The main issue I have with FDR's second bill of rights is that it does nothing to fix late stage capitalism. Generational wealth will continue to accrue and those without it will be punished by no fault of their own. Sure it will make poverty less common and less impactful but people will only have bargaining power in employment via unions while not enshrining unions with more protections.
I think you see the impact of that in a country like Sweden. One of the lowest income inequalities in the world, but also one of the highest wealth inequalities in the world.
The wealthy don't earn a wage to accrue wealth, they make money off having wealth. It's why whenever you ask a finance bro how to become wealthy and it's a three step program of have money, don't spend money, make money off having money.
Yeppppp, and when you ask them "well how do I get enough money for step 1?" they're just like "idk get a better job I guess? I had a trust fund lol", as if better jobs grow off trees.
Just get rid of the concept of corporations, funds, foundations, etc all the ways rich people have sheltered their assets from the state. Wealth may only be held by individuals plus a 100% death tax on wealth above some level. Maybe 10million, whatever.
Hey guys! It's ya boi Walter Wiggles comin at you with a brand new constitution. Don't forget to like comment and subscribe. We're doin a new constitution every week, so leave a comment and tell us what freedoms YOU want to see!
Companies shall not own Residential Property under any circumstance.
Companies with Vacant Comercial Property beyond a certain time (1 year maybe?) after the last long term Lease (5 years?) have to prove an effort in filling the vacancy or face 20%(?) of the properties value as fine per year of vacancy.
That ought to fix the property market imo. Values debatable but general idea should help fix things.
Anything that makes you a captive market cannot be private or has to have a free public alternative.
If there is a private non-free alternative, it is inevitable that eventually a politician will be corrupted and opt for less public funding hoping to artificially make the private one much better, and then get their share of the profits.
I
empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II
The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III
One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV
The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one's own.
V
Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs.
VI
People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one's best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
VII
Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Crest image by Luciana Nedelea.
They're basically trolls who put pressure against blue laws. They're genuinely great and are a large reason why things haven't devolved into theocracy. Every time fundamentalists get a huge W passing an abusive law they come in to prove just how easy it is to turn it against them.
"If you think it's OK to merge the state with Christianity, then it is by your definition ok for us to build a satanic temple in the white house"
The entire body of the state, be it executive, legislative, or judiciary should have a youth quota.
Like say at least 60% of members must be 40 or under.
People over 50 are fundamentally incapable of comprehending the modern world and because they won't have to live in the world they are building -- They are more than willing to sacrifice us all to guarantee their own.
Full disenfranchisement of the old would be reckless, but a quota? Yea.
Had shit to do. Had to stop short. Now that I'm back, a few additions:
Excessive Wealth and Political Activity are to be mutually exclusive -- If your net worth surpasses XXX (number to be determined) times the wealth of the average citizen of the nation, you are barred from all political participation, be it holding office or voting. You can reacquire your political rights by willfully surrendering assets (be it to the government or to a charity) until that condition is no longer met. -- If you are found using indirect methods to influence politics anyway your assets are to be seized and you tried as a criminal against national security. Vice-versa for politicians, if you become too wealthy while holding office, you forfeit your office or your wealth, you may not have both.
Human bodies are sovereign territory, not to be controlled by anyone but the individual themselves. Such sovereignty begins at birth and lasts until death. No family member, community backlash, or state intervention shall be allowed to intervene in that. Even if the individual is harming themselves, that is their right as their body belongs to them.
Free communication and free culture being recognised as rights, any law regulating trademarks or commercial copying rights should respect a person's fundamental right to sharing in human culture and human knowledge.
All laws, regulations and precedents must be reviewed every twenty years. In case they are no longer relevant and ought to be gone or need updating to match a changing world.
While I'm in board with the sentiment, I think there would be a lot of implementation problems with this. Just off the top of my head:
I'm a parent, and my kid isn't competent to make decisions about his own body. Given the right to do what he wanted with it, he would immediately eat ice cream until he threw up, then do that every day in between gaming sessions until he died from diabetes.
Existing laws being reviewed is a good idea, but I could see politicians with a slight majority holding fundamental laws hostage to extract concessions from other parties. You can work around this, but it could be difficult to avoid gotchas.
Do we include right to free movement in the sovereign territory point? Because we have a large prison population. I'm on board with dismantling most of that, but there will probably always be people that need to be restrained from harming others.
What counts as communication? Because if I can put a character on a shirt and sell them cheaper than the independent creator on patreon or wherever, most of their profits go away. I can subscribe and support them, then turn around and sell their work on the same website. I'm not a huge fan of copyright, but it did/does have a purpose beyond endless abuse by Disney.
As for the wealth tax thing, I don't care if it has implementation issues lol
I will always be skeptical of the whole "I'm a parent and (...)" -- I guess because my own parents were keen on letting me fuck around and find out when I was a kid? After two ice cream binges end on being horribly sick, even a kid can go "... Yeah I'd better not". I should know because a similar scenario happened to me. I feel like trying to use -authoritative control- to keep people safe will just make them desire the thing they are being kept from even harder, and this is universal for children, teens, and adults alike.
Fair enough
Yes unless the person becomes a danger to other persons. The idea of a body being sovereign also applies the idea behind sovereignty of nations, I.E.: Once a nation starts fucking around starting wars, suddenly infringing on their sovereignty to put a stop to it is a good thing.
This is a bit of a thing so I'mma break out of the list format so I can use more than one paragraph lmao:
In general my argument is that copyrights as they exist right now are a stifling force that mostly protects corporations while punishing both small creators and just... Regular individuals. For engaging in like. Human culture. Since I was suggesting lines for a constitution and a constitution is generally meant to be a sort of meta-law, like 'these are the intents of this state that we are forming, so the actual laws will reason on the practical application of it based on the intents', I didn't speak as to how this might be in practice. But to actually get into it --
I recently read the works of Lawrence Lessig, who is a bit of a stick in the mud and too much on the side of corporations for my liking, but when talking copyright the point he makes, which is a good point, is that at their root, copyright laws seek to regulate creativity as a commercial activity, I.e.: So you can't deprive creators of the money they might make from making stuff to sell by just waiting for them to make it and then reselling it. And that in the age of the internet where the line between "commercial creativity" and "just human culture being human culture" has become hopelessly blurred -- And that bad actors seek to keep that line blurry because it invests them with power. Power to use invasive DRM schemes. Power to charge for repeated viewings of something already purchased. Power to control what is even said about their product.
So if I were to make this into actual law, I'd make it so that every creative product would necessarily be copyrighted to a person or persons rather than a company. Because even bigass team projects are not made by a studio, but by the people that made them. Disney didn't make Aladdin 1991 -- It was written by Ron Clements, John Musker and Ted Elliot. So the story should belong to them. The amazing music was written by Tim Rice and Alan Menken, so it should be theirs, while the performances of said music in the movie should belong to the performers, the animation? It'd collectively belong to the people that made the drawings.
It's more overhead than saying "THIS CORPO OWNS IT ALL BECAUSE THEY WERE WORKING WITH THIS CORPO" but it is ultimately needed, because this in itself would already do a lot to cull what, to me, is the biggest abuse within the copyright system. If something belongs to a person, that person will eventually die, and at that point the whole "you are denying this person the fruit of their own creation" argument dies with them. A corporation is an immortal abstract entity and should never be allowed to own -- Anything really.
I would also ensure the text of the law specifically protects creators against people profiteering off their creation without them being duly compensated -- So like, selling copies of someone else's art? Crime. Showing other people the art with no commercial intent? Not a crime, can never be one.
I like the copyright idea described above. I'm not sure how well it would work in practice, because I've never heard of anything like that being implemented, and new solutions almost always have problems. It's interesting though.
Regarding the kids making their own decisions thing- my example was intended to be a little funny, so I may not have picked the best one. Instead of the ice cream example, what about sex with adults? Sex changes? General amputation? Living on their own? Cigarettes? Harder drugs?
These are all things that kids can have opinions about, all things are mostly changes to their own body or bodily freedom, all things that can have terrible long term consequences. Should we prevent parents from controlling their kids, and allow the children to decide whether they want to do any of these?
Sometimes the finding-out part of the fuck-around-and-find-out experience is an irreversible addiction that there's no coming back from. Parents aren't always better, obviously, but they probably avoid more permanent harms for their kids than the kids would in their own.
Eeeeh, I can concede on the general premise of 'sometimes find out is something you don't come back from', although I am also skeptical of parents having childrens' best interests in mind when it comes to things like gender-affirming care because [gestures vaguely at the literally everywhere]
Yeah, fair. My parents were painfully religious and harassed me unmercifully because I wasn't, so I'm not saying it's all sunshine and roses. But leaving kids free to do whatever they want seems like it would have an attrition rate similar to turtles running for the ocean.
Also a pretty interesting idea, a sort of per-election test to see if they are both fully sane and up to date on current events.
... Although the senility test might end up as a tool of disenfranchisement anyway. Just remember Literacy Tests in the American Slave States during Jim Crow.
I get where you are going but it would make more sense to be based on a percentage above a living wage or something like that. In 100 years 10 million will be worth a lot less than today.
All software that's paid for by taxpayers must be open-source, or at least source-visible. I know some European countries are heading this direction (or may already enforce this) which is great.
Actually, let's do that for everything that's funded by taxpayers. If I'm paying for something through taxes, I should be able to see more detailed information about where the money is going and the output of it.
Although I tend to agree with that, there are softwares that should not be open source by nature. For example, an open source antivirus would not be effective.
Okay, I'll start with a basic one. Equal rights for everyone, regardless of beliefs, physical traits, emotional traits, sexuality or financial situation - will probably need amendments since it's hard to come up with every possible circumstance.
They should still have the same rights as everyone else, and that shouldn't be a controversial statement. But of course, as soon as they break the law, they should be punished. If they never break the law, they should have every right to be shitty people in public.
The government choosing what is morally right and what is morally wrong and punishing people for holding morally "wrong" beliefs is exactly what led us to be in the situation we are in right now in the US and China. Not everyone will ever agree on what is right or wrong. Make laws based on actions, not beliefs, and if anyone commits those actions, punish them for that.
They are saying that beliefs shouldn’t determine laws.
That's not what I meant. I am saying you shouldn't be arrested simply for holding a belief. Not until you commit an action such as assault, murder, torture, forced labor, or one of a million other things that Nazis do should you be arrested. Being racist shouldn't be illegal. You should have the right to be a shitty person. But as soon as you hurt someone because of your racist beliefs, you should be arrested.
I mean I don't cherish the idea of giving a Nazi anything, but I still think they deserve equal rights, but it probably also depend on what you mean by rights.
My interpretation would be that this include every service provided by the government. Handling groups like Nazis I think would fall under hate speech if they use their opinions to antagonize or incite violence towards other people.
They exist in countries with coalition governments (e.g. Germany) and yes the Nazi parties are popular, but they do not hold a majority and likely never will, so their power is reined in (just as with other parties).
If the party didn't exist, then those fascists would just join other mainstream parties and sow division within them (see: UK and US politics). Fascist pigs should have a voice, and be represented, like anyone else. Their voice just shouldn't drown out anyone else, and that is the case in a government that has proportional representation as one of its founding tenets.
Equal rights yes but please remove the "lift crazy religious beliefs/rules to a right" thing some people interpret into "freedom of religion", especially as it affects children of those people or the ability of those people to discriminate in direct contradiction to the equal rights clause itself.
You build a timemachine. You set a date for the future. If the machine says that it cannot generate a portal at that date, you edit the policy until it does.
Political parties are outlawed. Every MP should represent their own view, not tow a party line dreamt up by a PR agency.
Your vote affects others (like driving, owning a gun etc put others at risk). To vote you must pass a test; to pass the test we offer free education. To enable you to attend this education, we offer you a universal basic income. The test must not discriminate based on gender, age, sexual orientation, income etc etc.
I get the subtext of that question and I can understand this concern.
But what I’m proposing is that in a new constitution to properties of the test is guaranteed and then you’d put a cross-population group of experts together to formulate a test that lives up to those constraints. No doubt you’d end up in a courtroom every now and again to settle whether a specific question was constitutionally sound or not.
