But we’ve already distributed a lot of wealth through elite privatization, so what’s left to hand out?The neoliberals claimed that government was getting in the way and that the state should sell its assets to the highest bidder and in doing so created the oligarchs that didn’t exist prior to that. Israel sold off its assets and created the oligarchs who didn’t exist 30 years ago – most assets used to belong to the state or to the Histadrut, the Jewish Agency, Jewish National Fund. Very little was in private hands.We can’t fix what has been done, but the state is today the greatest creator of wealth. Through regulation, over 55% of economic activity is by the state. The state owns lands, ports, airports and owns the regulatory power to create wealth.You have to get used to one idea that proponents of neoliberal capitalism don’t want to get used to, and that is that the state is the greatest creator of assets. Regulation is no longer a mere matter of regulating economic activity; it creates wealth.How would you distribute assets, then?For example, I am trying to promote a law for urban regeneration. [Biran sits on a committee on urban regeneration founded by former housing minister Ze’ev Boim.] Israel has some 2,100,000 apartments of which some 750,000 are in poor areas. My suggestion was to provide property rights to those buildings, which has happened; and secondly, to set up a committee that through affirmative action would provide extensive building rights to the residents and not to developers. If you have an apartment today in a shikun [tenement], it isn’t worth much; but if you were to give 500% building rights, then you would have created new wealth.So through such a regulatory act, you create assets. Regulation doesn’t just regulate, it creates enormous wealth, every day. It creates wealth for those who are connected politically. If you are connected, you get. If you’re not connected, you don’t get. What I am trying to explain is that through regulation you create wealth that has yet to be distributed. Band length, broadcast waves, that whole IT revolution that creates this new wealth is in the hands of the state, so it all depends on how you distribute it and to whom you distribute it.
So how would you distribute the kind of wealth generated through regulation?In the hands of companies where control is in the hands of all citizens of the state as shareholders.But if you hand out shares, isn’t there a danger of a repeat of what happened in Russia?In Russia there was corruption, but there doesn’t have to be corruption everywhere. The privatization process in Russia created a historic opportunity for the Russian people who suffered so much in World War II. The Russian people finally had a chance to emerge from a period of darkness and to have the assets transferred to their hands and not to the oligarchs. But corruption ate up everything, and that corruption did not have to happen. Nothing has to happen. There is no determinism; not everything comes from above – everything is in the hands of people.
What about Israel’s natural resources?I would distribute natural resources within the framework of social privatization. I say that even though I have a personal interest in the matter [Dor Alon, a company in which Biran is a major shareholder, has a 4% stake in the Tamar gas field.] On the one hand, there is a need to encourage entrepreneurship. But on the other hand, the part that belongs to the public should reach the public. I say give it to people so they can enjoy it now and not have to look to the next generations.There is nothing more hypocritical than talking about the next generation. I say make people wealthier, empower them, give them education. Children of families with educational opportunities are the next generation.This whole issue of the next generation is political demagoguery that doesn’t want to solve the social problems that are so acute here. Create work, create better education, take people out of pitiful housing, out of the poor neighborhoods. Instead of having 300 medications in the health basket, have 400; save children that can be saved. It’s a humanistic orientation that has no connection to Left or Right.Do you really believe it is possible to develop an egalitarian society, or a society of equal opportunity?I don’t believe in an egalitarian society, I don’t believe that everybody has to be equal. On the contrary, I believe in individualism. The idea of egalitarianism is utopian, futuristic and not one that can be realized, but I do believe that society can be just enough to provide each and every member of that society with the economic foundation that enables them to take advantage of the opportunities that the world provides.The world today is a world of opportunities...if you are educated to be an entrepreneur, to be creative, to think, to get ahead, then you can, so long as you have a basic economic foundation – and that is something that can be delivered by social privatization. That is the only way. Nationalization has failed, elite privatization has failed. Social privatization is the only way to give people a minimum.What is the essence of your message?The essence of what I am proposing as a solution to the existing situation is that we are now living in a world of new ownership, the ownership of ideas, which is a moral ownership created in the mind of man without exploiting anyone, without exploiting people, without exploiting nations, without force, without battalions. It is a very moral ownership and one that will continue to take a more and more significant role in the world economy. If you grant ownership rights for ideas, conduct a reform of intellectual property, and if you give meaning to Jefferson’s slogan of sweat equity where the capitalist invests capital but the worker invests sweat, then today there is idea equity, which