Modern economics is founded on the principle that all agents act purely out of self-interest. Thus, no rational person will undergo a risk without a possible reward, and no labourer will perform his duties without proper recompense. Although to some extent, "brother love" can be seen as a justifiable reward in Marxist or generically socialist societies, relying on the goodwill of mankind has proven to be neither particularly profitable nor liberating in the long run. For those treasured few who gain some ordinance of pleasure in self-deprecation or immolation, collectivism may work particularly effectively, but on a larger scale, where it is impossible to ensure that every human being has a similar "community-minded" spirit, such economic systems can only be maintained through force and authoritarianism, where such collectivist attitudes are enforced rather than simply encouraged. After all, if one does not labour out of love, they can be forced to labour for their lives.

Although I am myself not the greatest libertarian to ever walk the earth (in fact, in many instances, chronimism has certain commonalities with fascism), complete oligarchy or totalitarianism would ultimately serve to detract from the overarching goal of chronimism: to continue to evolve mankind even in a low-inflation, depopulating environment until eventually the perfect humans emerge, the post-modern Adam and Eve. Dictatorships, even dictatorships of the meritorious, will stifle the emergence of new ideas and bold innovations because any change to the social order would threaten the security of the tyrant. Only an omnipotent dictator, such as God, whom mankind could never hope to surpass would be legitimized in perpetual dominion over the earth. Any man could always be unseated by another and so, even if he attained his position as a just reward for his actions, he would fall into corruption as he illegitimately held onto power through massacring his enemies or indoctrinating his allies. In order to prevent this, chronimism has set a specified limit to the rewards one might seek for their actions. Political power is strictly rationed, and economic clout is regulated to the point where should an individual become more successful, the costs of doing business will exponentially increase to point where monopoly and even basic conglomeration is impossible. Instead, a chronimistic society would be one filled with numerous independent socio-economic actors all competing amongst themselves, some greater than others, but no ever able to truly conquer the other.

The inherent problem that arises in this system is the lack of sufficient reward. In communist nations, where an individual would gain nothing by being more productive or inventive than his peers, the individual choose to be neither productive nor inventive unless forced to do so. Even then, communist labourers were famous for pretending to work whilst the authorities pretended to pay them. The natural inefficiency of this state can be described through the economic collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990's as well as through numerous anecdotes leading up to it. Consider the case of a factory dedicated to the production of nails in Leningrad during the first of Stalin's Five Year Plans. The factory was forced to increase its production of nails by so many tonnes per annum to comply with Stalin's quixotic twenty percent all-encompassing increase in industrial production. Instead of producing more nails, however, the factory simply made heavier nails: a process which required no change in industrial practice or increase in labour. The finished product was totally useless given the poor state of the hammers used to pound in said nails, but the workers received the same compensation regardless of the number or quality of nails they produced. They subsisted purely on the quota, and so, as one could guess, became entirely focussed on how to do the least amount of work being that it was all given the same reward.

If a person is to understand that my system discourages success in the sense that expansion is difficult and hiring employees always costs more than being one, it is possible for the same communist mentality to develop. If a politician was never going to have complete power no matter how brilliant they were in back-room negotiations, or if an industrialist could never hope to own their competitors no matter how superior they were, one might wonder what point there would be to becoming an adept statesman or entrepreneur. That being said, the most stable of all economic and political system in history have often been those which offer no tangible reward at all. Morality has been used more than effectively to control unruly populations for thousands of years, with the Catholic Church in Europe and the caste system in India being both excellent examples of how offering imaginary benefits in the afterlife keeps a people productive and malleable in this life. Modern capitalistic nations prefer to dangle carrots in the faces of the poor, providing the wealthy with incredible tax relief and little regulation to prove that if a person is able to become rich, they will surely live a life of untold luxury and hedonism. However, much like the moralists, one must pay their dues to achieve such success by working for low wages or starting a business or inventing a new product, the profits of which inordinately go to those whom are already wealthy. Thus, although a person in my age has little chance of ever succeeding past the circumstance of their birth, their wish to be more affluent than they are makes them pliable in society and helps them ignore the poverty and suffering imposed on them by a hugely unequal distribution of wealth.

