Saturday, January 22, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
à
Conjecture on
tariffs and a new global economy
A conjecture is not always an assertion that must be true.
A conjecture is an assertion that might be true.
First, some observations are in order.
Prior to the Congress passing legislation establishing the income tax, the federal government relied almost entirely on tariff taxes imposed on imports and exports.
This seems an entirely Republican party type of thing to do.
That part of the American population which is "enlightened Republican" is attracted by this notion that less taxes on American people (and Corporations) might be balanced by increases in the tariff.
So the conjecture is:
Perhaps increases on tariffs levied on National
imports and exports in a new global economy is the way to pay for Social
Security obligations and more. One
type of benefit would be in an increase in national pride. What the nation exports deserves to be fully
paid for, and what we import needs to compensate those whose work makes
products and services possible.
Tariffs are a form of evaluation of the social
and global considerations that Nash’s economic theory addresses. So why should not social security benefits
be derived from increases on tariff income?
Some additional thoughts:
“Because of the War on Terrorism”, our Nation is making expenditures on increasing active knowledge of what will arrive at our ports.
Part of OntologyStream Inc’s current effort is to support prototype deployment of a knowledge management system that derives and uses active knowledge from real time measurement of the various event spaces.
In our proto-type, active knowledge is being based on ontology mediated information processes of the type Tim Berners Lee has been talking about.
The Semantic Web concept is fully understood only with the notion of a two-sided "Semantic Web". One side has humans and human communities, and the other side has machine processes that exchange data in a transparent fashion. OntologyStream Inc has talked about Anticipatory Web mechanisms that will be observed when significant Semantic Web systems are focused on real time event measurement.
By "ontology" we mean structural knowledge of how data is organized. Once structural knowledge is being measured and managed by a set of concepts, encoded as simple OWL ontologies, one can creates anticipatory mechanisms using functional activity patterns.
Of course, the way computer-based data is organized now, in non-agile and inflexible relational database schema, has limited meaning. The XML and web services revolution is already underway. This revolution is however, only the beginning.
To increase the value we get from information science the BCNGroup has called for a National Project to Establish the Knowledge Sciences as an Academic Discipline. The planning activities leading to the National Project has been predicated on the concept that new information science will open new economic processes and create the next great manufacturing sector. Futurists see this next manufacturing sector as leading into the Hydrogen economy and involving the agile (computer mediated) control of micro-processes in food and device manufacturing.
If XML repositories are extended by reference to sets of concepts, as in the Ontology Web Language and topic maps standards, then the references themselves will provide an increase in meaningful interpretation.
One consequence of increasing the informational transparency on worldwide shipping is to increase our sense of security. The problem being that a 100% secure system is not possible. A smart asymmetric threat likely will plan to exploit a quite small vulnerability to cause a very large effect.
This resilient vulnerability does not argue against the budgetary expenditure. The vulnerability reminds us that a complete security depends on a peaceful world, as the President has pointed out. We must increase security from several points of view.
But the economic benefits could more than justify the expenditures now so often justified solely based on security concerns.
The Bottom Line: The means to intelligently manage tariff collections calls for increased informational transparency at our ports, over supply chains leading to import activity, and over issues like intellectual property protection and business intelligence. As we gain this transparency, the Nation may act to more efficiently manage tariff assessment and collection and to thus increase the value of the import/export process.