I think we could work it out. We can for driving tests.
Environmental protection, LGBT and womens' rights including bodily autonomy would be explicitly written into the constitution
The 2nd amendment would be rewritten to protect the right to self defense not the right to own enough guns to start a war.
Our first past the post voting system would be replaced with alternatives that do not degenerate into a 2 party system.
The electoral college and senate would not exist. House representatives would be allocated based on population.
Supreme court justices would no longer be lifetime appointments.
If there is a minimum age to serve in government, there will be a maximum age as well.
The US will be obligated to abide by promises and treaties made with Native Americans.
The president is no longer required to have been born in the US. The requirement that the president be a natural born citizen was meant to prevent foreign powers from gaining control during a tumultuous time in US history that is no longer relevant.
Slavery would no longer be allowed for any purpose. (Currently it is legal in many states as a punishment)
A wall of separation between church and state as well as the right to privacy would be explicitly written into the constitution. (The right to privacy is implied but not explicitly stated)
Qualified immunity for police and other monopolies of violence would be abolished.
So I agree with all of these, but someone has to ask so it'll be me:
Why abolish the senate? It was established to be opposite the house as a system where every state is represented equally. The concept of the senate guarantees a form of equality between Rhode Island and California, where in the house a vote that massively benefits California will inevitably drag lesser states with it by sheer population difference.
The reality is that the states are mostly independent entities with their own constitutions and governments. What's good for California may not be good for Rhode Island, and it's not very fair that you'd have to get the whole east coast on board to vote down an initiative championed by California alone.
I understand that the metaphor between California and Rhode Island isn't a perfect one, its sole purpose is to illustrate the point.
Although not as important as population representation, locational representation still makes a ton of sense for a country as geographically big as the united states.
A purely population based government without locational representation on a federal level would likely tip the power of law to the 5% of US land mass occupied by cities, and end up having the other 95% eventually forced to follow laws that don't make sense from a rural or suburban perspective.
So the senate does serve a purpose in that regard.
Now, on the other hand, I do think certain US territories should have seats in the house and senate.
I dont think that all the states should be equal precisely because they have vastly different populations. People talk about how unfair it is for California or Texas to drag other states kicking and screaming wherever they feel like but the opposite side of that coin isnt really any more fair.
I do agree that large and small states may need to be governed differently but thats something that needs to be addressed in a more direct way not by tipping the scales in favor of states with more grain silos and cows than people. i.e ground rules need to be set about how and why laws are constructed. i.e the real issue that the senate doesnt actually solve, is that laws aren't being rationally designed in a way that makes sense for the states that are subject to them. As long as that underlying issue isnt being directly addressed, the senate wont really fix things. And I would strongly argue that history proves that the senate is being used more as a political baseball bat than it is a tool of low population states to defend themselves.
I do agree that large and small states may need to be governed differently but thats something that needs to be addressed in a more direct way not by tipping the scales in favor of states with more grain silos and cows than people
Yeah, sure, but the solution to that isn't tipping the scales the other direction. Having the senate exist in the government as a check against the house is a measure to keep the scales from tipping in the first place. They already must work together to get anything done, and that means that the senate is just as beholden to the house as the house is to the senate. The proverbial scales will inevitably tip the other way if the legislative branch is reduced to just the house. If your goal is preventing the scales from tipping, that's not how you do it.
I think what you're really proposing is a restructuring of the legislative branch altogether, with maybe more law making power shifted to the states. Because just eliminating the senate and leaving the system how it is now would result in a heavily unbalanced legislature.
Anyway, nice discussing this with you. This isn't an easy topic, for what it's worth. It took a hundred men several months to hash out the details of what we're casually sitting here discussing.
Should we care about the states or the people in the states? There are less people in Rhode Island than California. Are those people so much more important that they get more representation, proportionally speaking?
People have locational representation in their local governments. Let them rule over themselves if you want, but don't give them disproportionate authority over the rest of us.
I chose to pose this hypothetical as a separate comment to better illustrate my point:
Why is it that proposing abolishing the senate only invokes the idea of stopping the minority from having authority over the majority and not the other way around? It needs to be said that the senate is just as much a check on the house as the house is the senate.
Let's say the house is the only voting body of the legislature. What is to stop them from imposing a 50% tax on all states under a certain population limit, paid directly to the other states? Obviously this benefits large swaths of the population, so their representatives vote unanimously yes. Now it doesn't matter how many representatives lower populated areas have because they will always be outnumbered.
So are you proposing that it's fair for extortion to take place in that manner? Because without an equal vote to be able to defend themselves on a more level playing field, you're inviting that kind of power imbalance.
Frankly, that's a ridiculous scenario. States are an artificial construct. There's no reason California couldn't be split into five states so they can get more senators, and there's no reason tiny east coast states couldn't be merged together. It's just a matter of political will. States rights do nothing to benefit the individuals living in those states. Often when we talk about states rights, states are imposing some kind of oppression or restriction on their citizens, abortion being the most recent example. The Supreme Court threw it back to the states, many of which banned it immediately.
The states don't matter! They're overgrown, glorified municipalities. If we are going to redesign the system, we need to reduce their power all together. States are a relic of a colonial system founded by the British, where each colony was individually granted a charter, and a of a constitution written at the same time the Holy Roman Empire was alive.
What stops ridiculous, punitive laws from being passed? What stops them from being passed now? The courts, for one, and the federal government. Often it's the states that are trigger happy in committing some kind of mayhem.
We've lived with states for so long that we've been gaslit into thinking that their existence is in our best interest. While states might be useful in some form, like in organizing regional infrastructure projects, their power should be diminished, and they are not deserving of house on par with the house of the people.
Of course, Congress is in need of other dire reforms as well. It should be bigger, for one, and first past the post should be replaced with some kind of alternate system (perhaps California-style jungle primaries?).
I believe the prompt was to reform the constitution, not the system. In case you forgot, or don't know, the states ratify the constitution. Not the other way around.
In a perfect world, sure. States need not be framed as rigid individual governments. In a scenario where the fed is overthrown and the states are intact, there's nothing stopping the states from just saying "nah, we'll form our own country".
Which if that's you're goal, I guess sure. The reason Texas hasn't done that already in the current system is that the federal government is there to stop them and they don't have the numbers.
I think your assumption in this thread is that the states already don't have power, which isn't even close to true. In the meantime ranting about how states are insignificant kind of comes off as missing the forest for the trees.
Frankly, that's a ridiculous scenario
I will say that the irony of you calling a hypothetical that I made ridiculous, and then immediately presenting a more ridiculous scenario isn't lost on me. So thanks for that.
The prompt just says the revolution was successful and that now it's time for a new constitution. It's not even US-specific, so there's no reason to assume that state governments even exist in the context of the prompt, much less need to approve this new constitution. There's no need for such niceties if we're in a world where a revolution has destroyed the old regime in its entirety.
I understand that line of thinking, and you'd have a point if the senate could act alone. But the senate and the house have to agree on everything they pass, with very few exceptions. That means that the fact that Rhode Island gets an equal vote in the senate doesn't actually matter if the majority of the population doesn't want something anyway. In the same way that the majority population doesn't matter if the individual governments can't agree.
The people in Rhode Island don't matter as much as the people in California for sheer numbers, and that is already reflected in the house. Seeking to abolish the senate isn't an exercise in majority rule, it's just disenfranchising the minorities that exist.
Edit to directly answer your question:
Should we care about the states or the people in the states?
We should care about both, given that we are a nation comprised of 51 smaller governments. It's asinine to assert that those governments don't matter on the federal scale. We have a system established already that cares about both. Axing the part of that system that keeps the most populous areas from getting everything they want is not the solution you think it is.
Smaller states should have less of a say. I'm not sure how that seems unreasonable. The people should decide. It doesn't matter what state they live in. It might have made sense 200 years ago but now I can't believe people seriously support it.
Smaller states do have less of a say. The house and senate have to work together. If the majority of people don't want something, it still doesn't happen. The purpose of the senate is to prevent the smaller states from getting no say.
No political system is immune from gaming. You're trying to fix a problem every government has on some level by disenfranchising smaller groups in general. That problem would and does still exist in the house alone. I mean, the house is gridlocked right now, and it has nothing to do with the senate.
I actually started writing up a a new constitution a while ago as a sort of thought experiment. It's not finished yet but some of the highlights thus far include:
A unicameral congress, with uncapped membership
A right to privacy, free education, internet, and government transparency
Freedom from religion clauses
Constitutionally limited intellectual property: Copyright is 15 years for corporations, life for individuals.
Uncapped supreme court, 2 appointments per presidential term
Right, patents are a whole separate thing. I added a clarification above that the 15 years/life is for copyright. The way I did patents is that corporations are ineligible for patents, and individuals get them for 5 years.
As long as labor is necessary, some form of market economy is likely to crop up, and as long as there's some form of market economy I'm hesitant to limit the ability for individual creators to make a living in said market economy, so I'm not sure I'd personally go for such a large carve-out from patent protections.
free to reproduce Patented and otherwise protected physical items to any end, provided you make no profit in doing so.
How would you prevent a company with gains from other means coming in and destroying a competitor only to start charging for their version after the other company goes under?
Funnily enough, I had this exact scenario assigned as a project in my political science class in college.
What I came up with is a lottery-based council government. The system is designed with none of the "gentleman's agreements" that the US systems seems to be based on, and assumes that if it's possible to abuse the system, then the system WILL BE abused. So it's designed to minimize the ability for the system to be abused.
You want to get rid of career politicians? Make it so they don't even have the option of running for office in the first place.
Councils
The way my system worked is that all governmental tasks are performed by a council created for a specific purpose. Every council is made up of an odd number of members, with a minimum of 5. Councils can be created to manage a geographical area, such as a state, county, or city, or for a topical purpose, for example, medical oversight. Each council has the ability to create lower councils that report to it, but only within the purview of the parent council. For example, a State Council can create a Municipal Council for a city within the state.
Sitting at the top of the entire structure is the Prime Council, which always consists of exactly 11 members. Decisions of the Prime Council are final except in the case of a supermajority overrule as detailed below.
Lower councils are subject to the decisions of higher councils with one exception - a parent council's ruling can be overturned and vacated if a supermajority* of child councils that existed at the time of the ruling vote to overturn it. For example, if a State Council outlaws gambling, but 75% of Municipal Councils vote to vacate the ruling, it is overturned. But, for example, if a Municipal Council votes to allow prostitution, the state or national council can overturn that ruling on its own. Again, however, this overturning can be overridden by a supermajority of child councils. However, the chain ends there. A parent council CANNOT vacate a supermajority vote passed by the collected child councils. Child councils must have a reason for existing can cannot be created simply to stack a supermajority vote.
A singular case can only be tackled by ONE council at a time and cannot be interfered with during the proceedings by any other council at any other level. For example, if a Municipal Traffic Council is considering a motion to raise a speed limit on a road, no other council (Municipal, State, or even the Prime Council) can interfere in that case or tell the lower council how to rule on it. However, once the case is complete and the ruling announced, THEN a higher council may take up the issue and/or vacate the lower council's ruling.
Decisions of lower councils can be appealed, but a parent council has no obligation to take up the issue and can simply deny the appeal.
Courts
Courts, as we understand them, do not exist in this system, per se. Civil and criminal cases are handled in the same way; there is no separation between the case types. Likewise, there is no differentiation between the natures of the decisions that can be handed down. Every court case is presided over by a council created especially for the purpose of hearing this single case. All the other rules surrounding how councils work detailed the Councils section still apply.
The Lottery
Council members are selected by lottery from all eligible citizens. Each lottery is specific to the seat being filled. To be considered eligible for a given lottery, a citizen:
Must be a member of the geographical area that the seat's council represents. For example, if the seat is on a Municipal Planning Council, the citizen must live within the city.
Must meet the qualifications defined by the higher council when this council was created. In this case, perhaps, qualification requires that the citizen hold a bachelor of science degree in any subject.
Must NOT have previously served on this same council.
Must NOT have been declared unfit for service by a medical professional.
All citizens of legal age are automatically in the lottery pool by default, and the lottery operates on on opt-out basis.