There is, of course, one more manner in which to control populations and to maintain social order and that is through starvation or the destruction of excess production. According to the Orwellian view of human history, there has always existed three social classes: the top, the middle and the bottom. Sometimes, during times of desperation and strife, the middle can convince the impoverished bottom to help them usurp the top. Thus, the middle becomes the new top, but the top are so wealthy and powerful that they can't fall to the bottom, thus leaving the poor essentially in the same place for all of entirety. This in itself is perfectly stable, but if the current top wishes to remain so perpetually, all they must do is ensure that the middle stay fed and contented and then destroy the excess production so that bottom can never succeed to the middle. Furthermore, once starved, the bottom can be more easily directed through conflict at any bottom group elsewhere. This warfare also has the added benefit of being the cause of the destruction of excess production. Ultimately, so long as the middle has no reason to rebel and the bottom has no resources on which to mount a revolution and a facet through which to focus their meaningless existence, the social order can exist forever. Consider how the North American aboriginal tribes remained in virtually identical conditions for tens of thousands of years prior to European colonialism. Unlike Meso-america, where empires flourished, overextended and then collapsed, North America held just enough potential food to keep the tribe (if populated correctly) content but not enough for the members to fight over. Elsewhere, truly progressive civilizations were born where conditions were so harsh that tribes were forced to cooperate and innovate or where resources were so abundant, tribes naturally attacked and competed amongst each other. The ultimate lesson to be drawn, then, is one of the goldilocks zone of natural resources. Too much or too little of something promotes change, whereas having the perfect proportions allows for stability and stagnation.

Being that the purpose of chronimism is to assist the evolution of the human race, and its own design makes it impossible for individuals to seek enormous rewards, chronimism must provide a more traditional impetus for evolution. The perfect goldilocks zone of wealth distribution that creates stagnation must be avoided at all costs, but instead of adding more wealth to the top as contemporary economists are accustomed to do now, the better solution is to remove wealth from the bottom, to keep the least productive one percent of the population perpetually starving. Instead of everyone being their most productive out of greed for reward, then, humans will be most productive out of fear of reprisal. This may seem rather similar to the communist manner of worker encouragement, as labourers went about their duties for fear of their lives, but in fact, it is quite different. Only those who are the most deserving to starve will do so. Anyone can protect themselves from this fate by working harder than their peers or being more intelligent than their bosses. In truth, this will not immediately encourage inventors or industrialists to realize their fullest potential, but once the starvation begins to creep up the social ladder and affect them, they will be forced to acknowledge the absolute of their abilities.

Removing wealth from the bottom of society would have the opposite effect of Friedman's "Tickle Down" theory, recently disproven by the IMF. Those starving would attempt to better themselves, becoming equal to those immediately above them. In order to stay above the herd, those now-equal people would improve themselves, moving up the rungs of the social ladder, each class forcing the other to improve because failing to do so would mean assured death somewhere in the future. And, once the bottom one percent had completely died away, the next lowest percentile would be starved, meaning that the standards of success had been moved ever so higher. This would continue until eventually, all of humanity was dead except for a small group of perfect individuals, who could stop this practice and repopulate the earth, starting again, but in a more refined and more evolved manner than any human had ever employed before. And should they fall into the same dilemmas as we did, the chronimistic process can be re-established to produce an even more evolved version of our species. 

Obviously, one can expect some opposition by the self-labelled humanitarians of the world to the concept of slowly starving the human species into a virtual extinction; however, such sentimentalism is a luxury that will not exist very far into the future. The essential problem with humanity is that we have become our own greatest enemy. As Margaret Atwood so elegantly put it, "humans are the only species that [reproduce] more when they have less food." Whereas other animals in nature regulate their litter size to correspond with available nutritional resources, humans do the complete opposite. In fact, there is an inverse relationship between wealth and education and rates of reproduction. The women who have the most children are not the most intelligent and most productive of our species, the ones whom we so desperately need to keep, but instead are their remedial, impoverished and lethargic cousins. Once upon a time, when such a large swath of the population was killed in infancy or later in life through disease, these developments might not have been troubling, but now that infant mortality and debilitating diseases are on their way to being conquered, the underbelly of humanity is being able to multiply like never before at the same time that the wealthiest and most intelligent are being encouraged to limit the number of children they bear. Thus, mankind can currently look forward to, at best, a future populated by mediocrity, dullness and poverty.

