Michael, your wish is granted

"What I'm asking for is a new economic order," [Michael Moore] says. "I don't know how to construct that. I'm not an economist. All I ask is that it have two organising principles. Number one, that the economy is run democratically. In other words, the people have a say in how its run, not just the 1%. And number two, that it has an ethical and moral core to it. That nothing is done without considering the ethical nature, no business decision is made without first asking the question, is this for the common good?" (src)

I think I have some answers for him.

For Moore's first point, we need some kind of arrangement whereby people can use tokens to vote for things they want. So every time they get a loaf of bread or a cinema ticket or whatever, they hand over a certain quantity of these tokens. I don't suppose it's easy for some central committee to work out how many tokens each good or service should command, but perhaps the supplier can give a number? I guess if they pitch it too high, people might decide it's not worth it and go elsewhere, so there's an incentive to pitch the number right to get the most votes they can.

And how do you get tokens? You might say that we should get an equal allocation, but that doesn't work really. After all, when the baker gets tokens for his bread, he will go and use them to vote for a farmer's carrots or a tailor's suit. In other words, these tokens just keep circulating around the economy, and we cast our votes with them every time they change hands. It would be impractical to try and come up with some way of allocating them equally. Anyway, bakers have to work to bake the bread that we eat and they only get tokens if they provide decent bread. So why don't we say that everyone ought only to get tokens if they offer something in exchange, even if it's only their labour?

For his point 2a, I dunno, maybe we ought to have some kind of rules or something which tell people what's acceptable behaviour. I mean, agreeing on ethical principles is hard but I'm sure most people have an ethical code of some description they try to follow. I think we could manage to agree some basic ground rules for our new system: don't steal other people's products or their tokens, don't cheat or lie, that kind of thing. We could call them 'laws', perhaps, and have some kind of way of agreeing on the rules together and dealing with people who break them. It's a good idea to make sure that the rules are administered fairly as well, so that the rich can't buy a favourable judgment and so that the weak aren't picked on by the strong. Some ideal of the laws being in charge, rather than the whims of people, perhaps.

(That raises a point: we may not want whim to rule, but even so we will need people to administer these laws and to keep them up-to-date and so on. That means some people won't be able to exchange their labour for tokens: but how will they live? They're working anyway, so perhaps we should make one of the rules to be that we pay this administration a certain proportion of the tokens we have received every year. Then these administrators will have enough to live on.)

And for point 2b, the 'common good' (whatever it is he means by that), I suppose that to be democratic we ought to let people's votes determine what that is. After all, we don't want the common good to be whatever Michael Moore says it is!

Presumably it affects most of us, so it should attract lots of voting tokens when people use it. Even if it only indirectly affects us, I expect that if it's necessary for society to keep going then it will manage to attract the votes of the people who do use it: maybe not you and I, but maybe the executives who use this are aware that it is necessary and will cast their votes accordingly. After all, executives have a say too, don't they? So I'm guessing that if this 'common good' can get lots of tokens then it can afford to offer jobs to people, and to buy what it needs, in order to keep itself going.

I've no doubt there are some problems with this, but as a first attempt I think it fares well: we've got democracy, the common good, basic ground rules and we've still got the old-style activities which we all know and love. I bet there's even room for radical left-wing film-makers somewhere. This 'designing a new economy' thing is hard, though. Still, I'm glad we've got Michael Moore to tell us what we should all be doing. After all, we wouldn't want to get that nasty old capitalism back again, would we?