“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” – Winston Churchill
Churchill, an aristocrat, imperialist, racist, and militarist, was arguably part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Spoken like an aristocrat.
[Procedural note: since I may need to clarify some things, rather than leaving them entirely in the comments, I will make any edits or additions to the body of the text in this lovely shade of blue.]
Churchill’s quip annoys the hell out of me, because political philosophers have been offering up a variety of ideas for political systems for as long as there have been political philosophers and aristocrats to ignore them. We would also do well to remember that the Athenians killed Socrates because of his politics – religious “impiety” was the ostensible reason, but that impiety was more to do with Socrates’ support of aristocratic government instead of democracy. It’s impossible to assume that his great teacher’s death over political philosophy left Plato unaffected when he wrote The Republic – a sort of pre-refutation to Churchill – perhaps all Churchill could really say is something like “Post-enlightenment democratic republics are so adequate that political science runs on inertia and it makes us less willing to try other, potentially better, things.”
I’m going to go out on a limb, here, and offer my own idea for a political system, for the non-existent civilization of Badgeria. It’s going to be a shortish series that are a reboot of a political sketch I posted back when I used to write on the Fabius Maximus website. I don’t ask for a “generous reading” but I’d appreciate it if you could bear in mind that I know I am talking impracticalities, pie-in-the-sky stuff, and I am not offering a rigorous defense of the ideas. Plato’s Republic offers utopian ideas that are equally impractical: a philosopher king who’s obsessed with trolley-car problems and epistemology, and selfless guardians who give up everything because they’re good people. Indulge me, then, and offer me the same suspension of disbelief – maybe even more because I am far less worthy of it than Plato.
A Quick Tour of Badgeria
A thumbnail sketch of Badgeria is that it’s a direct democracy based on distribution of powers tied to sunset clauses. Instead of attempting separation of powers between branches of government, the government of Badgeria consists of different capabilities that are directly authorized by the people; every capability has a sunset provision so that, in principle, if a majority of the electorate disagree with the direction the overall government is taking, they can wait it out and watch it die. That is a trick I stole from the US’ two-party system’s budgetary games: I call it “government by passive-aggression.” It’s not such a crazy idea, if you think about it, because it answers Robert Paul Wolff’s question about autonomy: citizens can agree to let their autonomy be reduced by a government as long as they have a non-violent way of revoking their participation at any time. The rest of the structure of Badgeria is as a set of bodies that don’t govern at all, but exist only to organize public discussion around the tasks to be undertaken by the parts of government – the agencies – that actually do things. The intent of this arrangement is to make it harder for power to aggregate, or for politicians to lobby covertly; systems of government must be resistant to corruption and influence and that resistance can only be achieved through radical openness and a separation of powers between the people and the government. In Badgeria we recognize the iron laws of bureaucracy and oligarchy and try to head them off at the pass.
Let’s start with the foundational ideals of Badgeria. They are:
- Government exists to serve all of its people; the government is an emergent property of the will of all of the people.
- Government exists to maximize personal opportunity first and foremost, and also to protect the weaker citizens from the stronger, more numerous, or those that shout loudest. When a decision must be made between the needs of the collective versus the desires of the few, we will favor the few so long as no harm is being done.
- It is impossible to support human flourishing in a society where there is more than the small amount of naturally-occurring inequality. Once society has discharged its first duties (#1 and #2) its remaining duty is to do whatever it can to foster equality.
- There are many dangers in human experience where it is best to respond collectively: natural disasters, man-made disasters, and economic problems – government’s responsibility to its people is to coordinate efficient and effective response.
- There are many problems in human experience that are best to address collectively, therefore, it is government’s responsibility to provide for common services as well as the common good. This manifests itself in the form of standards and core services, e.g.: telecommunications, education, standardized roads, transportation systems, interchangeability of government-adopted technology, etc.
- A human being living outside of civilization is not fully human; when a person is born into a civilization, they are allowed to use its resources during their life-times, but individual ownership of property is a lie; society may choose to allocate a car, or a residence, or art-works to individual citizens but that person is serving as custodian for the resource on behalf of society – they are expected to take care of it, maintain it, and return it to society upon their death or when they otherwise no longer want it.
- Because the citizens of Badgeria are a collective, they are expected to understand that when they help their fellow citizens they are helping themselves by making a better, happier, safer collective. There is a designation, hoplite, that some citizens may aspire to – it combines the roles of national guard, emergency response patrol, disaster engineer, and street police. Being a hoplite confers no additional privileges, and comes mostly with additional responsibilities, though the government may deem it useful to equip or train hoplite citizens appropriately during their term of service. For example, a hoplite unit responsible for fire response might get a fire-truck, time off from other responsibilities(s) in order to train, and emergency gear. Per #6, such gear is owned by the collective, and the hoplite is expected to return it in good condition when they are done with it.
- Citizens may take upon themselves responsibilities that are above and beyond the basic duty of a citizen when this happens, a system of money exists in order to track and value citizens’ work. The basic duties of a citizen are simple: don’t cause trouble. Citizens that are meeting their basic duty get a basic stipend that is sufficient for a baseline standard of living. Naturally, citizens are expected to want more than that, so they are encouraged to use their time and energy wisely to take on responsibilities that either other citizens or the government may be willing to pay for. [Some citizens may choose to do nothing, or to play online games on the Internet, or to read books, or study their own navels to prevent belly-button lint. Being a full-time Omphalopsychite is a “career” in Badgeria. The bar for a “job” is very low.] The government’s Department of Human Resources serves as a clearing house for work projects ranging from the small (“pick up trash by the hour”) to the large (“be a brain surgeon”) and also carries projects for businesses that are looking for staff. The H.R. Department is also responsible for regulating the value of responsibilities within established ranges based on the educational requirements, physical requirements, hours, difficulty, etc., of a job. For example, the H.R. Department would not ever be likely to value a job such as “Corporate Senior Executive” with a high educational requirement and an 80-hr work week as more than twice as valuable than “University Professor” with a high educational requirement and a 40-hr work week.
- Raising a child is a tremendous responsibility, since a child is a citizen and has rights of its own that a child-raiser must navigate. Children are categorically not the property of a parent; the parents’ rights over a child are minimal and there is a bill of child’s rights indexed to age until maturity. For example, a child-raiser has no right to modify a child’s body or to fill its mind with nonsensical ideas like religion. Child-raising is a profession with educational and practical requirements, certification, and oversight. If someone unqualified to raise a child creates one, The H.R. Department will find a qualified child-raiser to raise the new citizen. Many citizens of Badgeria decide to have and raise a child, and reduce their other responsibilities and fall back to the basic stipend while they are taking the child-raising training and getting certified, before they start the child. Many others prefer to take advantage of the free contraceptives that are available from the Department of Wellness kiosks. While a child is a minor, the child-raiser is responsible for wisely spending the child’s basic stipend on the child’s well-being: food, clothing, supplies, room, etc. As the child begins to approach majority, the amount of its stipend the child can access gets shifted by increasing percentage so that eventually the teen-ager is spending ‘their own’ money on choosing their own clothes, cell phones, etc. Any child-raiser who redirects a child’s stipend has committed the serious crime of embezzlement.
Regarding point #3: a free-market advocate or someone who has been deeply indoctrinated by US anarcho-capitalism/pseudo-liberalism might say “centralized government is less efficient than free markets!” The Badgerian’s response is: it is government’s job to be as efficient as a free market, in certain areas, and we expect nothing less. Badgerians would point out that free markets are actually pretty inefficient, themselves, because they result in multiple implementations of parallel infrastructure, and encourage endless expansion of bureaucracy as a result of competition. Badgerians understand that free markets optimize for the best outcomes for the market-maker, and not necessarily the consumer.
Point #7 sets up the justification for Badgeria’s national defense and emergency response, which is a topic for another episode.
Point #6 is where we will spend the rest of this discussion; the structure of the rest of the government is a larger topic for another episode.
Life, Death and Taxes in Badgeria
Foundational principle #6 sets up the financial structure of Badgeria – citizens don’t “own” anything, though they can trade money for lifetime use of a resource, object, residence, or short-term use of a service. Upon the citizens’ death, everything they had the use of reverts to the Department of Logistics. “Everything” includes any money that the citizen may have piled up during their lifetime. In terms of older civilizations such as the United States of America, this could be described as “100% death tax.” Some citizens might build substantial wealth prior to their death; they can die secure in the knowledge that their accomplishments are being recycled into the collective.
A citizen’s child does not need to be provided with an inheritance because, as a citizen, they are subject to the bill of rights from childhood. A child-citizen gets a small stipend (e.g.: “an allowance”) that increases in steps as they age, until their stipend is equal to the basic stipend at the age of adulthood.