If a citizen is chosen for a council, they have the option of declining the position. In which case, another eligible citizen is selected.
Additionally, a citizen can elect to be removed from the lottery pool for any or no reason for one year at a time. This election can be renewed indefinitely, but it must be renewed UNLESS a medical professional declares that they are unfit for service. An unfit-for-service declaration can be made for a specific amount of time or on a permanent basis.
Antagonistic Resignation
Any council member can resign their position on a council at any time before their term is over. In addition, a council member may enact the right of "Antagonistic Resignation" whereby they remove both themself and ONE other member of the council. There is no veto or override process allowed. To clarify, any council member can remove any other member from the same council by also removing themself at the same time. The replacement council member(s) will be chosen via the lottery.
Antagonistic Recusement
A council member MAY NOT vote on or interfere with the vote on any issue the results of which they may directly benefit from. That is to say that if a council member could personally benefit from a decision on a matter, they are REQUIRED to recuse themself from the case and may not interfere with the case in any way, including but not limited to public discussion or press releases related to the matter.
A council member with a conflicting interest in a single case must either resign from the council or recuse themself from the case. As with Antagonistic Resignation, the recusing council member chooses ONE other council member that must also recuse themself from the case to preserve the odd number of council seats. Again, there is no veto or override process allowed. However, unlike Antagonistic Resignation, the recusing council member MUST choose one other member for recusement - they do not get the option to decline. If the number of active seats on the council would drop below five for this single issue, interim seats will be created and filled by lottery for this specific case only, after which the additional seats will be removed from the council and the interim council members' terms will be considered complete.
Protection and Compensation
Serving on a council is a full-time job and may require taking a sabbatical from work. While an individual citizen has the ability to decline a council seat, NO other entity, individual, or organization may punish or otherwise act against a citizen for choosing to accept the responsibility of service. Therefore, it is considered unconstitutional for any entity to retaliate against a citizen for accepting a council seat, punishable by a fine of not less than 50% of that entity's yearly income. It is understood that this is a harsh penalty, and the severity and calamitous nature of it is intentional and intended to avoid even the outward appearance of impropriety or retaliation. If a citizen CHOOSES of their own accord to decline a council seat out of a sense of duty to an organization, that's allowed, but it is absolutely not acceptable for an organization to demand, tell, ask, or even imply that a seat should be declined.
It is required by law that an employee (and this shall be construed loosely, to include any person who is in any way a member of an organization) of an organization be reinstated at the end of their council service to their same position, pay, benefits, and tenure as though no sabbatical had been taken at all. This is inclusive of any required "re-onboarding" time.
Council members shall be paid the greater of 125% of their reported yearly income or 200% of the average salary of the relevant lottery eligibility pool. This shall be to incentivize citizens to fulfill their duty and serve on a council.
Councilar No-Confidence
At any time, the citizens may petition a geographical council (Prime, State, County, Municipal, etc) for a status of Councilar No-Confidence. This petition shall require the signatures of 55% of the individual citizens of the geographical area represented. Upon submission of a completed petition, the council will be dissolved, and a new council will be chosen by lottery according to all the requirements for the council being replaced. This action is automatic and cannot be vetoed or overruled.
Branch No-Confidence (The Nuclear Option)
If instead, the No-Confidence petition contains the signatures of 75% of the individual citizens of the geographical area represented, the council and ALL LOWER COUNCILS created by it, directly or indirectly, are dissolved and replaced as above. This is akin to pruning a branch from a tree - every branch and leaf connected to the branch is also removed. Note that this applies to EVERY level of the system, so a No-Confidence petition signed by 75% of the citizens of the entire country and submitted to the Prime Council results in the entire system being wiped away and reset.
It went a lot deeper than that, but I've already typed a LOT and think this mostly gets the gist of it.
This is great thanks for posting.
How do you deal with apathy? Like in current political climate in which many people (all?) would decline the lottery?
People could also have lots of reasons to decline. Personal, professional, etc. What were the incentives to accept?
People are paid for their time on the council, and by law the pay is AT MINIMUM 25% more that whatever you were already making, but could be considerably more depending on the pool of eligible citizens. Remember, the pay is the GREATER of 125% of whatever you were already making in your private job, or 200% of the average pay for the eligibility pool. So if you're making $40,000 per year and get called to council, you're gonna get paid a minimum of $50,000 for your term, but if the average pay for your eligibility pool is $40,000, then you're gonna be paid $80,000 for your term. It's structured so that there's always a strong financial incentive to serve.
People don't vote because they feel their vote doesn't matter. When you're part of a pool of 10 million people, one vote is more or less negligible. But, when asked to serve, you're now one of only a handful of votes. Maybe one of 5. Maybe one of 11. But your vote absolutely matters in a way that nobody could dismiss.
And tbh, if somebody declines, it's really not that big a deal. Eligibility pools would be big enough that a nontrivial number of people could decline the position and we'd still have plenty of eligible citizens. Worst case scenario is come kind of coordinated general strike against serving on councils, but to be fair, if the population is pissed off enough to enact a general strike in a meaningful way like that, they would have enacted a Branch No-Confidence movement long ago.
The wealthiest 10% of people must donate at least 5% of their yearly earnings to a general fund for public welfare, including free food, shelter and medical aid. Business assets domestic and international are included in this calculation. Anyone who attempts to hide assets to avoid donating, even within the confines of the law, can be tried for the manslaughter of everyone who died from poverty that fiscal year.
Essentially, if you have the financial means to help people, you are legally required to.
You're not wrong, but I'd want it separate from tax so it goes directly to welfare and not just government funds. It also sounds nicer to donate than pay taxes, and you never get a donation rebate.
Tax goes to a single government spending fund, but I want this to be separate so it can't be channelled into buying guns or whatever. It's only welfare, and nothing else.
While donations are typically voluntary, there's nothing stopping it from being enforced. Someone can put a gun to your head and force you to donate to charity, and that's still a donation.
The vainglorious rich jerks might be less hesitant to part with their cash if they can boast about how much they donated, even if it was required of them. Only a little less, but that's still good.
I have thought about it, and I am sticking with "donate" as the term.
It's hilarious you think the people with the highest yearly earnings get that by working hard. Do you think Jeff Bezos has been working harder than you have this entire year in the time since you posted your comment alone?
First
No elected official is allowed to take money or goods in excess of 50% of the median salary for all workers in the country in total for the entirety of their time in office from any organization or unrelated individual nor sit on the board of any company following office. Any payments to said official totalling over 50% median salary in the 5 years prior to their election and 20 years after leaving office from a single entity must be declared.
The state will provide a generous pension to ensure future employment is not a financial necessity.
These measures are intended to allow elected officials to be free from influence.
Second
Any change in leadership of a political party immediately triggers a general election. Change in leadership generally means a failure of the manifesto and/or a change in the policies which were presented to the public when the leadership was elected.
Third
No advisory referendum shall be conducted without the intention to act upon the outcome and therefore any referenda should only be acted upon with a super majority of 66%.
Prior to action following a referendum, the winning side must demonstrate how the result will be acted upon and where negotiation with outside interests is necessary, since the outcome cannot be known at the time of the first referendum the public should be offered a second referendum to decide whether to accept the outcome.
Fourth
Politicians shall be held to account for any lies or dishonesty. Burden of proof lies with the politician accused of misconduct to provide evidence for their claims which are in dispute. Therefore evidence provision at the time of any claims is encouraged and can be published to a publicly accessible repository. Punishments can range from fines to removal from office depending on the severity and frequency of misinformation.
Fifth
Proportional representation she'll be enacted to eliminate tactical voting.
In addition any changes to the electoral district are subject to scrutiny by a randomly selected jury of 1000 residents in each of the affected areas. Voting by, and identity if the jurors shall be anonymous.
The public may request redistricting at any time with a 2 year cool off via a petition meeting a minimum number of 100,000 signatures.
No official decision may be made without the entire process towards that decision being recorded, documented, and these records be made available to the general public with minimal restrictions. With a specific exception if revealing that information would put more people in danger than concealing it.
All natural resources, be it harvested (e.g. ores, oil) or otherwise (e.g. land, air), are property of everyone. If any individual is to monopolise and/or utilise some of these resources, they are to compensate everyone else for doing so.
Resources for the public good are to be taken from each according to their ability, and redistributed to each according to their needs.
Any supreme office must exist with a hard maximum time an incumbent is allowed to serve.
It must be possible for any person holding an official position, including any supreme offices, to be held accountable for their actions in power.
All official decisions must strive to be made to materially benefit the greatest number of individual people.
It may not be the duty and/or responsibility of government to impose opinions on the general public.
In an election, any vote must hold the same weight as any other vote to the greater outcome.
Any income and/or net worth for individuals in excess of approximately 1 Billion EUR-equivalent is to be taxed 100% and redistributed among the public, to each according to their needs.
Lawmakers are to be compensated an amount directly proportional to the median income of all citizens, and any benefits they receive must be equal to the legal minimum.
No wage may be paid that is insufficient for a person to afford a decent existence.
No corporation may exist where the compensation of its highest paid member exceeds 500 times the lowest. Any shortfall will be taxed upon the company at 200% the excess, and redistributed across its staff according to their needs.
I wanted to include something that makes the government responsible for some standard of public transit, but I can't seem to get the words right...
I like your ideas, but have you considered that this one:
All natural resources, be it harvested (e.g. ores, oil) or otherwise (e.g. land, air), are property of everyone. If any individual is to monopolise and/or utilise some of these resources, they are to compensate everyone else for doing so.
Effectively makes literally everything free? Not that this would be a bad thing. It just makes so many of the other things irrelevant.
Competency tests before you can appear on a ballot, with a commission that reviews the requirements to prevent the exclusion of minorities.
All financial information must be disclosed by anyone with power over others.
Somehow replace shares with cooperatives and employee ownership.
No elected judges, with stringent training and yearly bias testing. Like a postdoc in judicial impartiality.
Same with sheriffs. No elected police. Police should be a career, like a civil engineer. To be promoted, people must pass ever more strict ethics courses.
Any person who is a position of trust and power who then acts contrary to the ethics of their role can never be elected. Or have power over anyone again.
Children must be free of religion until they are 25.
Children must not be mutilated by their parents religion.
National healthcare.
USA focused: each state gets one senator, plus one per 2 million residents.
You cannot trust a government to routinely create arbitrary standards used to regulate that same government.
This is different from a government enforcing your average law because this law applies to the election process itself and allows for significant bias. Where there is room for bias in this process, it will be taken advantage of. Look at gerrymandering.
What problem does your law actually solve? If people are willing to elect a candidate, isn't that a sufficient measure of competency? At best you're creating an elitist state controlled by those who set the bar for competency, and at worst you're creating a one party state.
Most of what you've described would inevitably lead to the establishment of a single party totalitarian state.
Competency tests before you can appear on a ballot, with a commission that reviews the requirements to prevent the exclusion of minorities.
Don't like the opposing party? Just make it part of the test. Today, one party could exclude the other by including questions that agree or disagree with critical race theory, voter fraud, etc.
No elected judges, with stringent training and yearly bias testing. Like a postdoc in judicial impartiality.
Same issue. Who determines impartiality? The party in power? Single party state.
Any person who is a position of trust and power who then acts contrary to the ethics of their role can never be elected. Or have power over anyone again.
Who determines "ethics"? Single party state.
Children must be free of religion until they are 25.
What is religion? You're definitely banning several books, and possibly banning a lot more. Many books can be turned into a religion or contain religious aspects. The party in power decides what's a religion and what gets banned.
USA focused: each state gets one senator, plus one per 2 million residents.
At that point, why have a separate Senate and House? The point of a two-chambered Congress is to balance state and federal power.
Honestly, I would just ban it entirely at this point. I'd rather see the abolition of marriage entirely than have the government dictate who can and cannot participate (outside of consent issues, obviously).
Rule 1: No billionaires. Upon being assessed at having a net worth of 1 billion dollars, regardless of where your wealth is or how it's invested, the entirety of its ownership will be transferred to a public trust, and all liquid assets will be equally distributed to the poorest 1%. This rule is to never be ever re-defined due to inflation.
