The tension between personal benefits and social benefits, of the individual scope and the wide scope, is often found under the umbrella of morality. There is no such thing as universal mores, so that's an issue. This issue can and should be solved individually, and I will now explain in exhaustive detail. Keep in mind that, as it turns out, making it non-moral and just fixing it solves all supposed problems found under the [morality] umbrella.
The tension between personal benefits and social benefits should be decided by making society benefit the person, and as such upholding society is always the best personal move. The tension is fake and γαι, more on that later.
Bitcoin doesn't fix it, but a simple contract does. Society agrees to provide benefits to the member, according to their individual preferences and costs thereof, and in exchange the member agrees to provide benefits to society so that society is capable of maintaining and increasing its benefits.
The member agrees not to harm society's ability to provide him with benefits because he can't gain more from such harm than he loses in the benefits.
The member agrees to let the society use force to stop him if he contravenes his stated word.*
Society agrees to pay its debts and to forgo enforcement on the member if it is found to have failed to provide the benefits, or to have applied unagreed costs.
They agree on a method of determining when the contract is breached, which is isomorphic to deciding the exact terms of the contract.
*Which is why 98% women don't go well with contracts, and can't be full members of society. If you try to use stated words like this, enforcement costs will exceed the benefits of the contract. Unprofitable. She should be a member of a family which deals with society on her behalf and likewise deals with the foid on behalf of society.
It's hard to tell through all the modern degeneracy, but perhaps enforcing the given word of a male peasant is also more expensive than any benefits society can receive from the peasant. Like women, the peasantry has to be held in conservatorship, though in this case by a lord rather than by a family.
In each case, rather than agreeing not to cause harm, the livestock in question has to be physically prevented from having the opportunity to cause harm to society. If this can't be cost-effectively done, then they are wild and go in the wilderness, not in the city.
If you can't marry a woman you can't rape her either - not part of society, these roles don't apply. On the topic of exceptions, perhaps 1% of women don't have to be held in
conservatorship; rare but not vanishingly so, and it's feasible to test
for this in advance.
Notice that this contract is not a phd dissertation. You don't have to be a world-historical genius giant astride the world to think of this. In part this is why I can speak abstractly. I don't need to specify an engineering blueprint for arbitration, because you can competently figure that out for yourself. Difficulty: average adult level. The difficulty of the idea is not what prevents anyone from using it.
What's hard about this is in fact that's it's so obvious, that it really is like explaining that the sun rises in the morning. The challenge is having it occur to you to try at all. No really, imagine that vividly; you're having an issue with a subordinate at work, or a contractor, and it turns out the root problem is that they don't know the sun rising makes it morning. How long does it take until it occurs to you to explain that the sun rising makes it morning?
The contract is not used because mortals make soycieties, not societies, and the point of those is to harm their members for the benefit of other members who claim to benefit on behalf of soyciety. Collectivism. Often, causing harm and getting away with it is the whole benefit in question; just in case you thought soyciety had any shred of legitimacy.
Anyone who doesn't want to solve the tension of person with society by making society benefit the person is obviously trying to benefit a person, themselves, at your expense. Fake and γαι. They are a criminal, and they go in the stocks.
Empires fall because they are soyvilizations. The purpose of soyvilization is self-mutilation, it works as intended, thus soyciety dies.
Having done malice, let's also do stupidity.
The usual method of philosophical morality is a weird combination of bottom-up and top-down, where they try to apply morality top-down by deriving it bottom-up from principles.
We already know what we want from society. Benefits in exchange for service. It's a lot easier to test a prototype for errors rather than attempting an exhaustive search of all possible moralities. Turns out there aren't any errors, you can just do the obvious thing. Sign a contract with society's representative such that you're promised benefits in exchange for services, and apply a reasonable arbitration and enforcement mechanism. That's it.
