On Equitalism

I know capitalism isn’t working for us, and I know communism has failed. Chinese capitalism is just a very aggressive form of socialism, and though it works, it works by virtue of a culture that demands compliance and accepts mediocrity for the majority of the population.

One evening I decided to try my hand at coming up with a better solution, and by first envisioning a shared pool of resources, I realized I was reinventing the feudal system, and went on to improve it so that there was no aristocrat owning the estate or the business. There was just an autonomous busienss that had no owner, a shared pool of resources and a competitive grading metric for who achieves what level of access to the companies resources.

The main concern was land ownership and family management in my mind, so I set the base value of compensation to whatever it takes to achieve a family and land to raise children on. This took me about two hours of thought to come up with  and I then starting bouncing the idea against Claude AI to note some weak spots and come up with solutions for it.

The whole architecture of an equitalist busieness is meant to operate within the moral architecture of an Autonomous Nation, which is centered around a board of ethics, which itself is a graduated version of a personal warranty company. The principle of self concerned altruism is intended to keep the orientation of law towards the enforcement of equitalism, since otherwise enterprise will be gamed into becoming another form of capitalism where fair distribution of resources are maximized in favor of a small group of individuals rather than distributed in a competitive manner.

It’s easy to understand how removing the ownership of a company from one individual to a collective and removing personal accounts from the picture would breed new problems as well as form new advantages. I have yet to fully think through the consequences of what such a transition would look like, and am hesitant in putting such a new theory into a manuscript with ideas I have spent years considering.

However, I think that it is important to not only take a look at the creative impetus I put into action when I create such an idea, as it is to take a serious look at a problem no one has dared try to solve and show with a little visualization and retro engineering the mind can come up with a solution, not that it is necessarily a good solution.
Now, it is evident that capitalism does not provide the desired result for economic exchange that multiple people seek from an economic system.

So, within the framework of Autonomous Nations I intend to lay out a potential alternative to the capitalist, socialist dichotomy. Equitalism is a n attempt to remove the main means by which billionaires make their billions without removing the competitive advantages of a market economy. To do this, businesses become owner less autonomous entities, and the people that form those companies share in a graded manner the wealth of the business. Rather than a communist attempt to redistribute wealth equally, wealth is distributed equitably, so that those that have earned their way through a companies hierarchy get rewards according to their merit. This reward Based economy is designed to ensure everyone who works gets a middle class lifestyle, and that their assets and wealth are provided by the company, through access to company resources.

The core principle of equitibalism is that all workers ought to make contracts where they are given due compensation. Since people cannot be trusted to organize themselves and set the value of their labor in a socialist way, it must be a small group of ethical individuals that seek to create a political reality by which others share in the benefit of due compensation. Lack of due compensation is a violation of economic exchange in this system, and can be considered a form of undue harm.

To do this, I have designed a system that Preserves competition and leadership while eliminating hoarding and unbalanced power dynamics. The entire economy is meant to be decentralized but also built upon a guild system, whereby economic unions have the potential to lobby governments and form councils. The goal is to ensure a clear communication chain between the small and large businesses and making sure that everyone has the capacity to inform government of their insights and specific needs. It is also designed to create ample opportunity for entrepreneurship while avoiding massive wealth accumulation through guild cooperation and multiple entrepreneurship grants offered to highly graded workers.

The enterprises themselves are autonomous legal entities woth no owners. The stward who formed the company, or inherited the company directs the company rather than owns it as an enterprise. The property of the business is collectively owned by all the workers and shareholders.
Stewards have decision making authority over the businesses operations, high grade access to company resources and political representation through the guild particular to the business. They are also responsible for offering entrepreneurial grants to the workers who have shown exceptional promise.

Stewards Cannot sell property from the business, extract dividends or equity beyond graded compensation, transfer control through inheritance or leverage enterprise assets for personal ventures. Like the  rest of workers in equitalism, they gain access to company resources depending on their grade, rather than having a personal account that they get paid into from the busienss. It is access to the companies resource pool that is the reward, not payment in the traditional sense.

Purchasing power then equates to an individuals grade times factored into the companies available resources to the workers. When a worker changes businesses, they keep their grade, but the company they are now working for will have a different resource pool for them to pull from. In this way investing in the business directly increases the earnings of the workers. Because there are no personal accounts, no mechanism for hoarding exists.
Workers keep things lie clothes, tools, personal items, land and housing.

Companies productive capital remains with the company, and is used to produce goods and services. These resources are still accessible to workers, depending on their grade and licenses to access or operate such assets.  Workers do not take company resources with them when leaving a company, but keep their land and personal assets gained through working with the company.

Payment includes land, housing, and resources necessary to raise a family of six. This is calculated as an average of current costs, and is considered the minimum standard for due compensation. Higher grades mean that they will gain the ability to purchase assets using company resources. This will include vehicles, communication devices, really any asset that a person can think of be it a legitimate need or a luxury for pleasure.

The mechanism is as if the company buys the land or asset for the worker, though in effect they are giving them temporary access to their money to pay the banks mortgage which is in the individuals name. Any excess capital saved by the worker is retained by the business but is accessible to the worker as a means of purchasing other assets by this same mechanism. So, every worker gets a pool of capital that they can access from the business.

