Down with ‘Down with the System’!
up with improving the functioning of the existing economic system
Every geopolitical community, from the tiniest hamlet to the biggest nation-state, has a political process and an economy. The political process is the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole. The economy is the production/acquisition of goods/services. No community of human beings has any choice but to effect choices. In any community of human beings there will be production/acquisition of goods/services.
The political process and the economy are separate, but they are never independent of one another. They are always interdependent: each has effects on the other that must be taken into account by the participants in each of those societal processes. Taken together, those processes form what is colloquially referred to as ‘the system’ for any nation.
Technically, there is a political system and there is an economic system. The former is the set of institutions via which the political process proceeds. The latter is the set of institutions via which the economy proceeds.
Note that to this point no reference has been made to the particular form of a political process or an economy. While there are lots of different political systems in the world, there is essentially only one economic system that is used by all nations. Let’s focus on it.
That system consists of the following institutions: money, a banking system culminating in a central bank, and a central government. That last one is not only in itself the most significant single economic entity in any nation, but promulgates the rules that govern participation in the economy, which rules are a crucially important part of the economic system — and ‘the system’. Those rules include the relationship between the central government and the banking system as well as taxation/redistribution (the former always unavoidably including the latter), not to mention the existence/extent of private property and the profit motive. As such, that same system can be very different from one nation to another. Still, it is the same set of three basic institutions.
Differences in the rules governing the system determine the functioning of the system, culminating in the outcomes of the economy for individuals and society as a whole. That economic system can be made to function much better than it does at present in any nation. It can be used to eliminate unemployment and poverty for any (adult) citizen of any nation — without having to redistribute anything, impose any cost on any employer, or impose any limit on income/wealth (presumably making that more politically feasible in any nation). It can be used to eliminate taxes/public debt for funding government — all government, from local to national, forevermore at the current per capita rate of total government spending (presumably wildly politically feasible in any nation). It can be used at the same time to make the economy self-regulating while making it systemically more sustainable environmentally.
All of that would follow from changing only the monetary component of the system. So: down with ‘down with the system’; up with ‘improving the functioning of the system’.
“A New Liberalism” (here in Medium, but not — for the benefit of any ‘guest readers’ — behind the paywall): the last section, “The economy”