Since “abundance” is apparently the in-thing, I thought I should get in on the act. At the onset, I will admit I don’t have much new to offer to those familiar with my writings, but sometimes a repackaging is useful.

I have my usual favorites:

1) Patent and copyright monopolies,

2) The bloated financial sector,

3) The corrupt corporate governance structure,

4) Protection for doctors and other highly paid professionals.

Before going through these obstacles to abundance, let me emphasize a point that everyone involved in policy discussions should recognize: a cost to one person is income to another person. This means that the ridiculous drug prices we pay because of patent monopolies and bloat in the financial sector are all income to the people who benefit.

This is obvious when they scream bloody murder, if we try to make the economy more efficient. But the high earners in these sectors also come back to bite us when they spend the money we gave them. All the money that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk spend sending people into space and blowing up rockets is employing people who might otherwise have done productive things like providing healthcare or teaching children. We have fewer people to work in these sectors because the rich and very rich are paying them to serve their ends.

The other way the money going to the rich and very rich comes back to bite us is in the form of higher housing costs. When the rich and very rich buy their second, third, and fourth homes they are pulling away land that might otherwise have housed more moderate or middle-income people. This is especially the case when they grab up huge plots in prime locations, like Bill Gates’ estate just outside Seattle. If we had something like the same income distribution we did a half-century ago, many moderate and middle-income people would have better housing because the rich and very rich had less.

Patent and Copyright Monopolies

It is hard to overstate the importance of these government-granted monopolies, which is probably why they get so little attention in policy debates on income distribution. These monopolies make many items very expensive that would otherwise be cheap. The most important item in this category is prescription drugs, but it is also the case with computers, software, medical equipment, and a wide range of other areas where most of the price of the item is due to these monopolies.

In the case of prescription drugs alone we will spend over $700 billion this year on drugs and other pharmaceutical items. We would likely be spending close to $100 billion if these items were sold in a free market without patent monopolies. The savings of $600 billion comes to $4,800 per household. That gets us pretty far right there toward our abundance agenda. (We would have to spend $100 billion or so of this money on publicly funded research.)

Taking away the patent monopolies would also remove the incentive to lie about the safety and effectiveness of drugs. This is a huge and ongoing problem in the drug industry, with the worst example being the opioid crisis. If research was paid for upfront and open-source it would likely advance more quickly and be far more honest.

However, these monopolies also hit our pocketbooks in many other areas. Without patent or copyright protections imagine being able to buy your next smartphone or computer for $100 to $200 dollars. Most software could be gotten at no cost over the web. If we paid for creative work upfront, we could download movies, music, and the latest news at no cost. Medical scanning equipment, like MRIs and CT scans would be cheap, as would kidney dialysis machines and most other therapeutic items.

The switch from patent and copyright monopolies to upfront funding would get us far towards our abundance agenda. But there is more.

Eliminating the Bloat in the Financial Sector

We have a large and growing financial sector which is an increasing drain on the productive economy.  The financial sector has exploded relative to the size of the economy over the last five decades. The broad financial sector accounts for 7.5 percent of GDP, almost $2.5 trillion annually. The more narrow securities and commodities trading sector (i.e. Wall Street) accounts for 2.4 percent, more than 5 times as large a share as it had half a century ago.

In addition, private equity is taking up an ever larger share of the economy, with assets under its control now exceeding $4.0 trillion. The crypto promoters are also looking to have a growing share of the economy flowing into their pockets.

The growth of the financial sector has produced many of society’s great fortunes but has contributed little or nothing to the economy. While we need a financial sector to allocate capital to people and businesses needing to borrow, and to handle our payments, this can be done with a far smaller financial sector.

What would be the harm if trading volume in the stock market fell by 50 percent, to roughly the level we saw in the 1990s? And what have we gotten from crypto other than a more efficient way to pay for illegal drugs and ransom to kidnappers?

The downsizing should start with a modest sales tax (e.g. 0.1 percent on stock trades) comparable to, but much smaller than, the sales tax most of us pay on shoes and clothes. We should also make the tax system less friendly to financial game-playing, for example by eliminating the carried interest tax loophole that primarily benefits private equity and hedge fund partners.

We should also tighten up bankruptcy laws to make private equity’s habit of taking firms into bankruptcy less profitable. Replacing private health insurance with a universal Medicare-type system would also eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, including many big paychecks to insurance CEOs and other top executives.

Reforming the Corporate Governance Structure

Our CEOs get paid far more than their counterparts in Europe and Japan. This fact was driven home in the UAW strike a couple of years ago. The CEOs of the Big Three automakers all got paid over $20 million a year, with GM’s CEO topping the charts at $29 million. By contrast, the CEOs of the equally large and profitable European can makers got single digit millions. And the CEO of Honda was getting just $2.3 million.

The main problem is that we have a corporate governance structure that puts no effective check on CEO pay. If an autoworker or retail clerk wants higher pay, there is a manager very prepared to tell them to get lost. But CEO pay is determined by corporate boards, who are generally deferential to the CEOs who they ostensibly oversee.

Top management has huge sway in getting people selected to the board. Once there, the best way to stay on the board, which typically pays hundreds of thousands a year for a few hundred hours of work, is to keep other board members happy. Board members nominated by the board for re-election win over 99 percent of the time.

In principle, shareholders should have a strong incentive to rein in CEO pay. If the corporate governance structure were altered to make it easier to replace board members and put some real teeth into the “say on pay” votes on CEO pay, we may see CEO pay get more in line with levels in other wealthy countries.

And this would matter. When the CEO gets $30 million a year, the other top execs are likely getting over $10 million and even the third tier are likely getting multiple millions. And this infects pay structures elsewhere. Presidents of universities and major foundations often earn several million a year. We would be in a very different world if CEOs were getting single digit millions.

Ending Protectionism for Doctors and Other Highly Paid Professionals

Our trade deals have been quite deliberately designed to put U.S. manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world. This had the predicted and actual effect of costing millions of jobs and putting downward pressure on the pay of the remaining jobs.

We could have designed trade deals that had the same effect on the pay of doctors and other highly paid professionals. Our doctors on average earn more than $360,000 a year, twice what their counterparts in other wealthy countries make.

If we changed our licensing requirements to make it easier for doctors in other countries to train to our standards and then practice in the United States, we could bring salaries more in line with those in Western Europe and Canada. If we cut average pay by $100,000 a year (mostly for specialists, not general practitioners) it would save us close to $100 billion a year.

We should do the same for other highly paid professionals. We should also look to change licensing standards that prevent many lesser paid professionals, such as physicians’ assistants or nurse practitioners, from doing tasks for which they are entirely competent.

Other Abundance Enhancers

We should be vigilant about looking for sectors where the current structure of the market allow for large rents. Social media would be a good candidate. Section 230 protection has helped giants like Facebook profit at the expense of traditional media outlets. We can alter the protection in a way that is less friendly to the current behemoths.

There is also an important issue that often gets overlooked in the abundance folks’ complaints about high housing costs in cities like San Francisco and New York. While we should look to reduce zoning restrictions that block housing construction in these superstar cities, we should also think about having an economy and society where people don’t have to move to these cities to enjoy decent lives.

While the major cities have much to offer, many smaller cities have plenty of worthwhile features and even small towns can be great places for millions of people. With hugely increased opportunities for remote work, it should be possible for people in many occupations to live wherever they want, making the housing costs in superstar cities irrelevant. The effort to make non-superstar places more attractive should have a prominent place in an abundance agenda.

Have We Gotten Abundance?

I’m sure that I haven’t nailed everything down here, but I think I got us much of the way there. We need to add a few things to ensure that life is good for everyone. In addition to national healthcare insurance, college should be free, we should have high quality childcare. Advances in AI and other technologies should ensure we have the productivity gains to allow an increasingly generous welfare state. We also need to increase unionization rates to ensure that ordinary workers get their share of productivity gains. And we should have the six weeks of paid vacation each year that workers in Europe have enjoyed for decades.

Anyhow, that’s an outline of what we can do if we want decent living standards. And of course, we should be pretty much fully reliant on clean energy and electric vehicles, which are already cheaper than traditional cars and fossil fuels, if we don’t allow the Neanderthal Cold Warriors to keep us from getting access to Chinese technology.

At a time when Trump-Musk having us going full-speed in the opposite direction, giving more money to the rich regardless of the cost to the economy and the country, it may seem silly to think about abundance. But we need to have hope, at least until they make it illegal.

This originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post My Abundance Agenda appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.