Political Philosophy
To Build A Better Government
1. Prerequisites For Understanding This Political Philosophy
If you want to understand this political and ethical philosophy, the best way to start would be to read the book and all the essays listed on the biological realism section of the website. This political philosophy is based on understanding the implications that evolutionary theory has for the human race and human societies. Humans are a biological species, so they cannot be understood without a very firm understanding of biology.
Evolutionary biology is actually the least arbitrary starting point for forming a societal framework(s), since sociology, psychology, economics, etc are all essentially applied biology. In a sense, biology is more “pure” than starting from a sociological, psychological, etc point of view. And it’s not biased with morality either, the world’s greatest delusion. We also recommend reading our philosophy of value and our essay on the superiority of consequentialist ethics.
NOTE: I haven’t finished writing this page. This page doesn’t describe everything about how a fully operational government should work. So far, it’s mostly just a place for me to talk about all my political ideas that don’t fit into other webpages.
2. The Constitutional Principles Of The Government
How to govern society is one of the oldest philosophical problems, and while there aren’t always perfect solutions to every problem, there are still pragmatic and heuristic approaches that we can take.
2.1. The Practicality of Constitutions
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.
2.2. Political Philosophy and the Goals of Government
The foremost goal of government is to resolve problems of cooperation: 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.
The height of humans in society is also a tragedy of the commons. It would be better if everybody was shorter because shorter people have longer lifespans, and longer lifespans amortize the amount of effort and energy required to raise new offspring. However, there are also strong social advantages to being taller. So, every individual has strong social and financial incentives to defect and become taller than others. This is true even though everybody would benefit if everybody was shorter average, if we assume that we value long lifespans. Ideally, a healthy and adaptable population would also have some generic diversity of people who are taller or shorter than the average, so that if there is ever any need for the population’s height to change, then it would be relatively quick and easy for that to happen.
An implication is that making everybody shorter on average is only likely to succeed if it is backed by government force, perhaps as an effect or side-effect of eugenic population control. This tragedy of the commons is also applicable to the height of trees in forest, since trees are incentivized to tower over each other.
2.2.1. Prisoner’s Dilemmas
The Societal Prisoner’s Dilemma (SPD) is the most fundamental game theoretical problem that every society must solve. Once a community of humans surpasses roughly Dunbar’s Number, it becomes possible for humans to take advantage of others without other people being able to suspect it because not everybody knows each other. This creates incentives for every individual to either: 1. kill, abuse, and steal from other people when it makes them better off, or 2. be bound to also kill, abuse, and steal from other people as a reaction to other people who are doing the same thing. The resolution of the SPD requires an enforced legal code that enables cooperation. Societies cannot exist without cooperation, and cooperation between strangers cannot exist unless the Societal Prisoner’s Dilemma is solved.
In the absence of a law enforcement that would punish people for committing crimes, every person has an incentive to kill, abuse, and steal from other people because these actions make it easier to gain the resources for supporting oneself and one’s desires, compared to if they had labored and traded with other people instead. If only one person is defecting while everybody else is cooperating with each other, then this scenario is analogous to either of the two scenarios in the standard Prisoner’s Dilemma where one party cooperates while the other defects from the other, except that there could be any number of people cooperating and defecting at the same time.
When it’s easy and feasible for one person to defect from cooperating with everybody else (Anarchy & Lawlessness), everybody else is also incentivized to defect from everybody else too. If this happens, then this scenario is analogous to how the two parties involved in the standard Prisoner’s Dilemma are both defecting from each other, except that this defection applies to everybody in the area of lawlessness, not just two people.
Obviously, neither of these scenarios are desirable in comparison to a prosperous society where each person’s labor produces wealth that is guaranteed to not be stolen or abused by other people, and where people can safely trade commodities and money to make each other better off with the guarantee that the other side will be punished if they don’t hold up their side of the trade. Read More: Why cooperation isn’t necessary in every person’s best interests.
