Yes, the collaborative economy is destroying jobs. So what’s next?
OuShare, 16 October 2012
by Stanislas Jourdan
Let’s not be blind: yes, the collaborative economy is destroying a massive number of jobs. Is that a disaster though? It is, if we don’t redefine what ‘job’ and ‘work’ means, and how they relate to income. However, if we seriously consider the radical alternatives, this could be a great step for society.
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The major point of the Collaborative Economy is that value creation is being scattered among society. This makes it difficult to be measured. For instance, consumers are now involved in the co-production of the products they buy. The problem is not only that they do not get paid for their contribution, but a large number of companies would not even exist if they could not use open-source tools created by communities of developers , long before these businesses were even created, for free. In other words, a large amount of the market economy’s profits is built on a large free lunch – the one of the non-market economy.
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A simple solution to this would be to give everyone a basic income grant, without conditions and not means-tested. Philosophically, this would be a compensation for what the French economist Yann Moulier Boutang calls the “retribution for pollinisation”, or a reward for all non-marketable values we create by accident, like bees that fertilize flowers by carrying pollen.
Phi Beta Iota: This is interesting in part because when one considers the tax base for government, prominantly individual income taxes that are vanishing along with the jobs, and corporate income taxes that have been vanishing as the corruption of Congress deepens, it is clear that the US Government, to take one case, is running out of “old” tax options. The new tax option is obvious — the Automated Payment Transaction Tax that collects, automatically, a tiny tax on every transaction including stock and currency transactions not now taxed.
A Tax Revolution – Replace All Taxes On Few with One Tiny Tax on All Transactions Including Stock and Currency Trades
….1 21st Century Governance Revenue (Plain English)
….2 21st Century Governance Revenue (Business-Speak)
….3 21st Century Governance Revenue (Economist-Speak)
….4 Dr. Edgar Feige, Professor of Economics
….5 References on Government Revenue and Economy
….6 Discussion of the APT Tax
