places a ceiling on the national debt.
The NMF would then invest its capital in high technology, robotics and automation, concentrating its efforts on modernizing industries that have become technologically backward.
“Specifically,” Albus says, “the NMF would attempt to promote the development of robots and automated factories and would provide supplemental worker’s compensation and retraining incentives where these would be necessary or useful.”
The profits coming back to the NMF from the increased productivity of the roboticized industries would be paid to the investors: the citizens of the U.S.A.
Albus emphasizes that, “NMF payments would not be welfare or charity based on need. They would be dividends paid to the shareholders of a profit-making institution.” As in any corporation, each share of stock would receive an equal share of the dividends.
In other words, the National Mutual Fund is a way of making a capitalist out of every American citizen, while at the same time providing funds for the robot revolution and distributing the profits equably.
Critics point out that the NMF’s borrowings from the Federal Reserve could cause enormous inflationary pressures on the economy. Albus replies that the government could control such pressures by giving a part of the NMF’s profits to its shareholders in the form of savings bonds, rather than cash. This would be a form of government-mandated forced savings which would remove spendable money from the marketplace, slow down the inflationary spiral, and even provide more capital for investment in the NMF.
Private citizens will be able to invest in the NMF on their own, of course. The share issued to a person at age eighteen (or at the initiation of the Fund) is only a beginning. Like any corporation or mutual fund, private investors will be able to buy more shares if they want to.
In essence, Albus’ plan would allow workers to retire whenever they were financially ready to, based on their income from the NMF rather than the salaries they receive from their jobs. Instead of drinking in the morning at the saloon, everyone can get into the country club.
Before the First Industrial Revolution, most men and women worked the land or toiled at hand crafts in their own homes. Cash money was very rare; payments were usually in kind. But with the advent of steam-powered factories, a new lifestyle came into being. People left their homes and went to a factory, or a mine, or an office. There they performed some service or helped to produce some goods. For this they received a wage, in money. Some two hundred years later, we have come to accept this way of life as normal and natural.
But it is no more “natural” than laboring from dawn to dusk behind a plow. If robots can produce the wealth that men such as Albus and Frosch foresee, our society may reach the point where most people need not depend on wages from jobs for their income: they will live on the dividends generated by robots that they own, in one form or another.
When? How soon before we can all sit by the poolside and watch the robots toiling away for us?
“Probably not in my lifetime,” says the fifty-year-old Albus, “or maybe late in my life. And quite probably it will start in some place like Scotland or New Zealand, some small democracy where people are not quite as afraid of the idea of socialism as we are.”
Robot welfare. Robot socialism. Is this the wave of the future? Certainly the robots are already causing deep and lasting changes in the patterns of employment in many manufacturing industries. And computers are generating vast changes in the white-collar world. The hope is that someday we will be able to share in the profits those robots and computers earn, perhaps through an ESOP or an NMF. But the fear is that we will be pushed aside by automation, dumped into the economic gutter because we can’t compete with the tireless, inhuman machines. For today, the choices seem to be either
The NMF would then invest its capital in high technology, robotics and automation, concentrating its efforts on modernizing industries that have become technologically backward.
“Specifically,” Albus says, “the NMF would attempt to promote the development of robots and automated factories and would provide supplemental worker’s compensation and retraining incentives where these would be necessary or useful.”
The profits coming back to the NMF from the increased productivity of the roboticized industries would be paid to the investors: the citizens of the U.S.A.
Albus emphasizes that, “NMF payments would not be welfare or charity based on need. They would be dividends paid to the shareholders of a profit-making institution.” As in any corporation, each share of stock would receive an equal share of the dividends.
In other words, the National Mutual Fund is a way of making a capitalist out of every American citizen, while at the same time providing funds for the robot revolution and distributing the profits equably.
Critics point out that the NMF’s borrowings from the Federal Reserve could cause enormous inflationary pressures on the economy. Albus replies that the government could control such pressures by giving a part of the NMF’s profits to its shareholders in the form of savings bonds, rather than cash. This would be a form of government-mandated forced savings which would remove spendable money from the marketplace, slow down the inflationary spiral, and even provide more capital for investment in the NMF.
Private citizens will be able to invest in the NMF on their own, of course. The share issued to a person at age eighteen (or at the initiation of the Fund) is only a beginning. Like any corporation or mutual fund, private investors will be able to buy more shares if they want to.
In essence, Albus’ plan would allow workers to retire whenever they were financially ready to, based on their income from the NMF rather than the salaries they receive from their jobs. Instead of drinking in the morning at the saloon, everyone can get into the country club.
Before the First Industrial Revolution, most men and women worked the land or toiled at hand crafts in their own homes. Cash money was very rare; payments were usually in kind. But with the advent of steam-powered factories, a new lifestyle came into being. People left their homes and went to a factory, or a mine, or an office. There they performed some service or helped to produce some goods. For this they received a wage, in money. Some two hundred years later, we have come to accept this way of life as normal and natural.
But it is no more “natural” than laboring from dawn to dusk behind a plow. If robots can produce the wealth that men such as Albus and Frosch foresee, our society may reach the point where most people need not depend on wages from jobs for their income: they will live on the dividends generated by robots that they own, in one form or another.
When? How soon before we can all sit by the poolside and watch the robots toiling away for us?
“Probably not in my lifetime,” says the fifty-year-old Albus, “or maybe late in my life. And quite probably it will start in some place like Scotland or New Zealand, some small democracy where people are not quite as afraid of the idea of socialism as we are.”
Robot welfare. Robot socialism. Is this the wave of the future? Certainly the robots are already causing deep and lasting changes in the patterns of employment in many manufacturing industries. And computers are generating vast changes in the white-collar world. The hope is that someday we will be able to share in the profits those robots and computers earn, perhaps through an ESOP or an NMF. But the fear is that we will be pushed aside by automation, dumped into the economic gutter because we can’t compete with the tireless, inhuman machines. For today, the choices seem to be either
Similar Books