The best scenario (as well as the only scenario that can create a functioning society) is when every person cooperates with each other. In practice, this can only be achieved by a government that imposes the rule of law, which effectively eliminates every person’s incentive to defect, since the penalties and punishments for defecting (breaking the law) are too costly and the probability of getting caught breaking the law are near ~100%. Note that the exact probability doesn’t matter as long as it’s reasonably high enough to punish nearly all defectors and to discourage other from defecting. The imposition of this law is involuntary by definition because every person has to abide by it whether they like it or not. On the other hand, a “voluntary” imposition of law would be an oxymoron because every person would disobey the voluntary law and defect in the Societal Prisoner’s Dilemma when it suits their self-interests. Law can thus only be involuntary and involuntarily imposed.
The previously mentioned scenario comes with an important caveat that doesn’t exist in the standard Prisoner’s Dilemma. When the government enforces the rule of law, some members of the government may choose to “defect” from the rest of the society by abusing their power to better achieve their self-interests. Such is the Nature of Game Theory and the intrinsic selfishness of life. But this is still better and more functional than an Anarchist world where literally everybody is defecting from each other, not just a handful of people who are in control of a strong government. Even if the government defects from the people whose interests it’s supposed to represent, that’s still fewer people defecting and thus a more prosperous society, compared to the alternative (Anarchy). How to govern society is one of the oldest philosophical problems, and while there aren’t any ideal solutions that can completely eliminate corruption, there are some pragmatic principles and heuristics that we can follow to generate a better society.
2.2.2. Free-Rider Problems
A free-rider problem is a situation where most people do the necessary contributions for making the community thrive, while a minority of people reap the benefits of the majority’s effort while contributing nothing in return.
When a minority of a people can benefit by doing nothing, this incentivizes everybody else who is doing their part to reconsider that they could also do nothing instead, while getting the same benefits, for everybody else gains. When this happens, the free-rider problem becomes more similar to a tragedy of the commons, but they were different initially.
Examples of Free-Rider Problems:
- Voluntary Self-Protection
- Welfare States
- Vaccination and Herd Immunity
- Overpopulation
The free rider problem partially explains why content creators and service providers that rely on donations are less likely to make money. For example, if a private security service for monitoring one’s home provided everybody with free security, then no one would pay for it. Everybody would just hope that someone else pays the company with sufficient money to help the company make a profit and continue affording to provide the service. The free rider problem thus explains why people and companies have to charge money for the value that they provide.
2.2.3. Forms of Planned Obsolescence
Planned Obsolescence is a serious market failure that results from the mismatch of corporate and consumer values.
Read more: The Various Forms of Planned Obsolescence
2.3. Rules and Legal Practices to Use
- Meritocracy and Sortition, instead of Electoral 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. For example, if the laws and legal system are dysfunctional, then it makes more sense to fix the legal system first before trying to “fix” the court system (assuming that there are no power barriers to fixing the legal system).
2.4. Functions of the Government
- 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.
2.5. Defining Who “The People” Are
“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.
2.6. Rights of the Citizens
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.
2.7. Functions of Government-Issued Citizen ID Cards
Every Citizen is provided an ID card for free.
- Standard citizen recognition tool that nearly every country provides its citizens, critical to establishing contracts between members of society (especially job applications, land/rent leasing, etc)
- Paying taxes
- Reproduction License for X number of children
- 2/3 direct democratic veto card?
- Identifying to police force for incidents/calls
- Attending court system as defender/accuser/witness/etc
- Applying to work for the government (legal/urbanplanning/court/etc), police system, etc)
- Standard Education Certification (perhaps this card could then be granted upon completing such standard education at around ~16 years old?)
- Driver’s License Certification
- Attendance of public education institutions
- Traveling to the territories of foreign political bodies
- Tracking criminals and criminal records
Every government-issued ID contains built-in security features such as check-sums for the ID number, authenticity features found on driver’s licenses, etc.
3. The Problem of Governance
3.1. Public Trust in the Government
[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. As a general rule, one trying to solve the problem of governance, it’s better to have more checks and balances rather than fewer.
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?
3.2. Reducing Corruption and Ensuring Accountability to the People
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.
Recommended Video: Is Bureaucracy Killing Civilization? - WhatIfAltHist.
All politicians must take mental competency tests before they can run for office, especially if they are over 65 years of age or have questionable mental performance (e.g. head injury, brain damage, brain cancer, etc)
A judicial court system must 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.
