Empowerment Politics politics for the information society by @c3o ❧

I hold these truths to be self-evident…

1. Human Potential: People are interested in their own improvement and that of the community they perceive being part of. They are ambitious, creative, productive, friendly, responsible and collaborative when free of fear and not discouraged.
   • If they aren't behaving that way, look for systems dis-incentivizing these traits.
2. Government is a major way people organize for mutual benefit. Its goal is to put in place and oversee effective systems that empower people to make their destinies and find their happiness in a socially viable way.
   
   • Empowerment is an active process, it does not happen by inaction/laissez-faire.
   • Being empowered requires: Ensured survival, humane living conditions, equal rights and opportunities and personal freedom. Securing these for everyone is the priority.
   • Beyond that, government should strive to act gently and without dogmatic pretense: Incentivizing instead of enforcing, providing meta attributes (opportunity, transparency, education, information) instead of directly organizing – where that suffices to achieve above-mentioned goals.
3. Power and opportunities are distributed highly unfairly due to circumstances at birth (gender, race, class,...), non-meritocratic hierarchies and the distribution of money. It is a key government responsibility to redistribute these more justly, while working to remove the underlying power imbalances by birth, meritocratize or flatten hiearchies and disconnect wealth from power.
   • Money is just another system that can and will be gamed. Some people will accumulate disproportionally much.
   • Money is a flawed indicator of productivity. Other officially sanctioned indicators should be sought.
   • Monetary wealth does not correlate well with happiness.
   • The purpose of redistribution is a fair set of opportunities for everyone, not a "fair"/equal distribution of monetary wealth
   • Unfortunately, equal opportunities can't solely be legislated, since discrimination happens in social as much as in legal structures, which are tricky to control by law. The most effective tool here is education.
4. Leanness: Large hierarchical organizations (corporations, parties, governments, etc.) routinely reward skillfully navigating their bureaucracies and hierarchies over actual productivity. They become inefficient, irresponsible and harmful to society. Power always corrupts.
   • Self-organization by many small, independent actors is preferable. This self-organization usually happens in networks and markets.
   • It is the job of government to ensure their functionality.
   • Entities in a position of power and wealth will defend their position against innovation with all their might, to the detriment of society.
   • The natural tendency for bureaucratization to continually increase must be actively fought.
5. Stakeholdership: People will only care about something they are actively involved in.
   • If they don't care about it, they're not involved/empowered/stakeholders enough
   • Current political systems are constrained by the necessities of less connected, less globalized times. Individuals' day-to-day participation opportunities have to be radically increased.
   • In education: Students only learn in pursuit of interests and means
     • Graduating/getting grades are insufficient stand-ins for actual means
     • The primary purpose of education is to inspire & motivate, not to "teach"
   • In business: Encourage shared ownership, employee options, profit sharing, etc.
6. Progress & Technology: With technology, we can we do more with less, which is usually good. It's the fastest, most scalable tool to make the world better, and we've only just begun.
   • Continuous growth is possible for the forseeable time.
     • Our most powerful, reasonably renewable, and so far hardly used resource is human brainpower
     • If natural resource depletion goes hand in hand with efficiency increases, resources only asymptotically near zero, they never reach it
       • Politics must ensure that this gradually becomes the case
     • Our ecosystem is the universe, not planet Earth
   • The Internet is, so far, humanity's ultimate tool of individual empowerment.
     • All citizens must have access and the necessary skills
     • All government services must be rethought in light of individuals' new technologically enabled powers.
     • Knowledge and understanding of technology is critical for policy makers – in fact, we need technological innovators in government.
     • It can/will/is/must enable better market and government transparency, connect individuals together to solve problems so far the responsibility of inefficient bureaucracies, transform education, journalism etc.
     • Because of its unique role in empowering people, attempts at regulating the Internet must be extremely closely scrunitized.
7. Non Zero-Sumness: Win-win situations for everyone are possible
   • ...and are, in a true free and fair market, the only possible move
     • If non-win-win situations happen, the market conditions or the freedoms of all of it's actors still need to be improved
   • It's important to also increase the size of the pie and not just work on the distribution of its current size
8. Complexity & Change Life, society & people are massively complex and messy systems
   1. Nobody knows enough. Every action has unforeseen, unintended consequences. Everything is an unjustifiable simplification/generalization. Circumstances always change faster than we realize.
   • Anything centrally planned will be frequently wrong.
   • You cannot fix a centralized system's problems by giving power to a few "better" (smarter, more pure-hearted, etc) people.
   • We need to be agile, risk things, fail often and correct the path often.
9. Sustainability
   • In addition to its current citizens, government must also represent the interests of its future ones.
   • Current systems of governance, corporate leadership, and others incentivize short-term thinking.
   • Short-term thinking harms society long-term.
   • Sustainable use of resources and long-term planning must be incentivized
   • Cities are humanity's most efficient, scalable, sustainable habitats – though obviously there is much room for improvement.
10. Rationality
    • I cannot demand that my preferences, fears or other emotions be made legislation.
      • There can be no victimless crimes.
    • We must continuously work to avoid rhetorical fallacies and to identify/stay aware of our own biases and privileges.