Education is provided for all citizens, through the Department of Education. At the age of majority, a citizen has three choices:
- Resign their citizenship. They get a free ride to the border.
- Continue their education; the Department of Education provides education for any citizen up through a PhD.
- Enter the work-force or start a business or career. [Or sit on the couch and play World of Warcraft all day. In which case, playing World of Warcraft would be the citizen’s “career”]
Did you know it was Ben Franklin who said that?
While still students, citizens may subsist on the basic stipend, or find additional work. Citizens that decide to enter the work-force or start a business are given “the grub stake” which is a one-time payment from the government that is intended to allow a new adult citizen to gear up for a career or business, or which they may save or invest. Most Badgerian citizens, naturally, don’t tend to pile up money – there is no need to have a cash cushion against events or medical crises – money in Badgeria circulates rapidly; many citizens refer to it as “recycling.” Citizens that choose to continue their education up to PhD or medical school do not get the grub stake; the presumption is that their education is already building value in their careers and they will not need a booster to get started.
Badgerian currency is negotiable only within Badgeria; citizens are only allowed to hold a small amount of foreign currency, and foreign exchange is controlled by the Department of the Treasury. Citizens attempting to “offshore” wealth, or to transfer it to children, are guilty of a serious crime – antisocial selfishness – which may result in a free ride to the border, or the Department of the Treasury nationalizing the money. Foreign commerce is not taxed on the Badgerian side, though (because of currency conversion) all transactions are cleared through the Department of Treasury’s Commerce branch.
The successful and wealthy Badgerians realize that their wealth is impermanent; there is no reason to accumulate endless amounts or to lay aside money to give their children an unfair head-start in life. In fact, attempts to give a child an unfair head-start are antisocial selfishness on the part of a parent – the implication being that their genetic legacy is more important than anyone else’s and their children ought to be promoted though they did nothing whatsoever to earn it. There have been incidents where Badgerian parents have tried tricks like starting businesses that will employ a child as a way of gathering inter-generational wealth. The Department of Logistics’ probate process includes some analysis of a deceased person’s wealth, and appropriate scrutiny is applied; such attempts are considered dishonorable and antisocial, and most people would be very unhappy if a parent did something that would set them up as suspicious to their peers. As they age and begin to feel that they are heading into their retirement years, wealthy Badgerians often start businesses or foundations to dispense with some of their wealth. The Department of the Treasury has strict guidelines for the sort of corporate structures that qualify as “survivable entities” that may continue past the founders’ death. Survivable entities may be anything from a small business that its founder wishes to survive, to a large corporation or a service organization. The key criteria for survivable entities are that they do not exist simply to accumulate wealth, they must have some socially valuable purpose even if it’s only that it creates jobs. Survivable entities must do their hiring through the H.R. Department, in order to ensure that they are offering fair-market compensation and are hiring fairly. Survivable entities would, depending on the type (charitable foundation, or for-profit corporation) be subject to regulation and taxes – similarly to how charitable foundations in 21st century USA are required to disburse a percentage of their assets; there might also be a nominal corporate tax for for-profit corporations (because otherwise the for-profit corporations would simply attempt to grow infinitely large, forever).
To tune the Badgerian budget it might be necessary to have spot-taxes on certain luxuries, or specific excise taxes to fund major projects. Generally, however, the principle is that enough money will be recycled when people die, to fund the government. I don’t know how to estimate whether such a system would actually work, though I’ve tried. For example, the total wealth held by all Americans in 2000 was $44tn. Something like 900,000 Americans die every year; presumably they’re going to fall on a curve of wealth that approximately matches the population, so there would be 900 1%-ers dying every year, and the 1% hold 34% of the wealth. Roughly, the numbers look workable to me. I think that any necessary tuning could be accomplished with a nominal tax on all survivable entities – since survivable entities never “die”, it seems reasonable that they would be expected to return a percentage of their accumulated wealth to society, annually. Depending on the size of Badgeria’s economy that wouldn’t be a particularly large amount. One of the other ways that Badgeria’s economy is shock-resistant is by not spending 10% or more of its wealth on military.
Next up, we will look at the structure of Badgerian legislature; it’s deliberately a bit convoluted. After that, we’ll talk about how national and civil defense works, and the role of the hoplites.
The nuclear family, a pernicious myth.
The idea of a 100% death tax came to me after a really unpleasant dinner conversation. I was at a conference in New York and went to the speakers’ dinner (as one must) and wound up seated next to a self-described “social and fiscal conservative” who began making some disparaging remarks about the “welfare state.” Like any proper trout, I rose to that fly, and as he drank more, the conversation began to pull in some of the surrounding diners – soon he was calling me “red baby” and other things that I suppose he imagined were insults. I messed with his head a little bit by asking him how having a massive military/industrial complex that was centrally managed by the Department of Defense was any different from worst-case socialist central planning, and then started asking him why he was against welfare. I was being quite honest – the idea of hating the poor because of their situation has always made no sense to me – and, since he was getting quite drunk and aggressive, I thought it’d give him a good chance to sermonize from the mount for a bit. That was when things got really interesting: he went full-on class war, saying something like:
What I don’t want is to have my hard-earned money go to some ‘single mom’ who has had 6 kids by 8 different men, and who’s on welfare and is using her welfare money to drive a mercedes. She’s not earning the money, she’s just asking for a handout.
No kidding, he really said that. Of course, I immediately pointed out that he didn’t appear to understand how poverty works; nobody who’s unemployed and is trying to raise 6 kids is having a good time, unless they’re wealthy and can afford the logistics to make that work. I also pointed out that he was promoting an unpleasant and ignorant stereotype. At that point he started waving his fist around and some of the others suggested he calm down. So I asked him:
If I understand correctly, then, your complaint is that you want to control how your money is spent?
What would you do with it? What great purpose do you have for your money that you can’t afford to help someone out?
He replied:
I’d use it so my kids could go to a good college, and I could buy them a car or something when they graduate.
And I said,
Fair enough, but what did your kids do to earn the money? Are you just giving them a handout? Shouldn’t they work for it?
I couldn’t get that conversation out of my mind (mostly because it was pretty unpleasant) and I got to thinking that one of the great reservoirs of inequality is inter-generational wealth transfer. Any society that wants to achieve some kind of equality must break inter-generational wealth – but also must give every child an equal start. That means that private education (one way of transferring inter-generational advantage) must not be an option. That means that employment opportunity must be managed by the government. Those three realizations are the pillars of Badgeria’s egalitarianism.
Does human nature make it impossible for parents to be willing to have children that they don’t raise? I believe that’s the hardest part of implementing Badgerian society – but I don’t think it’s that huge a deal. For one thing, parenting, as something socially valuable, has been “outsourced” in many societies. 33% of American preschoolers are raised by a non-relative (day care) versus 44% by a relative. Perhaps making child-raising a professionalized art-form and career would do the trick. My observation is that my drunken dinner companion’s emphasis on “my kids” is empty posturing; the American “nuclear family” is a myth that only held sway for a brief while in the 1950s – prior to that, and for all world history going forward, it was quite common for children to be orphaned or raised outside of a family unit. Consider the constant disruptions to family units from wars, plagues, and famines, and atomic families have been historically rare.
I’m not going to ask you to be gentle, but – pulling these sort of ideas together into a whole picture is a challenge. I’m sure I’ve missed things. It’s an interesting game, playing armchair general with civilizations – I understand why Plato attempted it, though I can’t hope to play at the level he did.
The Fabius Maximus website: interesting stuff, but the site’s moderator veers into toxic skepticism – JAQing about global warming and I eventually became uncomfortable with being associated with conspiracy mongering and asked that all my stuff be removed.
I don’t have big objections to #6; I’ll reserve that for parts of #9.
Let’s talk about the grub-stake for a moment. Do I understand correctly that the maximum grub-stake is for the proposed equivalent of a high-school graduating senior who wants to start a new business, and this gradually reduces down until a terminal degree is thought to replace it completely?
This may be a fair allocation, but it strikes me as also being an anti-progressive one. In this dimension, 18-yos are not generally noted for maturity or managerial skills. There are exceptions, and perhaps more exceptions in Badgerian high-school graduates, but it does not seem likely to produce much success.
On the other hand, I can see that most this-Earth grad students aren’t well versed in managerial skills; they have usually (but not always) developed better self-discipline and time management skills. Do they necessarily do better at producing progress? I recognize that I seem to have suddenly subscribed to a Whiggish mindset.
Perhaps a better solution would be to make a business-founding grant available to any citizen of any age who successfully applies, with an application process that rejects the lowest-quality plans. Since individual profit is not the highest goal of Badgeria, the business plan might be a non-profit organization, in which case the specific societal objectives need to be acceptable.
