Political Philosophy

The de facto power of the United States Constitution is weaker than the de jure power of the Constitution, but this isn’t surprising. At the end of the day, a Constitution is just a piece of paper created by the government to limit what the government can do. If the government had the power to create the constitution and enforce it, then it can just as easily have the power to stop enforcing parts of it or even ignore it completely.

If government has to exist, then it’s reasonable to have a document of rules describing what the government must aim to do, as well as what it can and cannot do. Even most anarchists have implicit rules for their societies, and they would have to have a document that explicitly states the rules of their “societies” if they were actually serious about their ideas. So, it’s still worth creating a Constitution that states the explicit rules of society and figuring out the best characteristics that a Constitution should have.

Conclusion: In order for a Constitution to have the true power and enforcement that its authors intended it to have, Constitutions must be enforced directly by the people instead of the government. It cannot be stressed enough that the citizens much be vigilant to veto, rebel, and reform if the legal system ever proposes an anti-constitutional update to the legal code, lest a deep state will form.

The foremost goal of government is to resolve Prisoner’s Dilemmas, Tragedies of the Commons, and Free-Rider Problems. Government comes from the necessity to create reasonable sets of laws that will create a societal framework from which selfish individuals can cooperate together for greater mutual gain (than if they didn’t cooperate together). Cooperation is the foundation of civilization, and the best legal code is the one that enables that to the greatest extent possible.

The relationship between a government and its citizens is called a “social contract”, but it shall instead be called an Implicit Mutual Social Agreement (IMSA) in this essay. Every time the word “contract” is used, some people complain that it’s not really a contract because they never signed it. And while they’re right about that, they’re missing the point. The idea is that if you want the benefits that society gives you, then you have to comply with society’s rules, even if you don’t like all the rules. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you’re going to break the IMSA, then society is justified to prosecute you.

Thought Experiment: The Veil of Ignorance.

• Parliamentary Democracy Instead of Presidential Democracy
• Jus Sangris, instead of Jus Solis
• Common Law versus Civil Law? Civil Law might be better if you don’t want political power to get transferred away from the legislature to the judiciary branch, over time.
• Determining The Legal Age Of Adulthood
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I am no legal expert, but if I had a better understanding of all the major differences between the world’s legal systems, I would certainly use that knowledge to improve this post. This map leaves me with many questions on how all the world’s legal systems differ: Legal Systems of the World.

Chesterton’s Fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.

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Any proposal must be geopolitically stable. A network of city states would fail since it wouldn’t be geopolitically stable, so it is not viable.

There are lots of ideas that would not be geopolitically stable, and yet people think they’re immoral anyway. A realist couldn’t care less if people think that measures that ensure geopolitical stability are “immoral”. Some examples include the selective service system, the illegality of secession, the need to maintain a strong global military presence, etc, which are all necessary for geopolitical stability. If the alternative is geopolitical instability, then those moralistic ideas are not worth any consideration because they would lead to war, conflict, and the country’s downfall.

Private cities are similar in concept to the nation-states that exist today, except that nation-states are bigger, have more laws, and characterized by local geography, socio-ethnolinguistic groups, history, cultures, etc. If someone doesn’t like the country that they are currently living in, they (usually) have a choice to leave and migrate to another.

• Establishing a legal code that solves game theoretic problems that collectively benefit (most) of society.
• Collecting Natural Resource Taxes (LVT) to fund the Government and redistribute the excess revenue as the Citizen’s Dividend.
• Providing the Police Force, Courts, Detention Centers, Military, and Border Guards.
• Establishing alliances with other governments, as it serves the country’s interests.
• Ensuring that everybody who is unauthorized to have (more) children has mandatory contraception.
• Settling disputes.
• Urban Planning.
• Providing Monetary Rewards For Innovations Instead Of Patents.
• Collecting Census Data on the Country’s Population.
• The Public Education Safety Net.
• The Healthcare Safety Net.

It’d be nice if we could have a society that fixes problems before they happen, instead of after they happen. Unfortunately, most people are only inclined to do the latter since the former option requires thinking on a much higher level than what most people can do. We live in a determinsitic, cause-and-effect universe. Since people have selective attentions, they tend to only focus on things after they happen. For most people, there has to be something that causes them to think about those problems in the first place.

