A Simple Plan

A Simple Plan
(Reader's Digest Version)

I have a bad tendency to go off on tangents…so much so that people seem unable to grasp the concepts put forth in A Simple Plan

This is an attempt to rectify that tendency.

A Simple Plan is based on a few central concepts

The first core concept is the ‘human anti-exploitation law’. This outlaws anyone from personally profiting from the labor of another. The buying and selling of labor has another name: we call it slavery.

The second core concept is direct democracy. It is vital to the survival/prosperity of a society to remove the law beyond the reach of the self-interested. A vast majority of the laws on our books today exist to protect the interests of the people that sponsored them and no one else…

In order to ensure justice, the law must be the exclusive domain of everyone that lives under them. Anyone can propose a law, as there won’t be a legislature.

To prevent being forced to run to the polls ten times daily, all proposed laws would have to first pass the ‘golden rule’ test before being submitted for a vote.

The third core concept is universal employment, that all members of society are guaranteed employment that pays a living wage.

The fourth core concept is your money is for you (and only you.) All money will be electronic and there won’t be a way to transfer funds between individuals. It will not be possible (nor necessary) to go into debt.


My first attempt at explaining the four concepts resulted in 75 rather confused pages. The second attempt ran 140 pages and was even murkier because it introducing new concepts.

This time I’ll stick to the four core concepts and keep it simple.

I provide the human anti-exploitation law as ‘number one’ because it is the most important piece of the puzzle. It could even be argued that it is the only ‘necessary’ piece, the others are optional.

Your liberty, the freedom to pursue your own destiny resides in the human anti-exploitation law.

If you believe it is your ‘destiny’ to be an employer, a ‘shining beacon of stability’ for all the ‘employee wannabe’s’ out there, you are admitting you are no better then a 18th century planter…a slaver.

The human anti-exploitation law forbids any person or entity earning their living by buying and selling the fruit of ‘anyone’s’ brow.

It goes a step further than that. Since debt would also be illegal (debt is exploitative) there wouldn’t be a way to raise the capital so you could own your own automated factory. (Nor would anyone be able to ‘gift’ you such a sum…for a couple of reasons.)

Buying and selling would also be considered ‘exploitative’ due to ‘uneven access to information’. The seller knows their ‘true cost’ and is under no obligation to inform the buyer.

So ALL buying and selling between private parties (a.k.a. individuals/corporations) would be outlawed.

Naturally, the elimination of commerce’s ability to use you as a beast of burden would, by default, outlaw corporations.

Because all ‘owners’ (save some sole proprietors) derive their living from the efforts of others.

So, who would we work for if we no longer worked for ‘the man’?

Who would cut our paychecks…or would we bother with money at all?

Here we must shift mental gears to address a cruel fallacy perpetuated by capitalists.

You know what they are calling ‘deflation’, that descending spiral where falling wages leads to falling sales which leads to falling employment?

Do you know why this happens? The answer lies in the ‘hierarchy of needs’. There are only a handful of things that are ‘indispensable’. We are constantly bombarded with product offerings but most of them are ‘discretionary’, you can survive without them.

Simply put, the economy is ‘imploding’ because people are no longer buying what they don’t ‘need’.

To the flip side of this we have the issue of jobs. If only the most basic industries offered consistent employment…what would the vast majority of us do to support ourselves?

Thirdly, there is the resources issue…a tremendous amount of strategic resources are squandered producing products that few need and even fewer can afford.

But I’m going ‘off track’ again.

How ‘few’ are our needs? I came up with a list of only 11 ‘unique’ fields of endeavor, I added a twelfth to provide an interface between the original eleven as well as to provide the consumer with ‘one stop shopping’.

If you examine the list of SIC codes, the world of work has hundreds of different niches but most of them aren’t ‘unique’. Rather than create dozens of wasteful ‘layers’ of management (each with its own little narrowly defined patch of turf to defend) it’s best to keep it simple and consolidated from the start.

If you can no longer work for ‘Joe Blow, LLC.’ It’s okay, you are ‘guaranteed’ employment with one of the twelve ‘divisions’.

Why can you work for a ‘division’ and not for ‘Joe’? Because the divisions are ‘non-profits’…they don’t exist to earn money for their owners, they exist to support and advance the ‘common good’.

Your ‘paycheck’ is cut directly by the ‘end –user’ of the products you make and the services you provide, society itself.

There will be no such thing as a ‘central bank’ nor will there be ‘private banks’ as ‘banking’ will be an internal function of the division that employs you.

