I've been thinking about this thing with the demands to defund the
police and stuff. I think it is one of these things where people
have a legitimate problem they would like to get solved and the
answer that is "picked" out of the soup of memes is the one that
seems most "appropriate" but hurts least the ones in power.
The problem is systemic racism. The cops are just the surface
layer. The cops are a symptom, not the disease.
What I think might be closer to an answer would be something like
this:
1) Remove the right to give inheritance of
more than, lets say 2M dollars
2) Change democracy into a lottery
These both would have enormous issues, but I don't think nothing
that couldn't be handled. Lets first talk of the advantages.
What keeps the racism going is the wealth. A random white
nationalist is not a power player. Neither is a random cop. But
all this surface layer stuff is distracting from the actual
problem which is the corruption in politics and the wealthy
people taking advantage of it. If your wealth is larger than
a small country's budget, I would go as far as to call that in
itself a crime against humanity. It is disgusting. It is making
the system fold around you in a way that causes the racism we see
in the world, among other inequalities. It's like you have a
gravitational pull that turns the world into your image.
Now, if we (the people) just take your money after you are dead,
you are not worse off. Your kids are not essentially worse off
since you have had time to get them to good schools and all that.
They would just have to work for their living. And isn't that
what you rich people think is the highest human value? To work
and succeed in beating down your competition? Why then not allow
your kids to have to work for themselves and test their mettle?
This is good for them.
The second part is to make it harder to corrupt politicians. It
works because of statistics, basically. The definition of
"politician" would change a lot though. So, instead of having a
bunch of old white men sitting in a room, you would randomly
select a big number of people, let's say 3k - 10k, to think about
selected issues at their leisure and have chats about this stuff
with each other. You could only be selected once. There would be
a 24h staff of very qualified advisors who you could call at
any time to ask about the issues. There would be teams of people
to do legwork for you, research and stuff. You would be sworn
to silence. If it was found that you have told someone you are
a politician, you would be dumped and a random person would
take your place. You could tell your family obviously. I am
thinking in broad strokes here, so if it seems that something
would turn into comedy, (like having your wife or husband be a
secret politician and trying to keep it a secret from you and
you thinking they must be cheating on you since they are acting
weird these days) then just don't take it literally.
I think these two things would have an enormous benefits to
the regular people. The problems are huge too. Like, for example,
how will a country like this appear to other countries? What would
happen the first time someone points a nuke at you? I suppose a
lot of this sort of decisions would have to be taken from the
politicians to experts of various kinds, but that begs the
question of the corruptability of the experts. I suppose that
even with slight corruption of them it would still be better than
the current situation. You could also cycle the experts or
have some draconian surveillance on them. That's fine since they
are being paid a lot to be in that role so it's not the same
as draconian surveillance on a random person through Facebook.
There is the question of the financial empires and if they are
actually a net good compared to smaller ones. If you have a
very successful company, should it not continue it's existance
after it's owner dies in order to keep doing the good it is
doing? I guess so, although, it sort of seems to me that a
company will turn bad after 30 years or so. Also, I don't
think it necessarily follows that a company would not be able to
continue without a filthy rich owner. I guess in this world
the companies themselves would be the worst corrupting influence,
since they can have a lot of propagandist influence on the whole
population. So, it could be that they would have to be somehow
cut down to size. I don't know how that could be done, though.
Well, that's my take on it. Of course this is not an exhaustive
study on the topic. I am sure there would be massive problems with
it, but there are massive problems with the current shit show too.
I don't think anything like this will happen anytime soon, but
then again, a lot of stuff that I hadn't thought would happen
are happening these days so what do I know.
