A Health Care Plan for Vashon A project of the Ad hoc Committee on Alternate Currency Presented here is a combination of single-payer health care with a local exchange currency system. This combination attempts to fix certain problems with US health insurance and US currency. As will be seen, this health care is unlike conventional health insurance and this exchange currency is unlike US currency. Here follows a short description of the combination. The single payer is a Vashon organization that owns a clinic and employs medical staff. It is funded by monthly premiums paid in Exchange currency. The Exchange is a membership group. All members of the Exchange are entitled to basic health care by paying a monthly premium in Exchange currency. The Exchange maintains a ledger consisting of one account per member. Of a type known as complementary, the Exchange records trade between members by subtracting from one account and adding same to the other. Each account begins with zero and has credit up to some figure... Read More »
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News synergizes. This is what happened in the April 15 Beachcomber as Tom Bangasser's crusade to keep K2 industrial got on the front page with the Library move survey. Three Letters synergized, Michael FitzPatrick was displeased that a K2Commons developer brushed off the survey result. Kyle Cruver sensed with regret a "divisive mindset" in the survey that hampers the worthwhile efforts of the Commons developers. And Bob Moses held that the Library move would "divide and conquer" Vashon Town. I have always thought the site should be used instead of the dump to recycle our throwaways. Here's what went to the Beachcomber today: Most of us are having trouble thinking outside of the box labeled K2. From the start it’s been, “what shall be done with it”, which ignores the larger question what shall be done with an island once largely self-sufficient and now a vulnerable collection of bedrooms. Months were wasted on conventional manufacturing ideas when thought should have looked forward to preparing Vashon for... Read More »
It is fashionable in these trying times to worry a lot about protectionism. Economists issue dire warnings that hard times must not lead us to clamp down on “free trade”, because inhibiting the free flow of goods will lead to local scarcity and higher prices for everyone, thus exacerbating the current economic malaise. But I wonder if these ideas have been thoroughly thought through in the light of the new economic order that we are trying to build. To my mind, well managed protectionism is starting to make a lot of sense. One of the biggest ecological problems that we face is the endless flow of goods around the world. Current economic models call for raising lettuce in Chile or somewhere, then shipping it clear to California and undercutting the local farmers with cheap produce. But this model costs a huge amount in resources (see Economic Sense, my previous post), which for arcane economic reasons are severely underpriced in terms of the damage that they do to the planet. The costs of all this... Read More »
When I was a young man, life was a bit simpler. There was a thing called Common Sense. People thought that things either made sense or they didn’t make sense, and easily described them in that way. Nowadays it’s a bit more complicated, and one of the most interesting additions to that vocabulary is “economic sense”. Recent events have caused me to reflect a lot on the notion of economic sense, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is essentially an oxymoron. People usually say that something makes “economic sense” when they mean that it doesn’t make sense any other way, and is in fact irrational and ridiculous, but because of our arcane and bizarre set of economic rules, somebody can make a ton of money doing it anyway. Take, for example, off-shoring. It makes “economic sense” to make a computer chip in Los Angeles, ship it across the Pacific Ocean to China, have somebody stick the chip into a board, and then ship that board back across the Pacific to be sold again in Los Angeles. But... Read More »