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Prospectus for investors/sponsors of Gavin Tang’s writing of his book Capitalism and Money

Prospectus for investors/sponsors of Gavin Tang’s writing of his book Capitalism and Money

 

This is an informal prospectus outlining a proposal to finance Gavin to write his proposed book Capitalism and Money.

Capitalism and Money deals with all the key financial-monetary issues endemic to capitalism and then explains how they all stem from a false idea of what money and banking is; and that the rectification of these ideas will lead to a healthy economy, or what in anthroposophy may be referred to as a fraternal economy.(meaning) ie Brotherly or sisterly

The key financial-monetary issues referred to above include, but are not restricted to:

  • Unemployment, inflation, increasing inequality
  • Taxation
  • Banks’ dominance of the entire economy, and how they got there (Where does the interest of ratepayers go)
  • The military’s infiltration of the entire economy and society
  • Corporate control of government
  • Poverty, homelessness, environmental vandalism under capitalism, unaffordable housing, shortage of funding for public spending such as welfare, education and health.

All these issues are inter-related and interdependent, and the difficulties of overcoming capitalism are in part due to the fact that everything has to be seen all at once. The reductionist training of modern science (with its emphasis on separating things and studying them in isolation) is not conducive to this way of seeing things. When one proceeds from a careful and imaginative understanding of money, and sees how the banking realm should work in reality, one has a starting point for this way of seeing everything at once.

Capitalism and Money is the first of a series of three books. The second volume is called Capitalism and the Governance of Society; the third volume is called Capitalism and Fear. The second volume is more about the political aspect of capitalism; the third is more about the spiritual aspect. In total, the sum of these three books is to lay a foundation in ideas for a threefold society. As Rudolf Steiner said in 1922, after he gave up hopes of realising a threefold society in his time, there is a window of opportunity to realise a threefold society in ‘a hundred years time’; in other words, now 2022.

Below I give a list of (planned) chapter headings with a short synopsis of each chapter. As one can tell, there is a lot to talk about. These chapter headings and synopses are not fixed and things may change quite a bit as I progress.

 

Terms of agreement between investors/sponsors and Gavin

Currently, I project that I would like about 10-15 thousand dollars to allow me to write Capitalism and Money in a decent time frame (say 6 weeks to three months for first draft). At time of writing (January, 2023), I have a pledge of $5,000. I estimate the full cost of book one of the three at $15000.I wish to raise another 5 to10. thousand dollars before writing under sponsorship.

Investors will be repaid in the following manner;

  • Of any royalties form the book Capitalism and Money, one-third will be repaid to the sum of
  • This one-third of royalties payment will cease when investors (individually and collectively) are repaid by five times the amount that they contributed to Gavin’s writing of the book. For example, a person who has contributed $2,000 can expect a maximum return of $10,000.
  • If for whatever reason, Gavin does not or cannot finish the book, or if the book does not get published or does not sell, Gavin is not indebted to investors. The debt however is transferable to any royalties from writing that Gavin may earn in future.
  • Investors, in case of death, may transfer the royalty payments to nominated beneficiaries.
  • Investors will be known to each other unless they choose not to The sum of investors can monitor the progress of the book and Gavin will update periodically on progress.

Currently, Gavin has a kind offer from Charlotte Rogers of Bellingen to do the initial editing of the book.

 

Chapter headings [roughly, and not necessarily in this order]

Part 1: Money and Banking

  1. What is money?
  2. Money and banking
  3. Depriving private banks of the right to create money
  4. The hierarchy of power in capitalist banking
  5. Unearned income and ‘growth’ as the raison d’etre of capitalism
  6. The practices of commons banking and the elimination of unearned income from the economy
  7. Corporations and cooperatives – the question of labour
  8. The issue of land ownership [from private to common ownership]
  9. Unemployment
  10. Inflation
  11. Increasing inequality
  12. A new approach to taxation [transaction tax]
  13. Speculation and financial crisis under capitalism
  14. An initial introduction to the three factors of production – land, labour and capital [also includes the three social classes and their relationship to the three factors of production]
  15. Banking’s interrelationship with the other two sources of public revenue – land rental and taxation
  16. Capitalism and the destruction of the environment
  17. Welfare and public spending in a post-capitalist fraternal economy [includes study of Superannuation and pension funds]

