From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat May 25 2002 - 17:19:00 MDT
This is something that would work in many - perhaps
most - legal jurisdictions right now. I don't know of
anyone presently doing it. I do know of people who
tried doing it and then dropped out, generally because
of opposition by the mothers, who usually seem to feel
that establishing relations on a rational financial
footing undercuts their power-based position.
(I think of the highly successful micro-loans program
as a kind of model for this. If it had not actually
happened I or anyone else who proposed it now would
get little but ridicule, I'm sure. There are other
examples of how a simple financial vehicle can bring
about radical improvements - e.g., the guy who went
from country to country in Africa setting up debit
card vending tied to stable currencies. Or the Web -
I recall trying to convince programmers of the value
of a "browser" in the mid-80's.)
There are, however, many adults right now who have
established a similar financial vehicle in a personal
corporation. Rock star David Bowie comes to mind.
Using a personal corporation to limit liability or
bring in outside investment seems to work reasonably
well for many.
A personal corporation may be a viable alternative for
the most part, in the near term future, but I prefer
to use purely market mechanisms, such as the
"Massachussetts Trust." The corporation is a child of
the state. This can be limiting, especially accross
jurisdictions. Also, the state sets the rules,
although historically large corporations themselves
have usually been the major influences on those rules.
And, as an anarchist, I don't like using anything
tied directly to the survival of an organization that
has been responsible for the vast majority of murder,
theft, slavery, and every other bad thing.
In fact, I see the possible adoption of the personal
trust concept as part of the evolution of social
mechanisms, including also a general social contract,
that will make the state obsolete. As Spencer
MacCallum pointed out in his "The Art of Community,"
the state arose as a desperate solution to certain
societal problems, for which we lacked adequate social
technology. By the time we created that technology,
which would have made the state unnecessary, the state
had evolved its own system of support memes, including
such things as setting groups of people against one
another and then backing one or both sides with its
concentrated capacity for violence.
I had the basic idea back in the early '70's. Then I
ran into Anthony Hargis <www.anthonyhargis.com>, who
was working on using what he called a "common law
association" as an alternative method of organizing
and financing businesses. He later refined his
thinking and adopted the model of the so-called
"Massachusetts Trust" or "Free Market Trust". He sold
a kit and consulting services to people interested in
pursueing this, and quite a few of these trusts were
successfully created and still function.
(Recall the "Trust Busters" of the late 19th Century
U.S. Trusts were long preferred over corporations,
but the trust, being a private contract, did not offer
the kind of state control that the rising statists -
especially the "progressives" - had been seeking from
the early 1800's. At the same time, many of the
ultra-wealthy class who owned majority shares in the
biggest trusts saw the progressive goals as a method
of achieving what they really wanted, a guaranteed
survival via state mandated elimination of their
competition. Thus, they financed the progressives who
were supposedly their enemies, got the Trust Busting
legislation enacted, and then staffed the regulatory
boards and bureaucracies with their own paid agents.
Trusts - and trustees - could be sued in civil court
for real environmental damages by the actual class of
victims. Corporations, however, were generally ruled
to be already covered by laws and bureaucracies
specifying slap-on-the-wrist fines, which, in the rare
cases of actual enforcement, could be written off as a
cost of business. Thus, the progressives created the
environmental mess we now face.)
Hargis also offered roughly the equivalent of a free
market bank, in which customers could have accounts in
either gold or dollars and move funds between the
different accounts or write transfer orders which
ALH&co. could turn into checks written on FDIC bank
accounts. ALH&Co. has been in business and steadily
grown since 1975. (I do not, by the way, necessarily
agree with all of Hargis's politics or his views of
history.)
When I brought up the idea of bringing the family
structure into the post-Neolithic age, I discovered
that Anthony had already done considerable thinking
about how to go about it. Later on, he began
promoting the idea of creating personal trusts both
for onesself as an adult and for ones children, in
their own names.
What happened in his own case was somewhat typical, I
gather. His devoted wife of a couple of decades and
compadre in his various ventures decided they should
have a child, and convinced him. They had a daughter
and Anthony was delighted to use the opportunity to
set an example of proper child-rearing as well as a
personal child trust. After the birth, things went
down hill. His wife was pretty clearly suffering from
Post Partum Depression. In any case, they ultimately
divorced, she dissolved her own personal trust, and,
I'm pretty sure, dissolved their daughter's as well.