Very hard to define this rule. Money in the bank? Collective value of possessions? Value of those possessions set by whom and to what standard? What about rich people not owning much but having everything in their company, non profit, etc.
If they can spend the money on something not necessary for the company it should be counted as their money I think
Companies get their own money separate from an individual but after a certain bracket they have to be audited by an impartial third party to make sure the money isn't just being used for personal stuff
How about both minimum wage and mandatory cost of living pay raises are inextricably tied to BOTH the GDP and the highest net worth, to be determined by an independent commission that keeps track of the assets of the wealthy?
At the point when wealthy individuals' vast resources cause the pay rate to rise in a way that threatens economic stability, that would trigger policies to divest said resources into public trusts aimed at the most at-risk parts of the population. Instead of a trickle down model, you have more of a circular model, where fabulous wealth always funnels directly to the bottom. This creates a cycle of uplift, rather than simply an accumulation at the high end.
government policy will be primarily set by a peer validated group of experts in their fields. funding will be dictated by a multidisciplinary team that assesses need through funding requests by the expert bodies with accompanying impact assessments. that will dictate taxes and so on.
elections will be performative and meaningless as you lot have absolutely shown you can't be trusted but also need to feel heard or you'll break things you don't understand.
good call. just well paid, expert professionals without a vested interest doing a job they are qualified to do, and being reviewed by people qualified to understand their performance.
currently governments fund and slash funding to all sorts of things according to political convenience.. I just want to see all those decisions validated entirely on merit by someone who understands it.
if it's popular with the mob but it's not true or doesn't work, well, we don't do it. president isn't an expert and can't say shit, and especially can't do stupid things so he can sound tough in a media release. we can't afford to keep dicking around with whatever sounds good to win popular support with the lowest common denominator while the world goes to shit.
the world is far beyond the level of complexity where any one person could understand enough to make off the cuff, meaningful decisions about big issues. people need to stop thinking they can vote sensibly on policy or policy performance on almost any issue, let alone all the issues.
While Ranked Pairs sound good in theory, how would you actually sell this method to normal people? Transparency is one of the basic requirements for the acceptability of a vote, and this method will be beyond maybe 70-80% of the American public, if not more.
Well, a lot of them don't really understand the current system either.
What is important is how are you, as a voter, gonna vote for the person you want to win. In the end, it's either choose one or rank them from top to bottom.
What could be the problem is tallying several million individual votes, let alone putting them into a computer. I wonder what the algorithmic complexity is for this system.
Everybody gets to vote within 35 minutes or less, maybe I should rephrase that too on average in a voting area that people vote in 35 minutes or less. Make it unconstitutional stand in line for eight hours to vote just as an example.
All voting areas are drawn and simple squares are rectangles and it is done via a mathematical algorithm.
Abortion is a constitutional right, no limits, it is always between the person who is pregnant and their doctor.
In the United States we called the fairness doctrine, I would put that into the constitution.
A gross income tax if you are above a certain income you get taxed before you get to do any deductions or write off or anything. That same gross income tax would apply to trust funds it would also apply to businesses.
Dark money in terms of politics would be bound by the constitution. Businesses would not be allowed to run ads or donate money. Money going to campaigns has to come from an individual and the maximum be US$5000 per year.
This one mystified me a bit. Why should we only get 35 minutes in which to vote? Then I realised you meant usually the queue was hours long in your country. Still seems pretty bizarre.
We have compulsory voting here (rich people can afford the fine, but if you're less rich like me, it isn't worth it to not vote) and so everyone votes, pretty much, but the two weeks they give you to get a vote in at a before-the-cutoff seem pretty normal to me, and there's always postal votes if you aren't able to go in for two weeks and can't afford the fine. Why not just open up the voting to a longer amount of time? Then you could go in after work one day to prevote in the two designated weeks like we do.
Using "think of the children" type arguments in political debate should be punishable by loss of passive voting rights (the right to be elected) for life. And the same for "If you have nothing to hide" type arguments.
I am not talking about arguments about future generations, I am talking about "we need to watch everything you do because some bad people do bad things to children" type arguments. Or, for that matter, the arguments from conservative and religious people who claim we can't talk about LGBTQ+ people existing because it might scar children to see two guys kissing.
Basically using children as an argument to further your political goals that you had anyway, regardless of any children because nobody wants to be seen arguing against the well-being of children.
To be fair it’s not just children. There are plenty of mass shootings at concerts, movie premiers, random gas stations. It’s just that the us has 288 school shootings from 2009-2018. The next highest would be Mexico. At 8 in the same time frame.
So it’s not so much “think of the children” as it is “hey guys, so many people get shot, and it’s worse in America than anywhere else. What can we do to make it not so bad? Maybe make it harder for idiots or unstable folk to get guns? And since most people who advocate for less gun CONTROL (not banning, just controlling who can go get an AR-15 off the shelf) tend to be the same folk saying “but we can’t let LGBTQ people exist! Think of the children!” But then children get shot at school and the cops are like “I’m not going in there. I’ll get shot!” Or “yeah you have to give birth because “think of the baby!” But the moment that child is born we don’t give a fuck about them. Let’s slash welfare because poor people don’t WANT to work!” But also those children we were thinking of? Let’s slash their welfare too. Damn poor babies. I bet their parents are drug addicts!
Nobody arguing against gun rights use “because of the children” as their main argument. The US does have way too many school shootings though, and we should probably address that somehow.
I own a gun. I have nothing against guns. I enjoy target shooting. Gun control isn’t about taking away guns. It’s about controlling who gets guns based on how likely a gun in their hands is to cause a bunch of people to die. Even one person dying is not okay. So I think more stringent requirements for who can own a gun are reasonable.
You want to ban capitalism. You'll end up with an authoritarian state as a result of that choice as every non-capitalist state is or has been authoritarian.
How to do voting even is a big question. The really representative systems tend to end up with razor thin coalitions full of smallish parties that play brinkmanship. There's got to be a way to discourage that, but I don't know what it is yet.
More controversially, it should probably address economic inequality in some way.
Our Constitution as it is is pretty good, so wisdom would be to tread lightly.
I think the only change I would make is to prohibit primary elections. That would be considered a right, as in, no person or group may deny a candidate with sufficient signatures the right to appear on the ballot.
I would also mandate some sort of ranked choice voting or instant runoff election.
These two changes would be to fix the problem of having to vote against a bad guy rather than voting for a good guy. It far too often ends with the second worst candidate who goes into the primary, coming out victorious. We should be electing the best, not the second worst.
Sorry, I forget that while Reddit had a largely American userbase especially in political posts, Lemmy does not. I refer to the United States Constitution, which I think is damn near perfect, but has been screwed up by multiple generations of voters who pay little or no attention to their government's mismanagement and just keep re-electing the same incumbents despite having shit approval ratings for Congress, because they don't bother to actually do any research of their own or read what the candidates write other than just a few sound bytes on TV.
There are lots of good ideas out there, I'll just add some that are pretty niche:
Anything that is legal to do for free is also legal to do for money.
All laws must have a justification for them written into something like a preamble. If the justification turns out not to be true, winning something like a basic law suit against the law is all that is needed to have the law struck down. No need to wait for legislators to pass a repeal bill or for a very specific case to make its way to a supreme court.
A universal right to purchase, own, sell and (if applicable) conceal carry any weapon that is allowed to be used by the nation's military, without any kind of permit or registration.
Also, explicitly prohibit military conscription and legally equate it to slavery.
I have to vastly disagree with this. The argument hat a gun is a necessity is disingenuous at best.
I love my guns, but too many fuckwads treat it like a toy or some sort of social justice equalizer. It has been proven to me time and again that we cant trust people with unfettered access to fire arms.
Y'all can't even have political discourse without being violent. So nope, you don't deserve to have the right to bear arms. (I mean "you" collectively and include myself in this hypothetical).
You are not supposed to operate a car without a license but somehow, trying to regulate guns is big brother trying to take away muh freedoms.
It just doesn't stand up to actual critical thought.
Y'all can't even have political discourse without being violent.
take away muh freedoms
I understand why my message might suggest that I am American, but I am, in fact, not. I won't go into details to avoid doxxing myself, but I live in a country with strict gun laws, and, in long term, the lack of civilian firearm ownership has proven to have much worse consequences than the opposite.
To add to my original comment, I believe that "without any kind of permit or registration" should be explicitly stated in every article that guarantees some kind of right, as the lack of such statement often leads to slow erosion of the right, starting with the requirement of declaration, and then permission, which then gets more and more difficult to obtain (example: the right to public protest in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine)
lol.
You have the chance to change something and your idea is: "Hey we need more shootings. Not enough children and other people get shot. Let's increase the number"
Addendum: With a lottery allocation of ammunition. Each year, one lucky citizen recieves 1 bullet in the mail and can decide to whatever they want with it!
Banning personal use cars, making efficient public transport mandatory and failure to provide it would result in prison time for people responsible.
Banning makeup which hides skin itself for the sake of illusion.
Banning photo editing which alters how humans look like.
Generally I'd ban things which hurt mental and physical health. I'd definitely reduce the legal amount of kcal allowed per 100g, sodium and sugar too. I'd get experts who never affiliated with any companies to chime in.
Gender equality, education, access to medical care, etc. basically a slightly modified version of FDR’s proposed bill of rights.
The main issue I have with FDR's second bill of rights is that it does nothing to fix late stage capitalism. Generational wealth will continue to accrue and those without it will be punished by no fault of their own. Sure it will make poverty less common and less impactful but people will only have bargaining power in employment via unions while not enshrining unions with more protections.
I think you see the impact of that in a country like Sweden. One of the lowest income inequalities in the world, but also one of the highest wealth inequalities in the world.
The wealthy don't earn a wage to accrue wealth, they make money off having wealth. It's why whenever you ask a finance bro how to become wealthy and it's a three step program of have money, don't spend money, make money off having money.
Yeppppp, and when you ask them "well how do I get enough money for step 1?" they're just like "idk get a better job I guess? I had a trust fund lol", as if better jobs grow off trees.
Just get rid of the concept of corporations, funds, foundations, etc all the ways rich people have sheltered their assets from the state. Wealth may only be held by individuals plus a 100% death tax on wealth above some level. Maybe 10million, whatever.
Hey guys! It's ya boi Walter Wiggles comin at you with a brand new constitution. Don't forget to like comment and subscribe. We're doin a new constitution every week, so leave a comment and tell us what freedoms YOU want to see!
I so wanted to downvote you because that legit annoyed me lol.
Shout out to my boy 📢 📢 📢 A-A-ABRACADABRA HAM 📢 📢 📢
Housing should be affordable, and never sold as an investment
Companies shall not own Residential Property under any circumstance.
Companies with Vacant Comercial Property beyond a certain time (1 year maybe?) after the last long term Lease (5 years?) have to prove an effort in filling the vacancy or face 20%(?) of the properties value as fine per year of vacancy.
That ought to fix the property market imo. Values debatable but general idea should help fix things.
That it gets reworked every seven years.
A pretty good idea from Jefferson that was just maybe a bit of a mistake to leave out.
Every citizen has a right to food, water and adequate shelter.
Anything that makes you a captive market cannot be private or has to have a free public alternative.
Things like healthcare, transport, housing, water, energy, internet etc.
Equal rights.
If there is a private non-free alternative, it is inevitable that eventually a politician will be corrupted and opt for less public funding hoping to artificially make the private one much better, and then get their share of the profits.
Yeah it may be better to just not allow private enterprises in anything that is required.
Keep them to entertainment and the like.
I think it's pretty exhaustive lol
Just the seven tenets of the Satanic Temple:
I empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one's own.
V Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs.
VI People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one's best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
VII Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word. Crest image by Luciana Nedelea.
Truly inspired words to live by /s
the fuck even is the satanic temple, a philosophy? a religion? what does it even identify as exactly and why pick satan as their mascot
They're basically trolls who put pressure against blue laws. They're genuinely great and are a large reason why things haven't devolved into theocracy. Every time fundamentalists get a huge W passing an abusive law they come in to prove just how easy it is to turn it against them.
