A Political Decision-Making Process Guided by Science and Engineering Principles  

Planning a sustainable socioeconomic system that meets the UN SDGs and mitigates the risk of Black Swan Events destroying civilization will have a higher probability of success if decision-making follows good engineering principles based on scientific evidence. This shift in the social order of economics can be facilitated by energy-intensive investments and infrastructure built around sustainable energy production. This will require patient capital investments in the machinery necessary to build a sustainable circular economy. 

The idea that "efficient" free markets will naturally build an infrastructure to achieve these goals is pure folly. The experiment with unfettered "free markets" has been running for over 40 years, and the experimental results signal a failure of this policy. The markets have failed to produce anything resembling a sustainable, safe, and just system. 

The experiment to deregulate the economy has resulted in a net loss in income for the bottom 50% of the population that it was supposed to serve. Cutting support for social services, under the guise of austerity, has drained the savings of the working class and forced them into debt slavery. As a result of the austerity tax cuts, public schools were decimated. All incentives to enter the teaching profession have disappeared. The social safety net has been shredded. The authoritarian class wants to take what little is left for support during retirement and force the population "reinvest" their retirement annuities in a private stock market that functions as a casino with loaded dice.

Milton Friedman was wrong when he said corporations' only responsibility is to maximize shareholders' returns. That is in direct conflict with the historical reasons for the founding of the United States. Corporations are an artificial legal construct. While the first corporations were employed to invest funds for building trading ships. Corporations were charters granted by European despots.  who colonized the North American continent.  

The Europeans who migrated to the 13 colonies, and their descendants,  hated corporations. The corporations the European kings granted charters often were given monopoly power to control trade as agents of the kings. The monopoly status was a major issue and one of the causes of the revolt against King George. The Boston Tea Party was a protest against a monopoly controlling the importation of tea into the colonies.  Many books have been written on the evil doings of corporations and their bribery of those in government. 

In contrast to aj Judge made law, corporations are not people. 

This grab for political power and wealth has had a resurgence since the 1970s when Friedman and other libertarian/pro-corporation advocates devised a plan to [the Powell memo] systematically lobby for deregulation of corporations....

When the country was formed corporations did not exist at the federal level. They were state entities. When they did start to appear they were generally no-for-profit entities, such as a short-term mechanism to finance the construction of a bridge and then pay off the cost of building the bridge by paying tolls. It is only through the grant of a charter that corporations were allowed to exist. They were created to serve a community. It was a privilege to exist and operate within the country. They are obligated to serve in good faith to benefit all who live and toil in that country. They are not suppose to goble up competition to form monopolies. Instead they should strive to improve the their performance while doing no harm to the environment. They should not profit from negative externalities, such as pollution or endangering the lives of all lifeforms who coexist within the biosphere. 

Consider the metrics' efficacy used to measure success.  Measuring the GDP growth and the level of corporate profits, and the resulting ROI to the investor are suspect. In what way is this a measure f a successful economic system?

The Prime Directive

Humans have a moral obligation to treat fellow species as equals. They should not go extinct due to human greed and folly. Human action will have to be modified to meet this obligation. This plan will help all those who wish to join the effort achieve this goal. It is in everyone's self-interest to do so, but it must be a voluntary action to join the cause.  This project intends to form an autarky based on a safe, sustainable socioeconomic system.

The biosphere of Earth is a heat engine. Ultimately, the laws of thermodynamics apply. Add too much energy to the biosphere, and the oceans boil off.  Life on Earth will cease to exist long before that. A project to build Planet B will move humans out of Earth's gravity well into free space where this heat-death danger to Earth does not exist. It will start humans on a path to a Kardashev Type I Civilization (around 2×1017 watts). With this move, humanity will take a step towards the future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry on Star Trek.  

A socioeconomic system that is stable and fair and operates through peaceful coexistence can be engineered by flipping the creation of money within the system and requiring all enterprise activities to participate in a circular economy. 

The under-regulated global economic system is a form of capitalism that fails to hold participants accountable for negative externalities. Market failures, recessions, depressions, wars, and legal theft are designed into the rules of the socioeconomic system. The financial system has been rigged to enable hedge funds, venture capitalists, shadow banks, and other bad actors to extract wealth from the system. They use this extracted wealth to leverage the purchase of revenue-generating businesses and aggregate them into monopolies.

The rewards for short-term returns on investment are another cause of the slowing pace of economic growth. Investments to build a sustainable infrastructure require a massive investment of patient capital. Unless short-term investments are not taxed at a higher rate, people have a perverse incentive to gamble on short-term investments in the stock market casino.