In our current society, what percent of children are conceived intentionally, and what percent incidentally, even if the latter is never admitted? I fear that too many children would be conceived incidentally, despite free and open promotion of contraception options. Maybe I’m not thinking big enough about free Norplant ideas for both men and women.
Presumably there would be both K-12 and adult classes in parenting, and those who do ok and pass various tests would get to keep their kids. If parents started taking this seriously when they conceive, if it took them 9 or 15 months to qualify, presumably they could then get their offspring back to raise. But who sets the cutoff point? After how many years does a kid get to stay with their adoptive parents vs the biological late-qualifiers?
These questions are not necessarily deal breakers, but they could be contentious until society felt it had reached a consensus. Thanks for laying out an interesting scenario.
Just preliminary thoughts …
I am assuming, although I don’t think you specifically say so, that those undertaking parenting whether of their own or others’ children get the reasonable costs of that for food, clothes, learning to use ones leaisure time etc covered by the State? One of the things that I think is not really done or certainly not done well in any society I know well is the taking account of the various rates of development to adulthood. We know that one of the things that happens during teenage is that the brain is essentially rewired, that while this process goes relatively smoothly for some it has more severe affects for others eg affecting their ability to concentrate in school and for a few it can have devastating effects even though those teenagers can end up as reponsible adults eg if they have committed imprisonable crimes while under the influence of the rewiring. So I would like to see some account take of this, that would include real opportunities to re-enter education when older and rather than an age of majority the demonstration of maturity.
At the other end of life I think you would need the equivilent to the qulifications for the parenting role for caring for older people that need various levels of help to live reasonable satisfactory lives. I also think that the ability to have assistence to end ones life when one wants to is absolutely essential.
Badgerian foundational ideal 3, as presently posted, seems a bit incomplete.
… that impiety was more to do with Socrates’ support of aristocratic government instead of democracy.
That support, at least per I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates, went to Spartan aristocrats: quite a sore point among the Athenian demos at that post-Peloponnesian-War period.
( *cowers in anticipation of cartomancer’s magisterial corrections* )
Ideal #3 looks like it is missing some text. The sentence is not complete.
Aha, Pierce R. Butler beat me to it!
jazzlet@#3:
I am assuming, although I don’t think you specifically say so, that those undertaking parenting whether of their own or others’ children get the reasonable costs of that for food, clothes, learning to use ones leisure time etc covered by the State?
Ah, that’s a hole I forgot to cover! (I dreaded posting this piece because I knew I would forget stuff)
While a child is a minor, the child-raiser is responsible for spending the child’s stipend on the child. As the child gets older and starts getting control over their stipend, the child-raiser gets less. The way this would usually work out is, for example, a 13 year-old citizen might begin purchasing their own choice of clothes using their percentage of their stipend. The intent, much like an “allowance” is to give a child an opportunity to learn how to budget and spend money.
There have been instances of people who became child-raisers as a profit-center. Since the child’s stipend is supposed to be spent on the child, it is a serious crime (embezzlement) for a child-raiser to spend the child’s stipend on themselves. There is a larger topic: crime and punishment – which I will eventually address in a posting about the hoplite system and how justice works in Badgeria.
One of the things that I think is not really done or certainly not done well in any society I know well is the taking account of the various rates of development to adulthood. […] So I would like to see some account take of this, that would include real opportunities to re-enter education when older and rather than an age of majority the demonstration of maturity.
Very good point. I know this is going to sound slightly like a dodge but “That’s the Department of Education’s Job” and it depends on how the D.Edu is structured. That brings in the whole question of how “Continuing Projects” work in Badgeria – a “Continuing Project” being fairly analogous to what we could call a “Government Agency” in the US or UK. In Badgeria, continuing projects fill that role but function quite differently. Not to spoiler myself, but, the people have considerable control over how a continuing project executes its objectives and if the people felt that the D.Edu needed to have a metrics-based notion of majority, that’s how it would be.
As I write that, I realize that sounds very squishy and dodgy but “squishy” is a key attribute of Badgerian bureaucracy. I look forward to explaining it.
Starting off very squishy and ending up somewhat squishy is inevitable in designs that involve people, I’d have far more problems if you started off with too many fixed points eg ‘if everyone was just educated the way I think they should be, they would all agree with me’ and I am sure you can all insert your own choice of ideologue that you have encountered spouting that little smear of slug slime
I wonder what would happen when a young child gets sick. Ideal #9 states that child-raisers do not have the right to modify their child’s body, but children cannot themselves consent to medical procedures until they’re old enough to understand them. Since just letting children die because they can’t give consent yet seems rather abhorrent, someone should be able to provide it in their place. How would you handle this? Do you give this authority to the child-raisers, or do you put it in the hands of medical professionals, or someone else? And at what age should this authority be given back to the child itself?
Bruce@#2:
Presumably there would be both K-12 and adult classes in parenting, and those who do ok and pass various tests would get to keep their kids. If parents started taking this seriously when they conceive, if it took them 9 or 15 months to qualify, presumably they could then get their offspring back to raise.
Yes, the Department of Education would offer classes in child-raising, and anyone who wished to raise a child would need to graduate with a passing score. Usually, when Badgerian parents-to-be welcome a child they are bringing into the world, some of them take leave of absence and spend the 9 months getting their child-raising certificate.
In Badgeria there is no requirement that children be raised by a couple; collective families with internal division of labor are allowed. In fact, collective families showed themselves to be so effective that there was a mild back-lash from “traditional families” that felt they were socially disadvantaged. After extensive public debate, the “traditional families” were told to “suck it up.”
If parents started taking this seriously when they conceive, if it took them 9 or 15 months to qualify, presumably they could then get their offspring back to raise. But who sets the cutoff point? After how many years does a kid get to stay with their adoptive parents vs the biological late-qualifiers?
This is going to sound a bit dodgy but, “who sets the cutoff point” would be either the Department of Human Resources, or the Department of Education, or possibly another department, depending on the legislative structures that evolved to govern such things. That answer will make more sense when I describe how continuing projects/government agencies work.
One of the problems in describing a government is that, when you get going on it, you discover that governments are inherently a circular while: loop. That’s actually a good thing but it means that you have to do a bit of hand-waving.
I would assume that if someone wanted to be a child-raiser and couldn’t pass the test, the Department of Human Resources would identify a child-raiser who wanted to raise a child and who was qualified to do so. It’s a crucial matter of child’s rights that no child be raised by an incompetent! That gives the child a bad start in life, because of the want-to-be parent’s selfishness – completely unacceptable.
The child-raising classes are not difficult; they cover basic things like: child-safing one’s home, identifying children’s medical problems, first aid, conflict resolution, the child’s bill of rights, and all that sort of “teach your child not to put beans up its nose” kind of stuff. There is a special unit on “a child’s view of civics” which is a way of explaining how Badgerian society works to a young member.
they could be contentious until society felt it had reached a consensus
Absolutely agreed. An unspoken but underlying motive in Badgerian child-raising and the children’s bill of rights is to make sure that parents want children, and don’t bother having them if they don’t want them. But in the event that a child turns out to be too much for a parent to handle, or any child-raiser finds they do not wish or are not able to raise a child, the Department of Human Resources is responsible for finding child-raisers who want to raise children. Embedded in this set of principles is what people in the USA might call “adoption” – the intent is that there’s no social stigma attached to having a child one does not wish to raise (although, Badgerians would give someone the hairy eyeball if they started talking nonsense about how contraception was bad, or abortion was a sin. A Badgerian’s response to such a person would be to say “you’re clearly not qualified to be a child-raiser, with those weird ideas you’ve got.”)
Part of where these ideas come from is my perspective on the myth of the “atomic family.” Through most of human history, it was not at all uncommon for a child’s mother to die in childbirth and the child to be raised by someone else – or for daddy to go off to the wars and never come back. The mythical “atomic family” as worshipped by late 20th century Americans is a class construct that amounts to fetishization of British Imperial Victorian child-raising practices. Even while Britain and America built this edifice of presumed childish innocence and the importance of having parents, their actual practices gave it the lie: in upper class British families children were largely ignored by parents and raised by professional child-raisers (“nannies”) While late 20th century Americans made a big deal about child-raising, the middle and upper class massively resorted to collective child-raising (“day care centers”). The Badgerians see all that as nonsense and lies and don’t assign much weight to it at all.
I am interested that child-raising is such an important point!
I’ll confess that I didn’t go into a lot of detail about it because I’m personally pretty averse to children. Most Badgerian males who feel as I do get a vasectomy, like I did.