At worst, the continued increase in the earth's population will destroy mankind itself. After a certain point, evolution becomes counter-intuitive. If a species is so efficient at reproduction that it overextends itself and uses all available resources, it will be destroyed by its own success. Humans will suffer a similar fate unless we change the manner in which we conduct ourselves as a species. Firstly, although the West professes its desire to lift the rest of the world out of poverty, if everyone on earth lived like the average American, more than four earths would be required to sustain us. Social mobility in its current form must therefore be impossible because if the poor were able to rise above their stations en masse, their resource consumption would destroy all of civilization. Ultimately, capitalism has become a lie, because those who are born poor cannot, for the sake of humanity, ever hope to be anything more than poor. It's only a matter of time before that is discovered and the destitute masses rise against their masters in an unpredictable conflict that will likely engulf the planet. Secondly, the environmental costs of maintaining the current social order are also becoming unsustainable. Millions of acres of farmland has become saline over the last fifty years and the pressures of climate change on Australia, the American South and Midwest and East Africa in particular are going to continually diminish the amount of food available. The large scale clear cutting and corporate farming of Sub-Saharan Africa is a possible solution, but it would need to be done by foreign, dare I say colonial enterprises which would mean that most of the increased agricultural production would leave the continent. Being that Africa is going to have more than one billion additional mouths to feed in 2050, this in and of itself could create more unrest and a potentially global scale conflict as the world's dominate powers compete for precious agricultural land and the African people rise up to claim the food they need to survive. Ultimately, being that humans both use up resources and then pollute, making those resources less abundant, the more humans exist, the worse off humanity will be.

After a certain point, once there are enough people to satiate the need for economic specialization and cheap labour, additional human beings are more of a burden than a blessing. Starving the poorest one percent of the population off may seem callous and even cruel, but without such calculated actions, mankind as a whole will not be able to survive to the end of this century. Mass starvation is going to become a fact of life no matter which economic system comes to dominate the future. No matter what happens, it will always be better for those who earned life to live and those who deserved death to die. The sentimentalists may try to keep everyone alive, but they will only succeed in showing everyone to their grave. In order to save the garden, one must be willing to get their hands dirty and perform a little weeding every once in a while.

There is still the philosophical question remaining as to how it can be acceptable, especially in an economic system that professes objective value, for individuals to be motivated by the actions of their peers. Theoretically, if every worker in a particular plant was a complete imbecile except one, the one would have no real reason to improve himself because he could always sleep easy knowing his family was extremely distant from starving. There are rewards related to being more productive, of course, but they are nothing compared to the penalties of being less industrious. So, why would a person ever truly reach their full potential if they only had to be slightly superior than their fellows to survive?

This is going to be a question that requires for further study. Although chronimism does allow for those who work harder or more intelligently to be better compensated, it clearly gives fewer rewards than those associated with laissez-faire capitalism. Even in such forms as free enterprise, where every individual has ample reason to acknowledge their true potential, it can be argued that it impossible for anyone to ever truly reach it. For instance, if Mark Zuckerberg had lived during a time before the internet, his preferential algorithms would have been pointless and he would have had no impetus to be the genius that he is because his particular brand of ingenuity would not have been marketable. One can say the same of Da Vinci, who, having been born in the current age could have been a brilliant scientist and engineer, but having lived in the Renaissance was rewarded with enduring works of art and an often challenged sexuality. Compared to his genius, Da Vinci never truly tasted the fruits of his success and one can only marvel at what a mind like his could have produced under more pressure with greater possibility of reward. Whatever the time period and whatever the economic system, a person is inevitably going to be juxtaposed with their peers and will find the necessary inspiration from their society. A truly unique individual who is totally disconnected from his time would be interesting to study, but completely useless because he might waste his efforts on matters not necessary for the milieu (consider a medieval peasant designing a cellular phone). One's success is always going to be best determined by others' failures. The valedictorian of a high school may only be an average student in university, not because he has become any less intelligent, but because his competition has dramatically increased. A millionaire may feel impoverished when golfing with his billionaire best friend, not because he is poor, but because he has no textile factory slave child with whom to compare at the moment. Chronimism centres around evolving the society, not just the individual, and thus, if a society is not ready to reach its potential, it can be difficult for any one individual to do the same. Ultimately, one can see that an individual's true potential is determined by their milieu, not necessarily that person's merits alone.

