In a nutshell
The Self-control Charter In a Nutshell
Everything you didn't know you wanted to know.
Start with any current government. Strip it of all prosecution powers, and add a few more steps.
Only victims can prosecute. There will be no more victimless crimes, such as going to prison for finding an eagle feather, or the more traditional insider trading, prostitution, and drugs.
Losers pay everything spent because of the case — damages, case costs, time off work — so people will think twice and thrice before prosecuting frivolous cases.
People who refuse to participate in a case lose; if it's frivolous, then it's easy to win and make a profit off the loser.
Losers cannot file any charges for less than their unpaid verdict debt, which allows everyone to steal lesser amounts from them. If people have to hire police to help, that adds to the verdict debt. This is the charter's public enforcement.
Invert the power structure so people control the legislature.
Government has no control and nothing to say concerning voting.
Legislators cast how many votes they won, eliminating equal-sized districts and abrupt political changes, and reducing the temptation for fraud.
Residents define districts and hold district elections, independently of government, to determine when and how the legislature meets and to override and opt out of parent legislation.
All government laws are challenged, defended, and enforced by We, the People, not government.
Self-control
Self-control came before realizing how much libertarian legal beagles derive from the seemingly self-explanatory "self-ownership".
Self-control is the unalienable right, and duty, to control self.
"Unalienable" means self-control cannot be taken from you; it does not mean you cannot give it up, and what you have given up can always be reclaimed. But the symmetry is essential. The right to be drunk pairs with the duty to not bother other people, and if you ignore that duty, you lose the right.
Property
The self-control definition does not mention property because property is a natural and inevitable consequence of self-ownership; if you do not have the right to control your property, you are a slave and do not own yourself. If someone steals a chair you made, they have enslaved you, whether for the past when you made the chair, or for the future when you make a replacement.
Control of property is again both right and duty. If you cannot control your property, you have lost the right to that property. A fence around land is your claim to control it. If your dog runs loose terrorizing the neighborhood, you have abandoned both right and duty to control it, and you no longer own it. But if you patrol your fence, maintain it, and make an effort to keep out or evict trespassers; and if you make an effort to keep your dog at home, round it up if it escapes, and make amends for damage it causes; you are asserting your right and duty to control them, and they remain your property.
Non-Aggression Principle
The NAP follows from self-ownership. If you hit someone, you have violated their self-ownership and your duty to control yourself; you have surrendered the corresponding right to control yourself, and your victim is free to hit back or restrain you.
This extends to preemptive actions to deter or block threats, where threat can be defined as "an imminently unavoidable violation of self-control". One doesn't need to be hit before trying to block the hit.
Guardianship
Guardianship is not defined or part of self-control, but is as natural. Parents have a natural inclination to nurture and protect their offspring, until the offspring mature and self-emancipate as others accept them as adults.
Wards are not slaves. They still own themselves, and guardianship must be appropriate. Everyone understands amputating a gangrenous arm; no one understands gratuitous amputation for a role in a remake of The Fugitive. Don't push children off a roof because they think they're Superman; don't mutilate them because they think they're one of 57 genders. They can endanger themselves when they're adults.
The charter
Thus we come to the charter itself, a voluntary compact for resolving self-control disputes, called redress.
A single line suffices to describe redress; self-control constrains interpretation and implementation.
Dicta and perjury are adjuncts to redress.
Charter government facilitates redress. Self-control also constrains government, but its general characteristics require more arbitrary definitions.
Dicta
Dicta, singular dictum, are what words and deeds represent. It is not just legislation; it applies everywhere.
Authoritative representations expire in 1.5 years unless renewed; false dicta equal the issue at stake.
If you do not understand a dictum, you cannot honor it; it is defective. This is the key to interpreting the charter. Dicta must be consistent, falsifiable, minimal, relevant, and a whole lot more. "Oak Streeet" is understandable; "Oaak Street" may not be.
Context matters. A contract referencing an external standard uses the version in effect when created, otherwise third parties could revise dicta indirectly and change the understanding. It would also be inconsistent.
Automatic expiration prevents surprise 100 year old dicta whose language and context are no longer understood. The length allows a full year of data analysis between updates, for desirability, enforcement consistency, expected consequences, and so on.
Think of false dicta as perjury applying everywhere, not just redress. Trying to frame someone for murder is treated as murder.
Defects and perjury are independent. If you present someone with an invoice for $100, there are four possibilities:
It's real and has enough information to verify.
It's real but has too little information to verify. It's defective.
It's a lie and has enough information to falsify. It's perjury.
It's a lie but has too little information to falsify. It's perjury and defective.
Redress
This brings us to redress, the charter's purpose.
We, the people, resolve self-control disputes beyond reasonable doubt with contracts for full restitution ...
Redress resolves those self-control disputes, and nothing else; there are no laws to break.
The parties, not third party government officials, resolve disputes such as crime, contracts, and bar brawls, by negotiating a verdict laying out who owes whom how much, including full restitution: damages, lost wages, hired help, lab work, and recovery from recalcitrant debtors.
Suspects must be brought into the case and participate in all aspects as soon as possible, to reduce the appearance of biased victims tampering with evidence, inadvertently or intentionally.
It is ALL the parties' charter duty to work towards resolution. Stalling lets evidence deteriorate beyond a reasonable doubt, runs up costs, and marks the malingerer as an incompetent adult who the other parties must shun as a child to advance the case.
Tampering with evidence is perjury.
Warrants
If resolution requires investigation, looking for evidence necessarily violates self-control, resolved by more negotiated contracts; warrants. Refusal to negotiate is again malingering. But warrants cannot compel testimony; it is unreliable.
Like all dicta, warrants can be defective. Don't look for a stolen car in underwear drawers. If you think the keys or pink slip might be there, say so.
Warrants which fail are perjury, and the issue at stake is the warrant itself; the target gets restitution in the verdict, regardless of who wins the overall case. If nothing else, replay the warrant on its author; exactitude is impossible and unnecessary.
Execution beyond the warrant is not perjury, just another part of the overall self-control dispute.
Enforcement
Charter redress is enforced by cost and the public.
The longer parties stall and drive up costs, the more they will owe. And because criminals are part of the case as soon as possible, they know they are not being framed by crooked cops or prosecutors in a tight election. Everyone's incentive is to tell the truth, keep costs low, and not aggravate the other parties.
At its most basic, public enforcement comes down to reputations. Not honoring verdicts makes it harder to borrow, rent, or get a job. But the public can also decide that verdicts are biased and unfair, and help the loser with appeals (which are complaints against verdicts).
Yes, some bad verdicts can slip through the cracks. Only a few people care about most cases, celebrities can bias the public both for and against them, and notorious unlikeable criminals won't get a fair shake. But it's more self-correcting than any legacy system I know.
But reputations only matter on a small scale, and slowly. Victims want restitution now, not karma next year. Charter redress adds outlawry: verdict debtors cannot file complaints for less than what they owe.
... delinquency precludes lesser disputes.
Thus everyone can steal lesser values from outlaws without being hauled into redress.
It encourages cooperation, keeping case costs low and arranging better payment terms, such as loans.
Obstructing a verdict creditor is malingering, because it still blocks resolution. But outlaws can obstruct everyone else, and if the loss exceeds their outlaw debt, they can complain.
Stolen property value cannot be deducted from the verdict debt; the opportunities for fraud by opportunistic thieves, creditor undervaluations, and outlaw overvaluations make it unfalsifiable.
Government
Charter government serves only to facilitate redress. It is a legislature, nothing else, whose powers are delegated from people's elections outside its control, with no budgets, employees, or coercion. Its bylaws can only be challenged, defended, and enforced by private citizen complaints at their own expense and risk; government employees, budgets, and revenue are neither minimal nor relevant.
Associations
People who want more government get their fix from associations: spontaneous organizations with their own charters, defining purpose, officer selection, and how to revise it and implement bylaws.
Dicta association bylaws are normal dicta enforced by normal redress. Think of insurance cooperatives, mutual aid societies, sports clubs, community parks.
Guardian association members are adult wards, explicitly signing away specific rights and allowing bylaws validated and enforced only by the association. Charter redress review is limited to their charter and membership contracts. Think of tithing churches and Ponzi pensions, all the way up to torture, maiming, and killing -- legally. But members can self-emancipate at any time right up to the gallows.
Legacy associations emulate legacy governments: legislatures, courts, police, taxation, and as much bureaucracy as their scattered virtual membership wants.
Territorial association members live, and possibly work, in their territory, allowing much more legacy government emulation. Think dictators and clannish morality.
Fiscal reality reduces the ease of running out of other people's money. Their shenanigans inoculate everyone else to the dangers of legacy government.
Is it feasible?
I have a separate post on why I believe this is feasible, albeit highly unlikely.