The cost of food, the cost of land, the cost of assets and commodities are all factored into this pool. Since it is an average cost that the company must play based on the regional costs of land, the companies themselves are incentivized to reduce the cost of housing and land rather than investing in speculative markets.

This system is possible after a personal warranty company ecosystem is established, so there is a mechanism for the grading to occur. The existence of a federation of autonomous nations would allow the grading of nations based on their transition to Equitalism as a means of fighting avarice in a population.

As for the guilds, these are companies that are genealogical connected through the generation of new businesses through entrepreneurial grants and professional associations. These networks exist to create a democracy of sorts where the businesses have to pool resources together through aggregation to achieve economy of scale and discipline uniformity in businesses.

These guilds can share resources, but mostly they operate as political bodies, useful for communicating with government and collecting the opinions of large and small businesses alike within their guild. They can also take part in collective bargaining, allowing for them to increase their bargaining power when trading. Like everything else in a graduated democracy, guilds themselves are graded by personal warranty companies to be given access to political executive privilege.

The formation of equitilism starts with individuals forming equitalist companies and generating profit through this unique form of business. The S.T.A.M.P clubs are voluntary, but their ownership models are the same, and serve as a good test bed for the structure of equitalist businesses. As for the building of equitalist businesses, there are no real legal barriers to just doing it, it’s the genesis of the se businesses that we have problems to solve. Without a graduated democracy incentivizing such businesses, we would have to create our own incentives and collaborate both others to create the first equitalist companies.

The personal warranty company would be a good start, but again, gaining the initial capital would be challenging. It could be a goal of every  S.T.A.M.P cell to try and build for themselves equitalist businesses, or it could be more efficient to build an autonomous nation first and mandate it. Legislative mandate would help greatly, but I feel like in revolutionary countries too down building is best, while in established, stable countries, bottom up S.T.A.M.P clubs formation is the best way to move forward.

The goal of this structural change to economic exchange is to change the outcome of human behavior, not necessarily change human instinct in any meaningful way. It is to achieve wealth distribution while retaining competition and innovation. The total effect of an equitalist nation would be to have all the wealth accessible by the majority of the population, where billions of capitalist dollars are locked away in the hands of billionaires and under the thumb of politicians.

With the idea presented we can now start to critically analyze the by-products of what would happen if we were to play it through by trying to run a mental simulation. In the initial stages it’s easy to think that such a model simply would not compete with capitalism. It would be over compensating workers from a capitalist point of view, and maintaining a spending pool for all employees is an accountants worst nightmare. However, when we consider the economic consequence of paying a $60 minimum wage becomes feasible when the surplus capital is what you are paying them with and that money is not going into the pocket of a now non existent owner.

It would be necessary for there to be a constitutional agreement for how the busieness would run, think of it like a program for keeping the thing running. How much money is reinvested, how much goes to employees, how much is saved for entrepreneurship grants? These things need to be worked out if a business is going to be successful. Of course, the board of directors would be in charge of maintaining the operational constitution of the busienss, those who are licensed to do so would have earned that license through a curriculum and through investment into the company with their own time and effort, which may yet be a good prerequisite to such licensing procedures.

Did I know this before I wrote down that paragraph? No, I put it together as I went. Problems broken down into familiar patterns and solutions built uo from fragments of things I’ve seen and heard before. And yet, now that I read it over, it seems to me a simple enough solution to a problem of infinite complexity: form a court of educated people who have the businesses interests in mind to run the business. Councils are something I put a lot of faith in, but incentivized oversight from a PWC is something I put more faith in.

Because let’s now consider the effects of the PWC on each of these businesses. Should a resume start at $130,000 a year, then minimum wage stops being a career option that they will insure. If someone earning less than $60 an hour signs up, the immediate result would be re education to get them to a working position where they can afford a house and children. That is in a capitalist system, but in an equitalist system, producing workers that earn that much is part of the companies mandate, and so they would be graded based on their ability to get workers up to the $60 and hour level.

Now, in a fully equitalist economy, where equitalism is mandated by law, there would be no capitalist businesses and so minimum wage would be whatever it costs to raise a family on a plot of land. The PWC’s would have authority over the operation of most busieness and the result is a de centralized pseudo command economy where incentives are used rather than decrees. This is different from socialism since it’s no longer a conventional capitalist base, it’s actually closer to communism in my opinion since people do not own their own wealth insofar as they gain access to a collective give pool of resources.

I may not be an economist, but I am a philosopher. And philosophy has taught me that all knowledge is valuable, and if one gains a grasp of how knowledge works, then they will be able to use whatever knowledge they have to a maximized effect. Perhaps none of this will work, from S.T.A.M.P to PWC to Equitalism, but if it does it will be because the gaps were filled in by people who knew how to extrapolate on incomplete data sets, innovate where no one else would try, and implement what was never done before. I believe that giving everyone the opportunity to live a full life and the the possibility to be an entrepreneur themselves could only increase the potential of human beings to achieve more. However, they will still be human beings, so the question is with all of these structural safeguards in place will that reduce the absurd capacity of humanity to try and take more than they deserve from their fellow people? There is only one way to find out: to try.