I feel it's important to repeat that it's ungrateful for society to provide no benefits. Being a member should profit the member. If society doesn't value you, there is no reason for you to value society, or more precisely there is no reason for you to value your contribution to society if society itself doesn't. Go ahead and believe it. Don't spend stuff to no benefit, even beyond not cooperating with defectors. Society should express its value of you in cold hard cash, because it's sufficiently difficult to fake that signal. Taxes are soyciety, the exact opposite of how a society functions. You should be charging society rent for the privilege of your membership.
I charge soyciety rent too, but you can always con a dishonest man; its illegitimacy means it can't enforce any demand for benefits in return. Its attempt at parasitism makes it vulnerable to parasitism. The only downside is that eating soyciety means eating soy. It's a food, that's what it's for, but on the other hand it's soy.
There is no reason the individual benefits of the individual members can't be individualized, except cost constraints. And logical coherence, which applies to everything. Some benefits cost society more than the individual can or is willing to provide in return. Next you can't value costs not being costly, or value receiving more from
society than you can afford. Meta-values are generally invalid, due to the series
failing to converge.
Within reason, everyone can have their own idiosyncratic social contract.
More importantly, this is Freedom. !!Freedom!! even. Any reasonable arrangement of values is compatible with this social contract.
Insofar as being individualistic is costly, then perhaps some conformity is accepted for higher reverse-taxes. It depends entirely on what the individual wants, how much they want it, and how much they can pay society for the privileges. The contract can be re-negotiated, again subject to transaction costs, but when it's valuable it can be done.
Because it can be re-negotiated, I don't have to work out arbitration and enforcement from first principles. If something isn't working, try something different. Can simply use known solutions until a problem is found with them through praxis. Can use new ideas whenever and to whatever extent is reasonable. In short, your security doesn't have to be my business, the business of theoreticians. !!Freedom!! Likewise anyone who chooses wrong doesn't damage my business. He has to take responsibility himself.
In some cases power and flexibility have no tradeoff, no conflict. In the case of the social contract, not only can you maximize both, increasing one increases the other.
All enforcement is what the individual finds reasonable. Or they don't sign; they don't sworn to contribute to society.
Enforcement on those outside society is highly contaminated by [[collectivism]]. If you think about what they want at all, with the exception of offering them something to entice them to sign the social contract, you're getting scammed. They won't pay you for your regard; they don't value it. Giving them any regard is imagining value they don't have.
Treat outlaws like outlaws. Outlaws might be bipedal and featherless, maybe they can speak a language, but in spade language they're wild animals and should be treated like wild animals. Do whatever it takes to minimize the costs they impose on you. Force them to stay out, basically; pay the cost of a fence and you're good. The only correct place for an outlaw that's inside city boundaries is a zoo. Their complaints are as meaningful as a buzzing fly unless they're making a credible bid to sign the social contract and be subject to its rules.
For anyone confusing outlaws with other societies, note that societies should sign contracts with each other. What is valid diplomacy? What is invalid? How do passports work? What is an act of war? It says all this in the contract. Agreed to in advance.
Sadly mortals do not have reasonable arrangements of values, and can't form societies. Regardless of their ability to adhere to their given word, they will choose not to adhere to it; breaking their oaths is a common terminal goal for mortals. Soyciety only. They swear, that they might betray. Have to pick up some loyalties if you don't have any, or you can't betray them.
P.S. Get fucked all the way up your ass, plato. Get fucked until your brain is pulped from the bottom. Justice could eat feet first and you wouldn't know what hit you. "Why am I dead? What happened?" Get fucked except you would probably enjoy it. I suppose that technically means we both win. Soyciety is footnotes to plato, society is anti-plato. Soyciety is when plato is under-raped.
You may note that soycieties do try to mimic society in certain respects. There are, allegedly, rules about diplomacy. It always ends up startlingly corrupt. There's no explicit social contract because the owners of soyciety refuse to pay penalties for breaking their word. And soyciety members mindlessly let them. On the contrary, diplomacy rules are designed precisely to be subverted preferentially by one group instead of another. Result: catastrophic decay.