“We the People” is a commonly repeated phrase when talking about American history and values, but who are “The People” exactly? Constitutions always say that the government must serve the people, but they never define who the “people” are. For example, slaves weren’t considered part of “the people” in the US until 1865, and neither were Native Americans until 1924. Some more examples include:

• Foreign-born citizens? They weren’t sometime in the past, but now they are.
• Men? Or men and women? (women didn’t gain suffrage in Western countries until the 1900s)
• Illegal Aliens?
• Mixed race people with ancestry of one of the ethnic groups of an ethnically homogenous country?
• Citizens of very closely allied countries?

The “people” could even be re-framed to mean special interest groups of the country that get special privileges.

We’ve concluded that ethnostate governments are more preferable because ethnically homogenous societies tend to have slight eugenic advantages, and they tend to be more socially and politically stable.

Relevant: The Origin Of The Need For Equal Representation.

Any proposed set of rights should protect and reinforce each other to the maximum extent possible, rather than contradicting each other. People may argue that population control violates people’s autonomy, but if the benefit is that it confers more protection to all other rights, then it’s a reasonable change to make.

[this section is still in development]

When people say “Never trust the government” or ask “Do you trust the government?”, what do they even mean? Government is very complex. There’s local, state, and federal levels, different branches of government, different agencies and departments of government, and many different people who all work for the government.

When conservatives say “Never trust the government”, they still usually trust government entities like the FDA, the USPS, local utilities, other government agencies, and probably many favored politicians. And when libertarians and anarchists say the tagline, they typically have even less trust and approval for the government as a whole (as it currently exists) compared to conservatives, but even they will still depend on at least a few functions of government to do things that they need.

So what specifically about the government should not be trusted? Any particular departments, agencies, or people filling administrative roles? And generally speaking, what aspects of government can be trusted?

Also, how does one define “trust”? Certainly there are different levels of trust, so what levels of trust can be applied to each component of the government? Are there different types of trust, or are they all the same thing?

Video: Rules for Rulers - CGP Grey.

There is no easy solution to the Problem of Governance because every political system is vulnerable to corruption. At the same time, government is necessary for solving game theoretic problems that occur due to human nature.

The best we can do to achieve this Pragmatopian government structure is to expand rationality, educate people about biological realism and game theory, and persuade more people to realize that morality is an illusion. If the culture won’t accept this form of government, then there is no hope of it ever being implemented.

Power is akin to large objects in space causing other objects to be absorbed by them, if they don’t have enough force of their own or orbit them if they happen to produce a mutual center of gravity. In society, power is not able to completely absorb others, for they have an individuality of their own. But it can make others orbit around it, be dependent upon it, and act in its interests through the application of force.

In other words, to determine who rules over you, one must identify how the removal of some particular element or organizing principle would cause the system to become disorganized.

• In the job market, it is the owner of the company and the supervisors.
• In the market economy, it is money and market laws.
• In the solar system, it is the Sun.
• In primitive societies, it is their charismatic leader.
• In the internet, it is people with a larger following and the infrastructure in which these people are permitted to gather following.
• In a political movement, it is its leader in lower political organizations, or its ideology in higher political organizations.

The next task is to determine a center of gravity in our body politic. What sort of political body causes a large portion of society to be dependent on it and become disorganized once such a center of gravity is removed?

A politician can do what’s best for the constituents in their district, but that won’t necessarily be what’s best for the entire world as a whole. For example, a local lawmaker/governor might criticize a local company for outsourcing labor that would take jobs away from their constituents (particularly in the short-term), even if that actually might be what’s best for the entire world as a whole. The company wins because it reduces its labor costs, the newly hired laborers overseas win because they acquire higher-paying jobs, and the community that initially lost jobs will eventually win in the long-term too (assuming that laid-off workers can find new jobs) since they can purchase cheaper goods and services. Conceptually, this concept can be expanded to other assets too, like determining which localities gets the most government funding and infrastructure, who gets the new Fortune 500 facility, etc. This is one reason why government often works against the people, and unfortunately it happens very often. A more efficient government ought to not do this.

All political systems are kratocratic oligarchies, regardless of how they present themselves. Leaders of centralized systems know almost nothing about a lot of things, rather than a lot about a few things. It’s not possible for a single person to rule an entire country all by themselves because they need subordinates who will enforce their rule of law. Likewise, it’s equally impossible for a democracy to work effectively unless it has representatives and a hierarchy of other government officials. It has to be that way, but it also creates problems with running the society.

