This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T. S. Eliot The Hollow Men (Wikipedia)

Or as Frank Zappa quipped "It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice — there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia." (Wikipedia)

There will be no End Times this year... or next. The Christians, Jews, Muslims (and Greeks etal) made it all up.

There will be no Tribulation, no Rapture, no Second Coming, no Day of Judgement, no Day of Resurrection. You will have to wait until the year 1,000,002,012 (ie: another billion years hence) before life on this planet ends.

The word "Apocalypse" is actually Greek for "lifting of the veil" or "revelation", a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, ie: the veil to be lifted (keep reading at Wikipedia). 

In common parlance the Apocalypse is the beginning of the end through a series of magical happenings set in the future; scenarios invented by ignorant superstitious men and fed by those who follow, who hear voices or make them up. Assuming we don't have to suffer the longed for outcomes of these crazed worshipers, the real Apocalypse will be the ongoing scientific method and its ability to "slay the beautiful hypothesis with an ugly fact" (Thomas Henry Huxely Wikipedia). 

It's a process not an event. As Max Planck offered in his 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (Wikipedia)

"Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." 

Charles Schultz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip.

The Automated Payment Transaction Tax (APT) by Edgar L. Feige PhD University of Wisconsin Professor of Economics.

By capitalizing on financial data processing technology, it is possible to create a tax code for the 21st century; one that is astonishingly easy for all citizens to understand, that is easy to administer and to comply with because it eliminates the need to file tax or information returns. 

The system, developed by Edgar L. Feige, is known as the APT or Automated Payments Transaction Tax and it would apply a micro fee to all financial transactions split equally between the two sides of the transaction.

Most of the value in a modern economy consists of financial dealings; sales of stocks, bonds, commodities, derivatives, currency exchanges, and transactions of goods and services at millions of point of sale terminals.

The APT would eliminate the tax complex. Gone would be personal, corporate, property, estate, capital gain, income, sales, excise and all manner of taxes or levies disguised as fees as well as the elimination of tax returns, deductions and special interest exemptions.

Implementation of this elegant and simple idea in Canada would allow Canadians to create an original, authentic social organization that would eventually be copied by all other nations; unless of course the incumbents are afraid of change and would rather cling to their failed state agenda.

Let's apply the power of the internet to get this Automated Payments Transaction Tax idea into the mainstream and into application. Canadians, write your Canadian Member of Parliament.

Ramifications of Implementing the APT

As with any major change what is viewed as positive for one group may be considered a negative for another. These are listed in accord with the expected majority point of view.

Think about the desirability and feasibility of replacing the present system of personal and corporate income, sales, excise, capital gains, import and export duties, gift and estate taxes with a single comprehensive revenue neutral Automated Payment Transaction (APT) tax.

In its simplest form, the APT tax consists of a flat tax levied on all transactions. The tax is automatically assessed and collected when transactions are settled through the electronic technology of the banking/ payments system.

The APT tax introduces progressivity through the tax base since the volume of final payments includes exchanges of titles to property and is therefore more highly skewed than the conventional income or consumption tax base.

The wealthy carry out a disproportionate share of total transactions and therefore bear a disproportionate burden of the tax despite its flat rate structure.

The automated recording of all APT tax payments by firms and individuals creates a degree of transparency and perceived fairness that induces greater tax compliance. Also, the tax has lower administrative and compliance cost.

Like all taxes, the APT tax creates new distortions whose costs must be weighted against the benefits obtained by replacing the current tax system.

The 6th reform: Universal Suffrage for All conceived by Brian Ripley, June 1st 2008

As you can see from Wikipedia, there is still no real universality when it comes to voting. The biggest group left out with the most at risk are children. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census +/- 25% of the population in the U.S. are under 18 and therefore cannot vote, or effectively inform their government to make changes now that will benefit them or move the national interest more towards "the greatest portion of good".

In Canada nearly 18% of the population is under 15 years of age (2007 Census Estimate). In Mexico 30% of the population is under 15 years of age (2007 Census Estimate).

These future citizens are barred from participation in shaping the world they will inherit.

How do we get this vote out? By proxy, held by the closest female caregiver.

That's right, a child's vote should reside with their mother or the closest female caregiver or guardian.

Women bear the future, they should be entrusted with the vote of the largest ignored class of voters.

Imagine what could happen if we allowed our living inheritors a say in our affairs.

In the United States for very 100 people, if 25% are children, and men and women share the remaining votes somewhat equally, then 37 women would have an additional 25 child votes to influence the other 38 male votes. That's 62 female vs. 38 male votes. That ratio would lead to dramatic change.
 
In Canada, the results would be 59 female vs. 41 male votes, and in Mexico 65 female vs. 35 male votes.*
 
North America would become a model for the rest of the world.
 
The Grameen Bank is a case in point. It was first created as a university research project by Muhammad Yunus in 1976 in Bangladesh as an experiment in micro-banking (small loans to poor people). By 1983 it was made independent by government authority and as of 2007, women make up 97% of the clients who provide a 98% payback of the money borrowed.
 