 

Part 2: other important issues

  1. What is the ‘commons’? [explanation including study of participation]
  2. A workable alternative to private land ownership (common ownership)
  3. What cooperatives may look like, and how they function
  4. Direct democracy as a defence against the incursions of capitalism into the political life
  5. The commons’ management of natural resources
  6. Government bonds as a scam created by the banking system
  7. Why the gold standard can never be reinstated
  8. Banks, money laundering and tax havens
  9. The supranational institutions that rule the world from the perspective of the three factors of production.
  10. People who opposed the bankers and who suffered unfortunate mishaps
  11. Why corporations and banks strive to beggar governments [i.e. make them not have enough money to spend]
  12. The global authoritarian plans of the capitalist elite – reading the future from current events and from the inherent nature of capitalism
  13. Capitalism, communism and Nazism from an economic perspective

 

Part 3: Creating a healthy economy through banking

  1. How to create a national fraternal economy in the face of opposition from international capitalism
  2. How to create a grassroots alternative currency to achieve the same
  3. How to use an ordinary bank to achieve the same
  4. The need for a true international currency, and how to create a simple, effective one

Transaction Tax

In the national economy, a transaction tax would be a flat rate tax on every monetary transaction with only a few minor exceptions such as transfers within a family unit. No costs or expense s by businesses will be tax deductible. Purchases of things like shares and currencies will also incur this tax (which pretty much wipes out the speculative transfers of capitalism). In the FEC economy we apply this tax to transfers between members so that we as a collective can do very good and powerful things with it. For marketing reasons, we have renamed this tax to ‘community contribution’.

Commons

We at the FEC do not think that the government is the appropriate collective institution to manage things like banking, taxation and land rental. These can all be taken out of the hands of government. Government should be restricted to policy making in the political realm. What we call the commons is an economic collective. This economic collective does not have the argy bargy of the political life. Outside of the capitalist context, it is the principle of cooperation and mutual aid that pervades the economic life, and it will have a very different structure to government. Because the term ‘public’ is often associated with government, we prefer the term ‘commons’ in reference to this economic collective.

Community Contribution

‘Community contribution’ is in fact the same as a transaction tax as described elsewhere [see Article 2 in ‘Further reading’]. The reason we have renamed the tax is for marketing reasons as people recoil from the notion of paying an extra tax. Tax payments is in fact how we as individuals contribute to the community in order to fund things like public transport, welfare and a functional judicial system. So people should be proud in saying that they pay their taxes. The reason that we have an aversion to the word tax is brought about by corporations who have the ability to make their expenses cost deductible. They load up all costs of dubious things into their income-expenditure calculations that they can get away with not paying a lot of the taxes that are their due. The whole scam trickles down to the rest of the economy and tax avoidance/evasion becomes an acceptable sport. In a true transaction tax, no expenses are tax deductible.

What is a fractal?

A fractal is by one definition ‘An object whose parts, at infinitely many levels of magnification, appear geometrically similar to the whole’. Take the fern leaf as shown in this image:

The first image above is a graphic picture of a whole fern leaf. If we take one of the ‘branches’ of the leaf – as depicted in the boxed section – and examine its structure, we find that the ‘branch replicates in full the pattern of the original fern leaf. The boxed section of the first image, rotated and appropriately magnified as in image 2, show an identical pattern to the whole leaf. If we take yet another ‘sub-branch’ out of the fern in image 2 as depicted in the boxed section of Image 2, we find the same leaf pattern replicated again. And so on.

The Fractal Economy Cooperative takes its name from this feature of fractals – that the part replicates the whole. We believe that what needs to be done in the global economy is the same as what needs to be done in the national economies; and that it is what we intend to do in the fractal economy. This means that we policies in a number of places that should also be practised in the national economy in order to make it a socially just and environmentally sustainable economy: direct democracy in the realm of policy making, direct individual participation in the allocation of public/commons spending; all the practices that make up for what we call commons banking, a new taxation system (which we call ‘community contribution’ for marketing reasons); support for cooperatives over share ownership of companies; a return to common ownership of land effected through the banking system.