Donnerstag, 20. August 2009

Virgin Soil of Thought

Pape’ete

Topics of the day: reading, health insurance, land reform, Maeva, Roti

Raphael worked on different logos for our bicycle action and went to book his flight home while I sat on the roof and read about a new, just and simple health insurance system (which rewards a healthy lifestyle and makes patients aware of the cost of their treatment) and a “land reform” – a topic I hadn’t engaged with before.

The idea of a land reform is actually quite simple. Equilibrism (an alternative socio-ecological economic concept – see links – surreptious advertising, just kidding I’m not trying to convince anyone I just know that our current system isn’t exactly making mankind any happier) takes a path between capitalism (private land and private use) and communism (communal land and communal use). No one is disappropriated (just in exceptional cases and then only with proper payment of compensation) but communes are obliged to buy land whenever it is put up for sale. The communal land is (then) categorized for a certain type of use (for example building land) and then put up for auction – who ever bids highest gets to lease the land for 30 to 100 years (a Pacht can be inherited). The money is then either spent on the younger generation in the form of child-raising benefit or “education vouchers” (word sounds wrong) or alternatively distributed equally among the population (in the latter case people living on small properties would get out more money than they pay in for the tenure).

I don’t really know much about the health care system and land reform so in case I oversimplified or got something wrong please let me know by posting a comment!

In the afternoon we went over to Roti’s where we exploited her hospitality again, did our laundry (or had the machine do it for us) talked about Rapa and concretized our vélotoa-plans (vélo (fr.) = bike and toa (tah.) = warrior).

Final thoughts of the day: I really admire Maeva (the protagonist in the “Tahiti Virus”) …a change of heart: that’s what society really needs!

The Land reform: Communal land and private use - seems like a sensible “third way” - "To each the same but to each his own!". How can some things just be taken for granted and considered just? Newborns "arrive" on a land that is already allotted - we need a new sense of justice! And I definitely need to learn more than just about technology!

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