Yunus discovered early on that men could not be trusted to repay the loans; women could. They used the money for creating businesses that provided income to insure the raising of standards for their families who in half the cases were previously living in desperate poverty but now have their children in schools, three meals a day, clean drinking water, sanitary toilets and rainproof houses.

It's time to acknowledge our future. Let's have Universal Suffrage, let's count all the votes.

*Canada, U.S. & Mexico's populations all show 49% of the total being male.

Percy Bysshe Shelley asserts that  "Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

It is possible to join him and those who came before and since; to add to the body of work, our own words which have "startled" us "by the electric life" contained in them. These posts are an attempt to become a "mirror" and reflect the "gigantic shadows" or big ideas, "which futurity" our muse, "casts upon the present". Shelley's big ideas included a list of 5 very specific reform goals:

1. We would abolish the national debt. (future post coming about the subject of "national debt" as well as this post about abolishing the tax system with a financial transaction fee, the APT)
2. We would disband the standing army. 
3. We would, with every possible regard to the existing rights of the holders, abolish sinecures (payoffs). 
4. We would, with every possible regard to the existing interests of the holders, abolish tithes, and make all religions, all forms of opinion respecting the origin and government of the Universe, equal in the eye of the law.
5. We would make justice cheap, certain and speedy, and extend the institution of juries to every possible occasion of jurisprudence. 

This list was made in 1819-20 and yet to this day we are still urging our governments to enact them. Notice that the list of reforms are transportable across time, place and culture unless your culture craves runaway debt, armies of aggression, privileged classes beyond liability, religious doctrine as public policy, and justice unavailable.

My understanding of reading Shelley is that to become a legislator of the world, to become an agent of reform, a trinity of action is required.

My contribution is the 6th reform which caught me totally by surprise on June 1st 2008 while I was traveling with members of the Simon Fraser University Graduate Liberal Studies class in Italy as we traced our way from Montreux to Rome via Venice, Florence, Siena and other Tuscan and Umbrian towns that either Shelley, Byron or Rousseau had spent time in. I was allowed to accompany the class as a member's spouse and although I was not enrolled in the program, I was expected to complete the course readings and participate in the class discussions along the way. This fulfilled the first essential action required in becoming "... a legislator of the world."; the study of the past masters of thought.

The environment of reading, study, discussion and travel set up the second requirement of experiencing the startling excitement generated by the current of power contained in an idea (the 6th reform), and that led me here to the third essential of publishing. 

"A Philosophical View of Reform"

Shelley's 200 page (+/-20,000 word) manuscript "A Philosophical View of Reform" was written between December 1819 and May of 1820 but never finished ending abruptly in mid-sentence and was first published by T. W. Rolleston in 1920.
 
A copy in various formats including PDF is available offsite here: www.archive.org/details/philosophicalvie00shelrich.
 
"A Philosophical View of Reform" is where we first see Shelley's famous argument that "Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Shelley's insights into this remarkable assertion are found in the prose at the end of his Chapter One (of only three completed) leading up to his conclusion.

"Such is a slight sketch of the general condition of the hopes and aspirations of the human race to which they have been conducted after the obliteration of the Greek republics by the successful tyranny of Rome, its internal liberty having been first abolished, and by those miseries and superstitions consequent upon them, which compelled the human race to begin anew its difficult and obscure career of producing, according to the forms of society, the greatest portion of good.

Meanwhile England, the particular object for the sake of which these general considerations have been stated on the present occasion, has arrived, like the nations which surround it, at a crisis in its destiny. The literature of England, an energetic development of which has ever followed or preceded a great and free development of the national will, has arisen, as it were, from a new birth. In spite of that low-thoughted envy which would underrate, through a fear of comparison with its own insignificance, the eminence of contemporary merit, it is felt by the British that this is in intellectual achievements a memorable age, and we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared in our nation since its last struggle for liberty.

For the most unfailing herald, or companion, or follower, of an universal employment of the sentiments of a nation to the production of a beneficial change is poetry, meaning by poetry an intense and impassioned power of communicating intense and impassioned impressions respecting man and nature.

The persons in whom this power takes its abode may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little correspondence with the spirit of good of which it is the minister. But although they may deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve that which is seated on the throne of their own soul.

And whatever systems they may have professed by support, they actually advance the interests of Liberty. 

It is impossible to read the productions of our most celebrated writers, whatever may be their system relating to thought or expression, without being startled by the electric life which there is in their words. They measure the circumference or sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and
all-penetrating spirit at which they are themselves perhaps most sincerely astonished, for it is less their own spirit than the spirit of their age.

They are the priests of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they conceive not; the trumpet which sings to battle and feels not what it inspires; the influence which is moved not but moves. Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

1819 was a productive year for Shelley who began or completed a third of his 24 major works including "A Philosophical View of Reform". Although it took another 100 years before it would be published, Shelley knew that the big ideas he articulated would resonate across time and survive as seeds do, hidden below the leaves of autumn to arise one future spring and act less as an individual's idea but as a reflection of the age.