Bureaucracies have a tendency to shift to self perpetuation over time. There are a few things that can be done to mitigate that. For starters, public sector unions are almost always bad since they’re focused on promoting the interests of their workers, i.e. they’re focused on perpetuating the bureaucracy, so perhaps they should be outlawed.

It is easier for public figures to voice opposition to bad ideas when they have no political power. Al Gore criticized the Patriot Act, but if he had won the 2000 US presidential election, then he would have surveilled the country too by abusing governmental power, just like George W. Bush did. The legislation for the Patriot Act was already written up waiting for the signal. 9/11 was that signal. As for when the Coronavirus left China, there was no legislation waiting for it since no one was expecting it. But the spread of the virus outside of China and its over-estimated perception of deadliness was still the signal for every politician to go full tyrant.

The Politician’s Syllogism Fallacy goes as follow:

1. Something must be done.
2. This is something.
3. Therefore, it must be done.

The underlying assumption that doing something is always better than doing nothing, regardless of certainty or cost.

Similar to how “just doing what the teacher wants” may not be what’s best for the student, politicians who are “just doing what their constituents want” may not necessarily be what’s best for the country.

Wikipedia: Regulatory Capture.

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Yet another example showing why the current government policies of subsidizing electric vehicles (EVs) via tax credits doesn’t work: Ford Raises Electric Truck Price By Up To $8,500 After Democrats Pass $7,500 EV Tax Credit.

Politicians over 65 years of age must take mental competency tests before they can run for office.

Principle: Always fix the legal system before fixing the judicial system. The judicial system is supposed to check the legal system, not the other way around.

A judicial court system should interpret the Constitution and other founding political documents by the intent of the writers’ of the documents’, not the words or language of the document since that is vulnerable to being misinterpreted via semantics.

How would checks and balances work ideally, according to game theory?

• What makes checks effective?
• What makes balances effective?

“If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the monopoly held by the drug cartels” – Milton Friedman

One of the best things that could be done to instantly reduce incarceration rates without having any negative effects on society would be to decriminalize (or legalize) all the illegal drugs, but this must be done methodically to ensure that the intended goals are achieved.

• Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2000, and it worked quite successfully for accomplishing its goals. However, Portugal’s experiment hasn’t worked perfectly because decriminalization alone wasn’t and isn’t a bullet-proof way to end the country’s problems with drugs.
• Another example to consider is how Russia has a huge societal/cultural problem with alcohol, even though alcohol is legal in the country.
• Vancouver legalized all drugs in early 2023, but it hasn’t work out very well.
• Drug decriminalization hasn’t worked out very well in Portland either.

What these examples seem to reveal is that before a successful drug decriminalization program can be implemented, there must be treatment centers, distribution systems, and oversight in place before just cart blanche decriminalizing everything. It helps massively to issue drugs to the users in a controlled medically controlled environment where they track and manage each users medical history while acting like a rehab center. Drug dealers must also continue to be persecuted to the fullest extent of the law, because we don’t want to condone drug abuse as a society.

See: Drug legalization / decriminalization would also dramatically reduce gun violence.

See: Why the War on Drugs is a Huge Failure - Kurzgesagt

It doesn’t make sense to punish taxpayers by forcing them to pay money that is used to imprison people who broke the law. Why should a lazy criminal have their existence be funded by good, productive people who are actually contributing to society? Imprisoning someone for several years is a detriment to everybody in society.

It can ruin the prisoner’s life too. People cannot imagine what it’s like to spend 5+ years in prison. Once the prisoners finally leave the prison, how are they supposed to return to a normal lifestyle? They could return to the outside world, but it would be completely alien to them because it wouldn’t be the same world they had left before they were incarcerated. Many recently released prisoners wouldn’t even want to go back to the real world because they’ve become so familiar with the prison world, hence why prisoners often get re-incarcerated immediately after they leave prison.

A better way to punish the criminals without wasting taxpayers’ money is to use corporal punishment instead of incarceration more often. This way, lawbreakers are punished, and taxpayers don’t have to pay the price for keeping the lawbreakers incarcerated. Physical punishment works in Singapore, which has some of the lowest per capita crime rates in the world (although race and economic factors undoubtedly help with this too). The people who get punished may be unable to work for a few days while they heal from the injury and are experiencing the pain, but they’ll quickly be able to go back to work and sustain themselves, so taxpayers won’t have to subsidize their existence.

