Subsidiary Subtle Monopolies within the Primary Monopolies of Land, Technology and Money

Insurance. On average, 50% of insurance premiums are consumed in selling and managing insurance. With almost no sales expenses, the cost of group insurance is only six percent.

Most insurance is required. Creating a single payer insurance commons with everyone having the right (or the obligation) to join would reduce insurance costs over 40% while releasing roughly 2-million highly talented insurance workers for productive employment.

Law.It is residual-feudal exclusive property rights creating subtle monopolies which create most legal battles. With the enormous gain in rights through a modern land, technology, and money commons-as addressed above-the need for lawyers and their support workers will drop to a small fraction of today's 2-million plus employed in the legal profession and release those talented American citizens for productive employment.

Medical. The difficulties in obtaining medical care for the poor and elderly in America will bring challenges to a statement that over 50% of U.S. medical expenses are unnecessary. But the many countries (Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, and Cuba) that provide equally high quality health care for half the cost and the many alternative care doctors, and individuals who provide even better health care at far lower cost, proves that 50% waste is there.[p] As I write this (2003) official diet tests are in progress may have already proven that Dr. Atkins has been right for 30 years; the very diet promoted to Americans by leading health professionals is causing most diabetes, most heart attacks, and many other illnesses. That correction of faulty science alone will eliminate well over 50% of illnesses in those who follow Dr. Atkins principles for good health.

Agriculture. Free food is enormously expensive. At first it would appear that giving millions of tons of cheap American grain to the impoverished world is very generous. However, both cheap and even free imported food can be one of the greatest disasters to befall a country. This can be quickly proven:

Where would Western business and labor be if a powerful nation exported food to it below the price of local production? Their farmers would go bankrupt, the tractor and machinery companies would go bankrupt, the millions of people depending on these jobs would be without work, production of remaining industries would have to be sold to other societies to pay the import food bill, and the West would quickly become impoverished.[16]

Frances Moore Lappé points out that "More than a third of annual U.S. government spending, an estimated $448-billion, consists of direct and indirect subsidies for corporations and wealthy individuals, in direct violation of free-market principles."[17]Free grain from highly-subsidized U.S. farms poured into the Ukraine after the Soviet collapse. Ukrainian farmers could not sell their grain for enough to pay costs so they quit planting. That breadbasket of the former Soviet Union became hungry and the entire region became dependent upon the world for food handouts. As buying power had been destroyed, this can only have been equally as devastating to all other industries in the Ukraine :

Exporting food may be profitable for the exporting country, but when their land is capable of producing adequate food, it is a disaster to the importing countries. [Note that many of the poor nations today are rich in natural resources and arable land.] American farmers would certainly riot if 60% of their markets were taken over by another country. Not only would the farmers suffer, but the entire economy would be severely affected.

Imported food is not as cheap as it appears. If the money expended on imports had been spent within the local economy, it would have multiplied several times as it moved through the economy contracting local labor (the economic multiplier).... This moving of money through an economy is why there is so much wealth in a high-wage manufacturing and exporting country and so little within a low-wage country that is "dependent" on consumer imports. With centuries of mercantilist experience, developed societies understand this well.... [S]ubsidies, tariffs and other trade policies eliminate the comparative advantage of other regions to maintain healthy economies in the developed world.... The result of these First World subsidies [for export] are shattered developing world economies.[18]

The economic multiplier is the health of an economy. A nation's farmers selling their crops provide them with the money to purchase products and services produced by others within the country. That person selling his or her products and services to the farmers uses their income to purchase what is produced by the labor of others in the country or region. The economic multiplier, through balanced production within a country or region, creates a healthy, wealthy economy. When a country imports food or any other product, and there are insufficient compensating exports of equally high value (meaning both high value-added products and the labor that produced them were equally paid), that country becomes poorer, not richer. Zambia had 40 small industries producing clothes for Zambians. A flood of used clothes from America undersold those producers, the multiplier factor went into reverse, and the number of impoverished Zambians rose rapidly. What appeared as a generous donation by the exporting country became a big loss for the importing country.