3.3. Check and Balances
How would checks and balances work ideally, according to game theory?
- What makes checks effective?
- What makes balances effective?
3.3.1. Creating A Democratic System
From Industrial Society And Its Future by Dr. Ted Kaczynski:
Paragraph #187: On the more sophisticated level the ideology should address itself to people who are intelligent, thoughtful and rational. The object should be to create a core of people who will be opposed to the industrial system on a rational, thought-out basis, with full appreciation of the problems and ambiguities involved, and of the price that has to be paid for getting rid of the system. It is particularly important to attract people of this type, as they are capable people and will be instrumental in influencing others. These people should be addressed on as rational a level as possible. Facts should never intentionally be distorted and intemperate language should be avoided. This does not mean that no appeal can be made to the emotions, but in making such appeal care should be taken to avoid misrepresenting the truth or doing anything else that would destroy the intellectual respectability of the ideology.
Paragraph #188: On a second level, the ideology should be propagated in a simplified form that will enable the unthinking majority to see the conflict of technology vs. nature in unambiguous terms. But even on this second level the ideology should not be expressed in language that is so cheap, intemperate or irrational that it alienates people of the thoughtful and rational type. Cheap, intemperate propaganda sometimes achieves impressive short-term gains, but it will be more advantageous in the long run to keep the loyalty of a small number of intelligently committed people than to arouse the passions of an unthinking, fickle mob who will change their attitude as soon as someone comes along with a better propaganda gimmick. However, propaganda of the rabble-rousing type may be necessary when the system is nearing the point of collapse and there is a final struggle between rival ideologies to determine which will become dominant when the old world-view goes under.
Read More: Thoughts on Democracy.
3.3.2. Creating A Veto System
- Liberal democracies should offer voters yes/no propositions to vote for on a city, state, or national level.
- Among eligible participating voters, if there are two people who would disapprove of some legislation for every person who does not disapprove, then the legislation is vetoed. Although a skeptic might argue that percentages are arbitrary, two-thirds (or approximately 66.66%) is the lowest majority ratio that is higher than 50% (or half of the population) and only uses integers.
- Hopefully, the system for direct democratic vetoes against the legal system would not devolve to have people joining political organizations akin to the political parties that exist today. Vetoing is a yes/no process, so the nature of the process could prevent such political organizations from forming for collectively vetoing or not vetoing legislation.
3.3.3. Legislatures Must Read The Bills They Are Voting On
For every x number of pages that a legislation document has and every y number of pages that added amendments have, there should be a minimum of d number of days between when it was proposed and when it is passed.
- The purpose of this regulation is to guarantee that the members of the government have enough time to read the legislation and carefully evaluate it before making a decision on it.
- If this rule is always enforced without exception, the worst case scenario would be that the members of the government simply don’t read the legislation like they’re supposed to.
- But at least it’s guaranteed that they will have enough time to read it like they are doing their jobs. This is still an improvement over the existing government which has no such rule.
Read More: Make Bills Read Again - Anthony Galli.
3.4. Preventing the Politician’s Syllogism Fallacy
The Politician’s Syllogism Fallacy goes as follow:
- Something must be done.
- This is something.
- 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.
3.5. Preventing Regulatory Capture
Wikipedia: Regulatory Capture.
Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal - Joel Salatin | Luke Smith’s Overview.
A local farmer details his frustrations dealing with bureaucracy, arbitrary regulation enforcement, and a number of issues.
The number of regulations imposed on small-scale farmers makes their jobs almost impossible and unnecessarily expensive.
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.
4. The Penalties For Breaking The Laws
Anybody who kills a parent (accidentally or unintentionally) will be legally liable to pay child support for all of that parent’s child’s expenses until the children become legal adults or 18 years old. This includes drunk drivers and people who text while driving, if they accidentally kill a parent.
Crime rates go down when more people get incarcerated. The reason why there’s a negative correlation between incarceration rates and crime rates is because it prevents repeat offenders from being able to commit more crimes.
A person who intentionally takes the life of another cannot claim a legal right to life, lest it would be contradictory to grant the murderer a legal right to life as well.
Pedophiles should be required to pay for the mental health expenses of their victims.