Anthony also had the idea of putting kids to work as
early as possible. His wife instead started buying
the daughter all kinds of presents. My impression was
that a rather man-hostile feminist friend egged on the
conflict, but it was ultimately her responsibility, of
course.
I personally doubt that many 1st world mothers,
especially in the U.S., would find the child-trust
concept attractive. For hundreds of thousands of
years, kids were raised because they were an economic
investment, both immediately and in terms of
supporting parents in old age. Then, in the 19th
Century, the Victorian ethos took over.
Essentially we had the sudden emergence of a huge,
affluent middle class, whose only role model was a
distorted image of Europpean aristocracy. Mark Twain
documents the impact of this on our models for
child-rearing in "Tom Sawyer" and/or "Huckleberry
Finn" with the "Little Lord Fountleroy" complex.
Children were suddenly seen as delicate little
darlings who had to be coddled, protected and dressed
up in precious finery - similar to the Victorian view
of women.
The middle-class women of that period, with their
nannies, servants or slaves and their leizure time,
were fodder for the "progressives," who mixed genuine
concerns and legitimate goals such as elimination of
legal sexism with an underlying philosophy derived
from the utopian socialism of the early 1800's. They
pressured lawmakers to institute disasterous policies
such as the anti-child-labor laws, for example, which
meant that the children who had formerly survived by
working in the factories were now free to starve.
Essential to the "progressive" message was the idea
that the individual only has meaning as part of the
collective, whose governance is through the state.
Children were seen as assets, like coal or oil, who
had to be properly reared to become good citizens.
Thus, the emphasis on compusory, highly regimented
public education. The parents are merely the
custodians of the child and can only expect
"spiritual" rewards for doing their social duty.
In practice, this has meant a demeaning of children as
individuals, and a virtual utter lack of any incentive
for parents, especially mothers, to seriously look
into how to really raise children optimally. Or, we
find the parents - as in many fundamentalist religious
nuts - who are determined to force their children into
a particular mold or career path. They often do make
special efforts, but in a decidedly wrong direction.
There is one additional source which bears upon what I
have suggested. A Mr. Allen Harrison invented a
system which he used very successfully in the public
schools in the '60's here in Orange County. It was
thoroughly documented by the local newspaper, the
Register. In fact, they ran an entire series of
investigative articles on it at the time.
Harrison basically introduced a monetary economy to
the classroom, in which your grade was directly based
upon how much was in your class bank account. Class
dollars could be earned by traditional classwork,
special projects, tutoring other kids (they paid you,
not the teacher), doing classroom jobs, etc. His
system was outstandingly successful, increasing grades
on standard exams by 50% or more, and Harrison
deliberately took on all the kids that no one else
wanted. The Teachers Union finally killed what he was
doing.
Later, he came up with a similar system for the home,
and quite a number of families were using it
successfully. Basically it analyzed the real economic
structure of the family and involved everyone as a
working partner, so that no one could claim unfairness
and everyone pulled their weight.
Out of time for now...
>Wei Dai (weidai@eskimo.com) wrote on
Fri May 24 2002 - 00:43:33 MDT
This sounds intriguing, but I'm having trouble
understanding how it works exactly. You wrote "it
would be the public record of the trust that would
determine its share value", what does that mean? Is
there a web page that describes this idea in more
detail?
I think it's horrible that children's educational
opportunities are limited by the financial resources
of their parents. It would be great to have a better
way of funding child education. >
>>On Sat, May 18, 2002 at 03:12:04PM -0700, Phil
Osborn wrote:
> On a related note, I've suggested before that if we
> were to update the practices common in traditional
> societies - where the children are expected to care
> for the parents in old age - to a modern economic
> framework, then child-rearing in general would
benefit
> enormously. I'm talking about the idea of forming a
> trust in each newborn child. This trust could be
> disowned by the child later, but doing so could be
> expensive, as it would be the public record of the
> trust that would determine its share value, and a
> person who disowned such a vehicle would find it
hard
> to get loans or credit.
>
> The parents could claim a portion of shares - or be
> granted them by the child at maturity - which would
be
> the financial payback for all the investment they
made
> in the kid. If they did a good job, then the share
> value would generally reflect that. Other people
> around the world could also invest in the child -
> typically thru child-oriented mutual funds, I
expect.
> Kids of exceptional potential would get the
education
> optimized to their abilities regardless of where
they
> were born, or their parents income level.>>
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