"If you think it's OK to merge the state with Christianity, then it is by your definition ok for us to build a satanic temple in the white house"
It’s basically an atheistic philosophy. I’m not sure why they decided to theme around a rather controversial and unpopular semi-deity from a religion.
im gonna guess it came from a 'piss off the religious nuts' mentality
rofl
The entire body of the state, be it executive, legislative, or judiciary should have a youth quota.
Like say at least 60% of members must be 40 or under.
People over 50 are fundamentally incapable of comprehending the modern world and because they won't have to live in the world they are building -- They are more than willing to sacrifice us all to guarantee their own.
Full disenfranchisement of the old would be reckless, but a quota? Yea.
Had shit to do. Had to stop short. Now that I'm back, a few additions:
Excessive Wealth and Political Activity are to be mutually exclusive -- If your net worth surpasses XXX (number to be determined) times the wealth of the average citizen of the nation, you are barred from all political participation, be it holding office or voting. You can reacquire your political rights by willfully surrendering assets (be it to the government or to a charity) until that condition is no longer met. -- If you are found using indirect methods to influence politics anyway your assets are to be seized and you tried as a criminal against national security. Vice-versa for politicians, if you become too wealthy while holding office, you forfeit your office or your wealth, you may not have both.
Human bodies are sovereign territory, not to be controlled by anyone but the individual themselves. Such sovereignty begins at birth and lasts until death. No family member, community backlash, or state intervention shall be allowed to intervene in that. Even if the individual is harming themselves, that is their right as their body belongs to them.
Free communication and free culture being recognised as rights, any law regulating trademarks or commercial copying rights should respect a person's fundamental right to sharing in human culture and human knowledge.
All laws, regulations and precedents must be reviewed every twenty years. In case they are no longer relevant and ought to be gone or need updating to match a changing world.
While I'm in board with the sentiment, I think there would be a lot of implementation problems with this. Just off the top of my head:
I'm a parent, and my kid isn't competent to make decisions about his own body. Given the right to do what he wanted with it, he would immediately eat ice cream until he threw up, then do that every day in between gaming sessions until he died from diabetes.
Existing laws being reviewed is a good idea, but I could see politicians with a slight majority holding fundamental laws hostage to extract concessions from other parties. You can work around this, but it could be difficult to avoid gotchas.
Do we include right to free movement in the sovereign territory point? Because we have a large prison population. I'm on board with dismantling most of that, but there will probably always be people that need to be restrained from harming others.
What counts as communication? Because if I can put a character on a shirt and sell them cheaper than the independent creator on patreon or wherever, most of their profits go away. I can subscribe and support them, then turn around and sell their work on the same website. I'm not a huge fan of copyright, but it did/does have a purpose beyond endless abuse by Disney.
As for the wealth tax thing, I don't care if it has implementation issues lol
In general my argument is that copyrights as they exist right now are a stifling force that mostly protects corporations while punishing both small creators and just... Regular individuals. For engaging in like. Human culture. Since I was suggesting lines for a constitution and a constitution is generally meant to be a sort of meta-law, like 'these are the intents of this state that we are forming, so the actual laws will reason on the practical application of it based on the intents', I didn't speak as to how this might be in practice. But to actually get into it --
I recently read the works of Lawrence Lessig, who is a bit of a stick in the mud and too much on the side of corporations for my liking, but when talking copyright the point he makes, which is a good point, is that at their root, copyright laws seek to regulate creativity as a commercial activity, I.e.: So you can't deprive creators of the money they might make from making stuff to sell by just waiting for them to make it and then reselling it. And that in the age of the internet where the line between "commercial creativity" and "just human culture being human culture" has become hopelessly blurred -- And that bad actors seek to keep that line blurry because it invests them with power. Power to use invasive DRM schemes. Power to charge for repeated viewings of something already purchased. Power to control what is even said about their product.
So if I were to make this into actual law, I'd make it so that every creative product would necessarily be copyrighted to a person or persons rather than a company. Because even bigass team projects are not made by a studio, but by the people that made them. Disney didn't make Aladdin 1991 -- It was written by Ron Clements, John Musker and Ted Elliot. So the story should belong to them. The amazing music was written by Tim Rice and Alan Menken, so it should be theirs, while the performances of said music in the movie should belong to the performers, the animation? It'd collectively belong to the people that made the drawings.
It's more overhead than saying "THIS CORPO OWNS IT ALL BECAUSE THEY WERE WORKING WITH THIS CORPO" but it is ultimately needed, because this in itself would already do a lot to cull what, to me, is the biggest abuse within the copyright system. If something belongs to a person, that person will eventually die, and at that point the whole "you are denying this person the fruit of their own creation" argument dies with them. A corporation is an immortal abstract entity and should never be allowed to own -- Anything really.
I would also ensure the text of the law specifically protects creators against people profiteering off their creation without them being duly compensated -- So like, selling copies of someone else's art? Crime. Showing other people the art with no commercial intent? Not a crime, can never be one.
I like the copyright idea described above. I'm not sure how well it would work in practice, because I've never heard of anything like that being implemented, and new solutions almost always have problems. It's interesting though.
Regarding the kids making their own decisions thing- my example was intended to be a little funny, so I may not have picked the best one. Instead of the ice cream example, what about sex with adults? Sex changes? General amputation? Living on their own? Cigarettes? Harder drugs?
These are all things that kids can have opinions about, all things are mostly changes to their own body or bodily freedom, all things that can have terrible long term consequences. Should we prevent parents from controlling their kids, and allow the children to decide whether they want to do any of these?
Sometimes the finding-out part of the fuck-around-and-find-out experience is an irreversible addiction that there's no coming back from. Parents aren't always better, obviously, but they probably avoid more permanent harms for their kids than the kids would in their own.
Eeeeh, I can concede on the general premise of 'sometimes find out is something you don't come back from', although I am also skeptical of parents having childrens' best interests in mind when it comes to things like gender-affirming care because [gestures vaguely at the literally everywhere]
Yeah, fair. My parents were painfully religious and harassed me unmercifully because I wasn't, so I'm not saying it's all sunshine and roses. But leaving kids free to do whatever they want seems like it would have an attrition rate similar to turtles running for the ocean.
Also a pretty interesting idea, a sort of per-election test to see if they are both fully sane and up to date on current events.
... Although the senility test might end up as a tool of disenfranchisement anyway. Just remember Literacy Tests in the American Slave States during Jim Crow.
All income over $10m per year is taxed at 100%. Foreign and domestic put together.
I get where you are going but it would make more sense to be based on a percentage above a living wage or something like that. In 100 years 10 million will be worth a lot less than today.
Maybe start it at 10m and index link it to the average wage thereafter. Make it in their own interests to boost everyone’s wages.
I like that idea!
Make sure it's the median wage rather than the mean wage, otherwise they can just hugely increase wages for a few outliers.
That would get rid of inflation really fast as billionaires try to figure out how to deflate the currency.
I don't think the billionaires survived the initial premise of this thought experiment.
I don’t have a problem with that
All software that's paid for by taxpayers must be open-source, or at least source-visible. I know some European countries are heading this direction (or may already enforce this) which is great.
Actually, let's do that for everything that's funded by taxpayers. If I'm paying for something through taxes, I should be able to see more detailed information about where the money is going and the output of it.
You have free reign here why not just make all software have to be open source?
Although I tend to agree with that, there are softwares that should not be open source by nature. For example, an open source antivirus would not be effective.
Okay, I'll start with a basic one. Equal rights for everyone, regardless of beliefs, physical traits, emotional traits, sexuality or financial situation - will probably need amendments since it's hard to come up with every possible circumstance.
They should still have the same rights as everyone else, and that shouldn't be a controversial statement. But of course, as soon as they break the law, they should be punished. If they never break the law, they should have every right to be shitty people in public.
The government choosing what is morally right and what is morally wrong and punishing people for holding morally "wrong" beliefs is exactly what led us to be in the situation we are in right now in the US and China. Not everyone will ever agree on what is right or wrong. Make laws based on actions, not beliefs, and if anyone commits those actions, punish them for that.
Can you please elaborate on that? What beliefs do you think should be against the law?
That's not what I meant. I am saying you shouldn't be arrested simply for holding a belief. Not until you commit an action such as assault, murder, torture, forced labor, or one of a million other things that Nazis do should you be arrested. Being racist shouldn't be illegal. You should have the right to be a shitty person. But as soon as you hurt someone because of your racist beliefs, you should be arrested.
I mean I don't cherish the idea of giving a Nazi anything, but I still think they deserve equal rights, but it probably also depend on what you mean by rights. My interpretation would be that this include every service provided by the government. Handling groups like Nazis I think would fall under hate speech if they use their opinions to antagonize or incite violence towards other people.
They exist in countries with coalition governments (e.g. Germany) and yes the Nazi parties are popular, but they do not hold a majority and likely never will, so their power is reined in (just as with other parties).
If the party didn't exist, then those fascists would just join other mainstream parties and sow division within them (see: UK and US politics). Fascist pigs should have a voice, and be represented, like anyone else. Their voice just shouldn't drown out anyone else, and that is the case in a government that has proportional representation as one of its founding tenets.
Equal rights yes but please remove the "lift crazy religious beliefs/rules to a right" thing some people interpret into "freedom of religion", especially as it affects children of those people or the ability of those people to discriminate in direct contradiction to the equal rights clause itself.
Convert the date format to yyyymmdd on all official government documents.
Why not go with the international on dd.mm.yyyy why make everything special?
Because that date format is inferior. yyyymmdd is the standard date format in IT for a reason, there's nothing special about it?
Youre right, it is sorted automaticaly.
All laws must be beneficial to all the children of the next 9 generations.
All laws that aren't part of the constitution, or charter have a 20 year sunset date.
I agree in principle, but this is practically unenforceable. How do we determine as a society what will be beneficial in 9 generations, and agree?
You build a timemachine. You set a date for the future. If the machine says that it cannot generate a portal at that date, you edit the policy until it does.
How would that be determined?
Fuck, yeah!
What will benefit the children born in 200 years?
I tend to agree with pinkdrunkenelephants
Law sunset time is interesting.
Jefferson proposed the idea, didn't get the Continental Congress to agree
"Don't be a dick."
That would already be violated during the writing of said constitution.
Political parties are outlawed. Every MP should represent their own view, not tow a party line dreamt up by a PR agency.
Your vote affects others (like driving, owning a gun etc put others at risk). To vote you must pass a test; to pass the test we offer free education. To enable you to attend this education, we offer you a universal basic income. The test must not discriminate based on gender, age, sexual orientation, income etc etc.
Who would design and oversee this test?
I get the subtext of that question and I can understand this concern.
But what I’m proposing is that in a new constitution to properties of the test is guaranteed and then you’d put a cross-population group of experts together to formulate a test that lives up to those constraints. No doubt you’d end up in a courtroom every now and again to settle whether a specific question was constitutionally sound or not.
I think we could work it out. We can for driving tests.
I don't think we can. Have you seen the results of our "driving tests"?
In all seriousness though. I get what you want to do, but this isn't how you get there.
I'll go the opposite. Political parties should be anonymous. We shouldn't associate a party with any single person.
This has caused people not to vote for a party because they don't like who is running it, but they agree with almost everything else.
If the parties became faceless entities, and a list of policies, then you can make a more informed and less prejudicial vote.
No human has any rights that they would deny to others.
Environmental protection, LGBT and womens' rights including bodily autonomy would be explicitly written into the constitution
The 2nd amendment would be rewritten to protect the right to self defense not the right to own enough guns to start a war.
Our first past the post voting system would be replaced with alternatives that do not degenerate into a 2 party system.
The electoral college and senate would not exist. House representatives would be allocated based on population.
Supreme court justices would no longer be lifetime appointments.
If there is a minimum age to serve in government, there will be a maximum age as well.
The US will be obligated to abide by promises and treaties made with Native Americans.
The president is no longer required to have been born in the US. The requirement that the president be a natural born citizen was meant to prevent foreign powers from gaining control during a tumultuous time in US history that is no longer relevant.