In recent years, there has been a lot of talk in Western public discourse about how governments should place a greater focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment. However, rehabilitation should not be a goal of the justice system. A justice system should punish people for crime, create the incentive to not do crime, and protect society from criminals. Those should be the proper goals of a justice system. Belief in rehabilitation and lenient sentencing have gotten a lot of people killed. Examples:
- Jack Unterweger was a famous “rehabilitated” criminal, who killed many people after his release.
- Jon Venables is another example of someone who was sentenced too leniently.
- Sheldon Johnson Jr’s father, son, and family have a history of committing violent crimes. Despite this, Johnson Jr was released from prison after serving a 25-year sentence. Johnson Jr committed murder, just one month after leaving prison.
- Murder of Junko Furuta: Five years after Jō Ogura finished his prison sentence, he later violently assaulted and threatened to kill an acquaintance. After Minato’s release, he was arrested again for attempted murder after beating a 32-year-old man with a metal rod and slashing his throat with a knife.
In the long-run, the most important thing that could be done for preventing crimes before they happen will be for the government to implement laissez-faire eugenic control of reproduction. That includes stopping criminals from reproducing.
Life imprisonment allow for the possibility to partially correct miscarriages of justice (people who were wrongly penalized can be liberated), whereas capital punishment does not. Of course, it’s much better to prevent crimes, than to correct them.
4.1. Corporal Punishment
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?
The strong desire to avoid physical punishment 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.
4.2. Why The Drug War Should End
“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
The Prohibition Laws in the United States from 1920 to 1933 were a complete failure, hence why they were eventually repealed after being enforced for only ~14 years. While Prohibition was motivated by good intentions, it largely failed to achieve its goals. It also strengthened organized crime and criminal gangs, along with other negative effects. Repealing Prohibition was thus beneficial for the United States. Similarly, Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2000, and it initially worked quite successfully for accomplishing its goals. I support decriminalizing all the currently illegal drugs, in the interests of personal freedom, expanding (medical) drug research, reducing the power of drug cartels, and reducing violent crime across society.
See: Why the War on Drugs is a Huge Failure - Kurzgesagt.
See: Drug legalization / decriminalization would dramatically reduce gun violence.
4.3. Decriminalizing Drugs Must Be Done Methodically
Any attempt to decriminalize illegal drugs must be done methodically to ensure that the intended goals are achieved without causing any unintended side effects. Merely legalizing or decriminalizing drugs without any precautions or regulations is bound to have negative effects. A clear example is that Russia has huge social and cultural problems with alcohol abuse, even though alcohol is legal in the country. There are also other examples of jurisdictions where the decriminalizing or legalizing of drugs has wrought negative consequences.
- As the years passed by, Portugal’s experiment didn’t worked perfectly because decriminalization alone wasn’t and isn’t a bullet-proof way to end the country’s problems with drugs.
- 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 medically controlled environment where they track and manage each user’s medical history, while acting like a rehab center. Illegal drug dealers and distributors should be persecuted to the fullest extent of the law, because we don’t want to condone unregulated drug usage.
Laws and regulations are also necessary to prevent drug users from harming others and degenerating society. A person under the influence of drugs shouldn’t drive, people shouldn’t be allowed to do drugs in public, children shouldn’t have access to drugs, etc. Alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana are legal in most US states, but all the states have laws regulating their usage. Decriminalizing other drugs across jurisdictions should follow similar policies for optimal success.
Soviet Russia and the Russian Federation have tried passing laws and regulations to limit alcohol consumption and its effects, which have had mixed success. From what I’ve heard, I’d argue that further success has stalled mainly because conflicts of interest have prevented further regulations from being placed on alcohol usage in Russia.
5. Determining The Legal Age Of Adulthood
5.1. Adulthood: Age Of The Majority
The age of majority ranges internationally from ages 15 to 21, with 18 being the most common age. The reasons why 18 years of age is the world’s social standard for defining adulthood are mainly:
- Nearly all humans have finished puberty at this age [Physical Milestone]
- Most people complete their compulsory education by 18 years of age [Mental Milestone]
- It is the predominant legal standard that almost every country uses [Common Legal Standard]
In particular, a younger cohorts’ attainment of adulthood centers on three criteria: gaining a sense of responsibility, independent decision-making, and financial independence. Sometimes there is the requirement of supervision by a legal guardian, or just by an adult. Other times, there is no requirement, but rather a recommendation.
