Ben Franklin wrote: “Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.”  Jay Chance proposes: The average citizen in a healthy society can be expected to have a lifetime of approximately one hundred (100) years. Valuing one dollar ($1) to one hour of every citizen’s lifetime provides a stable and equitable trust fund of $876,000 per citizen: $1 x 24 hours x 365 days x 100 years = $876,000. Each citizen’s trust fund of $876,000 represents his or her natural inheritance of lifetime. When junior citizens become adult citizens at sixteen (16) years of age, such citizens are free to collect time-backed citizens dividends every month: $876,000 / 100 years = $8,760 per year. $8,760 / 12 months = $730 per month. (03/06/02)

Elsewhere, I have challenged the concept of ownership of the Earth. The land and natural resources are wealth provided to us by God and Nature. The sunshine, air, water, land, minerals, and the earth itself all come to us freely. The Earth’s land and natural resources are not products of the human mind or body. They existed long before life and humankind even emerged on our planet. There exists no moral or rational basis for any individual to claim them as Property. Contributing editor John Champagne has come to a similar opinion independently of me. He writes: This new paradigm, built on the principle of democratic ownership and management of natural resources, will have as its most basic political act the citizen expressing a preference about what kind of world we should make, what human impacts on the environment we ought to allow. But this act, this expression, must be in a form that users of natural resources can read, so that it can inform their actions. We will need to develop easy to create, easy to read documents that we can use as our palate for painting a picture of the kind of world we want to live in. This is a question that any democratic society asks its citizens, implicitly or explicitly: “What kind of society do we want to create”? (03/07/02)
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