What I’m trying to do with the child-raising system of Badgeria is to remove the down-side or up-side of having kids. The Badgerian assumption is that is there’s no down-side or up-side then people will only have kids if they really want to. And the assumption is “if they really want to” they’ll take it more seriously than they would a hobby; Badgerian society gives would-be child-raisers plenty of opportunity to learn what they need to know, and provides a financial cushion to protect the children. Naturally there have been incidents of doting parents who spoil children by giving them too much, etc. At a certain point it’s possible that someone might lodge a complaint with Human Resources.
jazzlet@#8:
if you started off with too many fixed points eg ‘if everyone was just educated the way I think they should be, they would all agree with me’
I am trying to avoid Plato’s heart-breaking mistake in his utopia: assuming that having a philosopher in charge would just make everything, you know, wise.
As I continue this series, I’m sure you all will collectively rake my ideas over the coals. That’s the purpose of this game.
Dauphni@#9:
I wonder what would happen when a young child gets sick. Ideal #9 states that child-raisers do not have the right to modify their child’s body, but children cannot themselves consent to medical procedures until they’re old enough to understand them. Since just letting children die because they can’t give consent yet seems rather abhorrent, someone should be able to provide it in their place. How would you handle this?
The child-raiser has absolute responsibility for the child’s health and well-being while the child is under their care. The child also has a set of rights that include bodily autonomy. These two agendas are deliberately set at cross-purposes, yet kept (mostly) vague. So, here’s how it works: a child shows signs of appendicitis and the child-raiser (having studied, during their certification program) recognizes that extreme abdominal pain in a child is an emergency, and takes the child to the ER. The doctors examine the child and recommend an appendectomy. The child-raiser approves the surgery. There is no conflict here between the child-raiser’s responsibilities and the child’s rights because a) it is a medical emergency b) a medical professional recommended the procedure c) it will cure the child. Here’s another scenario: a child-raiser takes a 4 year-old child to a tattooist and requests that the tattooist ink “Death before dishonor” on the child’s arm. The tattooist asks the child-raiser to leave their place of doing business and calls a hoplite, who will call Department of Human resources and investigate the child-raiser’s competence, make sure they are certified, etc.
Pierce R. Butler@#4 and Sunday Afternoon@#5:
Fixed. I’m not sure what happened there.
“The founding archons of Badgerian society appear to have lost the thread, early in their founding principles. Philosophers still argue as to whether this was a deliberate ambiguity, or the results of a cut/paste error in WordPress.”
A thumbnail sketch of Badgeria is that it’s a direct democracy
A direct democracy means that people would have to vote frequently. I presume they would vote digitally (via something similar to Internet), because it’s not convenient to go to polling stations every week. I have been wondering about direct democracy as a computer security problem. Some countries have already attempted to make systems where people can vote in elections online from their homes. Computer security experts concluded this to be a bad idea and suggested that countries stick with paper ballots. They found plenty of vulnerabilities that allowed hackers to change voting results. This is why I have been wondering whether it is even possible to create hacker proof voting software for a direct democracy.
society may choose to allocate a car, or a residence, or art-works to individual citizens but that person is serving as custodian for the resource on behalf of society – they are expected to take care of it, maintain it, and return it to society upon their death or when they otherwise no longer want it.
How will these cars and houses be allocated? In USSR it was impossible to buy an apartment. Instead government officials gave you one for free. You went to the responsible government agency and they signed you up for the apartment queue. Then you could spend many decades waiting for the promised apartment. Of course you never got one. The real way how to get an apartment was different. There were two options: 1) become friends with somebody who has a high position within the party, this friend will get an apartment for you; 2) give a bribe to a government official who manages the apartment queue department, then this official will give you an apartment. Sounds great, right? Corruption and exchange of favors was how USSR citizens got everything. Any fool who didn’t want to give bribes, exchange favors and make friends with party members in high positions was bound to have a very miserable life.
When state owns stuff and gives people the right to temporarily use it, it quickly turns out that everybody wants the most desirable apartment and the best car. Unless you can come up with a foolproof distribution system, you can expect immense corruption.
There’s also another problem with “they are expected to take care of it, maintain it.” People neglect to take care of stuff they don’t own. Here where I live, rotting windows and leaking roofs were a constant problem in homes where people didn’t own their apartments. Why bother regularly painting wooden windows if you don’t own the home anyway? Why bother fixing the leaking roof? In USSR they had no building inspectors to punish people for neglecting to take care of the collective property. In Badgeria you’ll need a lot of inspectors regularly checking how people maintain their stuff. But you can still expect people to do only the absolute minimum of mandated care and maintenance. Let’s assume I broke something in my home. If I owned the home, I’d carefully repair it with the best quality materials. After all, it’s my stuff and I’m working for myself. If I didn’t own the home, I’d go for the fastest and cheapest option possible. Why care about durability, longevity and quality, when it’s somebody else’s stuff?
antisocial selfishness – which may result in a free ride to the border
I am selfish and lazy. I believe that majority of humans are inherently selfish and lazy (at least to some degree). You cannot just outlaw selfishness. And every political system, which fails to take human selfishness into consideration, is bound to fail. If you make a political system that, in order to function, requires citizens to be not selfish and not lazy, well, guess what will happen with your political system (hint: it will fail). This was a serious problem with USSR. A capitalist farmer is motivated to work hard, because harder work means larger harvest means more money earned. In USSR there wasn’t much correlation between how hard you worked and how much you earned. The result was that people did the absolute minimum work necessary. In her youth my mother had to weed kolkhoz crop fields. While working there she observed that most other people worked incredibly slowly. They were almost sleeping on those fields they were supposed to weed. Workers were required to spend a fixed amount of days weeding kolkhoz fields, so they just sat there for the required amount of time. Why bother working hard if you cannot keep the harvest? People just don’t care that much about their country and other citizens who will be consuming the harvest.
This is a big problem with all collectivist approaches. There is one single pot. All citizens put their work into the single pot and afterwards they take their share of goods out from the pot. Each person attempts to put into the pot as little of their work as possible. And they attempt to take out from the pot as much goods as possible. USSR attempted to solve the problem with medals for work heroes. The worker who mined the largest amount of coal got a medal. The kolkhoz, which produced most food, got a medal. The approach didn’t work. It turned out people didn’t care about medals enough to bother working hard.
Collectivism can work well on a small scale. The single pot approach works perfectly fine with families. It also works well for small groups of people who live in the same place and know each other. People personally know others, thus they are willing to share and contribute to their friends’ wellbeing. I don’t think that the approach can work on a state scale though. Communists certainly failed with this. I doubt whether it could be possible to make it work.
Being a hoplite confers no additional privileges, and comes mostly with additional responsibilities
That means very few people will volunteer, you might not get enough people willing to do the work. I certainly wouldn’t volunteer if there was no additional money or privileges.
Generally, however, the principle is that enough money will be recycled when people die, to fund the government. I don’t know how to estimate whether such a system would actually work, though I’ve tried. For example, the total wealth held by all Americans in 2000 was $44tn. Something like 900,000 Americans die every year; presumably they’re going to fall on a curve of wealth that approximately matches the population, so there would be 900 1%-ers dying every year, and the 1% hold 34% of the wealth. Roughly, the numbers look workable to me.
You can forget this one. If I was living in Badgeria, I wouldn’t bother saving money in the first place. The reason why I’m currently saving money is because I fear emergencies — medical problems, accidents, periods of unemployment. This motivation wouldn’t exist in Badgeria. Another reason why people save money is for their kids’ inheritance. Again, people wouldn’t save for this reason either. Let’s assume I live in Badgeria. At some point a doctor announces that I have cancer, I’ll die in a year. I have accidentally accumulated some money savings. In such a situation I would spend the last year of my life paying for luxury entertainment until I have wiped out all of my savings. Why should I leave any money to the state instead? If I cannot decide what will happen with my money upon retirement (I cannot take it with me in the grave), then I’d better just spend it all and have some luxurious fun while I’m still alive. I’d say that the only people paying death taxes in Badgeria will be those who died in car crashes or other unpredictable accidents. The death tax revenue will be pretty small and not enough to support the welfare state you are proposing.
There are many things I like about your proposal. I support the idea of a welfare state and guaranteed minimum income. I like the idea that parents cannot mess with their children’s bodies (intersex babies having their genitals changed by surgeons, circumcision) or minds (religious indoctrination). Equal chances in life for all children sound great too.
Yet for some other ideas I have the feeling that they might not work in real life. I have a pretty grim view about humans, I don’t believe that it’s possible to get rid of selfishness simply by educating (indoctrinating) people to care about others.
Part of the reason I’m interested in not so much specifically child raising but care requirements is my own experience with family elders and the care they didn’t get to keep them in the family home where they wanted to be compared to the care they got in residential homes. The care recieved in the home was iffy in several different ways, some repeating over different comanies and different elders, some unique; the care in the residential homes varied from iffy to excellent and was not related to how much it cost.