Slavery would no longer be allowed for any purpose. (Currently it is legal in many states as a punishment)
A wall of separation between church and state as well as the right to privacy would be explicitly written into the constitution. (The right to privacy is implied but not explicitly stated)
Qualified immunity for police and other monopolies of violence would be abolished.
Is 8 really not relevant? Considering our 45th president?
So I agree with all of these, but someone has to ask so it'll be me:
Why abolish the senate? It was established to be opposite the house as a system where every state is represented equally. The concept of the senate guarantees a form of equality between Rhode Island and California, where in the house a vote that massively benefits California will inevitably drag lesser states with it by sheer population difference.
The reality is that the states are mostly independent entities with their own constitutions and governments. What's good for California may not be good for Rhode Island, and it's not very fair that you'd have to get the whole east coast on board to vote down an initiative championed by California alone.
I understand that the metaphor between California and Rhode Island isn't a perfect one, its sole purpose is to illustrate the point.
Although not as important as population representation, locational representation still makes a ton of sense for a country as geographically big as the united states.
A purely population based government without locational representation on a federal level would likely tip the power of law to the 5% of US land mass occupied by cities, and end up having the other 95% eventually forced to follow laws that don't make sense from a rural or suburban perspective.
So the senate does serve a purpose in that regard.
Now, on the other hand, I do think certain US territories should have seats in the house and senate.
I dont think that all the states should be equal precisely because they have vastly different populations. People talk about how unfair it is for California or Texas to drag other states kicking and screaming wherever they feel like but the opposite side of that coin isnt really any more fair.
I do agree that large and small states may need to be governed differently but thats something that needs to be addressed in a more direct way not by tipping the scales in favor of states with more grain silos and cows than people. i.e ground rules need to be set about how and why laws are constructed. i.e the real issue that the senate doesnt actually solve, is that laws aren't being rationally designed in a way that makes sense for the states that are subject to them. As long as that underlying issue isnt being directly addressed, the senate wont really fix things. And I would strongly argue that history proves that the senate is being used more as a political baseball bat than it is a tool of low population states to defend themselves.
Yeah, sure, but the solution to that isn't tipping the scales the other direction. Having the senate exist in the government as a check against the house is a measure to keep the scales from tipping in the first place. They already must work together to get anything done, and that means that the senate is just as beholden to the house as the house is to the senate. The proverbial scales will inevitably tip the other way if the legislative branch is reduced to just the house. If your goal is preventing the scales from tipping, that's not how you do it.
I think what you're really proposing is a restructuring of the legislative branch altogether, with maybe more law making power shifted to the states. Because just eliminating the senate and leaving the system how it is now would result in a heavily unbalanced legislature.
Anyway, nice discussing this with you. This isn't an easy topic, for what it's worth. It took a hundred men several months to hash out the details of what we're casually sitting here discussing.
Should we care about the states or the people in the states? There are less people in Rhode Island than California. Are those people so much more important that they get more representation, proportionally speaking?
People have locational representation in their local governments. Let them rule over themselves if you want, but don't give them disproportionate authority over the rest of us.
I chose to pose this hypothetical as a separate comment to better illustrate my point:
Why is it that proposing abolishing the senate only invokes the idea of stopping the minority from having authority over the majority and not the other way around? It needs to be said that the senate is just as much a check on the house as the house is the senate.
Let's say the house is the only voting body of the legislature. What is to stop them from imposing a 50% tax on all states under a certain population limit, paid directly to the other states? Obviously this benefits large swaths of the population, so their representatives vote unanimously yes. Now it doesn't matter how many representatives lower populated areas have because they will always be outnumbered.
So are you proposing that it's fair for extortion to take place in that manner? Because without an equal vote to be able to defend themselves on a more level playing field, you're inviting that kind of power imbalance.
Frankly, that's a ridiculous scenario. States are an artificial construct. There's no reason California couldn't be split into five states so they can get more senators, and there's no reason tiny east coast states couldn't be merged together. It's just a matter of political will. States rights do nothing to benefit the individuals living in those states. Often when we talk about states rights, states are imposing some kind of oppression or restriction on their citizens, abortion being the most recent example. The Supreme Court threw it back to the states, many of which banned it immediately.
The states don't matter! They're overgrown, glorified municipalities. If we are going to redesign the system, we need to reduce their power all together. States are a relic of a colonial system founded by the British, where each colony was individually granted a charter, and a of a constitution written at the same time the Holy Roman Empire was alive.
What stops ridiculous, punitive laws from being passed? What stops them from being passed now? The courts, for one, and the federal government. Often it's the states that are trigger happy in committing some kind of mayhem.
We've lived with states for so long that we've been gaslit into thinking that their existence is in our best interest. While states might be useful in some form, like in organizing regional infrastructure projects, their power should be diminished, and they are not deserving of house on par with the house of the people.
Of course, Congress is in need of other dire reforms as well. It should be bigger, for one, and first past the post should be replaced with some kind of alternate system (perhaps California-style jungle primaries?).
I believe the prompt was to reform the constitution, not the system. In case you forgot, or don't know, the states ratify the constitution. Not the other way around.
In a perfect world, sure. States need not be framed as rigid individual governments. In a scenario where the fed is overthrown and the states are intact, there's nothing stopping the states from just saying "nah, we'll form our own country".
Which if that's you're goal, I guess sure. The reason Texas hasn't done that already in the current system is that the federal government is there to stop them and they don't have the numbers.
I think your assumption in this thread is that the states already don't have power, which isn't even close to true. In the meantime ranting about how states are insignificant kind of comes off as missing the forest for the trees.
I will say that the irony of you calling a hypothetical that I made ridiculous, and then immediately presenting a more ridiculous scenario isn't lost on me. So thanks for that.
The prompt just says the revolution was successful and that now it's time for a new constitution. It's not even US-specific, so there's no reason to assume that state governments even exist in the context of the prompt, much less need to approve this new constitution. There's no need for such niceties if we're in a world where a revolution has destroyed the old regime in its entirety.
I understand that line of thinking, and you'd have a point if the senate could act alone. But the senate and the house have to agree on everything they pass, with very few exceptions. That means that the fact that Rhode Island gets an equal vote in the senate doesn't actually matter if the majority of the population doesn't want something anyway. In the same way that the majority population doesn't matter if the individual governments can't agree.
The people in Rhode Island don't matter as much as the people in California for sheer numbers, and that is already reflected in the house. Seeking to abolish the senate isn't an exercise in majority rule, it's just disenfranchising the minorities that exist.
Edit to directly answer your question:
We should care about both, given that we are a nation comprised of 51 smaller governments. It's asinine to assert that those governments don't matter on the federal scale. We have a system established already that cares about both. Axing the part of that system that keeps the most populous areas from getting everything they want is not the solution you think it is.
Smaller states should have less of a say. I'm not sure how that seems unreasonable. The people should decide. It doesn't matter what state they live in. It might have made sense 200 years ago but now I can't believe people seriously support it.
Smaller states do have less of a say. The house and senate have to work together. If the majority of people don't want something, it still doesn't happen. The purpose of the senate is to prevent the smaller states from getting no say.
It's not that hard to understand.
It makes it too easy to game the system and create gridlock because you only need influence over a bunch of very small percent of the population.
No political system is immune from gaming. You're trying to fix a problem every government has on some level by disenfranchising smaller groups in general. That problem would and does still exist in the house alone. I mean, the house is gridlocked right now, and it has nothing to do with the senate.
I actually started writing up a a new constitution a while ago as a sort of thought experiment. It's not finished yet but some of the highlights thus far include:
Right, patents are a whole separate thing. I added a clarification above that the 15 years/life is for copyright. The way I did patents is that corporations are ineligible for patents, and individuals get them for 5 years.
As long as labor is necessary, some form of market economy is likely to crop up, and as long as there's some form of market economy I'm hesitant to limit the ability for individual creators to make a living in said market economy, so I'm not sure I'd personally go for such a large carve-out from patent protections.
How would you prevent a company with gains from other means coming in and destroying a competitor only to start charging for their version after the other company goes under?
Power doesn’t disappear. If it doesn’t exist in corporate form it’ll exist in political form.
Funnily enough, I had this exact scenario assigned as a project in my political science class in college.
What I came up with is a lottery-based council government. The system is designed with none of the "gentleman's agreements" that the US systems seems to be based on, and assumes that if it's possible to abuse the system, then the system WILL BE abused. So it's designed to minimize the ability for the system to be abused.
You want to get rid of career politicians? Make it so they don't even have the option of running for office in the first place.
Councils
The way my system worked is that all governmental tasks are performed by a council created for a specific purpose. Every council is made up of an odd number of members, with a minimum of 5. Councils can be created to manage a geographical area, such as a state, county, or city, or for a topical purpose, for example, medical oversight. Each council has the ability to create lower councils that report to it, but only within the purview of the parent council. For example, a State Council can create a Municipal Council for a city within the state.
Sitting at the top of the entire structure is the Prime Council, which always consists of exactly 11 members. Decisions of the Prime Council are final except in the case of a supermajority overrule as detailed below.
Lower councils are subject to the decisions of higher councils with one exception - a parent council's ruling can be overturned and vacated if a supermajority* of child councils that existed at the time of the ruling vote to overturn it. For example, if a State Council outlaws gambling, but 75% of Municipal Councils vote to vacate the ruling, it is overturned. But, for example, if a Municipal Council votes to allow prostitution, the state or national council can overturn that ruling on its own. Again, however, this overturning can be overridden by a supermajority of child councils. However, the chain ends there. A parent council CANNOT vacate a supermajority vote passed by the collected child councils. Child councils must have a reason for existing can cannot be created simply to stack a supermajority vote.
A singular case can only be tackled by ONE council at a time and cannot be interfered with during the proceedings by any other council at any other level. For example, if a Municipal Traffic Council is considering a motion to raise a speed limit on a road, no other council (Municipal, State, or even the Prime Council) can interfere in that case or tell the lower council how to rule on it. However, once the case is complete and the ruling announced, THEN a higher council may take up the issue and/or vacate the lower council's ruling.
Decisions of lower councils can be appealed, but a parent council has no obligation to take up the issue and can simply deny the appeal.
Courts
Courts, as we understand them, do not exist in this system, per se. Civil and criminal cases are handled in the same way; there is no separation between the case types. Likewise, there is no differentiation between the natures of the decisions that can be handed down. Every court case is presided over by a council created especially for the purpose of hearing this single case. All the other rules surrounding how councils work detailed the Councils section still apply.
The Lottery
Council members are selected by lottery from all eligible citizens. Each lottery is specific to the seat being filled. To be considered eligible for a given lottery, a citizen:
Must be a member of the geographical area that the seat's council represents. For example, if the seat is on a Municipal Planning Council, the citizen must live within the city.
Must meet the qualifications defined by the higher council when this council was created. In this case, perhaps, qualification requires that the citizen hold a bachelor of science degree in any subject.
Must NOT have previously served on this same council.
Must NOT have been declared unfit for service by a medical professional.
All citizens of legal age are automatically in the lottery pool by default, and the lottery operates on on opt-out basis.
If a citizen is chosen for a council, they have the option of declining the position. In which case, another eligible citizen is selected.
Additionally, a citizen can elect to be removed from the lottery pool for any or no reason for one year at a time. This election can be renewed indefinitely, but it must be renewed UNLESS a medical professional declares that they are unfit for service. An unfit-for-service declaration can be made for a specific amount of time or on a permanent basis.
Antagonistic Resignation
Any council member can resign their position on a council at any time before their term is over. In addition, a council member may enact the right of "Antagonistic Resignation" whereby they remove both themself and ONE other member of the council. There is no veto or override process allowed. To clarify, any council member can remove any other member from the same council by also removing themself at the same time. The replacement council member(s) will be chosen via the lottery.
Antagonistic Recusement
A council member MAY NOT vote on or interfere with the vote on any issue the results of which they may directly benefit from. That is to say that if a council member could personally benefit from a decision on a matter, they are REQUIRED to recuse themself from the case and may not interfere with the case in any way, including but not limited to public discussion or press releases related to the matter.
