The Free World - Economic Stability and the Empowerment of the Individual
“The divine right of kings and the prerogative authority of rulers have fallen before the intelligence of the age.
Standing armies and military chieftains can no longer uphold tyranny against the resistance of public opinion. The mass of the people have more to fear from combinations of the wealthy and professional classes – from an aristocracy which through the influence of riches and talents, insidiously employed, sometimes succeeds in preventing political institutions, however well adjusted, from securing the freedom of the citizen.”
US President Andrew Jackson
Address to Congress
September 1833
The Free World - Empowerment of the Individual
Following the military conflicts of the 20th century which ensured the security of the Free World, the newly formed Union of Nations helped create a societal framework for all of its member democracies.
In each of these idealized democratic Republics, a Bill of Rights founded and sustained the fundamental rights of its citizens. Once those rights were established, each member State’s constitution became the source of protection for those rights.
A Bill of Rights first identified a State’s community, a legal entity known as “The People”.
The People became the State
The ethics, intentions and purpose of the People were described as the “General Will”.
The rights of the citizens, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, superseded the powers of the State.
The rights of the citizens and their property were protected by the constitution.
The Bill of Rights, along with the constitution, became the framework for the protections required to ensure that the State, or any other entity, were prevented from infringing upon the rights of the citizens, with remedy then found under the law.
The rights and protections of the citizens were materialized, and continuously expressed and ratified by democratic principles and mechanisms such as petitions, plebiscites and referenda.
Those democratic mechanisms were only possible if citizens were informed by an impartial, wholly independent and trusted source. The services of such a single source of the truth were freely available to all citizens. The ‘Centre of Truth’ (CoT) was capable of providing all perspectives to significant issues, and the entirety of its product was factual and verifiable. Its data sources were secure and were assured of integrity.
Apart from the effective representation sourced from democracy itself as a fundamental human right, citizens were also assured of the following:
freedom of speech
freedom of worship
the right to self-preservation and appropriate forms of self-defence
a balanced and stable economy
The Free World - Economic Stability
In the early 21st century a very small percentage of the population controlled an excessive portion of the global wealth.
Accepted economic theory at the time was based on continuous economic growth. This was incompatible with multiple global crises facing humanity such as over-population, finite resources, multi-generational poverty, and environmental catastrophe.
Statistically, in the early 21st century, less than 2% of the Earth’s population controlled 98% of the planet’s wealth. (100 million out of the total population of 7 billion)
On average, each one of the wealthy 100 million was responsible for 70 other people being kept relatively poor, due to their ‘accepted’ immoral practice of continuous and exponential accumulation of wealth. This culture of unlimited greed ensured that the overwhelming majority of people had limited opportunities to raise their standard of living.
This problem was not due to the original intentions of capitalism, which had emerged as a unified ideology following Adam Smith’s “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (1776).
Capitalism’s primary purpose during the industrial revolution had been to assist new industries and technologies by raising funds to finance growth and research. Globally, share markets had become perverted from that original goal, into unregulated repositories for the bulk of the human civilization’s wealth.
Financial practices such as reactive speculation (eg. ‘trading on headlines’), and increasingly overt complexity (derivatives, CFDs, hedge funds, futures), were the main source of frequent instability, or ‘boom and bust’ cycles.
Under this dysfunctional financial system, extremely affluent or powerful interests could influence and manipulate the global financial repositories to ensure the continued growth of the investments of the wealthy. In many countries, the ‘Fossil Fuel Complex’ successfully lobbied for subsidies to retain competitive advantage over emerging sustainable and ecologically responsible energy sources such as hydrogen. Those criminally negligent obstructions to the sane and timely transition from fossil fuels to a sustainable and ecologically compatible economy, drastically impacted the environment, and hence the living conditions of billions of people.
Economic Stability is a cyclic process that was implemented by those member states of the Union of Nations whose leaders were courageous enough to urgently enact the required changes, by increasing regulation of the majority of the world’s economies.
Economic Stability’s primary mechanism for change was to moderate the power of the extremely wealthy so that their ability to make decisions that affected entire populations did not continue to disproportionately benefit only themselves.
The cyclic impact of Economic Stability was not a replacement for a market-driven economy – it was a refinement for an ever-changing world. It was not a move from Laissez-faire toward the state-driven economics of socialism, but a moderation of extreme behaviour implemented by the existing agency of fiscal policy.
The resulting gradual increase in wealth of the 98% who were responsible for only 2% of the planet’s wealth, led to a more ethical, sustainable and equitable distribution of the Earth’s resources, and a stable cycle of rational economic balance.
Economic Stability and the Empowerment of the Individual – a Case Study: Australia - Mid 21st Century
Originally a colony of the British Crown, Australia discarded the last remnants of its connection to an archaic monarchy and became a republic in the 21st century.
This process began by removing any references to the crown from their existing constitution. A Bill of Rights was then drafted and became the essential component to complement the constitution and the law, by first establishing a legal entity known as the “People of Australia”.