Here we touch upon the fourth ‘core concept’ where the fact that Mother Nature doesn’t have a cash register means that money is only useful to the individual as a tool with which they can build the kind of life/lifestyle they desire.

Money serves to regulate access to that which is in short supply. First come, first serve does not preserve the supply of highly desirable items that would result in shortages and lead to unrest.

Money is the most effective tool there is to prevent hoarding, the bane of all ‘open’ social models. It is here that the ‘non-transferability’ of funds between individuals is essential.

It’s not too difficult to see how the um, ‘independent minded’ would hoard or steal goods to sell at a premium for their personal profit.

The only reliable way to plug this gaping hole in the supply chain is to remove the ‘customer’ from the equation.

Since the divisions don’t exist to earn profits, prices would be set according to availability. Theft would reduce availability, thus driving up the price for everyone.

Understand that the divisions being non-profit means, by extension, there wouldn’t be a stock market.

We’d all ‘own’ the means of production and our ‘dividend’ would be the ability to buy everything at the lowest price possible across the board, not just on the products your division produced.

There would be multiple other benefits to be derived from not being exploited. The most significant of these would be the elimination of taxes. Perhaps the second most significant benefit would be totally free healthcare and education (society pays these people to do what they do so there’s no need for you to pay them too.)

Then there’s the ‘stack of lumber’. You would no longer be required to either rent or own one. Since the transfer of funds between individuals would be impossible, there is no way for the would-be landlord to collect rent…and rightly so.

There is only one (count ‘em) way to get money and that is to work for it.

The largest single benefit of this arrangement is crime prevention/resource squandering.

There is another huge benefit gained by ‘full employment’…once achieved, the economy automatically ‘balances’ itself and the ‘economic desert.

As you are well aware, unemployment is a tool used by the exploiters to keep wages low. They aren’t interested in paying you a living wage as much as they desire to maximize their profits.

Don’t look now good citizen but these crazy self-serving assholes have already made half of the working aged citizens in this nation ‘redundant’.

But I’m running off the rails again, no?

So I’ll segue into our second core concept as I have already ‘drifted’ into and pretty much covered the third core concept without meaning to.

The second and final core concept is direct democracy. Once we enjoy a true ‘free press/media’ (as all divisions are non-profit and no ‘purse string’ control exists over any of them. They wouldn’t rely on advertisers for funding and new truth in advertising laws would likely curtail advertising volume…)

The news industry is in trouble today due to a severe loss of reader trust. Once the onus of kowtowing to major advertisers and the threat of having their permits pulled by the government were removed, they would be free to serve the consuming public in a responsible way.

I wonder if anyone has a good answer to the puzzle of if we are all in this together, who precisely is the ‘opposition’?

The ‘boogeyman’ of ‘single party rule’ is nothing compared to multiple adversarial parties.

How many times have ‘the Republicans’ blocked legislation that was favored by a majority of the general public?

The short answer is too many. The baffling part is how they consistently get away with this bullshit even when they are not in the majority!

Rather than ‘single party rule’, I propose no parties at all. We would dismantle the party apparatus on both sides of the imaginary fence because, in the end, we are all in this together.

You can do nothing to protect yourself against the machinations of the self-serving if you are not permitted to vote directly on what the law will or won’t be.

Thus do we need the additional safeguard of the ‘fairness doctrine’. Nobody can pull a ‘fast one’ if proposed legislation cannot pass a basic fairness test.

Give it a try, you’ll see just how difficult it is.

Be subtle; try to hide the cheat in the little words…the ‘ifs’ and ‘whens’.

Understand that while leadership has no power to make or interpret the laws, they are the ones that determine if a proposed law is fit to be put to a vote.

Once won, liberty must be zealously guarded.

Here we circle back to the laws regarding money and the non-transferability of funds.

You see, another political change will be the elimination of elections. You will not vote for leadership, the qualified candidates will ‘compete’ for the job.

Since you, the citizen, will vote directly on proposed legislation, there is no longer a need for ‘representatives’. Since the citizen also has direct control over legislation, there is no need for a judicial branch either (as the fairness doctrine covers that base.)

Understand that the biggest single obstacle to enacting the human anti-exploitation law is the bought and paid for judicial branch…how else do you explain their inaction/open hostility to any measure that challenged their mandate to defend ‘private property’ ahead of all else, including the common good.

I think you can see how this undertaking could easily morph into ‘novel length’ work.

There is much more to say but this covers the four core concepts.

The ‘anti slavery law’.

True direct democracy.

Full employment.

Your money is for you.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner