After too many years of whinging about government incompetency, I invested many more years in trying to understand why incompetency seems to be its core competency, and this is the result. I'm an utter amateur whose legal and economic knowledge comes from reading books and blogs; but I'm fed up with all the excuses people make for governments. Perhaps you are too, and I welcome your contributions to my continuing education.
Self-control is my version of self-ownership, developed before I knew much of libertarianism beyond "leave me alone".
Self-control is the unalienable right, and duty, to control self.
The charter is my government according to self-control, and Chartertopia is the corresponding society; I would be happy living in it.
I think most people would also be happy in such a society, once they got used to no Big Brother to whine to, and no Big Brother to pick on them. I believe most people want to do The Right Thing, but government makes that unknowable. In Chartertopia, when people do The Wrong Thing, their victims use redress to convince society they have been wronged. It's a reputational system with teeth supplied by the public.
My purpose in starting this was to understand real world governments and why they suck. It's simple: they are immortal coercive monopolistic bureaucracies.
Immortal does not mean they are immune to collapse, conquest, and revolution, any more than immortal humans would be immune to accidents, murder, and suicide. It means their bureaucracies live on past their use-by date.
Coercive means they lack persuasive facts, logic, and arguments, and resort to "Because I said so." Adults behave like this only with pets and slaves; are you happy with a government which thinks it owns you?
Monopolistic means there is no market competition to keep bureaucracies in check. All bureaucracies are corrupt and inefficient, but fear of bankruptcy keeps business bureaucracies in check. The only real monopolies are those created by governments. Every innovation creates a small economic bubble which the disingenuous like to label "monopoly", but that label encompasses kids setting up a lemonade stand as well as Apple introducing the iPhone.
I've been sneering and laughing at government foibles ever since I was a kid, with my oldest such memory being of Sacramento legislators debating when food became a taxable snack; peanut butter between crackers was a snack, but if the peanut butter was in a separate tub from the crackers and there was a little plastic "knife" to assemble it yourself, that was untaxable food. The earliest records I have of this charter only go back to 2010.
I had read Eric Frank Russell's "The Great Explosion" when I was young; it concerns a Terran Empire trying to bring a 400 year old anarchic society under its control, baffled and stymied by its refusal to knuckle under. I eventually rediscovered it, and repurposed it into my own version of that 400 year old anarchic society, "The Little Implosion", which I doubt many would take as a literary improvement. It eventually turned into seven books on that society, and an eighth "non-fiction" exposition on Chartertopia. It would be nice if I were a good writer, but the goal is not to make a fortune or win an Ignobel prize, but to imagine how a charter society would actually develop and function. His society is unworkable but (to me) a literary wonder. My books describe (to me) a workable society and are a literary disaster. EFR's original short story "And Then There Were None" and novel "The Great Explosion" are both out of copyright and available on the web, or in books om Amazon. My copies are for sale on Amazon and available for free on my Google Drive.
What do I hope to accomplish with this substack?
Get feedback on self-control and the charter. I've fine-tuned it enough by myself. It’s time for others to have a laugh.
Post comments on current events and how Chartertopia would handle them.
Ridiculing government is easy and fun. I hope to keep such posts to a minimum, because it's repetitive and too easy.
Take a gander at the Charter link, but it will be a complete mystery until you read the Nutshell link, and then it will be less mysterious but still strange. I hope the rest of my explanatory posts remove the rest of the mystery.
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