Initially, the Bill of Rights and refurbished Constitution enshrined and protected the fundamental rights of Australia’s citizens, including freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and the right to defend oneself and one’s property. All important decisions were approved by referendum, which was enabled and assisted by AI technology made available to the entire population by law.
Following on from this fundamental change in governmental and societal structure, the Australian people realised they were in a unique position to continue the process of positive and constructive change and took advantage of the newly-found abilities of an empowered citizenry to improve their overall prosperity.
In the subsequent years, their focus turned to a much-needed transition from the dysfunctional policy of economic growth, which was wholly incompatible with the urgent requirement for sustainability, to a policy of economic stability.
By utilizing the services of the fledgling Centre of Truth and its meganet of Artificial Intelligence resources, together with the data gathered by Peoples.lib which provided ethical ratings of all owners of entities conducting business in Australia, the people were informed that economic stability could be achieved if an increased amount of the fruits of the Australian economy flowed back down to those who were most responsible for generating it – the public.
This proposal would only be possible by circumventing the existing bottleneck created by the dual impacts of an unbalanced diversion of wealth to the super-rich, and the incumbent policy of economic growth.
The CoT proposal recommended that the necessary changes should be initiated by increasing oversight and regulation of the Australian financial system. A scale was devised which classified the top two percent of the wealthiest people according to their net worth.
This group, labelled with a characteristic levity by the Australians as the ‘Econocrats’, were further categorised by the CoT and from data from an AI-based consumer service known as Peoples.lib, with differing levels of limitations applied to each band of the net-worth scale.
The CoT then informed the Administration of the Australian Republic that they would need to assume the responsibility for the proposed changes on behalf of the Australian people, and act without the approval of a prior referendum. The CoT recommended that the Administration implement the new policy in the same manner as conducting a covert war to defend its citizens from the hostile disregard and despotism of the privileged.
This was justified due to the extremely wealthy, often acting openly in the guise of lobbyists, or from behind the scenes of government, inflicting social and economic forces (controlling the global media, economic vandalism from boom-and-bust cycles, starting wars and maintaining a military-industrial complex to support and enforce the retention of their power) upon the people who were suffering life-threatening consequences.
The CoT also reported that a secret society known as the Sealed Globe was suspected of coordinating the activities of wealthy elites in the richest nations of the world.
Rather than introducing changes over several years, the CoT strongly advised the implementation of immediate, unannounced measures to prevent the econocrats from retaliating and causing widespread financial chaos.
In an overnight military-style operation, conducted by the Administration of the Australian Republic, those within the topmost bands, the super-rich and ultra-rich, had their domestic non-liquid assets such as stocks and bonds frozen and placed under the temporary administration of the Australian people. Following from this, that wealthy elite were prevented from acquiring new businesses, being active Board members or Directors, or from making any investments in the share market.
The book value of the frozen assets at the time of their acquisition was gradually transitioned back to the original owners over many decades so that minimal disruption was caused to the restructured economy.
As the remaining vast fortunes in liquid assets and property belonging to the members of each band were sufficient for them and their descendants to live very comfortably for many generations, these Australian citizens were effectively ‘retired’ from positions of influence or decision-making.
Of course, most of these retirees simply moved overseas while also attempting to transfer their domestic liquid assets to other countries. This had been foreseen and pre-emptively thwarted due to a Union of Nations decree which froze their international assets and accounts. The UoN International Capital Audit had been enacted at the behest of the CoT, simultaneously with the regulatory actions taken by the Australian people.
Other nations soon followed the Australian example, and a new era of moderated global finance ensued.
Conclusions
Human beings have throughout history dutifully followed the leadership of those who have wielded authority by being the 'strongest'.
For an idealistic global community to become a reality and function effectively, the idea of leadership needed to shift from the primitive beginnings of subservience and ‘follow the leader’, to a concept of trusted and empowered individuals.
Regardless of cultural differences, the rights afforded the individual by a democratic republic ensured the self-directed and harmonic co-existence of all the people of Earth.
Prior to this, powerful leaders, or influencers lurking in the shadows of power could abuse the authority entrusted to them by the people and pervert society’s purpose from virtues such as peace and social justice, to social vices such as aggression and greed.
The empowerment of the individual, mutual trust, and the ability to remove from office those who misused or abused their positions of responsibility, became the foundations of the Free World’s utopian society.
The General Will
“And most of all [Rousseau] provided a way in which the torments of the ego...could be assuaged by membership in a society of friends. In place of an irreconcilable opposition between the individual, with his freedom intact, and a government eager to abridge it, Rousseau substituted a sovereignty in which liberty was not alienated but...placed in trust.
The surrender of individual rights to the General Will was itself conditional on that entity preserving them, so that the citizen could truly claim that for the first time he governed himself.”
Simon Schama
Citizens – A Chronicle of the French Revolution
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