By the way..
A friend who lived in the USSR (or some client nation) during the cold war recently reminded me that things could be a lot worse than they are. Yes, I agree. Things can *always* be worse. But I think that there’s also a whole lot better they could be, and I think if we sit around all day accepting the way they are, or trying to change them through processes that have been demonstrated to be mostly ineffective, because they could be worse, then they are always going to be bad, and always going to head downhill.
I am NOT advocating going out and shooting everyone who works for Uncle Sam.. or even *anyone* who works for uncle sam. At most any revolution I would support would involve some destruction of property. Ideally, it would happen the same way the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation – people would recognize that the current system is broken beyond repair, and set up a series of systems for collaborating on a new and better system.
I continue to push for a wikiGovernment. I think that it should be possible to author a series of documents that describe the working of a government that are:
1) written in plain english that anyone can understand
2) Easily searchable
3) written in such a way to make fluid changes and improvements easy, and make recording a history of what didn’t work in each case equally easy
4) Designed for direct democracy, with whenever possible the actual citizens interested in a issue doing research and writing code -er, laws- surrounding that issue]
5) Based on a core similar to the Bill of Rights, only more carefully worded to protect more freedoms, and even more limit the power of government
6) Designed to be intrensically open. My wikiGovernment would ideally have *no* secrets, or have secrets only in cases of weapons too powerful to be practical (but that some idiot might otherwise build anyway) (i.e. nukes, fusion weapons, neutron bombs, etc)
7) Designed to put the needs of the ‘average citizen’ first
8) Designed to use the KISS principle whenever possible.
9) Designed to have as small a ‘ruling class’ as possible
10) Designed to allocate resources according to the wishes of the citizens – it should not be *possible* for the government to spend my tax dollars on something I abhor. If this means the government can’t have something because no one wants to pay for it, then so be it.
I could think of more, but ten seemed like a nice round number to stop at.
March 9th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
I had to mention.. #11 – would protect the citizens from each other to whatever extent is practical.
March 12th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
What about setting up a wikiGovernment site and getting the people of the world to put together a new government plan? Instead of the usual routine which is to throw out the old system first by force and then scramble to put something in place.
The idea being, if you could put together a system so good that nobody can deny its superiority over all others; maybe it could actually be put to use? Might be a fun exercise at least. Especially with the collective minds of the world working towards a system that could potentially work for _everyone_?
Meh, someone’s probably already thought of that.
March 12th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
If only local, domestic, and global politics could be reduced to a simple wikipedia edit, many harsh truths could be ignored 🙂