Reaching adulthood implies: 1. Having all the freedoms of an adult, and 2. the individual’s parents no longer have a legal obligation to provide for them. If one has all the freedoms of an adult, but their parents still have to provide for them, it can create a game-theoretical conflict if they are still living in their parents’ home under their parents’ rules.
Up until 1971, the minimum voting age in the United States was 21. Many American adults were drafted into the ongoing Vietnam War, despite having no say in whether the war should be fought at all. In response, the US Congress passed the 26th amendment. The justification was that men being drafted should have the right to vote. While the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18, the drinking age was raised from 18 to 21 in 1984.
5.2. Arguments Why 16-Year-Olds Should Be Considered Legal Adults
- Most women and some men complete puberty at 16 years old, and most men complete puberty at 17 years old, although this does vary by person and race.
- At 16 years of age, humans will have decent reasoning skills to make their own decisions for themselves.
- If people become adults and complete their secondary education at 16 years old instead, then that gives them 2 additional years to live their lives the way they want to.
- Even after 13 years of compulsory education, most people still don’t everything that they need to know because public schools are terrible at teaching rational thinking.
- If better education created by market competition and a more intellectual culture were available, people could probably learn the same stuff in 11 years instead, by the time they become 16 years old.
- If people remain under legal guardianship for another two years after 16 years old and their parents’ house simply isn’t a good environment for them, then they can leave that mediocre or suboptimal situation 2 years earlier by becoming a legal adult.
- Humans have no control to determine who the parents/guardians that will raise them are, so if they have bad / mediocre guardians, then they should be free to leave them ASAP.
- On the other hand, if they do like who they’re living with, then they can stay with them because nothing is stopping them.
- If people are told that they are adults and that they are responsible for their own actions, then there is some psychology to make them believe that they are adults and act like adults.
- It is known that the average human doesn’t completely finish their brain development until 25 years of age. Although 25-year-olds would probably be able to make better decisions than their 16-year-old past-selves, brain development should not be used as a metric to determine adulthood. The ability to make rational decisions regarding one’s life should be the true metric.
- Furthermore, people don’t need to be 25 years old to make important life decisions. I’m sure a 16-year-old wouldn’t either, assuming that they are rational and were given a comprehensive education.
People should be considered adults at 16 years old instead of 18 years old. If a 16-year old can get a job, drive a car, manage their own finances, complete puberty, date people, and finish high school (under a better education system), then they should be granted the same liberties that an 18-year-old has. But it should be noted that children are a lifelong commitment and investment, not something to be disregarded after 18 years or whatever the age for legal adulthood happens to be.
5.3. Using An Age Range Instead Of A Flat Age?
- Or maybe the system could be set up so that 16 years old and 17 years old can choose to become adults if they have completed their secondary education (among other requirements) if they want to. And then everybody else who met the requirements but chosen not to become an adult, or everybody who had not completed secondary education by 18 years old automatically becomes an adult at 18 years old.
- People start to do actions associated with adulthood at different ages, so this suggests that it would be more appropriate to use an age range instead of a flat age.
- Since mental and physical development varies by race, this implies that different races may be ready for adulthood at different ages than others.
- To an extent, the concept of adulthood is a social construction instead of a biological one.
- Even if 16 years old is determined to be the age for adulthood, this age is determined primarily by mental milestones. On the other hand, the basic qualifications for working for the military depend more on physical milestones instead of mental ones. Thus, it would probably make sense to set a minimum age of 17 or 18 years for this instead.
Another idea is that there should be tiers for when adult rights are bestowed. These tiers could be set by age levels and/or by individual merit. At the end of the day, the age of adulthood should be determined based on whatever works best for the society.
5.3.1. Rights Automatically Bestowed At 16 Years Old
These rights are automatically bestowed at 16 years of age regardless of educational attainment.
- The right to consent.
- The right to drive (provided that one completes the required driving test).
- The right to apply for jobs where a minimum age of 16 years old is most appropriate.
