Governments Timely Functions

Another Plank in the Morality of More Time

In all its laws and taxes, governments are time managers of citizens. Laws prompt people to structure their daily time for society, at best, or, for politicians, at worst. Taxes take about 40% of our worktime.

In principle, taxes are for hiring others' time to solve problems that citizens can't solve, e.g., national defense. As noted in Level Rights and Profit-Sharing Taxation, collected taxes should be kept close to the origin of the time-wasting problem. Otherwise, inefficiency and corruption increase. The aforementioned priniciples are why least government is the best government.

Good governments optimize citizens' time to be productive in the pursuit of happiness. As this writer is wont to say, "When politicians make good policies then the polity in the polis will be polite and polished without police." When a government reflects the needs and abilities of its population then the quality of life is higher.

One can quantify a nation's quality of life by dividing the cost of living (daily hours to have the necessities of life) into the 24-hour day, aka, the lifehour. If a government is morbid instead of moral, the quality of life and lifehours will be low. People will have to spend more time to buy the necessities of life.

A sign of low-quality government is the statement "And, it's legal." This references a privilege sanctioned by the government. An immoral goverment uses public law-making to pass private laws (privileges). Once started, enacting immoral privileges becomes a competition of who can corrupt the most election-addicted politicians.

Private laws lead to capitalism for a fewer few instead of capitalism per capita. Across the body politic, immorality becomes the norm. The moral to morbid continuum is the slippery slope of less and less time.

Governments are productive or destructive. Productivity is the time to produce a product.  Higher productivity means less time per product.

Inflation increases the time one must work for needed products to live. It lowers overall productivity per person. Productive deflation lowers the cost of living. Productive deflation is the time-savings of technology or trade that lowers the time cost of an item.

For economists, "Deflation" is a no-no, a taboo. Economists hate deflation like Marxist hating capitalism. Deflation was equated with high unemployment of the 1930s Depression, an economic mess that should be avoided at all costs. (Then, and now, the solution is share the worktime.)

From the perspective of workers' time, the 1930s was inflationary as it cheapened workers' time to be useless. Importantly, the inflationary cheapening of currency indexes a cheapening of workers' time. Inflation normally births the contradiction or paradox of more money but less buying power: A closed loop--strike for more wages in the face of inflation ... duh. Inflation is cheapening as seen in its semantic cousins, flattery and flatulence.

Why was the inflationary cheapening of  workers' time by unemployment in the 1930s Depression called "deflation?" Because politicians, economists and monetarists focus on funny numbers on funny paper instead of focusing on the value of human time. As such, the word deflation elicits a knee-jerk blindness like calling a person a liar. Economists' myopic understanding of deflation is one reason why adled minds are the wasteshops of economists.

A government should have policies of productive deflation rather than privilege inflation. Privilege inflation is the higher cost from non-producers with unearned buying power competing with the working producers. Consider the bank robber who competes with you for food and shelter. He is a profit-taker, taking your savings which are the profits of your toil at work. He adds nothing to lower the cost of living.

The politically privileged drive up prices. With its 2% inflation target, the U.S. Federal Reserve clearly does not not understand privilege inflation nor productive deflation--see DumbFed. Prima facia, the Fed's inflation fight is to accept inflation as a normal part of life. The Fed wastes a lot of workers' time, especially when monetary policy causes some workers to suffer the 100% inflationary cheapening of their time: unemployment.

As our time manager, our government should implement a shorter paid workweek. It is more than the choice of share job time or jobless crime. With climate hell, it is "share job time or share useless time." Mother Nature's revenge of natural disasters for our CO2 sins has increased the number of climate change refugees whose time is useless. Without changes in values and in understandings, many of the workers reading this today will be useless non-workers.

(The number one jobber who should observe "share job time or jobless crime" is habitual politicians: We need term-limits with staggered elections and citizen legislation via brainbees.)

As climate hell and the existential meltdown accelerate, only better democracy will eliminate of igknowance that is destroying our time. Prioritized on a global scale, timely citizen solutilons are needed to prevent social, economic and political collapse.

The forthcoming tools of timism are designed to facilitate citizens giving their two-cents into the public law-making process to solve time-wasting public problems. By better solving  problems that are shared by the masses, governments increase the individual's productivity in the pursuit of happiness. Brainbees implement Abraham Lincoln's view that "no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent." With better democracy of, by and for the people, we will have the Morality of More Time in our governed lives.

Chapter in Ecos Nomos: The Needed Economics