Proposed Solutions

Under current hierarchal law, contracts require mutual agreement by all parties involved; meanwhile, the contracts we have made with society and government remain implicit at best.

Natural Law asserts that biological economics—or the constitution of nature—is the only agreement we need to make with each other; it will serve well as a constitution of society, and of government. Natural Law is already conveniently housed within the Constitution of United States government; all that is needed is a firm grasp of its main principles, combined with the will of the American people to embrace those principles.

As ’rights’ can only be secured through violence—which aggravates all attempts to minimize uncertainty and disconnection—the proposed solution is to convert rights (which cannot be reasonably defended) into more tangible reciprocal ‘investments’ in our planet and in each other; this will incentivize connection toward mutual (and interdependent) relationships, which are the only relationships that can secure Life, Liberty, and Happiness for every person.

Per Natural Law, people need to retain a stakeholder’s share of the economic means and mediums of their connection. Per the U.S. Constitution, people need connection to essential needs to secure Life, Liberty, and Happiness. To navigate (survive) the current environment of hierarchal economics requires connection to the following essential needs, many of which represent the means and mediums of economic connection at the societal level:

1. Money connects laborers to the products of their labor.
   1. The American people own the ‘money powers’ through their government constitution; while this power has been obscured for over a century, it nevertheless remains intact.
   1. The private sector is currently in charge of renting out money, as well as paying a nonliving wage that ensures personal debt, which incentivizes money rental; this is the hierarchal version of a circular economy: a debt spiral. Economic rent begins with rent paid for the use of money.
   1. The average cost of a U.S. home in 2022 is $406,000, and the current interest rate is 6.88%, meaning that to qualify for a home loan, one would need a salary of $128,000 a year to cover a $3,000 a month mortgage payment; 74% of Americans do not make $128,000 a year.
   1. The lower one’s wage, the higher the price tag gets for renting private money; payday loans run as high as 391% APR for the poorest Americans.
2. Transportation lines (roads, rails, runways) connect people to their labor, the products of their labor, and to each other.
   1. The people currently own 4.17 million miles of public roads, 140,000 miles of freight rail network, and 10,000 miles of commuter and light rail through taxation. Roads alone cost $204 billion in 2020.
      1. Instead of generating any income, roads represent a sunk cost incurred by the people; the people similarly paid $85 billion to bail out car companies during the financial crisis (2008). Americans suffer six million car accidents, 43,000 deaths, and one million vehicles stolen in any given year; personal transportation needs to be reassessed.
3. Energy lines connect people to power sources that drive the economic process.
   1. The energy grid is privately owned, though our tax money pays for all the innovation in this field, and will foot the bill for modernization of it.^[014]
   1. Estimates in 2010 show government accounts for $610 billion in spending for something that the private sector owns^[015]; the U.S. government still gives out between $20 and $50 billion in fossil fuel subsidies each year, to keep costs down on every American’s energy bill. Like other subsidy deals, the taxpayer foots the bill to make essential needs appear more affordable and the inflation rate seem more palatable, but subsidies drain the General Welfare of the people to promote the Limited Welfare of the private sector.
      1. Subsidies are a dysfunctional economic arrangement; while applying taxation to ‘generally’ lower the price of a product might satisfy some superficial rendering of the General Welfare Clause, subsidizing profit-seeking has only promoted overproduction and the use of cheap and dirty (unsustainable) forms of energy and agriculture, which further tax the people with negative externalities such as pollution or land degradation.
4. Communication lines connect people to each other.
   1. Communication is crucial to Liberty but is still given over to the private sector to manage; recently, the FCC subsidized internet users with $3.2 billion worth of discounts, again draining the General Welfare of Americans toward the Limited Welfare of those allowed to own the medium and means of our Connection to each other. Per Natural Law, to relinquish possession of our collective neural communication network arguably ranks as the most oppressive arrangement to which the American people have willingly acquiesced. 
      1. Natural Law counts all economic exchange as communication, where various relationships are formed; private ownership of communication infrastructure clearly forms a parasitic relationship with the people who technically retain the right to speak freely but must pay a price to be heard.
   1. Amazon generates $470 billion a year as the medium of connection between laborers and the products of their labor; their business revolves entirely around the use of the taxpayer’s transportation and communication grid (In 2018, Amazon paid $0 in federal taxes, meanwhile they received $2.2 billion in tax incentives from three sources alone: New York City, Nashville, and Northern Virginia).
5. Water / Sewer lines connect people to these essential services.
   1. Taxation covers all water / sewer lines; the public once again pays for it but does not own it, so is charged for it twice, through a ‘utility’ bill (the same as payments for energy, communication, and waste management).
6. Housing connects people to a means of shelter.
   1. Housing has mostly been a private sector market. In 1940, the average home in America cost $2,938. With inflation, that house today would cost $63,823, except that the average cost in 2022 topped out at $406,000, or 6.6 times the inflation rate of everything else on the planet. Since 1970, inflation has risen 644%, while housing has risen 1,608%; for every $100 rise in U.S. rent, homelessness rises by 9%. The overall inflation rate for 2021 was 7%; for housing, it was 18.8% (17.6% for rental prices). In California, with minimum wage at $15.50 an hour, and one-bedroom rental going for $2,852 a month, residents would need to work 46 hours a week just to pay the rent, no utilities.
7. Agriculture connects people to a means of sustenance.
   1. Through taxation, 20,000 different farms received an average of $1 million stretched across 37 straight years, for a total of $18 billion in agricultural subsidies.^[016]
8. Education connects people to valuable knowledge, as well as labor opportunity.
   1. The people own public education through taxation.
   1. Private education has been a great source of student debt; if government ends up forgiving student debt, the private sector will still get their money, while the debt will pile onto the existing National Debt, which stands at $31.8 trillion, costing taxpayers $575.3 billion a year in interest.
9. Social Security connects laborers to their lifelong investment in themselves.
   1. Instead of holding the laborer’s payroll tax, or investing it on their behalf, the government spends it, creating a social security ‘debt’ that gets tacked onto the National Debt, meaning that the laborer is taxed to get back the tax they allegedly paid the government to hold for their retirement.
10. Government connects people to their liberty.
    1. The people pay for government through taxation, but clearly do not own their government or their Liberty, making this mandatory payment a ‘sunk cost’ when it could be a lucrative investment. Meanwhile, the private sector is allowed to dump its unwanted costs into the ever-expanding hole created by National Debt, which has risen from $9 trillion in 2007 to its current level of $31.8 trillion in 2023—an average of $1.5 trillion a year (Americans are taxed $575.3 billion a year just to make the interest-only payments). Again, ‘to drain the General Welfare of the many toward the Limited Welfare of the few’ is a fair description of current U.S. government domestic policy.
       1. The exorbitant cost of federal government represents the failure of hierarchal economics to sustain people, the planet, or even itself. Government must shoulder the blame for this, however, because it is not the job of a small number of private sector citizens to manage the life, liberty, and happiness of all Americans; We the People formed government to manage economics, not to be a taxpayer safety net for the guaranteed failure of hierarchal economics to do the job of government.
       1. Natural Law is economic law, and government is tasked to manage economics, otherwise government has no purpose; because the mission statement of U.S. government is to secure the life, liberty, and happiness of the people under its jurisdiction, government needs to manage economics toward that end. To do otherwise is not simply a manner of mismanagement; per Constitutional law, a case can be made against the government for criminal liability.