5.3.2. Rights Bestowed Upon The Completion Of Secondary Education
These rights are bestowed upon the completion of secondary education and being at least 16 years old.
- The right to leave their parents’ house without being forced to stay there at curfew (if they do this, this is basically “they’re on their own”).
- The right to relinquish their parents’ parenting responsibilities if they so choose.
- The right to travel abroad.
- The right to engage in a contract (aside from jobs, sex work, etc).
- The right to apply for jobs that require secondary education.
- The right to marry.
- The right to have children (if they reasonably meet all the other requirements and can pay the reproduction tax rate)
- The right to buy/possess firearms and other tools that are reasonable for self-defense.
- The right to gamble.
- The right to use alcoholic beverages and recreational drugs.
- The right to sex work & anything else sexually related.
- The right to serve in the military (provided that they finished puberty/physical development).
- The right to die if they choose.
Most people assume that democracies are the best form of governance, but I have more nuanced views on this. I think that government decisions should only be influenced by reason and people that have merit, rather than just anyone. Whatever the minimum voting age is, it should be considerably higher than the age of adulthood, e.g. 25 years old. The right to vote should also be earned, rather than given to just anyone.
5.3.3. Rights Bestowed At 18 Years Old
Anything under ’Rights Bestowed Upon The Completion Of Secondary Education’, even if they haven’t already completed secondary education yet.
5.3.4. Responsibilities Bestowed At 18 Years Old
- Parents lose parenting rights and responsibilities regarding the person concerned. (the human becomes free from their parent’s supervision, and the parents are not obligated to cover their living needs and expenses anymore)
- The human can be tried as an adult in a legal trial.
- Anything under ’Responsibilities Bestowed Upon The Completion Of Secondary Education’, even if they haven’t already completed secondary education yet.
6. Topics Addressed In Greater Depth Elsewhere
6.1. Government Revenue
Main Article 1: Georgism Crash Course.
Main Article 2: Natural Resource Taxation and Bootstrapping Market Prices.
See this webpage for an overview of all the different kinds of taxes and their effects.
The only acceptable taxes are the ones that don’t punish productivity. There would be three main sources of revenue for the government:
- Natural Resource Taxes (taxed at the point of extraction)
- Land Value Taxes
- Location Value Taxes
- Land Value Taxes
- Reproduction Taxes (the price for buying a reproduction license)
- Head Taxes (a fixed amount per person)
Natural Resources (oil, coal, iron, natural gas, stocks of fish, etc) will be taxed at the point of extraction, while taxes will be collected from the title owners of the land possessors. This will encourage land and resources to be used more efficiently and solve a tragedy of the commons with respect to land and natural resources.
If natural resource taxation takes into account what the businesses and other buyers want to create with the natural resources, then it would make sense to enforce a tax that applies specifically to excessively large vehicles, just like how it causes Japanese trucks to be smaller and more fuel efficient than American trucks. This could be done by taxing the weight, volume, and size of said vehicles. Another point is that excessively luxurious items like cruise ships and such would also be subject to an appropriate amount of taxation, since it would reduce the resource intensiveness of those products. Similarly, water should be priced in tiers, so that usage beyond basic need is prohibitively expensive. Golf isn’t the only industry abusing water usage.
The purpose of head taxes is to ensure that everyone who uses government services pays for receiving the benefits of society. If people who buy natural resources or possess land were the only ones paying taxes, then that cause one of two problems:
- There would be a free-rider problem where people gain the benefits of government, but don’t have to pay for any of them.
- It could potentially give corporations and land possessors too much influence over the government since they are the only ones funding the government.
Head taxes help prevent both of these potential problems.
Unless there’s a balanced budget amendment, there is no evidence that cutting taxes incentivizes governments to spend less. The so-called “Starve the Beast” theory doesn’t work. Whenever the US government has cut taxes in the last few decades, government spending continued to increase.
You can’t tax inheritance without taxing gifts, and you can’t tax gifts without taxing income.
6.2. Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
All policy proposals 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.
Read More: Philosophy of Geopolitics.
6.3. Addressing Global Warming And Climate Change
6.4. Enforcing EPC: Why And How
In order to prevent war, disease, and famine, there must be a maximum population limit enforced for the country’s total number of citizens. In order to enforce that population limit, anybody who wants to have children must acquire a Reproduction License for each child that they want to have.
