Politics 101

Politics 101:

• The state should limit coercion to harm prevention 

• The state should not use coercion to run organisations unrelated to harm prevention

• The state should run harm-preventing organisations

• The state should seek to minimise involuntary funding and staffing of harm-preventing organisations – seeking voluntary contribution

Examples of the inherently coercive:

• Taxation

• Policing

• Conquest

• Shaming

Examples of the generally not coercive:

• Employment 

• Contractual obligation

• Private property

• Asking

Harm examples:

• Starvation

• Injury

• Illness

• Distress

Harm prevention examples:

• A company is polluting a river, so the state intervenes

• Police, health and fire services

• Public housing, food banks

• Seatbelt laws, employment laws

Non-harm-prevention examples:

• Education unrelated to harm

• Transport unrelated to harm prevention 

• Museums

• A “Department for Culture, Media and Sport”

The state (meaning, a relatively small group of elected elites) should aim to watch over and facilitate the development of ecosystems of charity, cooperation and healthy competition, such that individuals feel surrounded by overlapping organic social structures that satisfy their needs and desires – semi-laissez-faire – operating more as a referee and helper than a direct player or dictator.

The state should not “represent” the people. That’s a lie. Either it is the people or it isn’t.

It should not:

• Make speeches and virtue-signal

• Be a cult of personality

• Be based on a members’ club e.g. political party

• Have a twitter (X) account or similar

The state should not:

• Use coercion in the name of harm-prevention while there is no actual harm to stop or prevent

• Perform harm prevention on the basis of an ideology that dictates what is and isn’t harmful, as opposed to in response to actual experienced harm, including reported distress

The state, at its core, should be a Department for Harm Prevention.

It should not use coercion unless either:

• It is a use of justified coercion to stop prior coercion

• It reduces total harm

Coercion is a cause of harm. Coercion can only reduce total harm by:

• Breaking abusive power dynamics

• Settling disputes

• Enforcing honesty and transparency, particularly in trade

• Enforcing duty of care

• Enforcing health and safety information

There is an unbalanced relationship between the individual and the state “above” them. The state should prioritise harm prevention for its innocent subjects over those newly entering or beyond the active reach of the state, particularly when their innocence is unknown.

The more that these apply, the more the state needs to discriminate in favour of its actual subjects, at the expense of outsiders:

• Among the native and innocent public, harm is disproportionately linked to the presence of perceived outsiders

• Organisations under the state are unfree to discriminate against perceived outsiders

Someone's response:

You will never get enough voluntary contributions to get a functional state.

My response:

I think a state that is 100× more efficient at serving the people will have 100× more goodwill than is normal, and therefore could get 100× more donations than otherwise.

However, to begin with, you need the current "high" taxation, but you can slowly reduce taxation and rely more on donation.

A state can’t exist without some form of voluntary submission. The ideal is 100% voluntary submission, and should be the goal.

Someone's response:

Wouldn't 100% voluntary submission be "pro Patria Mori"?

My response:

Well, AI told me:

“The phrase is famous for being ironically used in Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce et Decorum Est, which describes the horrors of WWI and calls the patriotic sentiment "the old lie".”

WW1 had conscription, and conscription isn’t 100% voluntary submission.

Of course, by “100% voluntary submission” I mean that there is no coercion, yet there is order due to people having faith in the wide view and planning of the authority.

In a case of 100% voluntary submission, a state would not need prisons.

I believe that if a reasonable person asks a reasonable person to do something reasonable, then they will do it. 

And if a reasonable state asks its reasonable subjects to do something reasonable, then they will do it.

And each subject should be considered reasonable until proven selfish.

100% voluntary submission is possible if:

1. The state is reasonable

2. The subjects are all reasonable

This is easier said than done because an unreasonable state raises unreasonable subjects who fail to respond to the state’s lack of reason. If unreasonable subjects become the state, they make it more unreasonable, and you have runaway unreasonableness (clown world) heading to collapse.

So, this is why history happens in waves and eras, because people don’t just shape the state – the state shapes people. 

You get feedback loops – but these are open loops – paraloops. There is always chance of escaping into the next dimension. No system is completely closed, because as the system declines, people question it and it becomes reasonable not to submit to the state.

