Avoiding Responsibility

Every once in a while, I do actually have an independent thought. I'll wait a while now for you to stop laughing and get back on your seat. But its true, I do occasionally get what would generally be referred to as an 'idea'. And the other night, I had another one (and before you ask, there was a couple of beers involved to lubricate the mind). But I swear, it's a good idea.

So anyway, there's this thing called an Internet, don't know whether you have heard it. And apparently its a lot easier to get into it if you are from a white, middle-class, western background, as opposed to an uneducated tribesman in central Africa. And this Internet thing, its changing the way people do business, and they reckon that the tribesman, because he can't access it, will be left behind and be unable to compete. People refer to this problem as the 'digital divide' - that those people who have access to the Internet are better off than those that don't, and the gap between their living standards will continue to increase because of this have/have-not relationship.

There have been various ideas floated around on how to prevent this from happening, well actually minimizing it cause it already exists. Unfortunately, all these ideas involve spending cash, and the methods put around for raising this cash don't generally get any support from anyone. The most common idea is what's referred to as a 'bit tax' - that is charging consumers a tiny amount for each bit of information they download, and gathering all this money from around the world, which would create a bloody big pile of cash, and then spend it on programs to minimize the digital divide. Pretty much everyone except those that will benefit from it say that this is a sucky idea. And western governments don't want to be digging into their own pockets and thus their tax-payers pockets to fund these schemes, and so nothing gets done, and the situation gets worse.

Whilst thinking about the usual guy stuff the other night (cars, girls and guns) my mind wandered onto the digital divide. I don't actually remember the segue - I think it was something about an easier way to traffic guns to African war zones -> Internet -> they can't order via the Net cause they don't have it. It could have been that, or the lack of fuel stations in sub-saharan Africa for the Paris-Dakar Rally. Not sure which, but its pretty unimportant.

Anyway, my thoughts turned to how governments fund their own programs - taxes, and where these are generated. The two primary places are individuals, and companies. Now an individual generally pays tax where they are physically located, which makes a lot of sense. If you are living in a country and using their telephones, roads, hospitals, schools etc, you should contribute to the running of those things.

Companies on the other hand aren't actual people. They are legal people, but they don't actually exist. This is what's known as a legal fiction, and the English common law system has a rich and colourful history of using such fictions to get around pesky laws. For instance, the buying and selling of land was illegal under the Feudal Tenure system because of the oaths and responsibilities attached to the land. The cunning lawyers devised a system which involved the court recognising someone that didn't actually exist, and thus allowing people to buy and sell land. By the court adopting this fiction, they created the system of property transfer, and the concept that people 'own' land, that is taken for granted in common law countries (for those interested I recommend 'An Introduction to English Legal History' by J Baker, as complete a book on the foundations of the common law as you will find).

Why all this talk of selling land? It's to make a point - if the courts hadn't long ago accepted the fiction, one of the fundamental principles on which the western capitalist economy is built would not exist. Even more so, if the courts hadn't accepted the legal fiction of a company being a 'person', another fundamental pillar of the capitalist system would not exist. It is my humble opinion that now, at the beginning of the next millennium of human inhabitation of this fine planet, that courts throughout the world accept another legal fiction.

At present, a company must be 'registered' in a sovereign country, and it is usually in that country that its taxes are paid. That country then uses that revenue for whatever purposes it sees fit. I propose that we extend this fiction just a little further, and allow a company to be registered in a fictitious space - cyberspace for want of a better word. The operation and dealings of those companies so registered are regulated by an international body, with all the powers to direct and penalise companies that traditional states have. The companies will pay their taxes not to a country, but to this international organisation, which can use these funds for various projects, one of which could be the digital divide.

It's just my two cents, I think it could work. Sure, there will be lots of problems, but like there isn't now with companies regulated in the traditional way?