Western opposition to corporal punishment is only a cultural thing. In Singapore, there’s a sizable amount of public support for corporal punishment. And after all, aren’t some crimes deserving of corporal punishment, like rape, massive pyramid schemes, torturing, or severe physical abuse?

Physical punishment and the strong desire to avoid it invokes primal instincts. Performing it publicly could amplify its effectiveness in deterring people from committing crimes. The combination of fear and humiliation causes corporal punishment to be both a psychological and a social force for deterring crime. Being soft on crime causes crime. And making people spend several years in prison when it’s a very costly and ineffective punishment counts as being soft on crime.

Alternatively, a prisoner could be offered assisted suicide. Then the taxpayers don’t have to subsidize their existence, and the prisoner would have no further opportunities to pass their genes onto the next generation. In most cases, it would be better for everybody if people serving multiple life sentences in prison were sentenced to death instead, but the main reason why this doesn’t happen is because it conflicts with people’s unquestioned moral dogmas.

The most ideal solution to climate change would be to have a global government that regulates how much of the atmosphere can be altered and in what way(s). Different countries likely have differing opinions on how the atmosphere should change since it would affect climates, crop types/growths, ocean depth levels (and thus affect coastal lands), and much more. Regardless, a consensus could probably be reached on what should be done. Once determined, the global government would enforce the solution on the world’s countries, thus avoiding a tragedy of the commons.

Since we don’t have a global government for effectively regulating and enforcing pollution and CO₂ emission policies, the next best solution to global warming is to alter the Earth’s atmosphere to block out more heat and sunlight, which would lower the global temperature to counter the rising temperatures of recent decades. Without a global government, any attempt to do things like climate pledges will succumb to a global Tragedy of the Commons. That’s why the best solution we have with the current state of world affairs is to block slightly more sunlight out of the atmosphere, since it could reduce global warming, while having far less pressing game-theoretical dilemmas regarding its implementation (if any). There might be a potential game-theoretical dilemma if countries don’t consent to other countries modifying the Earth’s atmosphere, but I suspect that dissenters would be increasingly less opposed to this idea as climate change continues to get worse and worse without any other reliable, foreseeable options.

We will have to be careful about this since technology in general is unpredictable and this technology has never been tried before, but if we don’t do this, the Earth’s climate and environment is going to continue to negatively change to the detriment of us humans and all other living species. Fortunately though, we have observed the historical effects of how sending tons of volcanic ash into the Earth’s atmosphere can cause global temperatures to drop by blocking out sunlight, so we at least have some idea of how to go about this and some of the possible outcomes.

Although this proposal would end (or even reverse) global warming, it might not completely prevent climate and environmental change. One example is that coral reefs would still be harmed by the increased acidity of the ocean water since the quantity of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans would continue to increase (although they would still benefit from global temperatures no longer increasing or even decreasing). Pollution taxes (a carbon tax in this case) would still be reasonable, even if the atmosphere was altered to block out more sunlight. Developed countries that have already emitted a lot of carbon dioxide should be taxed more since they’ve already made up their share for causing climate change.

Other Topics Related To Solving Climate Change:

• Wikipedia: Solar Engineering.
• Wikipedia: Climate Engineering.
• Wikipedia: Passive Daytime Radiative Cooling.
• Wikipedia: Weather Modification.

Overpopulation is a thousand times more problematic than pollution or climate change is. They each exacerbate each other, but once there’s overpopulation, it’s basically game over for civilization. Overpopulation causes Civilizations to fight wars with each other over scarce resources, until they finally collapse from nearly decimating each other.

Civilization rose and fall in the Mayan world many times over thousands of years. There was a constant cycle of growing civilization, overpopulation, and collapse. Life continued that way in the Americans for thousands of years until the Europeans came and build a civilization that wouldn’t collapse and fall… but maybe we should wait several more decades to see if another collapse happens.

• The parent must be law-abiding and have no criminal record.
• The parent must have a high school education [at least] and must have reached the legal age of adulthood.
• The parents must sign a contractual legal agreement with the government pledging responsibility for raising the child by themselves, and both parents must meet all of these requirements.
• One of the parents in the child-bearing agreement must be employed in a full-time job.
• A degree of consanguinity between the parents that is too low will be forbidden (incest is prohibited).
• The parent must have paid all their taxes (if any).
• The parent must pay the reproduction tax for having a child, which is set according to market rates with respect to the supply, demand, and price of reproduction licenses.

