(3) Banyan | Stuffing the Ballot Box. Many Asian leaders think elections are too important to be left to voters.
("Of you are a dictation, why not flaunt it and abolish elections? * * * If they hold elections without losing, as Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas put it in 'How to Rig an Election [Yale University Press, Apr 4, 2018],' they can have their cake and eat it")
(4) Free exchange | We the Shareholders. A radical idea for reducing inequality deserves more attention.
("The socialists of the 19th century reckoned that the best way to check the power of capital was collective ownership/ Experiments with state management of economy in the 20th century made the shortcomings of such systems horribly clear, In practice, they tend to be violently coercive, and their inability to take advantage of
distributed knowledge of markets often produces a grinding stagnation. (China may have so far avoided this outcome, but it has also signally failed to produce an equitable distribution of wealth. The market for ideas is, however, stocked with gentler, more practical leftism. Perhaps, for instance, the state could own a share of the economy's assets on behalf of the population. In a recent paper Matt Bruenig, a left-leaning writer, argues for the creation of an American 'social wealth fund.' The fund * * * disburse a share of its investment income each year as a 'universal basic dividend.' * * * And there are workable examples already in operation. Alaska's fund, financed with royalties from oil industry, is worth 113% of its GDP. It is invested in a diversified portfolio that has yielded annual returns of nearly 10% over its lifetime. The fund's dividend payments appear to reduce wealth inequality and poverty, without discouraging recipients from finding work. Norway's government, through oil-funded sovereign wealth funds created to protect its generous social safety-net against future declines in oil revenue, controls nearly 60% of the country's wealth. Yet the country has not turned into a grey socialist dystopia")
Note:
(a) There is no need to read the rest.
(b) What is Distributed Knowledge: "information dispersed throughout a community of practice and not held by any one individual"
IGI Global, undated
https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/distributed-knowledge/8067
Based in Hershey, Pennsylvania, IGI Global is an academic publisher whose slogan is "Disseminotor of Knowledge."
(c) China "has also signally failed to produce an equitable distribution of wealth"
English dictionary:
* signally (adv): "in a signal manner : NOTABLY"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/signally
* signal (adj; etymology: "modification of [Modern] French signalé, past participle of signaler to distinguish * * * from Medieval Latin signale"): "distinguished from the ordinary : NOTABLE <a signal achievement>"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/signal
Compare, in the preceding Web page, signal (n; etymology: "Middle English [of the same spelling: signal], from Medieval Latin [noun] signale [signal: Wiktionary] * * * from Latin [noun neuter] signum [a sign]")
(d) Matt Bruenig, Social Wealth Fund for America/ People's Policy Project (which Bruenig founded in 2017), Aug 28, 2018 (online publication).
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/projects/social-wealth-fund/
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