The same goes regarding my personal experience of education and my observations of others experiences. I spent a lot of my childhood ‘with my head in the clouds’ or my nose in a story and so missed a lot of what was said both at home and at school. This was partly protection against my large family, my way of having time to follow interesting thoughts, but it was a very effective technique, my housemates in one house I shared in university had a game where they would start to talk about me while I was reading, I wouldn’t notice so they’d move on to talking about me using my name and I still wouldn’t notice until someone raised their voice when mentioning my name or touched me to get my attention. The end result of this is that I spent a lot of time not know what was going on and while I did get to university I did not do as well in school or at university as I could have done because I wasn’t really there a lot of the time. I would have liked a real chance to do some of that education over again when I could have benefited from it and when me doing better would have also resulted in someone better able to contribute to society.
Ieva Skrebele@#15:
A direct democracy means that people would have to vote frequently. I presume they would vote digitally (via something similar to Internet), because it’s not convenient to go to polling stations every week. I have been wondering about direct democracy as a computer security problem.
I’ll get to that, so let me table it for now.
The whole Badgeria exercise started picking up steam when I was pondering how direct democracies might work.
How will these cars and houses be allocated?
You “buy” them with money. During the individual’s life-time they can think of it as “owning” the house or the car, but it returns to society upon their death.
So Badgeria uses money as a means of regulated social exchange for goods and services (barter economy is a pain in the ass and would devolve down to a scarcity/value economy anyway, i.e.: something would be “money” even if it was just Nuka-Cola bottle caps)
Why bother regularly painting wooden windows if you don’t own the home anyway?
For all intents and purposes, you do. Why would anyone want to live in a run-down dump instead of doing some basic repairs? Remember, Badgeria is an “ownership” society – people would save and work and allocate their money to buy the car or house or whatever that they wanted. The sunk cost fallacy is a pretty reliable way of getting people to maintain things.
It’s always possible to say: “but, there are going to be anti-social people” but that doesn’t mean the entire society won’t work. There are anti-social people all over the place, all the time, right now. I’m not proposing to solve the problem of anti-social people.
You can forget this one. If I was living in Badgeria, I wouldn’t bother saving money in the first place. The reason why I’m currently saving money is because I fear emergencies — medical problems, accidents, periods of unemployment. This motivation wouldn’t exist in Badgeria.
That’s not a bug, that’s a feature! See, here’s how it works: there’d be people who chose to just go “whatever” and spend everything they get, or not work at all and subsist on the basic income. But their money would be immediately going back into circulation. Most of those people wouldn’t matter much – they don’t contribute much to society nor do they take much. Where it matters is the rich people. There would still be rich people: entrepreneurs, gamblers, or just people who get lucky – and they would have no incentive to die with a pile of money, either. So: they spend it. Good, the money is back in circulation! Unlike in a late-stage capitalist civilization, you don’t have rich people dying with great big bags of money, they buy lamborBadgeris and Badgercaine and champagne imported from France. All that creates jobs. I mean, actually creates jobs not “creates jobs” like republican tax cuts. Someone would be building mansions and lamborBadgeris and growing coca plants and squeezing grapes and all that. And some of the rich would still die and leave behind big accumulated stockpiles – that’s the nature of wealth, people who are concerned with getting rich will still behave that way. But, so what? The government has a multi-million-dollar mansion to sell, instead of a multi-million-dollar bank balance to reallocate. (This would also tend to do a sort of price control on luxury items, since the government would be liquidating those lamborBadgeris at auction.)
There would still be plenty of opportunity to get rich, and lead a high life of decadence and luxury, for those that wanted to enjoy grabbing for the brass ring. In fact, there’d be no penalty for failure, so why not be an entrepreneur? The only thing that changes is that someone doesn’t get to amass a bunch of money and give their worthless frogspawn an unfair head-start over other children, like Donald Trump Junior.
The death tax revenue will be pretty small and not enough to support the welfare state you are proposing.
Given that everyone dies, the entire economy gets recycled every generation; I don’t see how you can possibly say that there’s not enough to support the welfare state. Besides, it’s not a “welfare state” – there’s a strong social safety net but there’s plenty of reasons for people to get motivated to succeed, make a lot of money, and live a life of luxury and decadence.
You “buy” them with money. During the individual’s life-time they can think of it as “owning” the house or the car, but it returns to society upon their death.
So basically people own all their stuff (that includes buying and reselling it), it’s just that they lose it upon death (a.k.a. a 100% death tax). You saying that “individual ownership of property is a lie” made me misunderstand that point.
For all intents and purposes, you do. Why would anyone want to live in a run-down dump instead of doing some basic repairs?
If there is no resale value for the home, then that’s exactly what many people do. That’s exactly what happened with the home I currently own. When my family bought it, former tenants had caused plenty of neglect related damage. For example, windows were very rotten. And I got the “joy” of sanding off thick layers of rotten wood and replacing whole fragments of the window frames.
Given that everyone dies, the entire economy gets recycled every generation; I don’t see how you can possibly say that there’s not enough to support the welfare state. Besides, it’s not a “welfare state” – there’s a strong social safety net but there’s plenty of reasons for people to get motivated to succeed, make a lot of money, and live a life of luxury and decadence.
Are you sure the math adds up? Where I live people pay over 50% income tax. Then there’s the 21% sales tax. And the property tax and a bunch of other smaller taxes. I’m paying in taxes over 60% of all the money I earn. In other words: the state gets in taxes over 60% of all the money I have earned during my lifetime. For your death tax to work and generate the same amount of tax revenue, at the moment of death I should leave an inheritance that is worth at least 60% of all the money I have earned during my lifetime. And that’s in a state, which actively discourages people from saving money. This means I won’t leave any large sums of cash. I’ll probably leave some real estate (my home), but I’m pretty certain that my home isn’t worth 60% of all the money I have earned during my lifetime. People will also likely leave some used cars, furniture, household items and so on, but I doubt that all the stuff they leave to the state after death will be that expensive.
The state where I live offers significantly more social welfare than USA (for example, I got free university education and my healthcare costs and heavily subsidized by the state). Still, my state isn’t giving anybody guaranteed minimum income and paying for some other stuff Badgeria is supposed to provide. That means that Badgeria, in order to pay for all the stuff you wish your state to provide, will need to collect tax revenue that is even larger than what is currently collected in my country. I suspect a problem here.
Ieva Skrebele @18
But the former tenants of the house your family bought were tenants, not owners, big difference and why in the UK at least landlords are responsible for the maintenance of the properties they own while tenants stick to decoratiing and furnishing.
jazzlet @#20
But the former tenants of the house your family bought were tenants, not owners, big difference and why in the UK at least landlords are responsible for the maintenance of the properties they own while tenants stick to decoratiing and furnishing.
I used the word “tenants” because that’s the only word I could think of. Before I bought my home, the home was owned by USSR state. The “tenants” got a right to live there for free. USSR state wasn’t checking how often these tenants painted the windows, nor did the state check anything else. Tenants were living in the house temporarily, they knew that they didn’t own the place, they knew that at some point in future they will simply be ordered to pack their stuff and leave. Thus the tenants didn’t give a damn about maintenance repairs. In fact, the day they left they took with them all the doorknobs and copper water pipes (to sell as scrap metal). This is the degree of neglect you get from people who don’t own the stuff they use. They don’t give a damn about regular maintenance. Which was my point: the moment you abolish property rights, people stop caring about the stuff they use. Which is why I believe that property rights are essential for any successful political system. Communists believed that abolishing property rights will lead to good consequences, but it didn’t work that way.
I brought up this point, because I misunderstood Marcus’ words that “individual ownership of property is a lie; society may choose to allocate a car, or a residence, or art-works to individual citizens but that person is serving as custodian for the resource on behalf of society.” If people only lose their property upon death, then such a system would probably work just fine. People still care for their stuff while they are still alive. But actually abolishing property rights is a really problematic idea.
I’m not at all convinced that this is universally true. I rent an allotment garden from my local council, where I grow fruit and vegetables. I feel a great sense of responsibility to care for, maintain, and improve that plot of ground, so that it will continue to be productive and in good order long after my time on it is over. I have invested a significant amount of money (not to mention time and effort) into it, even though it is not mine. I have completely replaced the shed, and spent a small fortune on the greenhouse, even though neither of these structures are really “mine”. And I am not in any way unusual in this: the entire British allotment movement relies entirely on these attitudes.
People’s attitudes to the things and resources they use are much more complicated than the simple question of ownership.
The converse is not universally true either: I’ve seen plenty of people completely ruin perfectly good things that they do own from sheer lack of care and maintenance. Just look at the state of most people’s shoes!
Marcus wrote:
Following the discussion in the comments, the phrasing of this also led me down the wrong path of understanding.
