, disappear. Where the rental value of land, resources, and banking profits are properly paid into the social fund, the wealth currently extracted from society by patent, medical, insurance, legal monopolies, and others are returned to society through massively lower prices for products and services
• Elimination of all monopolies, which establishes full and equal economic rights for everybody, automatically eliminates law monopolies, all welfare except for the totally disabled, most prisons, etc.

Again, this time on about one-third of a page, the complete monopolization story is told. I trust trained theorists will notice how easily every citizen is fully cared for when each have full and equal rights and realize something, actually almost everything,  is very wrong with current economic theory.

The Unearned, Unproductive, and Ever Expanding, Ethereal World of High Finance

Thank you  William K Black for Quantifying that massive, ever expanding, unearned, and unproductive finance capital:“Forty years ago, our real economy grew better with a financial sector that received one-twentieth as large a percentage of total profits (2%) than does the current financial sector (40%).” That ethereal world of high finance, all finance capital above that needed to run an efficient economy, is not only totally non-productive, they  extract $7 from the economy for every $1 of wealth they create. Andre Damon explains that, over a period of five years, the income of the wealthiest increased by a multiple of  five while others’ income remained flat. Matt Taibbi describes the outright scams for extracting even more wealth from the rest of us once so much unearned money has been piled up no place can be found to invest it.

Think of what that means when one understands this wasted finance capital thesis. Fully 80%, possibly 90% of our finance capital could be returned to the citizenry from which it was extracted (stolen) if we had honest economic theories which would automatically establish honest and efficient property rights laws as applied to nature’s resources and technololgies.

That massive, ever expanding, unearned, and unproductive finance capital, and the poverty of those whose rightful wealth has been appropriated, is specifically due to the inequality of  property rights laws, as applied to nature’s resources and technologies, denying others their rightful share of what nature offers to all for free. To the best of our knowledge, that story is relatively fully told only in our work

Nomi Prins explains to us the simplicity and low costs of plain vanilla loans within our banking system and the enormous costs of the totally non-productive wealth extraction process within the ethereal world of high finance banks have expanded into.

From a novel and mind bending direction, Matt Bivens explains that same wealth extraction process.

From a third perception point Sarah Anderson and Sam Pizzigati explain the ongoing theft of our wealth.


Les Leopold explains how, through control of the totally non-productive ethereal world of high finance, the top 1% gained wealth during this financial collapse while the producers of that wealth became impoverished. David Degraw also explains how the banksters are extracting an ever increasing amount of wealth from middle class Americans and the poor.

Robert Fisk’s explanation of how the unearned massive accumulations of the wealth, belonging to us all in roughly equal shares, addressed by the authors just above, and now collapsing the entire capitalist system, is spreading across the blogosphere like wildfire.

William K Black again explains it clearly. Our research tells us that most this finance capital (misnamed profits) is unearned. This unearned wealth is far more than the wealthy can ever spend or find a safe place to invest.  So those sums just get larger and larger and are “invested” in the totally non-productive gambling games, derivatives etc, addressed by the authors just above.

Matt Taibbi, best of all blogs on the subject, explains how the big boys of the naked short sellers had consumed all the small companies, started consuming each other (Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch disappeared), the takeover of the Fed, the Treasury, and the government by lackeys of the remaining two (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs) to pour newly created money at themselves to stave off their own collapse. My view is these thieves all know this economy is going down and their massive salaries and bonuses are going into safe havens such as gold so they come out on top.

The Mandelman Matters blog explains a win at the Supreme Court level which could slow this wealth theft machine down.

With a 99% success rate, Mondragon cooperatives are rapidly restructuring world business/production models.

Aetius Romulous has a similar property rights thesis.

We need your help in connecting the dots between “unequal property rights laws, as applied to nature’s resources and technologies, denying others their rightful share of what nature offers to all for free” and today’s unproductive, unearned wealth masquerading as earned wealth. Instead, most theorists and writers still consider this stolen wealth as earned wealth and this error denies themselves and their readers seeing the simplicity of it all as per this thesis.

That this unearned (extracted) capital is unproductive is now, as per the authors just above, written about all over the place. But they and others have not yet made the connection between this massive unearned, unproductive, wealth and “The property rights laws, as applied to nature’s resources and technologies, denying others their rightful share of what nature offers to all for free.” As soon as they do, their already high quality writings will be explaining this theft of our wealth in far more depth.

Before they can do this, these theorists and authors must realize the theft of our wealth goes far beyond land. The monopolies described above, banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals, medical, and patents (technology), plus the natural monopolies–railroads, electric and water systems, communication systems, etc–collectively and unproductively extract far more money from the economy than do land monopolies.

This is because there is only a small amount of wasted labor and resources within land monopolization while the waste of labor and resources within the other monopolies addressed just above is well over 50%. It is their elimination which would reduce our necessary working hours by 50 to 60%, even more counting the elimination of conspicuous consumption which we will now discuss.


As soon as society has equal pay for equally productive labor and they share those productive jobs, conspicuous consumption will disappear. No one will pay $3 million for a daughters wedding, travel the world in their personal airliner, tour the ocean floor for six weeks in their own submarine with picture windows, buy a $100,000 or even a $50,000 automobile, or build a 25,000 square foot or even a 5,000 square foot house, because their income would not cover it. Seven hundred dollar shoes and all those false identies will also disappear. The current elite can expend such money because it is they who are extracting wealth from you and me while producing little or nothing of value, certainly not creating even a small fraction of what they are consuming.


Not only would one’s income not cover, no one would expend such money and leave themselves short on money for clothes, food, socializing, etc, all far more important than big cars and big houses.