Therefore, if one's goal in life is only to remain one step ahead of their peers, it is perfectly acceptable. Because the baseline of starvation continues to slowly creep upwards, one must continually better themselves along the way until the point where they can do no better, upon which it is clear that they have reached their ultimate potential. The process is much slower than free enterprise, but the end result is still the same. Finally, if everyone else does the same thing, society as a whole will be constantly improved  until it reaches a post-modern perfection. It will take more time, but the gradual shift will ensure a more stable social order that is still able to grasp the concept of evolution. Although they will not know what they are doing, by always staying one step ahead of the bottom, the common workers will all be assisting themselves and their civilization reach their full potential. The tide rises all boats, after all.

This discussion naturally lends itself to the rather unpleasant topic as to how to enforce the curtailing of the human population. Since chronimism strives to objectively determine the minimum number of human beings required to maintain and evolve an existent and progressive civilization, at some point, the chronimistic leaders of the world need to start adopting  demographic planning in concert with the economic planning of this system. Although in the past eugenics was considered a firm science, the empirical supremacy of any racial group has been more or less proven to be a xenophobic fallacy. Despite the fact that there does exist, in some cases, evident disparities in intelligence and productivity between races, much of these differences can be contributed to social conditions instead of some inherent hierarchy of races. Being that the West has essentially subjugated most of the world to its economic and military control for the past three hundred years, it can be understood why there are supposedly significant gaps in IQ and industrial activity between the traditional conquerors and the traditionally conquered. The purpose of chronimism is not to exacerbate these differences, but to bridge them as quickly as possible, providing a foundation of equality of opportunity for all people of all races, genders, sexual orientations and socio-economic backgrounds. Therefore, any state sponsored or other annihilation of specific ethnicities for the purpose of fulfilling my philosophies must be strictly forbidden. Discrimination between races is completely forbidden and although the world does need a substantial reduction in population, that cannot be brought about through genocide. Yes, people will need to die, but that cannot be the end in and of itself. Instead, society must devise passive ways of selecting who must justly become deceased. 

The payroll tax is the primary method by which a government should be able to regulate unemployment in each industry. As I stated before, each industry must have one percent of its workforce unemployed to motivate each of those with a job to perform effectively, lest they risk losing it to a competitor. Because of an absence of social safety nets, one can assume that this percentile of the workforce would be, for all intents and purposes, starving. It is possible, however, for the market to find a point of stability naturally or through collusion such as labour unions, where workers cycle through jobs, being unemployed for a time and then coming back on the job just before their financial situation becomes too dire, all the while keeping the one percent mandatory unemployment doctrine satiated. This must be avoided at all costs. Trust and cooperation are enemies of chronimism. A poor employee must be fired and good one must be promoted, always and forever, regardless of what organization each pays dues to. Therefore, the government will be able to adjust the payroll tax over time to make hiring more expensive for employers whenever necessary so that the lowest percentile is truly in dire financial straits. Men must not only fear losing their job, but they must learn to fear the other men who work alongside them, because those will be the people that steal it. This above all will be the instrument through which maximum productivity is maintained and expanded.

White collar industries will also have a similar pressure exerted on them as well, but not through a payroll tax, as it is assumed that most lawyers, doctors, engineers and so on would be self-employed (although if firms did manage to manifest, they would be subject to the same taxation model as the blue collar industries). Instead, universities would be obliged to graduate one percent more students than necessary to sustain their profession. Again, if all those who graduate are reasonably close to equal and thus, instead of the bottom percentile being without work, everyone just has a slightly less trafficked practice, the universities can (under direction of the government) graduate more students to apply more pressure on professionals.

 As explained in chapter five, the costs of child-rearing would be entirely paid for by the state (in the form of a loan which the child will service in adulthood) and so even if a worker is without employment, he will still be able to feed, clothe and shelter his offspring as effectively as anyone else in the nation. That being said, the consequences of using the child's allowance to purchase foodstuff for one's self would clearly need to be punishable by the greatest of the state's powers. A person is unemployed because they are undeserving. If the child suffers from their own lack of utility because the parent is stealing their food, the child is being unfairly punished and the parent is being unjustly rewarded which is clearly contrary to the fundamental principles laid out by my economic system. Although I personally abhor capital punishment, it might be necessary to enforce such an edict. The point of having a financial value attached to each crime is to make certain that those who cannot pay for their crimes starve to death or are enslaved; however, if they are so desperate as to rob their own children, clearly adding another fiscal burden will not help the situation. In these cases, it might be necessary to defend a system of forced starvation with a stalwart basis of punitive damage.

Being that all financial transactions would be performed electronically, as prescribed by chapter seven, it will not be difficult to prove when a person is using a child allowance for two, instead of for one. However, state interventions into the spending of individuals has been disastrous before and so, it would be almost impossible to regulate how one spouse supports another. In the interests of pursuing maximum productivity, it is desirable for both familial partners to enter the workforce and since most marriages exist between people from the same social, intellectual and economic background, it can be assumed that most of the time spouses will be in similar economic circumstances, especially since chronimism ideally should end gender discrimination in employee compensation. This will not always be the case, however, and it is not impossible to imagine a circumstance where a husband is out of work but his wife supports him with her economic production or vice versa. Although this certainly runs contrary to the chronimistic system, it cannot be considered criminal unless the supporting partner is under duress from the supported partner. Whereas spending a child's money without consent is clearly robbery, one spouse choosing to support another is not. In order to maintain the same lifestyle, the supporting spouse will need to be more productive than before, or will have to limit their own consumption. Either way, since both spouses are legally considered the same person, the highest rule of chronimism will remain intact: that no person may consume more than they produce.

Finally, to end this chapter and this examination into alternative economic theories I must address how a society logically evolves into a chronimistic one. Had I been Karl Marx, I may have named this chapter "The Value of Revolution", but such idealism is beginning to show itself as merely a twentieth century fad. An evolution is a steady progress of a species, often taking millions of years. A revolution has the same goals but a much shorter window for success and unfortunately, more often than not, the immediacy of such actions can have disastrous consequences. When change is forced on an unwilling participant, violence is almost always necessary to realize said change. Since the specific objectives of chronimism are also very disturbing to one not completely erudite in its logic, it is probably unrealistic to assume that the masses will suddenly rise above their cruel masters in favour of a system that has every likelihood of being more detrimental to them and more amicable to their rulers. Instead, it would be most appropriate for chronimism to be adopted in a top-down approach, with the political leadership slowly implementing reforms in specific industries before moving on to the wider social reforms.

Since most radical economic solutions are found and implemented in order to conclude catastrophic economic problems, the adoption of chronimism will probably come as an opportunistic response to a global financial crisis. Judging by the worrying liquid asset to liability ratio of the West, such a crisis would almost inevitably rely on the extreme indebtedness of corporations, homeowners and governments. In response to this, a logical first step to adopting chronimism would be to reform and eventually destroy the financial services sector, moving capital from private hands to public ones. Essentially this would mean an eventual defaulting on all current debt and all future loans being given to individuals via the government. This process alone may take decades, and probably should, because the savings of billions of people, especially those on the top of the socio-economic pyramid would be virtually eradicated and society simply cannot accept that sort of shock over night; however, at some point, the stolen, exploited and inflated capital of the world must be eliminated so that new money can be earned by all groups of people. Limits would have to put on government loans to decrease their size which would in turn reduce the world debt exposure that caused the fiscal crisis in the first place. 

Being that capital will suddenly be coming in much smaller amounts, large enterprises which need massive and regular doses of cash to survive will eventually become insolvent. This is where the second step can be taken by government. Industries can be regulated and reformed to adjust to the chronimistic model as they fail under the capitalist one. As each industry individually falls, its commodities and worker productivity can be calculated by Regulations or a similar, existing department, making objective profitability possible again. And, if no one is able to make a profit in that industry, it would either disappear, if deemed necessary, have prices reassessed or be publicly managed at cost. Eventually, once a few industries are being successfully managed in this manner, the public will demand the entire economy be orchestrated as such and the chronimistic experiment can begin on the grand scale.