Marcus also wrote, in response to Ieva Skrebele:
and earlier:
I think we need some input from someone with actuarial skills & understanding on the consequences of the 100% tax proposal. That is not me.
My take on it agrees with Ieva that once your feature takes effect, the resources available to Badgeria will be vastly reduced from this estimate. Badgeria will need a different mechanism for income. What should it be?
I keep thinking back to the Star Trek canon where “money” has been abolished, yet they are still able to create things of immense value (and break the laws of physics while doing so!). What is the mechanism to encourage enough people to do good things for each other that such (fictional, I know, but so is Badgeria) good outcomes are the main result?
Sunday Afternoon a lot of it comes down to the kind of society you create and the social pressure it exerts upon people. I think one essential point about this is that it needs to be done in comparitvely small units, but look at eg the pressure to maintain ones frontage whether yard in the US or garden in the UK in many areas.
No option for just fucking off? Do we absolutely need to be doing something useful to the rest of society beyond not getting in trouble? Can we just proclaim ourselves to be artists, gather the mincome and occasionally show our collection of Mrs. Potato Head sculptures to the HR dept.? What shall we do with wandering priests of Sithrak?
We also should avoid having the ‘priveledge’ of a hoplite being the ability to bust heads or cause trouble. I would suggest double punishment for any offense that is derived from abusing a position of community trust.
sillybill@#26:
No option for just fucking off? Do we absolutely need to be doing something useful to the rest of society beyond not getting in trouble?
I will clarify that. Doing whatever you like, as long as it’s not causing trouble, is a “career” in Badgeria.
There are Badgerian citizens that have decided to complete every side-quest and collect every object in the entire Final Fantasy canon. This is considered “a career” – and, since those citizens are usually pursuing that while on the basic subsidy, technically it’s a “government sponsored career as a gamer.” The Human Resources Department doesn’t carry a lot of job listings for that career, however. There are a great number of Badgerian citizens whose business cards (if they bother to have one) read “Artist.”
One of the points that, to my surprise, nobody has commented upon, is that the Badgerian system is designed to foster entrepreneurship by providing a safety net from which people can experiment with careers however they want. Since there is no income tax or employment taxes, the whole notion of a government-protected corporation is unnecessary: if some Badgerian wants to start making and selling home-made soap online, they can go right ahead and do so. If they make money, they pocket the money. If their business fails, they are still on the subsidy. It’s important to understand that the American (and to a lesser degree most 21st C countries) corporate structures are a way of keeping small entrepreneurs out of the market: you need a substantial investment just to deal with the paper-work, but more importantly, governments’ tax systems implicitly favor larger businesses. In the US that’s a process that Alexander Hamilton began, when he set up differential taxes based on production size for alcohol distillers (thereby triggering the Whiskey Rebellion) [I forget which member of the commentariat recommended I read that book, but – thank you – it was a good call!] Obviously there would be regulation around fair trade – you can’t sell your home-made boxed lunches and make them using rotten meat – but the Badgerian system makes it exceptionally easy for groups of citizens to start businesses, literally instantly, with very little in the way of hurdles and regulations.
Naturally, there will always be Badgerians, who say “well, because I can’t hold onto my assets past my death, I’m not going to bother trying to have a better life!” and choose not to do anything that might accumulate assets (that’s basically Ieva’s position, though I am deliberately mis-characterizing it) While they’re welcome to do that, they have basically no impact on the economy because they only take a little bit and contribute only a little bit.
We also should avoid having the ‘priveledge’ of a hoplite being the ability to bust heads or cause trouble. I would suggest double punishment for any offense that is derived from abusing a position of community trust.
I’ll get to the hoplites eventually.
Agreed, in Badgeria, abusing the community’s trust is a serious crime – especially since it’s basically irredeemable: one can hardly claim ignorance and, since Badgeria offers everyone the subsidy, there is no excuse for it other than selfishness. Most crimes of irredeemable selfishness in Badgeria result in the criminal (if convicted) getting a free ride to the border. More on that later.
dashdsrdash@#1:
Let’s talk about the grub-stake for a moment. Do I understand correctly that the maximum grub-stake is for the proposed equivalent of a high-school graduating senior who wants to start a new business, and this gradually reduces down until a terminal degree is thought to replace it completely?
That’s the idea – the principle is that the student who consumes society’s resources getting an advanced education is not “paying” for the teachers and universities and whatnot, and the reduction in their grub-stake reflects the additional resources they were given by society. There’s also some idea in there about not having citizens decide that their entire life will be spent gaining knowledge.
This may be a fair allocation, but it strikes me as also being an anti-progressive one. In this dimension, 18-yos are not generally noted for maturity or managerial skills. There are exceptions, and perhaps more exceptions in Badgerian high-school graduates, but it does not seem likely to produce much success.
That’s true.
The way I imagine it working is that there are trade schools and tools, that a young Badgerian might want to take advantage of with their grub-stake.
I haven’t gone into the educational system (I have given it some thought, but not much) of Badgeria but I imagine that it includes a parallel track of “life skills” which includes basic budgeting, investing, diet, and household management as well as sex ed, consent, and the Badgerian social contract. Hopefully, the Badgerian educational system would not turn out clueless little monsters like the American educational system often seems to produce. Those 18-year-olds would be encouraged to put their grub stake into savings, education, or certification – they would be taught that “this is our way of giving you a nice boost, if you just spend it on a car and some drugs, you’re stupid and you may wind up on subsidy for your whole life, and you’ll have nobody to complain to except yourself.”
I imagine that Badgerians are fairly independent (hopefully!) as a consequence of their political system doing as much as it can to foster equality of opportunity, and independence. A Badgerian who simply blew their grub-stake on pizza and beer would not get a lot of sympathy – though, naturally, if they went and looked for a job at the Department of Human Resources, the HR folks would try to help them find something that matched their abilities.
Perhaps a better solution would be to make a business-founding grant available to any citizen of any age who successfully applies, with an application process that rejects the lowest-quality plans. Since individual profit is not the highest goal of Badgeria, the business plan might be a non-profit organization, in which case the specific societal objectives need to be acceptable.
I see this as a proposal (which I personally approve of) for a system of social capitalism – perhaps that would make a good government program or perhaps it might emerge as a continuing project from some concerned citizens.
When I get to the way that government departments and projects are proposed and deployed, I think that it’ll make a bit more sense that I say you’re proposing a system of social capitalism. To foreshadow a bit: if enough Badgerians decided that there needed to be a government program for social capitalism, proposals for that program would be offered to the public, which would vote them up or down. So, if enough citizens thought such a thing had merit, it would come to pass.
Sunday Afternoon@#24 and Ieva Skrebele@various:
Following the discussion in the comments, the phrasing of this also led me down the wrong path of understanding.
Yes, when I said “allocate” I was unclear. My intent was to reinforce that idea that society allows citizens to “own” things during their lifetime and that that ownership is not absolute but is, rather, arranged using money – it looks like ownership for almost all intents and purposes, but it’s really a system of allocation of goods that is an emergent property of the entire economic activity of the civilization. I’ll note that ownership is also a system of allocation of goods – it’s just one that’s inherently unfair.
Dunc@#22:
People’s attitudes to the things and resources they use are much more complicated than the simple question of ownership.
Yes.
What you’re getting at is a question beyond ownership, which is “value” – how do people decide what they value and don’t, and how much do they value something. There are many things people value a great deal, even though those things have no market value or street value.
Much of the discussion in this thread has been around the question of “why would anyone choose to do something, rather than nothing?” That is also a question of value. The snappy answer is Townes VanZandt: “it beats sitting around waiting to die.” Naturally, there are always going to be a few people would would rather just sit around waiting, than do something else. But even those who are questioning the value of doing anything are on problematic territory because, clearly, there is no value in posting comments on this blog – yet they did. The point is we all do worthless things, sometimes.
When I started thinking through this exercise, one of the main objections I had to deal with to my own satisfaction was that “you’re expecting a great deal of change, and people might not stand for it.” For example, the Badgerian child-raising customs – in other places where I’ve discussed that idea, a common objection has been “people’s instinct is to care for their kids.” Never mind that that doesn’t actually appear to be the case, we have a problem: how much of behavior is ‘instinct’ and how much is social. There are going to be some brute facts of biology, such that, at present, it takes a uterus to make a child, and we can’t simply change that by cultural fiat. But, is there an ‘instinct’ to want to raise one’s children with inherited wealth, or not? Or is that simply a behavior – a cultural expectation? As I tried to imply in my earlier comment about victorian child-raising @#10: a lot of the things we may be considering ‘instinctive’ probably are not. So I prefer to assume that almost all human behaviors are socially programmed more than ‘instinct’ until the evolutionary psychologists win that debate by presenting evidence that conclusively proves their hypotheses.
[I see this has already been covered sort of, but… well, sort of]
Tenet 9 seems a bit precarious. Legal guardians are responsible for making medical decisions when their charge is unable to do so, be it due to age or other reasons. Those decisions may turn out to be wrong (procedure was unecessary, worse option* or disagrees with patient preferences), meaning the guardian has essentially violated #9 and someone else’s right.
And no doubt there are lots of procedures where you could argue endlessly about uitility versus necessity. Right now the example that springs to mind are retainers / braces / brackets (the toothbender-thingies): The treatment is usually done on young-ish children. It’s also extremely uncomfortable, the child might disapprove. Lastly, while benefiicial it’s not necessary to do this. So where should we draw the line? Can the guardian force the child to undergo the procedure because it’s in their interest (but not critical), or can the child still say, ‘No, I don’t want this because it bloody well hurts!’
*Edit: Let’s say, for argument’s sake, there were several ‘equal’ options, with differing medical opinions. I.e.: The doctor’s can’t say one thing or another and it’s up to the guardian.
—
Regarding the death-tax, how do Badgerians feel about foundations or charitable organisations? Rich folk use these strategies as a general tax dodge. In lieu of regular taxes, Badgerians might still use it to dodge the Last Tax, the Grim Accounting. [Insert Pratchett-esque Euphemisms here]
For example, if I understand correctly, a rich badgerian might found a charitable organisation dedicated to [Cause] and, while alive, donate a substantial chunk of their fortune to said organisation. They die but the organisation carries on and ends up with an unrecycleable fortune outside the collective reach. Now that cause could anything: Cancer research, proving the existence of the yeti or, because we’re dealing with humans, it might be the Society for Furthering The Comfortable Lifestyle Of Offspring.
I guess the question really is how organisations are treated, since they tend to have a sort of immortality. They don’t have a fixed lifespan so you can’t count on them dying and freeing up their accumulated resources. In fact this could be very detrimental because you’d have to recycle successful businesses with every generation only to build them up again and again. On the other hand, if they are allowed to persists you might eventuallly end up with Badgeria Corp, which lived long enough to assimilate everything else. I’m not sure how problematic this is since personal (individual) profits are limited by tenet #8. It could still impact overall efficiency by stifling innovation and competition by virtue of being an all-encompassing administrative hulk. Besides, inheriting a business would be a gray areal. You’re still passing on wealth to the next generation in the form of guaranteed (admittedly high-effort) high-paying jobs that your heirs might otherwise not have access to or that could have gone to potentially better qualified people.
The “grub stake” thing neglects bankruptcy and why the founders of the USofA included it in the Constitution. People make mistakes. Grub Stake Committees make GSC sized mistakes. The heavily critiqued and superpopulist administrators of GSCs that are hired by the people to make sure that they don’t make mistakes (say five-year-plan anybody?) make monster-sized mistakes that end up hurting absolutely everybody.
Naturally, there will always be Badgerians, who say “well, because I can’t hold onto my assets past my death, I’m not going to bother trying to have a better life!” and choose not to do anything that might accumulate assets (that’s basically Ieva’s position, though I am deliberately mis-characterizing it) While they’re welcome to do that, they have basically no impact on the economy because they only take a little bit and contribute only a little bit.
“Well, because I can’t hold onto my assets past my death, I’m not going to bother trying to have a better life!” is unreasonable. People will still be interested in luxurious entertainment options (meals in fancy restaurants, vacations in tropical beaches) that require earning extra money on top of minimal income. It’s just that people will be less motivated to save and accumulate wealth.
Much of the discussion in this thread has been around the question of “why would anyone choose to do something, rather than nothing?” That is also a question of value. The snappy answer is Townes VanZandt: “it beats sitting around waiting to die.” Naturally, there are always going to be a few people would would rather just sit around waiting, than do something else. But even those who are questioning the value of doing anything are on problematic territory because, clearly, there is no value in posting comments on this blog – yet they did. The point is we all do worthless things, sometimes.
This is the wrong way how to put the question. Nobody will just sit around waiting to die. That’s boring as hell. It’s just that instead of working (doing something useful for the rest of society) many people will be tempted to do something they enjoy. If a Badgerian spends their time watching TV and playing computer games, the rest of society won’t benefit much (OK, some TV watchers decide to start making movies and some computer game lovers start careers making games, but they are the minority, most people just passively consume their entertainment). It’s a fact that majority of jobs are boring or unpleasant or simply less pleasant than pursuing one’s hobbies. I’m in favor of guaranteed minimum income, because it eradicates pointless suffering caused by extreme poverty. But you still want to keep your minimum income quite small to ensure that people don’t get too comfortable on it and are still motivated to work (I define “work” as something useful for other members of the society).
That’s the idea – the principle is that the student who consumes society’s resources getting an advanced education is not “paying” for the teachers and universities and whatnot, and the reduction in their grub-stake reflects the additional resources they were given by society. There’s also some idea in there about not having citizens decide that their entire life will be spent gaining knowledge.
But why is it bad if people decide to spend their entire life gaining knowledge? Yes, I know that education can be expensive (though USA prices are artificially inflated, once you have government owned universities that don’t try to earn a big profit, university education gets a lot cheaper; besides, technically it would be possible to reduce university costs even further with online video lectures and other innovations). But I still think it’s worth it. I would prefer a society where people are given incentives to get as much education as they wish. Or at least a society where people wouldn’t be penalized for pursuing more education. Some people tend to believe that there’s something bad about the overeducated burger cook who ends up working in a fast food restaurant. Still, I believe that an overeducated burger cook is better than an uneducated one. Technically I belong to those people with a useless degree (I have a master’s degree in philology, yet I earn money as an artist painting pictures), but believe that all the education I have had was useful. In universities you learn critical thinking skills, time management skills, you are required to learn independently (without a school teacher who tells you everything you’ll need for the test), you learn to do independent research (master thesis), you learn to search for required info, how to apply the scientific method to your research. Education is useful, especially in a direct democracy (where you need educated people to make good decisions).
I feel like there’s some inherent contradiction in the death tax and the incentive to “recycle”. If people are in fact encouraged to recycle much and often, won’t the tax income naturally drop? Sure, some basics will remain, like homes, but if people are discouraged from hoarding wealth, then there will be less hoarded wealth to tax. So, you can’t use calculations based on the current economic distribution.
Let’s say there’s a minority ethnic group in the country. Maybe they’re indigenous, maybe they’re refugees. They aren’t opposed to any of the major tenets that you outlined above, but they are definitely culturally distinct. They fail the parenting test at a much greater rate than the majority. Do you still take their kids? If so, which culture are they raised in? Does this prompt the state to re-evaluate the standards it’s testing?
Context – I’m an Australian, and we are struggling with the question of how to protect Indigenous kids from dysfunctional households without creating a second Stolen Generation. While I agree that children deserve to be raised by someone with the skills to do it right, I think you’re underestimating the long term effects of family-child separation.
lizziemcd@#35:
Let’s say there’s a minority ethnic group in the country. Maybe they’re indigenous, maybe they’re refugees. They aren’t opposed to any of the major tenets that you outlined above, but they are definitely culturally distinct. They fail the parenting test at a much greater rate than the majority. Do you still take their kids? If so, which culture are they raised in? Does this prompt the state to re-evaluate the standards it’s testing?
That’s a really interesting conundrum, and I’d say that the answer lies at the level of the social contract, and not the internal laws of Badgeria. To me, the real question is “is that minority ethnic group citizens of Badgeria, or not?” If they are citizens, then they would be accepting the laws – which would mean they’d do well to study their child-raising classes and pass them, if they want to raise children. (The intent, by the way, is not that those classes would be particularly hard.) Or, if they feel that they do not want to be subject to the laws of Badgeria then they would have to apply to secede from the state. That would be a whole other complicated problem I haven’t given much thought to, since one of the assumptions of Badgeria is that it is not growing by conquest, so distinct ethnic minorities wouldn’t be a “thing” unless there was some identifiable territory that didn’t want to be part of Badgeria to begin with.
Do you still take their kids?
What society with any basic ethics would give children to parents that were not qualified to raise them?
Here’s what I expect would probably happen: some members of that ethnic group would be able to qualify to raise children, and then you’d have a qualified tribal day-care/child-raising collective. There’s nothing wrong with that.
However, let’s look imagine a situation that goes rapidly pear-shaped: that ethnic minority has a ritual in which children have their genitalia modified at the age of 3 months. Clearly, the child cannot consent to this. The parents assert that it’s an important ritual. I would expect that case to go to the supreme court and the tribal minority would have the choice of a free bus ride to the border, or to support their children’s civil rights.
Context – I’m an Australian, and we are struggling with the question of how to protect Indigenous kids from dysfunctional households without creating a second Stolen Generation.