6.4.1. The Requirements For Being Granted A Reproduction License
- The parents must be law-abiding and have no criminal record.
- The parents 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.
- The parents must be unlikely to die during the child’s childhood. They must be reasonably healthy.
- A degree of consanguinity between the parents that is too low will be forbidden (incest is prohibited).
- The parents must have paid all their taxes (if any).
- The parents 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.
- Genetic Engineering is optional, but still subject to these requirements and other applicable regulations.
For more information about how these requirements were chosen, see: Eugenics And Reproduction Licenses FAQs.
6.4.2. How This System Would Be Enforced
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.
6.4.3. The Practicality And Feasibility Of This System
For more information and any questions, see:
For understanding the necessity of population control for sustaining future civilization specifically, see:
6.5. Urban Planning
There will be a commission responsible for urban planning in the urban / metropolitan area, and the members of the commission would be elected similarly to how jury members are elected. Any decisions passed by the urban planning commission can be proposed by the government, and if they are not vetoed, then they are executed with legal authority.
Location value tax would eliminate most of the need for zoning and would eliminate most gentrification.
Relevant: Why Cars And Car-Centric Urban Planning Suck FAQs.
Relevant Video: City Beautiful: Why Did Humans Invent Cities?.
Relevant Video: City Beautiful: Why Car-Centric Urban Planning is Inferior.
6.6. The Healthcare System
6.6.1. Why I’m Skeptical Of Public Healthcare
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.
6.6.2. How A Free-Market Healthcare System Would Reduce Costs
- 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 Drug War Should End.
- 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.
6.7. The Education System
There will be a public education system and a voucher system. This will be similar to health insurance in the United States where healthcare is provided by private companies, but there will be a public safety net for everybody else. Parents who don’t want to enroll their children into the public education system would not have to pay taxes to fund it, and would only have to pay for their children’s private education expenses.
There’s a good argument for a government-provided safety net for education. Public education can have a unifying effect on the collective values of society, which helps reduce the variance of the society’s values. In a society, you want to distribute the risks of life among everybody, and that’s why safety nets on a collective level are a good idea.
Furthermore, for-profit colleges tend to be some of the worst colleges anyone could choose. It’s true that Ancaps and Libertarians also support private non-profit colleges (which are among the best colleges, i.e. the Ivy League). Nonetheless, this is a great example of why it’s unreasonable to replace all government services with private corporations.
6.8. Regulating Academia
7. Global Government
7.1. Functions Of Global Government
- 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
7.2. How The Global Government Should Be Structured
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.
The Implications Of Adopting A Worldwide Auxiliary Language (Worldlang).
7.3. Addressing Objections To Having A Global Government
Many people have objections against global government that will be addressed in this section.
7.3.1. Why should there be a global government? Can’t nation-state governments suffice?
Global government is necessary in order to resolve critical game theoretical problems on a global scale. Solving game-theoretic problems is exactly what a government is supposed to do, and a global government simply does that a global scale. Some examples of game-theoretic problems that are best resolved by global government are:
- Overpopulation
- Global warming and carbon emissions
- Enforcing Georgism and the conservation of the Earth’s natural resources
- Regulating the pollution done by each country
- Preventing wars to the fullest extent possible (wars could potentially destroy modern civilization)
- Resolving geopolitical conflicts in order to ensure geopolitical stability
- Et Cetera
7.3.2. But aren’t smaller-scale governments more responsive and representative?
It depends on the situation. But even if this premise is true, it doesn’t refute the fact that a global government is still necessary in order to resolve critical game theoretical problems on a global scale, lest everyone on Earth shall face potentially catastrophic consequences.
We’re going to have some type of de facto global power structure no matter what happens. Today, that is currently the United Nations, combined with the influence of the Chinese and American superpowers, and other international organizations. An explicit, limited government is better than a hidden web of power, or a balance of power between hostile societies.
Also, moving problems somewhere else doesn’t accomplish anything. If nation-state governments are less effective for solving a game-theoretic problem instead of a global government, then a global government should take care of the problem instead.