 This dysfunctional system is not surprising as the system was not designed. It evolved out of the Dark Ages. The pursuit of power by the ruling class created a debt-based economy in which borrowed money paid for wars to conquer and enslave others. This socioeconomic system persisted for centuries. 

The war factories built by the Federal government produced the nonproductive machinery of the military during WWII and the Cold War.  This investment by the government perpetuated this debt-based, entropy-creating system. The race to create more powerful means of destroying the enemy created technology that has also been put to peaceful advancements that have aided the wellbeing of all. Technology can be used for good or for evil. How we use this technology should be a voluntary choice of individuals. One should not be forced to pay taxes to support the entropy death of civilization. One should have the option to invest in new sustainable infrastructure as an alternative. 

Ending the use of debt-backed currency

A socioeconomic system that places the poor in a situation where debt slavery is the only option to survive is a failed system. The laws that favor the creditor over the debtor should be examined to determine the origin of this inequity. In ancient times, periodic debt forgiveness was customary in many social groups. Borrowing money should not be supported by tax advantages as it tends to legitimize doing so. Borrowed money has ruined the lives of many because they do not understand the need to delay purchases until they can be afforded. Easy money is an addictive drug.  

It is time to have a Golden Jubilee. Our government has done this before, but for all the wrong reasons. When an individual, a city, or a country is bankrupt, it is counterproductive to demand that they pay loans that probably shouldn't have been given in the first place. However, those who borrowed foolishly should be scrutinized before loaning to them again.

The bailout of the banks after the 2008 financial crisis was a blatant example of crony debt forgiveness by the Federal government. Call it quantitative easing, but it was essentially debt forgiveness for the banks. They were allowed to write down their debts rather than going bankrupt. The same forgiveness was not offered to individuals who were crushed financially by the bank's misdeeds. This decision to forgive the banks but not their customers was politically motivated. Follow the money. The legal bribes between the banks and the politicians took the form of campaign contributions by the banking industry and the elite class. Again, follow the money. Who made money during the recession that followed the bailout.

Reaganomics was a Scam

There was no science behind trickle-down economics. It was a [slogan, car salesman line, a smooth-talking grift pitch]. It was a fraud with no evidence that the proposed solution was justified. But regardless of the assertion that the government was the problem and that a "free" market that was unregulated would make all boats rise faster, the evidence tells a different story. 

The facts speak for themselves in one graph. [reference graph showing that the 1% has sucked trillions of dollars of wealth out of the bottom 90% by lobbying Congress to give the rich tax cuts so that they could "create jobs by investing the money rather than pay their fair share of taxes." Instead of investing that money in industries that increased the country's productivity, they invested in rental properties. Real estate that pays steady, risk-free rent income is a conservative investment with a low risk of losing capital. 

According to the magical thinking of the grifter lobbyists,  gutting the progressive tax system would solve stagflation. Never mind that the WWII tax policies were an essential part of the policy that allowed the US economy to grow at the highest growth rate ever and allow the country to finance the infrastructure necessary for winning WWII without causing massive inflation. There is no counterargument. The result is self-evident and easily provable by a simple thought experiment.  

Restoring a fair and balanced media and a return to a progressive tax system will restore civility to society. When everyone feels they have an opportunity to have a better life, the anger will dissipate, and life will be good. 

The invention of machinery to amplify human productivity and the discovery of high energy density fuels to operate those machines fundamentally changed civilization. 

Rules created to govern society before the invention of the steam engine should all be questioned. Questions as fundamental as the legitimacy of private property [who gave them the right] should be debated and, when appropriate, revised.  Theft of property by the 1% through legal means can be stopped. They bought the laws that allowed them not to pay their fair share of taxes. The rules can be reset to those that allowed us to win WWII.

The colonists hated monopolies. A monopoly prompted the Boston Tea Party. Why not return tax rates to what they were during the greatest economic growth? 

 The Plan for Planet B addresses these failures.

Cooperatives as a social structure

The operational mode of the habitat production facilities will borrow from barn raising and open-source software development. Collective action is an effective way to build infrastructure. For example, the rural electrification program often included farmers installing power lines to their farms. They could use the tools and skills they possessed from building fences. 

The Blender software will be used to design the habitats. The Unity game engine will use the blender models to simulate the operation of the habitat.  This will require adding extensions to the modeling system. This digital twin of the habitats will include the operation of production facilities within the habitat that produce new habitats. This habitat factory will enable the exponential growth of the new socioeconomic system. 

Themes and Concepts

The following themes and concepts are synthesized into the project plan for building Planet B