I sort of thought that was where your question came from. The US has had similar issues, with native American de-nativization programs disguised as education. It’s a side effect of territorial growth by conquest and the native victims were never full citizens, they were living under occupation – the government never had any legitimacy to them.
komarov@#31:
Legal guardians are responsible for making medical decisions when their charge is unable to do so, be it due to age or other reasons.
One of the big problems the US created for itself is the notion that married people have certain inherent rights. One of the things I’d do (although I don’t know if the government of Badgeria would adopt such a policy) is to not have marriage have any inherent value. It seems to me that all that stuff could be handled with ordinary laws; designated powers of attorney, designated visitation rights, designated care-giver relationships, etc. If someone can apply to be a child-raiser for a child, I don’t see why it wouldn’t also make sense to have care-giver certifications for those that need life-care.
Regarding trusts and corporate structures, I wrote:
The Department of the Treasury has strict guidelines for the sort of corporate structures that qualify as “survivable entities” that may continue past the founders’ death. Survivable entities may be anything from a small business that its founder wishes to survive, to a large corporation or a service organization. The key criteria for survivable entities are that they do not exist simply to accumulate wealth, they must have some socially valuable purpose even if it’s only that it creates jobs.
In the US, if you create a charitable trust it is required to disburse a certain percentage of its capital annually (5% at this time) – I would expect that Badgeria would have similar laws for such things. If someone created a trust like, say, the Carnegie Foundation, it would have to dispense a certain amount of its principal annually, and naturally there might be other requirements – in the US a 501c3 charity cannot play politics (even though some do!)
komarov:
because we’re dealing with humans, it might be the Society for Furthering The Comfortable Lifestyle Of Offspring.
That would be tax cheating. I’m not claiming that it would be impossible for people to try to cheat on their taxes; even Badgerians aren’t that good.
What happens to a trust fund that is an attempt to cheat on taxes? Poof! The creator of the trust could sue the Department of Death and Taxes, of course, except they’re too dead. One of the nice things about this idea of having a death tax system is that audits would tend to be absolute and the decisions final.
Sure, some company might be created with a secret decree to try to hire the rich person’s kids. But any executive at a company that was doing that could expect a free ride to the border and the company would be broken apart and its assets stripped or it would hire new executive management and continue operations without breaking the law any more.
Besides, inheriting a business would be a gray areal. You’re still passing on wealth to the next generation in the form of guaranteed (admittedly high-effort) high-paying jobs that your heirs might otherwise not have access to or that could have gone to potentially better qualified people.
That would be tax evasion. Did you catch the part where I wrote:
Survivable entities must do their hiring through the H.R. Department, in order to ensure that they are offering fair-market compensation and are hiring fairly.
I suppose it might be possible that the heir of a corporate founder might be the most qualified person for the job, but they’d have to convince the H. R. Department of that. Badgerians think that the H. R. Department is a great innovation compared to how countries like the US used to do things. Racist and sexist hiring practices would be a thing of the past, as would nepotism, unequal pay, etc. Additionally, companies would no longer be in the position of having to investigate themselves in the event of employee abuse claims, sexual harassment, unsafe or unfair work environments – that’s a profound conflict of interest that never served anyone except the interests of corporate leaders.
As far as whether this would be all onerous; I don’t think so. You’ll notice that the Badgerians have rather carefully arranged it so that the government’s involvement is only at life junctures; it’s not constant. A citizen only has to “pay his taxes” once and isn’t even around to have to deal with it. It’s only onerous for someone who is trying to cheat their fellow citizens. The H.R. Department only gets involved in hiring and firing; the only companies that would find it onerous are ones that can’t feel employees on board – which is probably an indicator of another issue entirely.
The H.R. Department would look sort of like glass door/monster.com with an AI on the backend that matched qualifications to job postings and arranged interviews. Naturally, a company might choose not to hire a candidate after an interview. But an AI would be pretty easily able to determine if there was a suspicious pattern in their hiring, such as maybe that they only hired men for positions that were flagged as not requiring a penis.
LykeX@#34:
I feel like there’s some inherent contradiction in the death tax and the incentive to “recycle”. If people are in fact encouraged to recycle much and often, won’t the tax income naturally drop? Sure, some basics will remain, like homes, but if people are discouraged from hoarding wealth, then there will be less hoarded wealth to tax.
As I said earlier, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature. If someone decides to spend all their money, then they’re just putting it into circulation earlier and differently.
They’d have to figure out a way of spending it on something that had no retained value, too. There’s only so much pizza and beer a person can convert to shit during the course of their life. I suppose you could have someone antisocial who decided to spend millions of BadgerDollars on paintings and have a bonfire of paintings every year … But they wouldn’t get any joy in that, would they? That’s just antisocial and mean.
I clearly haven’t done a good enough job of making the case that money recycled on a citizen’s death is only part of the scenario. If the Badgerian economic system also means that the velocity of money is very high, that also works, because it means that wealth is not being stockpiled; it’s being spread around. Rich people can’t just buy from rich people – in Badgeria “trickle down economics” would actually work.
Crazy, right?
Also, I wrote:
To tune the Badgerian budget it might be necessary to have spot-taxes on certain luxuries, or specific excise taxes to fund major projects. Generally, however, the principle is that enough money will be recycled when people die, to fund the government.
That might manifest as taxes on gasoline, imported items (in the event of a trade war) or types of transactions. For example, a small transaction tax might be levied on stock transactions, to reduce market “churn” and the profitability (and destructiveness) of options trading.
Passing new taxes other than the Death Tax would, of course, have to go through the Badgerian legislative process, which is a story for another day.
They’d have to figure out a way of spending it on something that had no retained value, too. There’s only so much pizza and beer a person can convert to shit during the course of their life.
That’s not going to be hard at all. Most stuff you buy during your lifetime have no retained value. You cannot spend much on beer and pizza, but meals in fancy restaurants, nights in fancy hotels, vacations in exotic beaches are a whole different matter. Even “stuff” loses its value with time. Clothes and shoes are worn out, electronics break. And even if you don’t use it and it only sits in your garage, it still loses its value. If you place a new and expensive computer in your garage, 20 years later it will be worth a lot less than what it’s worth now because of technological advances. And some stuff loses its value just because it becomes old fashioned (any unworn clothes, unused furniture). Very few things retain their value well (real estate, artworks, jewelry, items sought after by collectors).
This is going to take some wadding through for me. But a couple of initial comments – whether Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, or the analysis of Badgeria, we are left without a history. The ‘ideal’ appears out of nowhere. Similarly, it exists nowhere – what are the other countries around Badgeria? What are the relationships?
It’s kind of like when I was a kid – I would design a house (or car or spaceship or nightclub) that would be _awesome_, but… Visiting Drain in Seattle, I noticed that, while a great venue, it was not designed to be a performance hall, though it has been one for decades – it was originally something else that got repurposed into being a club with a performance space. That previous history had an impact – what is the history of Badgeria? More importantly, how can we shape our future so that we are Badgeria’s past (assuming we can get to some agreement on a solidly good version of a Badgerian constitution)?
To this first comment, I add the observation that a general aspect of government design is ‘feedback’: a simple form is separation of powers with each center being a check on the others – this only works if each power center has roughly equal power though (what happens if the courts issue an order and the executive ignores it? In America, apparently nothing).
What are the power feedback loops that prevent someone from seizing greater and greater power? Or a family from taking generations to do so?
On the economic side, you are setting up some good feedback loops – aggregations of money are broken up and redistributed. To this end, I would point out that is the real purpose of tax policy – wealth redistribution – assuming Badgeria has a sovereign currency. Badgeria does not need to tune taxes to pay for anything – they can print more money to pay for it. This money must be used at least to pay taxes, that requirement makes it important in other considerations as well. To prevent people from creating their own money, I would suggest all banks and financial institutions be fully nationalized, or at least very tightly regulated in regards to both fractional reserve banking and options creation and trading (both of which can ‘create’ money by loaning without cash to cover). This also allows the state to exercise finer control over the money supply by setting interest rates across the yield curve etc.) Note – people still have the freedom to use bitcoin or gold or whatever, but at some point they have to convert that to Badgerian Pfennigs to pay their taxes.
Lets see – I still need to reread everything – but one more quick question comes to mind – what is the status of resident aliens? Or must anyone who resides in Badgeria be a citizen? (I am thinking of the statement:
“At the age of majority, a citizen has three choices:
Resign their citizenship. They get a free ride to the border.
Continue their education; the Department of Education provides education for any citizen up through a PhD.
Enter the work-force or start a business or career.”
Can a citizen resign their citizenship at any time?
Does Badgeria allow noncitizens to stay for any length of time?
What are the rights and obligations of noncitizens?