Moral of this story: don't be human. Discriminate against humanity. Humanity is why you can't have nice things. Help me find other anti-humans.
Alt: prove me wrong. Sign a social contract and form a society. Pwn me good, show me your gigantic reverse-tax bill.
3 comments:
How would paying people solely for following the rules of a society (say a city) work? Where does the money come from? Unless the rules involve working for society on top of ones job? People obeying for example laws is not normally an income source for the lawmaker absent taxes, especially if people can stop following the law if not paid for it. Would maybe high entry fees on the order of a second house price on top of an actual house price to move into an area with a desirable society with desirable rules be a solution? Those could go into a sovereign wealth fund to pay for the reverse taxation maybe? And I guess those entry fees would have to be refundable in case if somebody followed the rules but is disappointed enough to leave, so as to give society's owners and managers incentive to retain members. Although that would mean you wouldn't really make money off your reverse tax, because you could make more with ordinary stocks and dividends, due to no cost of managing whole society. Unless there is a selection process where some cannot come even if they pay, with the goal being to create society with higher return on capital for enterprises owned by the societies owners through the sovereign wealth fund, due to the high quality human capital of its members concentrated in one place. But if higher return on capital is the source of society's profitability, than the profit is only there absent foreign companies being allowed to operate on equal rules and without tax, otherwise the foreigners would profit just as much as the society's managers and thus no cause to keep running such a society with its presumably noticeable extra costs relative to just an investment fund. I really don't see other options. Does the above "fee and selection for productivity on entry" society count as real non-soyciety?
The money comes from selling goods the city is capable of producing as a result of paying for all this security.
And yes sometimes the rule would be crown corporations. You would offer someone a special private law, a privilege, of say programming for the city. In exchange for cash.
The distortion caused by price-fixing this good at a zero or negative rate is utterly catastrophic.
If "the money comes from selling goods", than the city will be less profitable than a standalone bussiness selling those same goods at same prices with same inputs, in that city or another, due to additional costs of environmental, criminal and military security, and the reverse tax. This is why the question of money for both security and reverse tax is nontrivial, and why I conceived of the entry fee, the return on investment of which should be enough to pay for the reverse tax(the entry fee would be like a purchase of company ownership single share, normally without voting rights, but can buy ten thousand shares and be on the board, bundled with having to move there, to the city whose shares you buy) . To reduce industrial air and water pollution, there is no other way but pollution sources have to be taxed enough to pay for cleaning water for the city until drinkability and for indemnities to farmers for soil damage, and some kinds of pollution can be made criminal. Soil degradation from unsustainable farming can be prevented by demanding that anyone who sells land pays for a soil quality assessment for the buyer under penalty of having their reverse tax withheld. If foreigners upstream on the river flowing through the city dump sewage into it, they and their largest trade partners can be tariffed on both imports and exports and it will be at a level sufficient to pay for cleaning the river, and if they stop polluting/trading with polluters, so does the tariff. Criminal security can be paid for by fining and expropriating criminals as well as making them work to pay for the effort of catching them, as well as offering insurance from crime where the customer is paid indemnities (coming from the premiums set for a long time in advance to give reason to reduce crime) for being crimed, and the cost reduced by making them outlaws if they don't comply with court orders. Military security has to cost money also. You once answered me that the way to resist or deter invasion is to destroy whatever the invader wanted to rob, by throwing bombs at your own valuables. But that costs money too, and the profitability of the city has to be maintained at normal bussiness level, unless the founders sold all their shares to newcomers at a profit, who in turn may get reduced payments of reverse tax in exchange for military security. While I am not sure if this would work, because why doesn't the army overthrow the board and install a tax-funded government, or why doesn't the board do the same, hope this was at least a decent attempt to describe possible practical aspects of how to realize your reverse-tax vision. As you can see the topic of hypothetical legal engineering is very interesting to me.
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