is what creates wealth today.The state, as I have tried to explain, is the greatest creator of wealth through regulation. I am against redistribution of existing capital because that will lead to revolutions and the destruction of democracy as we have seen in the 20th century. But if you are talking about the distribution of wealth that has yet to be distributed, then you can create the democratization of wealth through affirmative action for the lower classes so that they can obtain education and compete...Some 85% of global wealth is in intangibles. Wealth today has changed completely from what it was 50 years ago, and because it is intangible, it is also infinite because ideas can be used infinitely. It is no longer the classic capitalism of mines and railways and sweatshops. The origin of wealth is in ideas, in the individual’s thought. It is an economy of ideas.You have proposed the establishment of an idea bank so that ideas and not only their expression, for example as patents, can be rewarded. How would that work? The fact that there is no ownership of ideas is absurd. It keeps in place the current situation where ideas can be appropriated without remuneration, and for those who have the means to register patents to create wealth from them. Secondly, you create a situation where the ideas of employees are appropriated by employers without giving ownership rights to the real inventors. If you don’t give people the opportunity to own their ideas, their inventions, their methods, then you are abandoning them to those battalions of attorneys working for the corporations who have the means to employ them.But if I have an idea, how do you plan to defend it?From the insemination of the egg to the birth of a beautiful child after nine months, there are many stages to go through. In the development of an idea, there are many stages; there is no need to start with a patent. What I have suggested is an idea bank – which wouldn’t be for every crazy person with an idea, but for ideas where it can be proven that there is an opportunity, not a proven idea but an opportunity to create wealth, one that has the potential to create some kind of technological or systemic innovation. So once an idea has been formulated, one that has the potential for something new, one that has potential for the creation of wealth, then it should be registered.One of the things that this would achieve is that it would be open to the public, and the public would be able to benefit from that idea. One of the main claims against giving copyright to ideas is that it would block the development of those ideas; but in fact, the situation would be exactly the opposite. The idea would be open to the public and thus to development, but registration would ensure that if someone else develops that idea and creates wealth, its inventor would have a part in that wealth.It would be very complicated to create the legal framework for something like that.Yes, it is very complicated, but were you to ask me to prepare a paper on how to do it, then within a year it could done down to the final detail because ideas can be defined. An idea is an idea because it is defined, because it is not fluid or abstract. An idea is something that can be defined, in philosophy, in logic, in math, in any scientific system. Anything that can be defined can be given a symbol, so a solution is possible.Another suggestion you have raised is a public market for private goods, a sort of guaranteed market for culture. Can you explain? The status of the creative classes in literature, in art, etc., is in crisis. That is why I have suggested a public market for private goods. There is a need to change the market; you cannot compare a market of goods to a market of ideas. If you see the state as the greatest creator of assets in this age of intangible assets, then let the state create this public market and support it. Just as someone can travel on Route 6 for a toll or can watch TV if he pays the license, then let people have access to every possible book, and by clicking on their choice, the most popular writers will get the most and the less popular writers less and everyone will get their share with an assured minimum.Isn’t that populism, paying by the common denominator?Of course it’s populist, but that’s the nature of democracy. Personally I am against populism. I feel it is one the great disasters of our age. For me there is nothing worse, nothing as dangerous, nothing as anticultural as the crowd.With all the accessibility to information that exists today, there is an opportunity not to have to follow the crowd; there is an opportunity for privatization of the individual, to “uncrowd” the crowd, to release the individual from the mass.How does the 2008 financial crash fit into your theory?The last economic crisis wasn’t a recession, it wasn’t cyclical; it was a crash, a depression. It was a structural fault in the American economy. An analysis of the situation shows that the US wasn’t suffering from a lack of services or goods, the problem was demand as a result of the fact that the American middle class over the course of 30 years lost what had been a central tenet of the American economy, namely that its income went up with the rise in productivity.It was a shared economy in which one would get a share not in wealth but in growth. During that time productivity went up by 90%, while wages hardly moved. To artificially keep up demand, credit was pumped into the market and when the time came to pay that credit back, there was no way to pay it back because wages hadn’t risen.The problem of American capitalism is not one of supply but one of demand. If you want to solve the problem of demand, then you have to create income for the middle classes. If you don’t generate income, then you won’t have demand, and the crisis will continue.