Conspicuous consumption goes far beyond those false identities. One conspicuous consumer was wearing cowboy jeans he paid $100 for. His friend said, “I paid $15 at the thrift store for a great suit.”And what do you think of yourself” said the cowboy wannabe. A large share of this nation’s shoes, clothes, where one eats, etc, are priced for conspicuous consumption and most that will disappear as soon as labor is equally paid for equally productive labor.


The savings of an efficient society with full and equal rights will be massive. With most of their days free to do as they want, their most enjoyable structuring of time will likely be the most productive. Permaculture community gardens will spring up within communities to provide highly nutritious fruits and vegetables for little more than helping the master gardener and personally harvesting the food just days or hours before eating it. Carpenters overseeing construction, along with modest labor charges or trading labor by others would build homes, garages, etc. For a very modest price. Seamstresses would sew beautiful and unique clothes at low costs. Currently beautiful-but unsaleable-paintings, wood carvings, pottery, etc would decorate many homes at modest cost or for traded labors. Most mechanical repairs would be done within the community and only those which required expensive tools would require downtown shops.


Community barbecues and dinners with neighbors will replace going out to fine restaurants and be far more enjoyable. Community projects for renewable energy would retrofit homes with solar panels, wind farms, etc. As our research demonstrates, almost all education can be done at home over the Internet (the practice is spreading fast and picking up speed). School bus drivers, 95% of the teachers, 98% of the professors, as well as school support staff will be sharing the remaining productive jobs.


Most automobile use is to and from work. Most that expenditure of time, money, and fuel disappears. All this savings means less business, less shops, less paid employment, and yet a quality life for every citizen of this earth. If the entire world had been developed through sharing technology as per this thesis, there would have been no poverty, few wars, and all the world’s citizens would have had a quality life 50 years ago.


Counting elimination of wars protecting the current  monopoly structure and the automatic elimination of conspicuous consumption through sharing those remaining productive jobs and equal pay for equally productive labor, resource use lowers enough to protect against global warming even as each citizen of this world has a quality life.

When done explaining this thesis I ask, “You have never before heard on thing I just said did you?” “No I didn’t.” “And you understood every word I said, didn’t you?” “Yes I did.” Could you see the flow of products and services one way and the money flowing the other way within that efficient economy?” “Yes I could.”

Dear browser, Please study this thesis carefully and point out to me any social need that is not automatically provided within this full and equal economic rights structure.

We are all in this together. Everyone of you are sincerely looking for those answers. If you recognize how easily a society can be cared for within this full and equal rights structure, I would appreciate your support getting this to the world.

Supporting information

• In Principles of Political Economy (Great Mind Series, Prometheus Books, 2004), John Stuart Mill (1806-73) addresses the early beginnings of today’s monopolies. A study of the 16 pages detailing the subjects within the book page by page turns up many examples. But nowhere does one see nouns branding this process of extraction and accumulation of unearned wealth for what it is, the theft of wealth produced by nature properly belonging to all in roughly equal shares. Nor does one find quantifications of that wasted effort and unearned wealth.
• Henry George (1839-1897) is the recognized authority on land monopolization but, except for an occasional phrase and a foray into world trade, he did not go beyond land.
• Throughout the first half the 20^th century Thorstein Veblen, Stuart Chase, and Ralph Borsodi quantified some of the wasted labor and resources.
• A few industry specific researchers quantified wasted labor and resources within insurance, health care,  law, etc during the 2^nd half the 20^th century. In this 21st century, a few are quantifying the waste in banking and pharmaceuticals.
• The movie, The Corporation, addresses the privatization problem deeply in the same language we use. Ten minutes laying out this 170 word thesis as addressed on the first page would be a great fit.
• Nicholas Georgescue-Roegen, Hazel Henderson and others also proved that economics, as currently taught, has, except for creating wars, poverty, and misery, little connection to reality.
• Hundreds of deep exposure books are being published today, occasionally they and a few economic classics give a nod to Henry George principles, but none address the inequality of property right s law throughout a capitalist economy, as applied to nature’s resources and technologies, which causes inequality, poverty and war. Thus, when capitalism comes out of this financial collapse, just as in all previous collapses, unless the world wakes up, the same unequal property rights laws that caused it all will still be in place.

More information from the Institute for Economic Democracy

The two books below that tell this story were started five years ago under the assumption this financial crash was coming (that collapse of Plunder by by Trade has yet to hit). Both demonstrate how easy it would be to stop it in its tracks by pouring created money at the real economy, that is you and me if we are unemployed, and restructure the economy as outlined in this thesis.

You can purchase a hardcopy or download a free online version of the above books.

The out of print 2006 edition just reached $100.75, pbk, and $170.75 hbk on Amazon.com’s used book market. The 2009 edition, $35, digging deeper yet and with twice the power, was sitting right above those used book prices. Those high priced books were sold within a month but we notice they are for sale at inflated prices within other venues around the world.

Related links:

• Our presentation (and slides) at the United Nations
• Webcast of our presentation (70 minutes into the video)

Please help spread the word

Please help us spread this simple thesis for elimination of poverty and hunger across the world. We expect to learn from others as they comment. Please comment yourself.

Put this thesis into your own arguments and develop your skills for quickly reaching people on subjects dear to your heart.

With the exception of insanity, all problems will be at least partially alleviated and the world’s gravest problems are fully taken care of.

We appreciate acknowledgment but we are placing this short thesis in the public domain for all to use. This thesis stands alone. The good minds and broad frames of reference of others can flesh this out into a fully developed school of thought.

Thank you. Respectfully, J.W. Smith and the IED team