And therefore propose these policies:

Perpetual reinvention

1. No concept is sacred – periodically question everything… except this statement :)
   • All laws automatically time out. Renewal requires political effort and proof of positive effect.
   • Note: This makes worrisome laws (ie liberties vs. security trade-offs) less scary / enables us to try them.
   • Periodically rethink all government services in light of new social and technological developments.
     • Try not just to consider the status quo and what to incrementally change, but step back to the overall picture. Regularly sanity-check even things we've gotten used to.
     • (How to formalize this? Ministry of Reinvention? 3/5-yearly sessions?)
2. Discourage influence of any vested interests who aim to keep up a status quo regardless of benefit to society
   • Politics
     • Rotation principles & term limits
     • Domain experts over professional politicians
     • Discourage personality cults
   • Economy
     • Resist lobbying … how?
     • Resist entrenched interests seeking legal protection from progress
       • Music, film, newspaper industries, etc.
     • Do not protect employees from progress. Periodic job losses are necessary. Help individuals (ensured survival, free education), not obsolete companies.
     • No bail-outs of failing companies.
3. Fight bureaucracy...

Basic rights

1. Human rights
2. Right to a living: Basic income
   • Right to affordability of food, shelter and healthcare
   • Only someone who does not have to fear for their own (and their dependents') survival can meaningfully participate in a free market and not be unfairly taken advantage of.
     • Ensures workers' rights, should make most related legislation obsolete (ie: limiting store opening hours)
   • Providing people with that freedom unlocks the commons, shifting responsibilities from government bureaucracy to self-organized individuals.
   • See Basic Income
3. Information rights
   • Internet access
   • Full transparency of government
     • Open records ("Freedom of information" laws)
     • Open data
     • Make the navigation of government bureaucracy transparent & social
       • Collaborative tools (wikis, forums, chats) for people going through similar processes
     • Webpages about every government employee to evaluate performance and emphasize that they're the public's employees
     • Open party/campaign finance information, politician's incomes, etc.
     • Open databases of police actions, clearly visible officer ID numbers to justify monopoly on violence
4. Freedom of movement
   • Accessability for the differently able
   • Open borders
   • Access to roads, rails, ports
   • Subsidized (free?) public transportation
5. Social freedom
   • No victimless crimes (No legislation of drug use, obscenity, etc)
   • No government involvement in relationships or marriage
   • No regulation of religion, no special rights for religions
6. Privacy...
7. Freedom of identity
   • Transgender/intersex rights

Stakeholdership

1. Liquid democracy
   • Optional delegation of one's vote for all or single specific topics
     • Residents either participate (propose, write & discuss legislation; vote) on every issue themselves, or temporarily entrust someone (person/organization/party) with their vote
   • Chain/multi-level delegation possible/encouraged
   • Changable at any time. Delegations time out after a year
   • Anonymized but auditable (big technical challenge!)
   • Monitoring of who voted for what in your name
   • Reasoning beyond increased stakeholdership:
     • Encourages issue campaigns rather than election campaigns
     • Discourages parties, professional politicians
     • Backwards-compatible: You can still just vote for one party every year
2. Locally applicable legislation + continent-level legislation, with few intermediate layers (which are arbitrary today).*
3. Completing mandatory basic education (not reaching a certain age) awards the right to participate
4. Open platforms
   • Bug tracker for cities
   • Bug tracker for laws

1. Guaranteed Basic Income
   • Livable, but only just. EUR ~800
   • Regardless of age or circumstances. No application required.
   • Unlocking the commons
     • A basic income gives people the chance to truly pursue their own happiness, but also a better society
     • As a result, the state does not have to (keep) fund(ing) and organizing many things: Give responsibility back to independent individuals.
   • Enables entrepreneurship and experimentation
   • Replaces all other transfer payments, including pensions
   • Encourages automation of menial jobs
2. Nurturing the commons
   • Help people organize and associate
   • Provide local open, non-profit spaces w/ infrastructure
   • Encourage those that don't live off the basic income to donate theirs (ie: for bigger projects by those who do).
3. The unlocked commons benefits (and frees the state from involvement in): Art, journalism, neighborhood sharing, knowledge bases, education, caretaking, social work, child-rearing, open source software, etc...