The means and mediums of connection are A) essential to existence, B) mostly paid for through taxation, meaning they are already collectively owned by the people, and C) currently overseen by the people’s government, through executive departments (therefore, the government ‘infrastructure’ is already in place to manage these ‘investments’). Meanwhile:

• Congress only has power to tax and spend for the General Welfare and the Common Defense.
• The only areas where the people’s General Welfare intersects is around essential needs; the infrastructure to provide these needs is also the source of our connection to each other, so co-ownership of these means and mediums of connection would fit a societal-level model of biological economics.
  • Money, Transportation, Energy, Communication, Water / Sewer, Government, Education, Food, and Housing.
  • Healthcare and Social Security can be thought of as providing for the “Common Defense”—insurance against internal forms of violence.
• Only a National Public Bank has been deemed constitutional. The First and Second Banks of the United States were the original banks; they perfectly embodied the Congressional Money Power to tax and spend (i.e., collect the nation’s taxes, consolidate its debt, and through the “necessary and proper” clause, “provide for the Common Defense” and “promote the General Welfare”). In McCulloch v. Maryland, the Supreme Court reconfirmed their original ruling: Hamilton’s two National Public Banks—and no other banks—were constitutionally legitimate.
  • In accordance with Constitutional law (Article I, Section 10, Clause 1), Chief Justice John Marshall ruled—in Craig v. Missouri (1830)—that privately created money was unconstitutional. Between 1830 and 1837, Andrew Jackson attempted to replace all of Marshall’s Court; Upon Marshall’s death, the Jacksonian Court quickly moved to overturn Marshall’s ruling through a separate case—Briscoe V Kentucky (1837)—but the ruling only managed to assert that the federal government could not regulate privately-created money because it was not federally created; it was upon this shaky ground that the Federal Reserve was built, but Supreme Court interpretations have only confirmed that Congress never gave away its Money Powers, and thus may exercise its Liberty to reinstate this power at any time.
• Only taxed money has any real (‘positive’) value because it is directly derived from labor (private money is unconstitutional and of no value until labor is exerted to pay it back).
  • Therefore, putting taxed money into a National Bank to build the essential needs infrastructure not only promotes the General Welfare—because the means and mediums of connection are essential to all people—it does not add to a ‘National’ Debt but instead allows a ‘National Credit’ to accumulate.
    • Credit would accumulate as people pay the monthly bills associated with these essential needs.
  • The bank would curb inflation by capping the cost of essential needs. It would create continual employment in these crucial areas. It would control the interest rate (fixed at 4%) because the bank is publicly owned, so therefore must apply the Equal Protection Clause to eliminate any form of discriminatory lending.
    • To A) control inflation, B) maximize employment, and C) control long-term interest rates are the intended goals of the Federal Reserve, which it has absolutely failed to accomplish. Because the Fed is not a constitutional entity, and the money its private banks create is not constitutionally backed, the People are not beholden to employ either if a better solution presents itself.

