Literally it is from the Greek oikia + nomos, literally the laws of the home. Home in this context originally meant a farm.
However, the subject has been largely taken over in the public mind by “bank economists”, which means that money is used as a convenient shorthand for everything. It’s as if you opened a physics textbook and discovered that everything was recast in terms of the electromagnetic field, because the author has a battery and some wire.
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Ooooh, we haven’t seen that one in a while. Whatever happened to Hans wotsisface? He was well into that stuff. There were some looong threads.
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You cited icr.org on boingboing without the obligatory signs against the evil eye!
Mind you, it’s amazing stuff. Rationally argued delusion?
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I think that you are definitely on to something in terms of what actually works rhetorically; falling into the other guy’s conceptual framework is not a good plan; but it is frustrating and tempting when the Glorious Economic Experts, as a matter of fact, are producing unquenched toddler fires and a Frammistat index that is 6 points too low.
It is a trap, so being baited into it is bad; but it’s very tempting when patently false claims of economic expertise continue to be treated as fact regardless of the results they fail to generate.
Australia over a similar time period:
You can argue over the cause of that, but a notable feature of the post-GFC Australian economy was a complete lack of any “austerity” bullshit.
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And a rapidly expanding Chinese economy that uses Australia as a cheap source of materials. The white settlers took the land from the native inhabitants; now the Chinese are taking the raw materials and building high value products from them.
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…which has been a feature of the Oz economy since before the GFC, so doesn’t have a lot of explanatory value in understanding the post-GFC Australian exception.
Yes, modern Australia is fundamentally based upon colonial genocide and continental grand larceny. Just like the USA.
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It works. It just doesn’t do what it says on the tin. If you want to hyperstratify the market and eliminate the middle class, it’s excellent.
It’s functionally impossible to read the site you linked. 
What I could read isn’t as free of ideology as it claims to be. It is political to suggest that anyone who’s not working should starve, not have shelter, and be denied medical care. (It’s also political to suggest that food, shelter, medical care, and education are inalienable human rights but I’m not hung up on the idea that my deeply held beliefs are apolitical. 
)
(Even ignoring the fact that no capitalist system has ever devised a working scheme to accurately determine who is disabled and who isn’t … there are factors where essentially any system which doesn’t provide an out for even folks who aren’t disabled is inherently demanding that some people work in abusive jobs. Which is a political stance.)
$12.40/hr isn’t a living wage. No where in the U.S. is $12.40 an actual living wage. We’re all just so used to the idea of suffering being an inherent factor of life for people in the lower classes that it makes us underestimate where that bar is.
Even if the number was set to an actual living wage, it would just mean that companies would all hire at <that rate> for every job they possibly could. Which would further stratify the differences between the rich and the poor. There’d be inflation again. And <that rate> wouldn’t be a living wage anymore.
The “excess earnings” the proposal skims off the top without calling it taxes will just be moved to other countries to hide it until a big fancy purchase can be found.
The system @nimelennar linked is much more likely to work. Everyone would be able to live … and companies would have to either pay people enough to make the jobs worthwhile on the money’s merit, or the work itself would have to be worthwhile enough for people to take it. Employees wouldn’t have to stick it out with a job that’s abusive.
And if companies wanted to pay their disabled employees less because they’re disabled, they’re not going to have much luck at it. It’d better be one hell of a rewarding job.
I think the A Just Solution proposal is naive. But it’s naive in a way that shows Stephen’s heart (sorry for speaking in the third person if that’s you, wasn’t sure) is in the right place. I just wish the proposal was readable.
Note: I couldn’t tell if the site you linked was yours or not. If it is and you’d like help with the readability issues, I can provide some suggestions which are relatively easy to implement and will make it much more likely that folks will be able to read the proposal.
You can contact me over PM if you’d like or we can start a new thread instead (focused solely on site design and document formatting).
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Another problem is with this:
At the time of the conversion to this system every position in the economy being paid an amount equal to the median income or less would instead be paid the allotted income. The pay for those positions would come from the monetary agency. All other positions would continue to be paid in full by the employer, as at present.
The marginal difference (from the employer’s perspective) between paying someone $12.40/hr and $12.41/hr, isn’t $0.01/hr - it’s $12.41/hr. If they pay “minimum wage” then it costs them nothing. If they pay even a penny over minimum wage, they’re dinged for the full cost of the salary.
For any sort of unskilled task, why would you ever pay more than minimum wage?
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You are forgetting just how fast the Chinese economy has been ramping up. Steel production 600Mt in 2007, 1150Mt in 2013. Pre-crash production was on a much smaller scale, so the effect on post-crash Australia is much greater.
Also you totally miss my point. I was writing about the short-sightedness of the Australians, basically behaving like a second-world extraction economy (Russia, Saudi) rather than a First World economy. The Saudis now want to change gear and join the First World. Australia is happy with short termism.
I’m sorry you couldn’t get to the site. All suggestions for
improvements–for the site or the proposal–are welcome.
As for the proposal, you raised many important questions, but all of them
are addressed on the site.
“Real justice,” as I have come to call the approach to an ethic of justice
that gave rise to this monetary model, has three conditions of justice for
the economy: freedom, the existence of a democratically distributed income
(which would be available for an unlimited number of people but required
for no one), and the absence of exploitation (i.e., some people using
others to make money for themselves).
The proposal described at the Web site would satisfy the first two. The
"democratically distributed income" could be expanded to end exploitation.
That model is in my book, A Just Solution.
I will definitely study the alternative model you recommended.
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And $500 a week does not cover being too ill to work, especially without a “free at the point of use” healthcare system. Any money you personally save on taxes will be less than what you spend on medication and treatment.
When I was in my 20s I did not choose to become disabled, it just happened (admittedly I got CPTSD from the local neighbourhood fascists who had taken a dislike to my existence, but I could probably work if I only had that). I now live in exile at an expensive city a few hundred miles away from my family, with added expenses because of illness (which can be highly variable, but my outgoings will be more than $500 a week when averaged out over the year).
Sorry, but you can count me out of this, @sdewye.
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Have you tried typing the URL into your browser?
While I am lucky enough to have no serious ongoing issues related to my
health so far, I know for a fact that I could live well enough on $500/wk.
of tax-free money in Atlanta, GA, which is not the cheapest place in the
country to live. For those working and being paid that money as the minimum
wage, employers would have no wage bill, but they would compete for those
employees using benefits. Presumably, those would start with health
insurance.
There is an option for a family with at least one child to have one parent
paid that income for working in the home as primary home-maker, meaning a
couple would have over $50,000 in income with only one working outside the
home if they were both being paid that minimum income.
Keep in mind there would be no sales taxes, either. Also, government would
be be funded at the current (per capita) level, but would not have any
costs associated with Welfare, so there would be no reason to refuse to
implement a ‘free’ health system for primary care and those too
incapacitated to work, at least.
Working all that out would still have to be accomplished in the political
process. This is about creating an economy with a just institutional
structure.
I can’t present the whole thing to everyone all over again, but I do hope
you will not give up on it precipitously.
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