Imagine if we paid little or no taxes in this country. Wouldn’t that be awesome? We are rapidly developing the technology to make this totally possible!
Education
Let’s start by making public school no longer publicly funded! We are almost at a point where education can be privatized, and only the people who are getting the education would need to pay for it! And, better yet, to make it affordable, we could structure the education system such that the students could defer some percentage of their payment until they are working. When the students enter the workforce, as part of their educational licensing agreement, each month, a small percentage of their income would be directly deposited into their k-20 educational opportunity accounts [EOA].
And, if they attended an actual physical school building and had real human beings for face-to-face interactive instruction [F2i2] (buildings and F2i2 can pretty much be replaced with online curriculum access from home–at a significant educational cost savings, might I add) then the actual human teachers who taught them, and in whose classes the students tested well on the annual assessments, would get their portion of a very small licensing fee each month to pay their small salaries. All licensing fees would be negotiated prior to the student beginning his/her education, when the educational opportunity accounts [EOAs] are set up online by the parents of each child. Setting up the EOAs is what is today called enrollment–a time and worker intensive task that can be replaced with the online experience, which could just as easily be managed from India or China as within the US, further reducing costs.
Merit pay takes on a whole new meaning. This greatly incentivises teacher performance. The more of a teacher’s students who test well, the more the teacher would make over time as his/her students enter the work place. Over the years, this would increase, incentivising remaining a classroom, face-to-face interactive instructor [cF2I2] with a high student performance rating.
Transportation
Transportation costs could also be paid by those who use the transporation systems. For example, miniaturized GPS systems embedded in the driver’s license [EDL] can easily track and deduct from a driver’s (and even passengers as well) pay check the licensing fee associated with driving (or riding) on each specific road on which the driver drives. The licensing fee could change in real time based on the traffic on each individual road–the more traffic, the higher the fee. Using this licensing fee structure would certainly serve to incentivise driving at non congested times, thus more evenly distributing the traffic load to make the most efficient use of roadways.
Naturally, these licensing fees would fund the repair and maintenance costs associated with specific roads. The more a road is being used, the more repair and maintenance funding it generates.
Additionally, each time a driver begins driving his/her vehicle, a small licensing fee is deducted from the paycheck to fund driver’s education. And every time a driver exceeds the speed limit, rolls through a stop sign, runs through a traffic light that almost was still yellow, blocks an intersection, etc., the EDL would exact a fine that funds the court costs as well as any needed road upgrades. To reduce virtual court fees, offending drivers can simply have the traffic fine autodeducted from their bank accounts, reducing the cost and backlog of the strained court system.
Additionally, the information associated with the infraction updates the driver’s insurance profile in real time, immediately raising the driver’s premium on a per infraction basis. Insurance premium costs can be reduced by simply agreeing to more advertisement being sent through your car’s GPS navigation and information system as well as your phone. Advertising could be included at the boot up of your tablet, laptop and desktop computers. And since your car and your phone know where you are most of the time, the system would only send you real time advertisements from sponsors that are near you. When you spend a predetermined amount with these selected vendors, your insurance premium hike is forgiven pending no litigation associated with the infraction.
National Security
Transportation costs are fairly ascribed to users. Educational costs are appropriately ascribed to students. Now, all we need to explore is safety, security, and national security. The remainder of government can be eliminated or slashed to the very bone. Right? I mean, can’t the energy industries fund a radically smaller EPA, passing that expense on to users? Can’t the pharmaceutical, chemical, and food industries fund a radically smaller FDA, passing that expense on to users? Can’t the airline industry fund a radically smaller FAA, passing that expense on to users?
The whole congress has done next to nothing for over 5 years. Why do we even fund them at all? After all, the office of the presidency has assumed a massive amount of power in the last decade or two. Isn’t that office and the SCOTUS about all we need at the federal level? (Just think of the money we could save!)
Taxes? Who needs those! Slash them to the bone!
Replace taxes with auto-deducts, perpetual license fees, and advertisement revenues. (Reduce your personal taxes further by agreeing to these additional advertisements…)
I mean, Google and Facebook have the right idea. Don’t they???
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This post was inspired by reading Chad Sansing’s brilliant and terrifying post, The License. His post was so mind bending to me, I had a hard time getting my head around it; so, I borrowed some of his amazingly important ideas and wrote this in my feeble effort to make his ideas more assessable to us less techie, non-gamer types. His post can be found at this link. He also made his post available as a PDF; however, the link didn’t work for me. So, here’s a link to a pdf of his original work. His post is a must read as I think he’s on to something important.
Another important read for teachers: Ghetto-izing the Public Commons
It simply strains credulity to insist that pedagogues who get paid middling wages but nonetheless devote their lives to educating kids care less about those kids than do the Wall Street hedge funders and billionaire CEOs who finance the so-called reform movement. Indeed, to state that pervasive assumption out loud is to reveal how utterly idiotic it really is.
Related articles
- The license (coopcatalyst.wordpress.com)