Emergent Economy

1. Free markets with government involvement in:
   • Life-critical services: Water, emergency services
   • Public infrastructure: Pipes, roads, rails, parks
   • Preventing market failure
     • Prevent monopolies and collusion
     • Making supply transparent & providing information to base buying decisions on
       • Certify & label, instead of regulating
       • Enforce open market data
         1. Market participants above a certain volume must provide their price, availability and product origin data in an open format on the net
         2. Provide aggregation of that data
         3. Incentivize the creation of open source, non-profit listings, comparisons, calculators, marketplaces, wikis built on top of that
         4. List/publicize/advertise those services
     • Making demand transparent … todo
     • True cost economics: Factor in externalities, environmental effects into prices (ie nuclear power, fossil fuel, plastic, etc)
     • Ensuring portability (standards & procedures to allow customers to switch providers at any time)
     • International trade: Tax products produced elsewhere under circumstances not allowed locally
   • Incentivize small companies
     • Progressive tax on sales volume/employees with deductions for employee-owned, democratic enterprises
     • Never let any of the essential service providers become "too big to fail".
   • Incentivize long-term planning – how?
2. Ease of doing business
   • Cheap limited liability companies
   • Cut down founding bureaucracy
   • Allow recovery from failure (bankruptcy legislation etc)
3. Prevent undue corporate influence on politics
   • Campaign finance: Donations limited & transparent. Democracy Voucher?
   • Anti lobbying

Revenue

1. Entropy tax on extracting finite resources and other non-sustainable activities
   • But: Prefer emissions trading systems for activities that must be absolutely limited
2. Land value tax on exclusive use of land (fences, pollution)
   • Community gardens, open spaces etc pay none
3. Consumption tax on goods & services not necessary for survival
   • Exemptions for groceries, clothes, rent… how?
4. Corporate profit tax grows with company size
5. Inheritance tax (50%?)
6. Financial transaction & speculation taxes
7. Only after those consider taxes on work

Education

1. Primary
   • Free – but if possible just state-financed, not -run
   • Ages ~5-9
     • Basic tools: Reading, writing, maths, scientific method, local language, English
     • Social skills, collaboration/communication skills, compassion & tolerance
     • Creativity
       • Confidence & ambition, sense of wonder
       • Growth mindset
   • Ages 9-16 (blocks of decreasing length, government-organized)
     • Meta/soft skills: The HOW, not the WHAT
       • Learning skills, goal-pursuing habits, life-long learning mindset
       • Critical thinking, fact-checking, overcoming biases & fallacies
       • Dealing with change, complexity & uncertainty
       • Empathy & diversity
       • Physical & emotional health, self-image, nutrition, exercise
       • Relationships, sex, parenting
       • Political/social engagement, social organization, collaboration
       • Information retrieval, media literacy, tech literacy
       • Effective & non-violent communication, debate & presentation skills
       • Personal finance skills, entrepreneurship, job application
     • Inspiration: What's out there – Seeing and understanding a variety of different fields of study, lifestyles, viewpoints & vocations
       • Visits & excursions
       • Introductions to electives
     • Completing attendance of these courses affords voting rights. There is no exam – only the system can fail, not the pupil.
2. Secondary
   • Ages 9+ (ANY age!) Electives (hard skills & facts). Rough governmental curricula, privately organized institutions, free student/parent choice (voucher system). Flexibility to take them when you become interested in a topic.
     • Math, languages, economics, law & politics, history, physics, chemistry, sociology & psychology, philosophy, environmental science & geography, biology, IT, literature & theater, arts & music, crafts & electronics, media & design, sports & dance, farming & building & gardening, traffic education…
     • Interdisciplinary projects, practical experience
     • Point system to provide optional certification
   • Non-goals
     • Fact memorization
     • Authority & discipline
3. Higher
   • No organization
   • Student loan program repayable (only) if certain salary levels are reached, at central bank interest rate

Energy

1. Incentivize renewables
2. Re-evaluation of nuclear power
   • True cost pricing, no liability subsidization
   • Do not extend lifespans of old plants
   • Require passive security for any new construction (stable conditions in event of power loss/other system failure)
   • Encourage technological innovation, ie Generation IV

Cities

1. Livable streets. Dense, diverse, mixed-use, decentralized boroughs.
2. Open spaces for community use
3. End financial support for unsustainable single-owner/occupier housing & suburban development
4. Fight urban segregation
5. Wifi in public places?
   • Might already be obsolete with 3G and falling roaming costs.
6. Transport
   • Scale back grown privileges of private motorized transport
   • True cost economics for fossil fuel-powered vehicles
   • Inner city congestion charges, park and ride
   • Divide space at least 50-50 between automobiles and pedestrians, bicyclists, public transport

Law & Justice

1. Rehabilitation over punishment
2. Lawsuit costs...
3. Law simplification/language/understandability...
4. Curb patent law...

Health Care

1. I have no clue…?!
2. State guarantees affordability… how
3. Subsidized psychological care

Budget & Finance

1. Balanced budget, surplus in growth periods. Debt may only be taken on with highly credible plans on how the rate of economic growth will far outpace the rate of growth of debt.
2. (Geldmenge an Wirtschaftswachstum gekoppelt?)
3. I have no clue...?!

Foreign policy & trade

1. Free trade
   • …?
2. Prevent major loss of life/massacres
3. Really foreign policy
   • Incentivize space travel
     • Continued growth is not possible otherwise
     • Reduce risk of extinction
     • Driver of human aspiration

Environment

1. see: Sustainability tax.
2. …?!

See also

• Bright green environmentalism

To investigate