Homemakers. Elimination of the wasted labor of a subtly-monopolized wealth-producing-process will lower the workweek to 2-to-3 days per week. This will permit a husband and wife to share both home chores and a job or one can work five days while the other cares for the home.

Education.Only 5% of America 's communication capacity (fiber-optic lines and satellites) is being utilized. Alert professors and teachers are aware that taping the lectures of the finest teachers and broadcasting them over TV channels reserved for education would free them for other productive work.

Listening to several lecturers, students will gain a much broader education. With lectures subject to challenge, the massive misinformation currently in the soft sciences (economics, political science, some sociology, and yes history) will largely disappear.

The elimination of that misinformation alone will provide a higher quality education in less time. The greatest gains will be the elimination of the brick and mortar schools, the entire economic structure (teachers, janitors, builders, suppliers, school buses, et al.) which supports them, and society's remaining productive jobs shared with these highly qualified citizens.

With each citizen working only 2-to-3 days per week, a parent will be home to oversee their children's leaning. So long as a student maintained a certain grade average, a share of the money society saved on maintaining the present brick and mortar school system could be paid to each child's family up to the age of 18. Allowing for each child's ability that incentive would be paid for each subject and, on an average, for all subjects. With spending money earned for each subject, students would zip through those classes.

Through those financial and emotional rewards earned at a central testing facility, children will quickly take responsibility for their own education.  The brightest will obtain a 12th grade education in as little as eight years and even the slowest, but teachable, will do so in less than twelve.

A university education will be free and financial incentives should be paid through the age of 19. With classes as close as their TV set and the average workweek under three days, a university education is available to everyone. A large percentage of society will educate themselves to a much higher level, their knowledge will develop an even more efficient and productive society while protecting the environment and natural resources.

Alert professors have told this author that they and other professors are fully aware of these potential education efficiencies. But teachers and professors who have not studied the potentials of modern communications technology will be jolted upon hearing these claims. Immediately there will be a barrage of defensive statements: "The depth, tragedy, mystery, sanctity, and subtlety of human life and the universe cannot be transmitted from one generation to the next … without great teachers."

But the very essence of our research is that the depth, tragedy, mystery, sanctity, and subtlety of human life are not being transmitted to more than a tiny fraction at the heart of society. I am safe in saying that 90% of all conversation has to do with education to manage within the subtle monopoly system, the management of that system, or functioning within it. Where and when do you read or hear what you will read in this book? If you are one of the few who are aware then you know well that to all except a select few you must soften your statements to meaningless words or remain silent. You must remain silent because the truths in the soft sciences are largely absent within the population which means it is largely absent within the university system and the media. After all, the media and the university system is where the population obtained the beliefs they live by and opposing concepts are simply rejected.

Yet professors and the media are our most idealistic citizens. In Chapter 7 we will learn how citizens of a free country with a free press are propagandized to protect the wealthy and powerful and peer pressure maintains that protection. That propaganda comes right through the university and media system and has been in place for centuries (Eric Fromm’s building a "framework of orientation"). It can work no other way, we look to our universities and media to teach us and keep us informed.

Welfare.Except for those incapable of caring for themselves, almost the entire welfare industry disappears when citizens have full rights under a modern commons. Through rights to employment in jobs they can handle, the functionally challenged will gain pride and self respect.

Prisoners and Society's Protective Guard Labor. With full and equal rights under a modern commons, true competition will increase yet criminal activities will drop to a fraction that of an unequal society whose avenues of obtaining wealth are subtle monopolized. Incarceration and society's guard labor will reduce in step with the reduction in criminal activities.

Unemployed. Full and equal rights mean sharing productive jobs and reducing the average workweek to 2-to-3 days per week. There would be no street people and any unemployment would be by choice or very temporary.