The necessary first step in the ‘great re-transformation’ of U.S. economics is for Congress to reassert its Money Powers.

If A) money can only exist through our shared belief in it, and B) beliefs are the property of each person (through the Life and Liberty granted them by the United States Constitution), then C) only through a single medium (or source) that is owned collectively by all citizens could this shared belief be properly protected and disseminated. Further, D) no private institution could be allowed to garner any interest from the sale or rent of the people’s money, because this interest could only be the property of the people who share the belief in its value. Finally, E) since the federal government is the only institution with sovereign money powers, we cannot afford to believe in any money that is not created by a government bank (a government-created bank is the only bank ever deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court).

The proposed solution would look like this:

• House a National Public Bank within the U.S. Treasury, where federal taxes are traditionally collected.
• Instead of a federal income tax, collect 10% of gross revenue (positive ‘labor’ value) from all U.S. residents as a ‘mandatory investment.’ This could be implemented like the payroll tax, since the payroll tax would no longer be needed, either (as the 10% investment would cover social security, Medicare, and all other General Welfare).
• Divide the total amount collected into equal ‘shares’ among all U.S. residents and deposit these monetary ‘shares’ into a ‘local’ public bank branch (Congressional districts typically have a population of approximately 763,000 people; ideally, there should be a bank ‘branch’ in each community of approximately 109,000 people).
• Each community would be mandated to invest its allotted monetary shares (109,000) in new infrastructure: green energy, regenerative and vertical farming, clean and safe transportation, high speed fiber optic communication, HDPE water / sewer, walkable city centers, affordable housing, new educational and healthcare facilities, etc.
• All this new infrastructure would be paid back through utility bills, registration fees, purchases, etc., but only needs to cover cost plus 4% interest on the National Bank loan (so-called ‘self-liquidating’ loans). Once infrastructure projects are underway, leftover money could be used for home loans, small businesses, or commercial buildings; after that, investment money could be used to pay down the National Debt.
• While loans are paid back and fill individual ‘share’ accounts, new investments would continue to be made; unlike private bank deposits, no shareholders could withdraw these investment ‘dividends’ until retirement age, whereupon they would receive a steady income stream still being enhanced by the return of money from annual investments.
• While this income stream may (or may not) be modest, the investment in infrastructure would bring the cost of living down to under $1200 a month (it is currently $5,111 a month), because the cost of all essential needs would have been lowered (through economies of scale, elimination of profit, economic rent, hierarchal ‘middlemen,’ etc.).
  • This proposal would more correctly capture overall positive labor value, and realistically reward people for their collective efforts.
  • Essential needs infrastructurerepresents our economic mediums and means of connection; they would now be the property of the people and bring in a substantial ROI, while lowering the cost of living and creating a more stable version of social security for future generations.
  • Money, disseminated this way, would allow 1) everyone access to it (facilitating ‘equality of opportunity’), 2) overachievers to retain 90% of their efforts (facilitating ‘Liberty’), 3) everyone to share in the country’s overall economic success, through their contribution as laborer and consumer (facilitating biological ‘connection’), and 4) the value of money to remain stable (it is through the ‘inelastic demand’ of essential needs that inflation grows more rapidly).

The benefits of this simple plan are numerous:

• Natural Law sees any payment to a private entity for the use of one’s mediums and means of connection as a form of taxation; this solution would turn taxation into an investment to secure each person’s economic means and mediums of connection (essential needs infrastructure), which is set up to pay dividends that provide for a Common Defense later in life. Thus, a circular economic use of taxation would allow everyone to benefit from the full value of their labor.
• To provide people’s essential needs ‘at cost’ puts a cap on the cost of living, which makes wages livable without having to raise them, benefitting both employer and employee; it also solves the problem of ‘inelastic demand,’ which is the main cause of personal debt spirals. 
• With the proposed solution, the price of federal government would also drop from the current cost of $6.55 trillion in 2020 to under $1 trillion (half of that representing the interest-only payments on the National Debt, which this solution intends to pay off and eliminate, further dropping the cost of government to $500 billion annually).
• Further, the overall percentage of taxation would be lessened, as people currently lose at least 35% of their income to various taxes; this solution consolidates these taxes into one 10% lump sum.
• Rebuilding infrastructure allows for ‘greener’ solutions to be implemented, helping to sustain the longevity of the planet and thus ourselves.

The hope is that with the reduction of disconnection, the ensuing balance will lessen the internal and external violence of the previous system and thus the cost associated with it (statistically recorded in the cost of government, health care, national and international defense, incarceration rates, murder and suicide rates, etc.)