Once the entire industrial capacity of a nation is being regulated with regards to my economic theories, the industrialists will begin to have the moral foundation for withdrawing power from the people. The most successful entrepreneurs will be so because of their merits and as such, they will also be more able to select leaders and guide public policy than the general plebeians. Thus, the third step to fully adopting chronimism will be to restrict the voting privileges of society to those who make over a particular threshold of income. For my suggestions as to make this function appropriately please see chapter three and four. Regardless of its actual manifestation, the state must limit the powers of the lower portions of society before implementing the fourth and final step, simply because no truly democratic state would ever allow it to happen. As all agents act out of self-interest, individuals will still protect themselves over the future of their species. Thus, whether it be through crafty electoral alterations or corruptions or even a coup d'etat, power must be placed in those who personally profit from adopting policies that also save humanity.

I am, of course, referring to the last stage of chronimism, the one percent rule. It is difficult to imagine a population willingly allowing its bottom percentile to starve to death, even if they are all given equal chances to avoid such a fate. At some point, whether it be fear for one's self or love for one's fellow man, a person will attempt to stop such machination. Only when propagandized to dehumanize or demonize the afflicted person can whole societies ever feasibly accept such mass murder; however, being that genocides are strictly prohibited and those being starved are still human beings much the same as their peers, simply less productive versions, no level of indoctrination will truly be effective. Even Hitler was forced to curtail his rampage against the old and infirm after pressure from the pope. Whereas it is easy to distance ourselves from someone with a different tone of skin or features of the face, it is simple to see one's own self in the less advantaged. As such, the thinning out of humanity cannot be a national policy openly discussed and debated with the masses. Instead, the elite few who control the government will carry out this task purely by adopting new taxation and graduation measures. The public never has to know the intended goals of such legislation for the existential crisis this will cause will almost inevitably foster a rupture in the social framework. Sometimes, ignorance truly is bliss.

In order to ensure that the elite don't adopt strategies that will continually allow them to survive whilst others perish without merit, establishing an oligarchy, the incomes of everyone will periodically reassessed. Those who become more productive will be given more power and those who become less will be given less. This will protect the pureness of the chronimistic ideal because as soon as a person might benefit from an action of the state which would grant them more reward than they earned, they would no longer be able to vote for that specific action. In other words, the class in charge of political operations would not be as malevolent to their inferiors as it may seem because one day they might suffer the same fate intended for others. This might force the ruling elite to use warfare instead of starvation as the main tactic of reducing the population, being that it is slightly more elegant and considerably more honourable and at the end of the day, the result is essentially the same. So long as nothing of consequence is ever captured in these wars, the population can be slowly reduced over time in this manner without ever superseding the most crucial chronimistic principles. Should war be used a method of capturing resources, however, then it will. No man can consume more than he produces, and a man with a gun produces nothing.

And so, who declares when the chronimistic experiment has come to an end? Who will ring the bells and tell the world that this horrifying chapter in the human existence has finally come to an end? Since the tale of chronimism began with too much profit and too little inflation, it's probably satisfying to end it with the opposite. In order for the world to maintain the same profit margin with fewer resources, fewer workers and stagnant prices, this economic system will rely on a virtually unending stream of human innovation. Since every person will be competing with more and more advanced people as their lessers die out, more and more will be demanded of the people remaining. Although this rate of human evolution could continue indefinitely until there was only one man and one woman left who were so magnificent that they could carry on human civilization between the two of them, it isn't very likely. There has to be an accounting for the possibility of a "burn-out", of some absolute maximum of human potential on the planet earth. This can be measured through profits and inflation. If an industry deemed vital to mankind is no longer profitable, it will be publicly owned (decreasing profits) or have its commodities' prices increased (increasing inflation). If, at some point, all industries have been regulated to this effect, there will either be an absence of profit or a giant influx in inflation. Once zero profit is reached, chronimism must immediately stop, whereas this system can still exist with high inflation. However, once inflation has reached the point where a much higher percentage of the population is threatened than simply the bottom percentile, or stagflation has begun, the experiment must also end as well.

Ultimately, this decision will reside in the four heads of government, to be reached by consensus. After this, the chronimistic state will be dismantled and the people can once again, democratically if they wish, choose which economic and political system would be best for the future of humanity. It may take centuries for chronimism to be adopted and at least millennia before it has failed, and perhaps mankind will be wiped out long before it either truly implements or fully exhausts my ideas, but like all humans, I have an inexplicable, but uncontrollable need to look to the future. Chronimism isn't about writing that future, however. It's about ensuring that we have one.