For more information about how these requirements were chosen, see: Laissez Faire Eugenics.

Read More: Eugenics And Reproduction Licenses FAQs

There are various ways to do it, but ultimately, the enforcement will depend on how “authoritarian” the government has to be in order to enforce the Law. The government will start with the least authoritarian and least invasive methods for enforcing population control, and if those methods work for enforcing the law, then they will become the status quo. Ideally, the population would be compliant and none of the more drastic measures would be necessary. But if the measures are necessary, we still view them as being more favorable than having to deal with the horrendous consequences of overpopulation, when it eventually happens.

More Detailed Answer: Population Control FAQs Enforcement.

For more information and any questions, see:

• Overpopulation And Population Control FAQs.
• Eugenics And Reproduction Licenses FAQs.

For understanding the necessity of population control for sustaining future civilization specifically, see:

• Overpopulation FAQs: How is overpopulation a serious threat to humanity?.
• Reproduction Licenses FAQs: How is dysgenics a serious threat to humanity?.

It can be argued that a public healthcare system could make the general population healthier on average, but this ignores the fact that a public healthcare system would subsidize people who don’t take care of their health. This means that healthy people would have to pay the cost of that since it’s not possible to subsidize every demographic within an economy. Subsidizing is redistribution basically.

Moreover, a public healthcare system would increase the dysgenics of the population. As mentioned in this Wikipedia article on Recent Human Evolution, people who smoke tend to have fewer children since smokers have shorter lifespans. By providing healthcare to smokers and other people with unhealthy lifestyles, we are helping their undesirable genes stay in the gene pool by greatly reducing that selectionary pressure on the population, and that certainly isn’t good for society in the long-term.

If we’re focused on achieving a society that will last thousands or tens of thousands of years or so, then it would be better if the people who live the unhealthy lifestyles die off naturally via natural selection. In the long term, that would result in a much healthier population where healthy people don’t have to subsidize unhealthy lifestyles.

Side Note: Vaccine manufacturers should be mandated by law to completely and publically disclose the contents of the vaccines they produce.

• Allow importation of drugs and medical services/devices (huge deal).
• Allow competition across state lines for healthcare (huge deal).
• End the practice where local hospitals can veto the establishment of new hospitals (called Certificate of Public Need).
• Reduce or streamline the licensing requirements for certain healthcare practitioners.
• End all taxes on medicine and healthcare.
• Change from allowing companies to have 20 year monopolies after a drug is designed to instead have a bounty system allowing generics and name brand competitors to compete right away.
• Lessen FDA restrictions, reduce the threshold for over the counter drugs.
• Increase immigration for healthcare workers and doctors especially. A higher supply of immigrant doctors would decrease the cost for healthcare.
• Get rid of all price caps and price controls so that the long term supply equilibrium is met, stabilizing costs?
• Implement policies that increase full employment so that people can more likely afford healthcare through policies like eliminating the corporate tax, reducing income taxes, and getting rid of capital gains taxes and estate taxes.
• Legalize all the drugs (marijuana, methadone, etc.). See: Why the War on Drugs is a Huge Failure - Kurzgesagt.
• Allow or encourage Direct Primary Care instead of Insurance. This would enable people to pay once for their treatment, with no insurance needed.

Arguably, the best thing that could lower the cost of healthcare would be to encourage people to adopt healthier lifestyles and healthier diets. If people are healthier, then they will need less healthcare. If the demand for healthcare goes down, then the cost of healthcare also goes down. This is true regardless of whatever healthcare system a country uses. The main caveat is that it requires changing the country’s culture, people’s personal will to do lifestyle changes, and educating/persuading everyone on a case-by-case basis.

• Similar functions already done by the United Nations and the world’s superpowers regarding global affairs

• Any situation where states would otherwise have an incentive to pass bad things over their borders and onto their neighbors / the rest of the world, outside their territories.
• Border Disputes
• International Space Station

Global government is important for equally distributing countries’ natural resources. It is tremendously unfair that the citizens in countries with abundant natural resources in proportion to their populations (e.g. Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc) get to have their lives subsidized by the government’s ability to sell the abundant natural resources that are present on their lands, instead of having those natural resources be own equally by the entire world’s population and managed by a global government. This contributes to increasing the dysgenics of the world’s population.

Many people have objections against global government that will be addressed in this section.