My name is John McCone and I am the Founder and Director of Socibuild Ltd. I have been concerned about homelessness, poverty and damage to our environment for as long as I can remember. Since 2008, when a lot of my investments were seriously hit, I also became concerned about the unstable nature of our banking system. It is terrifying to think that global finance is built upon foundations that are so shaky the entire system could completely collapse at any time – but it is also true. All those images of people losing their jobs and getting evicted from their houses during the 2008-2009 recession also caused me to become deeply concerned about unemployment.
Although I have been vaguely interested in the idea of Basic Income for a long time due the fact the existing welfare system discourages personal savings, demeans applicants, and reduces their incentive to seek work, it was only during the past 3-4 years that I really began passionately promoting and writing about it.
I have written a small booklet which describes and lays out the case for a policy called “The Countryside Living Allowance” designed to steadily phase in a Basic Income. Indeed, I gave a talk in Braziers Park on the subject of Basic Income. I have also written articles about Basic Income as well as desperately needed reforms to our finance system on my blog: Philosophy For The Future.
The seed for the idea, that was destined to become Socibuild Ltd., was initially born out of a proposal I wrote for a basic income pilot for Malcolm Torry, director of the Citizens Income Trust, back in March 2018. In my pilot proposal, I wanted to measure the effect of different Basic Income payments on different communities in the countryside that would be established specifically for the purposes of the experiment. One particular thing I wanted to measure was the effect of basic income on Land Values. When I presented my proposal to Malcolm Torry, he informed me that I would not be able to get the government to fund a project that paid different people different amounts of money but that such a pilot study might plausibly be funded by a private donor.
Sometime later, it struck me that the increase in land values, which I expected that basic income would produce, might plausibly be enough to entirely fund the income and that it might be profitable to establish a Real Estate company on that basis.
It took a long time and a great deal of refinement to go from a vague idea, to a carefully crafted business plan, which eventually included fiscal reform through issuing the community income in the form of housing tokens. On the 10th July 2019 Socibuild Ltd. was incorporated as a U.K. limited company and hopefully, in the not too distant future, this company will give virtual workers, who yearn to return to nature, the opportunity to live satisfying lives, in ecological harmony, away from the hustle and bustle of the city.
But that is just a first step to expand from…
The exciting thing about using a private real estate company to fund basic income, compared to lobbying the U.K. government, is that private companies know no borders, and so someday, perhaps in 15 to 20 years time, I hope that Socibuild will be able to pay the same modest sum to all the inhabitants of planet earth, including those who live in poor countries, and banish poverty from everywhere, forever.
I, furthermore, aim to stabilize the global financial system once and for all.
A stable banking system has two fundamental requirements:
- That the institution which holds deposits, and makes loans, in a given currency denomination has the power to issue an unlimited amount of that currency denomination (and therefore will always be able to pay depositors out in full and need never default on deposits)
- That the currency has a stable value basis (i.e. its value is not in danger of falling to zero)
Number 1) is fairly straightforward to satisfy using existing trademark legislation. Any organization can sell tokens to people in arbitrary quantities, with a trademark, registered to the organization, stamped upon them, and other organizations will be forbidden from selling tokens that use the trademark of the first organization. Then all you need is a system of token accounting where people can subtract tokens from their account and add them to the account of others to make payments – turnkey solutions to establish such systems for secure transactions already exist. In addition the company could grant people the capacity to withdraw money from the “company’s token bank” in the form of notes where the company contractually guarantees that it will issue depositors who make withdrawals from the account with token notes with the company’s registered trademark stamped on them such that the numbers on the trademarked token notes issued, when added together, exactly equal the number of tokens digitally subtracted from the account. Finally, the company must also guarantee to credit the accounts of those who deposit token notes into them a number that exactly equals the total number displayed on the notes.
The more pertinent issue is 2). How can an organization get people to attribute value to the tokens it issues? The answer is simple: ensure the notes are redeemable for something whose value is fairly stable. This is the Achilles heel of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies – on the banking and accounting end, cryptocurrencies work fine, but, because they are not pegged to any stable item of value which they are redeemable, their values are extremely volatile and they are not a stable place to store your savings (unless you are comfortable with the idea that your life savings could suddenly depreciate by 99%!). For a great deal of history, money was pegged to gold. Today, money is fiat and its value is pegged through a combination of habit, taxes, and outstanding debts for which fiat currency is legal tender.
It seems to me that the best thing to make a currency redeemable for is land – particularly land rent. The issuer of a currency would own land and would price rents in the issued currency. Rent has the added advantage that the issuer of the currency can give value to those who pay him his currency without being required to part with the underlying asset that forms the basis of the currency’s value.
And while different plots of land will oscillate in value (which will in turn cause the currency to oscillate in value) so long as the land owner, who issues the currency, alters the rent sufficiently slowly it should be possible to maintain the currencies value at a tolerably stable level, even if perfect stability is unattainable.
No asset is completely stable, as value ultimately fluctuates with human demand, which is inescapably fickle, but of all the assets out there, the fact that housing both provides people with a basic need of shelter while simultaneously has a low rate of wear and tear, when compared to the other basic needs like food and water which are destroyed when consumed (there’s no such thing as a second hand market for food that has been eaten – compared to houses that have been lived in) makes housing, and particularly land, the safest asset out there and has lead to the phrase “safe as houses”, and while this phrase has often been the famous last words which bankers and politicians have uttered prior to massive recessions and debt defaults, comparatively speaking at least, there is no other asset class that is safer.
Land and houses are also the most transparent asset class to base an issued currency upon. The fractional reserve system arose from goldsmiths lying about how much gold they had stashed in their vaults, but land and housing is available for all to see! Furthermore land rent is the economic manifestation of the most fundamental components of our physical reality: that of space and time. For what is rent, if not the right to exclusively occupy a given space for a given amount of time?
Hopefully I have now articulated how Socibuild, as an organization, plans to simultaneously distribute a fair share of the wealth out to every inhabitant on planet earth and simultaneously stabilize global finance.
If these goals interest you as much as they interest me, then don’t be shy! Feel free to contact Socibuild here to ask for further information.