A council member with a conflicting interest in a single case must either resign from the council or recuse themself from the case. As with Antagonistic Resignation, the recusing council member chooses ONE other council member that must also recuse themself from the case to preserve the odd number of council seats. Again, there is no veto or override process allowed. However, unlike Antagonistic Resignation, the recusing council member MUST choose one other member for recusement - they do not get the option to decline. If the number of active seats on the council would drop below five for this single issue, interim seats will be created and filled by lottery for this specific case only, after which the additional seats will be removed from the council and the interim council members' terms will be considered complete.
Protection and Compensation
Serving on a council is a full-time job and may require taking a sabbatical from work. While an individual citizen has the ability to decline a council seat, NO other entity, individual, or organization may punish or otherwise act against a citizen for choosing to accept the responsibility of service. Therefore, it is considered unconstitutional for any entity to retaliate against a citizen for accepting a council seat, punishable by a fine of not less than 50% of that entity's yearly income. It is understood that this is a harsh penalty, and the severity and calamitous nature of it is intentional and intended to avoid even the outward appearance of impropriety or retaliation. If a citizen CHOOSES of their own accord to decline a council seat out of a sense of duty to an organization, that's allowed, but it is absolutely not acceptable for an organization to demand, tell, ask, or even imply that a seat should be declined.
It is required by law that an employee (and this shall be construed loosely, to include any person who is in any way a member of an organization) of an organization be reinstated at the end of their council service to their same position, pay, benefits, and tenure as though no sabbatical had been taken at all. This is inclusive of any required "re-onboarding" time.
Council members shall be paid the greater of 125% of their reported yearly income or 200% of the average salary of the relevant lottery eligibility pool. This shall be to incentivize citizens to fulfill their duty and serve on a council.
Councilar No-Confidence
At any time, the citizens may petition a geographical council (Prime, State, County, Municipal, etc) for a status of Councilar No-Confidence. This petition shall require the signatures of 55% of the individual citizens of the geographical area represented. Upon submission of a completed petition, the council will be dissolved, and a new council will be chosen by lottery according to all the requirements for the council being replaced. This action is automatic and cannot be vetoed or overruled.
Branch No-Confidence (The Nuclear Option)
If instead, the No-Confidence petition contains the signatures of 75% of the individual citizens of the geographical area represented, the council and ALL LOWER COUNCILS created by it, directly or indirectly, are dissolved and replaced as above. This is akin to pruning a branch from a tree - every branch and leaf connected to the branch is also removed. Note that this applies to EVERY level of the system, so a No-Confidence petition signed by 75% of the citizens of the entire country and submitted to the Prime Council results in the entire system being wiped away and reset.
It went a lot deeper than that, but I've already typed a LOT and think this mostly gets the gist of it.
This is great thanks for posting.
How do you deal with apathy? Like in current political climate in which many people (all?) would decline the lottery?
People could also have lots of reasons to decline. Personal, professional, etc. What were the incentives to accept?
Well, it's multiple things.
People are paid for their time on the council, and by law the pay is AT MINIMUM 25% more that whatever you were already making, but could be considerably more depending on the pool of eligible citizens. Remember, the pay is the GREATER of 125% of whatever you were already making in your private job, or 200% of the average pay for the eligibility pool. So if you're making $40,000 per year and get called to council, you're gonna get paid a minimum of $50,000 for your term, but if the average pay for your eligibility pool is $40,000, then you're gonna be paid $80,000 for your term. It's structured so that there's always a strong financial incentive to serve.
People don't vote because they feel their vote doesn't matter. When you're part of a pool of 10 million people, one vote is more or less negligible. But, when asked to serve, you're now one of only a handful of votes. Maybe one of 5. Maybe one of 11. But your vote absolutely matters in a way that nobody could dismiss.
And tbh, if somebody declines, it's really not that big a deal. Eligibility pools would be big enough that a nontrivial number of people could decline the position and we'd still have plenty of eligible citizens. Worst case scenario is come kind of coordinated general strike against serving on councils, but to be fair, if the population is pissed off enough to enact a general strike in a meaningful way like that, they would have enacted a Branch No-Confidence movement long ago.
No such thing as a non democratic workplace
This document will self destruct in fifty years
Taco Tuesday
The wealthiest 10% of people must donate at least 5% of their yearly earnings to a general fund for public welfare, including free food, shelter and medical aid. Business assets domestic and international are included in this calculation. Anyone who attempts to hide assets to avoid donating, even within the confines of the law, can be tried for the manslaughter of everyone who died from poverty that fiscal year.
Essentially, if you have the financial means to help people, you are legally required to.
Why use the term ‘donating’? You’re describing a tax. More specifically, an income tax.
You're not wrong, but I'd want it separate from tax so it goes directly to welfare and not just government funds. It also sounds nicer to donate than pay taxes, and you never get a donation rebate.
The word “donate” implies that it's voluntary. If it's enforced by the government, it's a tax.
Tax goes to a single government spending fund, but I want this to be separate so it can't be channelled into buying guns or whatever. It's only welfare, and nothing else.
While donations are typically voluntary, there's nothing stopping it from being enforced. Someone can put a gun to your head and force you to donate to charity, and that's still a donation.
The vainglorious rich jerks might be less hesitant to part with their cash if they can boast about how much they donated, even if it was required of them. Only a little less, but that's still good.
I have thought about it, and I am sticking with "donate" as the term.
Then it's still a tax, just a tax going to a different fund.
In that case, the person holding a gun to your head stole your money and then they effectively donated it to charity.
Punish those who work hard. Reward those who don't contribute to society. Let's see how that helps!
It's hilarious you think the people with the highest yearly earnings get that by working hard. Do you think Jeff Bezos has been working harder than you have this entire year in the time since you posted your comment alone?
Don't be assholes to your fellow citizens.
@Crabhands Exactly. And that's most of them.
@wildcardology argues that "all the definitions are in the dictionary".
True. But then it comes down to "who writes the dictionary", so it's just kicking the can down the road.
First No elected official is allowed to take money or goods in excess of 50% of the median salary for all workers in the country in total for the entirety of their time in office from any organization or unrelated individual nor sit on the board of any company following office. Any payments to said official totalling over 50% median salary in the 5 years prior to their election and 20 years after leaving office from a single entity must be declared. The state will provide a generous pension to ensure future employment is not a financial necessity.
These measures are intended to allow elected officials to be free from influence.
Second Any change in leadership of a political party immediately triggers a general election. Change in leadership generally means a failure of the manifesto and/or a change in the policies which were presented to the public when the leadership was elected.
Third No advisory referendum shall be conducted without the intention to act upon the outcome and therefore any referenda should only be acted upon with a super majority of 66%. Prior to action following a referendum, the winning side must demonstrate how the result will be acted upon and where negotiation with outside interests is necessary, since the outcome cannot be known at the time of the first referendum the public should be offered a second referendum to decide whether to accept the outcome.
Fourth Politicians shall be held to account for any lies or dishonesty. Burden of proof lies with the politician accused of misconduct to provide evidence for their claims which are in dispute. Therefore evidence provision at the time of any claims is encouraged and can be published to a publicly accessible repository. Punishments can range from fines to removal from office depending on the severity and frequency of misinformation.
Fifth Proportional representation she'll be enacted to eliminate tactical voting. In addition any changes to the electoral district are subject to scrutiny by a randomly selected jury of 1000 residents in each of the affected areas. Voting by, and identity if the jurors shall be anonymous. The public may request redistricting at any time with a 2 year cool off via a petition meeting a minimum number of 100,000 signatures.
To name a few:
No official decision may be made without the entire process towards that decision being recorded, documented, and these records be made available to the general public with minimal restrictions. With a specific exception if revealing that information would put more people in danger than concealing it.
All natural resources, be it harvested (e.g. ores, oil) or otherwise (e.g. land, air), are property of everyone. If any individual is to monopolise and/or utilise some of these resources, they are to compensate everyone else for doing so.
Resources for the public good are to be taken from each according to their ability, and redistributed to each according to their needs.
Any supreme office must exist with a hard maximum time an incumbent is allowed to serve.
It must be possible for any person holding an official position, including any supreme offices, to be held accountable for their actions in power.
All official decisions must strive to be made to materially benefit the greatest number of individual people.
It may not be the duty and/or responsibility of government to impose opinions on the general public.
In an election, any vote must hold the same weight as any other vote to the greater outcome.
Any income and/or net worth for individuals in excess of approximately 1 Billion EUR-equivalent is to be taxed 100% and redistributed among the public, to each according to their needs.
Lawmakers are to be compensated an amount directly proportional to the median income of all citizens, and any benefits they receive must be equal to the legal minimum.
No wage may be paid that is insufficient for a person to afford a decent existence.
No corporation may exist where the compensation of its highest paid member exceeds 500 times the lowest. Any shortfall will be taxed upon the company at 200% the excess, and redistributed across its staff according to their needs.
I wanted to include something that makes the government responsible for some standard of public transit, but I can't seem to get the words right...
I like your ideas, but have you considered that this one:
All natural resources, be it harvested (e.g. ores, oil) or otherwise (e.g. land, air), are property of everyone. If any individual is to monopolise and/or utilise some of these resources, they are to compensate everyone else for doing so.
Effectively makes literally everything free? Not that this would be a bad thing. It just makes so many of the other things irrelevant.
I was actually hoping to use that clause to incorporate a land value tax.
Competency tests before you can appear on a ballot, with a commission that reviews the requirements to prevent the exclusion of minorities.
All financial information must be disclosed by anyone with power over others.
Somehow replace shares with cooperatives and employee ownership.
No elected judges, with stringent training and yearly bias testing. Like a postdoc in judicial impartiality.
Same with sheriffs. No elected police. Police should be a career, like a civil engineer. To be promoted, people must pass ever more strict ethics courses.
Any person who is a position of trust and power who then acts contrary to the ethics of their role can never be elected. Or have power over anyone again.
Children must be free of religion until they are 25.
Children must not be mutilated by their parents religion.
National healthcare.
USA focused: each state gets one senator, plus one per 2 million residents.
A lot of those tests have already been done and were used almost exclusively to enforce segregation.
Which why there has to be strict oversight to prevent that from happening.
Oversight by whom?
You cannot trust a government to routinely create arbitrary standards used to regulate that same government.
This is different from a government enforcing your average law because this law applies to the election process itself and allows for significant bias. Where there is room for bias in this process, it will be taken advantage of. Look at gerrymandering.
What problem does your law actually solve? If people are willing to elect a candidate, isn't that a sufficient measure of competency? At best you're creating an elitist state controlled by those who set the bar for competency, and at worst you're creating a one party state.
Most of what you've described would inevitably lead to the establishment of a single party totalitarian state.
Don't like the opposing party? Just make it part of the test. Today, one party could exclude the other by including questions that agree or disagree with critical race theory, voter fraud, etc.
Same issue. Who determines impartiality? The party in power? Single party state.
Who determines "ethics"? Single party state.
What is religion? You're definitely banning several books, and possibly banning a lot more. Many books can be turned into a religion or contain religious aspects. The party in power decides what's a religion and what gets banned.
At that point, why have a separate Senate and House? The point of a two-chambered Congress is to balance state and federal power.
Those "competency" tests will be used to discriminate.
Marriage as a union of two or more consenting adults
Honestly, I would just ban it entirely at this point. I'd rather see the abolition of marriage entirely than have the government dictate who can and cannot participate (outside of consent issues, obviously).
I mean, go forth. Be fruitful. Multiply.
Eat, drink, be merry with each other.
Just leave the government out of it.
and intellectually capable* adults
Rule 1: No billionaires. Upon being assessed at having a net worth of 1 billion dollars, regardless of where your wealth is or how it's invested, the entirety of its ownership will be transferred to a public trust, and all liquid assets will be equally distributed to the poorest 1%. This rule is to never be ever re-defined due to inflation.
Open carry of guns... no
Open carry of booze... yes
Let's party!
open carry of a more interesting drug that isnt so toxic maybe lol
Sure! Bring enough for everyone!
The richest person can not be X times richer than poorest person.
Choose the X value wisely. Mine is 1000.
Very hard to define this rule. Money in the bank? Collective value of possessions? Value of those possessions set by whom and to what standard? What about rich people not owning much but having everything in their company, non profit, etc.