People are inclined to submit because the big fish eats the little fish, and submitting means being part of the big fish. 

And people will submit until they realise they aren’t part of a big fish anymore.

This seems to be the case. 

Regarding population growth and decline in China:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-96-9658-1_2

Institutions then (China, quoting the site):

"Humans should learn to control themselves"

"Efforts should be made to bring population under control so as to preclude population multiplication from holding back the progress of scientific research"

*Sterilising women, 1 child policy*

https://youtube.com/shorts/nFA-68cvpI4

How come the progress of scientific research is mutually incompatible with population growth?

It’s like political classes are inclined to find any excuse to tyrannise people.

Institutions now:

Sh1t!!!!!! You’re supposed to reproduce you know!!! Here take your own tax money to make a baby. https://www.ft.com/content/6318ce01-5d7d-4f40-94e7-9f0e85e71a24

So, first there was an overpopulation crisis, now there’s an underpopulation crisis… What if it’s all fake? 

What if the real crisis is evil governance?

The smart-ass scholar elite have shown themselves to be stupid, self-interested bullies.

I believe that it's not the state's role to micromanage people, such as stopping them from reproducing and then 50 years later incentivising them to reproduce.

The state should assume the role of macro-managing the things that the common people cannot — which is large organisations and projects that will affect many people.

True macro-management does not involve bullying huge amounts of people.

My concept of macro-management mostly involves:

• Occasionally bullying a powerful few leaders of organisations, to get them to work for the common good

• Planning infrastructure

• Nationalising key services that keep people alive e.g. nationalised water services, particularly if privatisation fails to play fair, which is mostly when there is a lack of competition leading to lack of effort. There is therefore no point in private regional monopolies on water. If a business isn't allowed to fail operationally, and has no competition, then it's not really a business, so what's the point in privatisation? Margaret Thatcher was clearly a.... Not intelligent.

To be meaningfully a customer, you must meaningfully be able to not be a customer. If you can't really choose your water company, you're not really a customer of the water company.

To get businesses and free association to do its magic, the state has to make sure that there is actually competition and options for the individual.

The state should macro-manage organisations such that individuals are not tied down, held back or exploited by organisations, but such that individuals and organisations can get the most of out of each other. So, there is then equality between the individual and the organisation, and that is because the innocent individual can choose what organisations they want to associate with.

To macro-manage is to manage management, as opposed to manage people directly. To manage management is to allow management to actually have freedom to manage, while still managing them in the end, and being in control in the end. (In macromanagement)​ You have the final say, and almost all of what happens is not your say, yet your say has enabled it to happen. Macro-management responds to the social environment, re-arranging it until a good one appears.

Macro-management wouldn't be just writing instructions and giving them to your subordinates so that they, without their own discretion and autonomy, use them to instruct their subordinates.

That would be distant micro-management. In such a (micro-management) scenario, you could take the place of one of your subordinates, and then, fundamentally your work is the same. (For macromanagement) Your actual product has to be to manage the managers. As such, you are their manager, yet they have no less control over their subjects than you do. Maybe this is equality. You are basically empowering managers to, so, you are no less a dictator than they are. They are just as powerful as you, because they are closer to the subjects. So, it's like, you, as the leader of the country, are very distant from your subjects, yet you have great control over them. Yet you also don't have more control than a lowly authority. You couldn't tell a lowly authority what to do, yet a lowly authority could directly tell someone what to do.

I think all you really have to do to be a successful country, at the highest macro-management level, is:

• allow competing interests

• decide which interest is better for the common good, resolving the competition

You kind of want to maximise social and business competition but also minimise the use of coercion in doing so. So you need to find a balance between setting society up for competition, but also not create such a competitive environment that you are actually making the market worse. But in order to do that you would have to use a good but of coercion.

So basically your job is to decide what ideas are good, and that means actually practiced ideas that organise people. As opposed to make your own ideas. Which means you do have to by default have a concept of a blank slate society in which there are no organised people, no written rules.

The point is that rules are necessary, but it is impossible to know what the most productive rules are, so you need blank slates and to compare social orders, see how you can merge them, make hybrids of them etc.[

The point in rules is that they allow people to cooperate, but in doing so they also limit cooperation.