A New Public Utility

Imagine a sophisticated online platform packed with functionality to maximize your earnings. 

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Within your rules, it can seamlessly (a) trade hours you want to work across any of your skills with full protections and benefits (b) rent or sell your possessions (c) track down pre-qualified job openings (d) lend/borrow cash for you.

 

Imagine this platform gives you constant,  localized, actionable, data about demand, supply, and earnings across thousands of microeconomic sectors. It uses those insights to incentivize market-aligning investment in your development, and can trigger government interventions if you are struggling. Operating at huge scale with ultra-low charges, the interconnected markets it offers are transparent, accountable, decentralized, and fair.

 

Its can be  hard to grasp how much platform technologies could be doing for us. We're so used to Silicon Valley's work apps;  global, siloed by work types, run by unknowable algorithms. These markets are distorted to maximize operators' profits, many are financially unstable, data is secreted. They can charge 30% of your earnings. 

 

How does our imaginary option became real? Your government needs to be the instigator.

 

 

Initiation, not Regulation

Our daily life is dependent on facilities started by politicians. Take roads. In the 1890's there were uncoordinated turnpikes laid by landowners for the rich; muddy tracks for everyone else. The idea of universal "government roads" with enforced rules, standardized junctions, consistent surfacing, and unified signage was opposed. But those streets spawned transport innovations, allowing anyone to reliably travel for work, family, or education.

 

Money, electricity, railways, telephones, and water supply, are other inventions first launched by random start-ups before public policy shaped a gamechanging vision. Each then drove economic growth and societal progress worldwide. 

 

We aren't forced to use these utilities. If you don't like the voltage from your nation's public electricity grid, buy a generator. But, for most of us, the versions initiated by governments are fine. 

 

 

Markets Matter

Access to comprehensive, truly empowering, economic platforms is vital to realizing potential in a computerized economy. It should be a basic right, in the way public agencies ensure we have power, communications, travel, or clean water. 

 

If widely adopted, platforms for economic activity operated as a genuine public utility would surface new resources from regular people and local businesses, then match them to buyers with unprecedented efficiency. That makes any market economy more inclusive, green, and supportive. 

 

This "People’s Capitalism" is a policy possibility alongside Universal Basic Income, Federal Jobs Guarantees, or Green New Deals. But it costs taxpayers nothing. The new platforms should be initiated through competitive official concessions. (That's how we get state and national lotteries.)

 

 

About Us

The People’s Capitalism initiative sits in our MM4A (Modern Markets for All) non-profit. MM4A emerged from British government programs to shape more supportive labor platforms. We now work with public agencies in the US who have also launched our technologies. 

 

Our speciality is the staggering possibilities for advanced market platforms initiated at scale by governments for public good. Peoples' Capitalism is the big-picture end of that vision. It is waiting for political leaders to, again, show the world how transformative some technologies can be when shaped by leverage only governments possess. 

 

Equitable infrastructure for capitalism now requires a policy we call "Modern Markets for All". Read more