That's why writing laws is hard. But you get the intention: limit wealth inequality.
If they can spend the money on something not necessary for the company it should be counted as their money I think
Companies get their own money separate from an individual but after a certain bracket they have to be audited by an impartial third party to make sure the money isn't just being used for personal stuff
How about both minimum wage and mandatory cost of living pay raises are inextricably tied to BOTH the GDP and the highest net worth, to be determined by an independent commission that keeps track of the assets of the wealthy?
At the point when wealthy individuals' vast resources cause the pay rate to rise in a way that threatens economic stability, that would trigger policies to divest said resources into public trusts aimed at the most at-risk parts of the population. Instead of a trickle down model, you have more of a circular model, where fabulous wealth always funnels directly to the bottom. This creates a cycle of uplift, rather than simply an accumulation at the high end.
🙄 Top 1% and Bottom 1% then
government policy will be primarily set by a peer validated group of experts in their fields. funding will be dictated by a multidisciplinary team that assesses need through funding requests by the expert bodies with accompanying impact assessments. that will dictate taxes and so on.
elections will be performative and meaningless as you lot have absolutely shown you can't be trusted but also need to feel heard or you'll break things you don't understand.
With the restriction that there should be no financial interest in the policy being passed for a committee member.
good call. just well paid, expert professionals without a vested interest doing a job they are qualified to do, and being reviewed by people qualified to understand their performance.
so similar to current, except for the 'expert' part
currently governments fund and slash funding to all sorts of things according to political convenience.. I just want to see all those decisions validated entirely on merit by someone who understands it.
if it's popular with the mob but it's not true or doesn't work, well, we don't do it. president isn't an expert and can't say shit, and especially can't do stupid things so he can sound tough in a media release. we can't afford to keep dicking around with whatever sounds good to win popular support with the lowest common denominator while the world goes to shit.
the world is far beyond the level of complexity where any one person could understand enough to make off the cuff, meaningful decisions about big issues. people need to stop thinking they can vote sensibly on policy or policy performance on almost any issue, let alone all the issues.
The voting system will be the Tideman method
While Ranked Pairs sound good in theory, how would you actually sell this method to normal people? Transparency is one of the basic requirements for the acceptability of a vote, and this method will be beyond maybe 70-80% of the American public, if not more.
There are voting methods hard to explain, this one is quite easy: "the winner must win against most of the other candidates on a 1x1 comparison"
And to avoid making n² voting rounds, we rank our preferences, the first beats all, the second beats all but the first...
Still overly complicated, especially for American minds who have been trimmed for decades to rate anything scientific as work of the devil...
If people can get sports leagues rules to win a championship, they can get this.
I don't think using ignorant Americans as a policy standard is going to achieve anything.
Well, a lot of them don't really understand the current system either.
What is important is how are you, as a voter, gonna vote for the person you want to win. In the end, it's either choose one or rank them from top to bottom.
What could be the problem is tallying several million individual votes, let alone putting them into a computer. I wonder what the algorithmic complexity is for this system.
Any ranked choice voting system is subject to Arrow's theorem; range/score/approval voting would be more effective.
"more effective" depends on which criteria you value for your voting system to have.
I value the Condorcet Winner, majority and independence of clones criteria.
Everybody gets to vote within 35 minutes or less, maybe I should rephrase that too on average in a voting area that people vote in 35 minutes or less. Make it unconstitutional stand in line for eight hours to vote just as an example.
All voting areas are drawn and simple squares are rectangles and it is done via a mathematical algorithm.
Abortion is a constitutional right, no limits, it is always between the person who is pregnant and their doctor.
In the United States we called the fairness doctrine, I would put that into the constitution.
A gross income tax if you are above a certain income you get taxed before you get to do any deductions or write off or anything. That same gross income tax would apply to trust funds it would also apply to businesses.
Dark money in terms of politics would be bound by the constitution. Businesses would not be allowed to run ads or donate money. Money going to campaigns has to come from an individual and the maximum be US$5000 per year.
The Constitution isn't the appropriate place for legalizing abortion. This should be done in the next Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen
This one mystified me a bit. Why should we only get 35 minutes in which to vote? Then I realised you meant usually the queue was hours long in your country. Still seems pretty bizarre.
We have compulsory voting here (rich people can afford the fine, but if you're less rich like me, it isn't worth it to not vote) and so everyone votes, pretty much, but the two weeks they give you to get a vote in at a before-the-cutoff seem pretty normal to me, and there's always postal votes if you aren't able to go in for two weeks and can't afford the fine. Why not just open up the voting to a longer amount of time? Then you could go in after work one day to prevote in the two designated weeks like we do.
Using "think of the children" type arguments in political debate should be punishable by loss of passive voting rights (the right to be elected) for life. And the same for "If you have nothing to hide" type arguments.
Essentially the whole climate change debate centers around the wellbeing of future generations aka "the children". How is this not valid?
I am not talking about arguments about future generations, I am talking about "we need to watch everything you do because some bad people do bad things to children" type arguments. Or, for that matter, the arguments from conservative and religious people who claim we can't talk about LGBTQ+ people existing because it might scar children to see two guys kissing.
Basically using children as an argument to further your political goals that you had anyway, regardless of any children because nobody wants to be seen arguing against the well-being of children.
To be fair it’s not just children. There are plenty of mass shootings at concerts, movie premiers, random gas stations. It’s just that the us has 288 school shootings from 2009-2018. The next highest would be Mexico. At 8 in the same time frame.
So it’s not so much “think of the children” as it is “hey guys, so many people get shot, and it’s worse in America than anywhere else. What can we do to make it not so bad? Maybe make it harder for idiots or unstable folk to get guns? And since most people who advocate for less gun CONTROL (not banning, just controlling who can go get an AR-15 off the shelf) tend to be the same folk saying “but we can’t let LGBTQ people exist! Think of the children!” But then children get shot at school and the cops are like “I’m not going in there. I’ll get shot!” Or “yeah you have to give birth because “think of the baby!” But the moment that child is born we don’t give a fuck about them. Let’s slash welfare because poor people don’t WANT to work!” But also those children we were thinking of? Let’s slash their welfare too. Damn poor babies. I bet their parents are drug addicts!
Nobody arguing against gun rights use “because of the children” as their main argument. The US does have way too many school shootings though, and we should probably address that somehow.
I own a gun. I have nothing against guns. I enjoy target shooting. Gun control isn’t about taking away guns. It’s about controlling who gets guns based on how likely a gun in their hands is to cause a bunch of people to die. Even one person dying is not okay. So I think more stringent requirements for who can own a gun are reasonable.
Make it illegal for politics to be based around religion or ethnicity. Also, I’d make capitalism illegal just like nazism.
So you want an authoritarian state?
Tolerance for intolerance leads to intolerance. If you call that authoritarian, be my guest.
You want to ban capitalism. You'll end up with an authoritarian state as a result of that choice as every non-capitalist state is or has been authoritarian.
Retail employees may legally put hands on the customer
And every person working in a call centre gets one free orbital laser shot per shift.
Blackjack and hookers for all
I'd put 1 and 2 right back in. It ain't broke
What do you have against the 3rd amendment?
Ok, and that one.
How to do voting even is a big question. The really representative systems tend to end up with razor thin coalitions full of smallish parties that play brinkmanship. There's got to be a way to discourage that, but I don't know what it is yet.
More controversially, it should probably address economic inequality in some way.
Words are cheap. I would suggest that citizens sing a song together at noon, to celebrate their joined opportunities.
We are, we are,
Walmart.
https://youtu.be/JOkQJm_UGM4?si=HaxHNKwYl7at_Tir
Guns don't kill people.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/JOkQJm_UGM4?si=HaxHNKwYl7at_Tir
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Why hasn't anyone ask about the country ?
Are people from Lituania supposed to want the same as people from Brazil ?
Land value tax, election by sortition for the legislative branch, bodily autonomy
Didn't Iceland do this a few years ago, after their economy crashed?
Iceland tried partially crowd-sourcing their constitution. https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/iceland-crowdsources-its-constituti-12-11-15/
However, that failed in the parliamentary process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932013_Icelandic_constitutional_reform
Actual human rights
Let the robots be in charge. They can't do any worse.
Depends who they were trained by
"OpenAI's GovernGPT 11 gets better economic results than Meta's 'LincolnBot', more at eleven"
Remember, no English
Any form of political corruption should be severly punished.
Any political office should have a limit of two terms.
Does everyone have to like it or do I just get to pick one and everyone has to live with it? If the latter, I might give technocracy a try…
I don't think it's possible to make a decision absolutely everyone will like
copy the old one verbatim (it is flawless)
/s ←←
Our Constitution as it is is pretty good, so wisdom would be to tread lightly. I think the only change I would make is to prohibit primary elections. That would be considered a right, as in, no person or group may deny a candidate with sufficient signatures the right to appear on the ballot. I would also mandate some sort of ranked choice voting or instant runoff election. These two changes would be to fix the problem of having to vote against a bad guy rather than voting for a good guy. It far too often ends with the second worst candidate who goes into the primary, coming out victorious. We should be electing the best, not the second worst.
Whose constitution is "ours"?
Sorry, I forget that while Reddit had a largely American userbase especially in political posts, Lemmy does not. I refer to the United States Constitution, which I think is damn near perfect, but has been screwed up by multiple generations of voters who pay little or no attention to their government's mismanagement and just keep re-electing the same incumbents despite having shit approval ratings for Congress, because they don't bother to actually do any research of their own or read what the candidates write other than just a few sound bytes on TV.
There are lots of good ideas out there, I'll just add some that are pretty niche:
The book Socialist Reconstruction came out last year and puts forth some interesting ideas. Specifically ch 2
I thought ch3 was pretty good, but a pale comparison to ch1:
Wipe out their leaders. Remember that a lot of people are just following orders on penalty of treason/death.
You gotta get some Judeo-Christian values in there, amirite guise?
Give the land back to its rightful owners and that's it. Nothing else. EDIT: and compensate for what was lost through genuine restorative justice.
It's not up to genociders to decide what gets done with their land.
A universal right to purchase, own, sell and (if applicable) conceal carry any weapon that is allowed to be used by the nation's military, without any kind of permit or registration. Also, explicitly prohibit military conscription and legally equate it to slavery.
I have to vastly disagree with this. The argument hat a gun is a necessity is disingenuous at best.
I love my guns, but too many fuckwads treat it like a toy or some sort of social justice equalizer. It has been proven to me time and again that we cant trust people with unfettered access to fire arms.
Y'all can't even have political discourse without being violent. So nope, you don't deserve to have the right to bear arms. (I mean "you" collectively and include myself in this hypothetical).
You are not supposed to operate a car without a license but somehow, trying to regulate guns is big brother trying to take away muh freedoms.
It just doesn't stand up to actual critical thought.
I understand why my message might suggest that I am American, but I am, in fact, not. I won't go into details to avoid doxxing myself, but I live in a country with strict gun laws, and, in long term, the lack of civilian firearm ownership has proven to have much worse consequences than the opposite.
To add to my original comment, I believe that "without any kind of permit or registration" should be explicitly stated in every article that guarantees some kind of right, as the lack of such statement often leads to slow erosion of the right, starting with the requirement of declaration, and then permission, which then gets more and more difficult to obtain (example: the right to public protest in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine)
lol. You have the chance to change something and your idea is: "Hey we need more shootings. Not enough children and other people get shot. Let's increase the number"
Addendum: With a lottery allocation of ammunition. Each year, one lucky citizen recieves 1 bullet in the mail and can decide to whatever they want with it!
Banning personal use cars, making efficient public transport mandatory and failure to provide it would result in prison time for people responsible.
Banning makeup which hides skin itself for the sake of illusion.
Banning photo editing which alters how humans look like.
Generally I'd ban things which hurt mental and physical health. I'd definitely reduce the legal amount of kcal allowed per 100g, sodium and sugar too. I'd get experts who never affiliated with any companies to chime in.
@Sprite @pinkdrunkenelephants Whoa, what an overbearing fuck.
I live in a rural area, far from population centres and public transport. Why can't I have a car?