THE SIDE OF GOOD
...presented by the very same philosopher who is (soon to be)
searchable on the internet as "King-errant Even"
check out:
and now...
Introducing
Enlightenment Liberal
Political Party Platform
23 points of agreement; by Even
1. The essence of this political party is that it opposes those who behave as if Might Makes Right, especially when those opponents employ Might Makes Right in the service of a vast, encompassing ideology; for the addition of a sweeping ideology to the practice of ‘Might Makes Right’ together form the essence of what one might call political medievalism, which is (we believe) what the original Liberals of the Enlightenment (such as the US founding fathers) were reacting against in the first place. Rejecting Might Makes Right, we therefore operate as if there are truly correct ways of acting—by governments and individuals. Thus we suppose inalienable rights exist; that unethical behavior such as religious intolerance or curtailing Free Speech are not ever justified; and that the use of Reason (thus the rejection of fallacies), benefitting society—as it does—when all adhere to these rules, is also a matter of ethical behavior. Therefore, we oppose all ideologies that seek to subvert the basic rules of Reason or to deny any ethical imperatives: ideologies such as Nazism, Social Justice Warrior/illiberal-Woke ideology/"Critical Theory", any hard-line Marxism, as well as any ideology that seeks to nefariously tear down Jefferson’s work and, with it (in particular), the separation between church and state.
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2. Protection of the Bill of Rights—all of them.
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3. Every part of government and its affiliates (including The State Department and willing foreign subcontractors) must behave ethically in all ways, based on the idea that there’s a right and a wrong, that ‘might’ doesn’t make ‘right’, and that the government’s will (or that of any individual within it or without it) is not above the law nor should be exercised in a way that assumes the ends justify the means. Torture, for example, is categorically wrong, and must not be pursued by any agents of the US, nor can we allow detainees to be handed over to foreign authorities to torture them on our behalf.
It may be contenting to point out that a national government doesn't have the same responsibilities to foreigners and non-citizens as it does to its citizens, but the degree to which a nation can reach out and touch, kill, or control citizens of another country is the degree to which ethical constraints on that controlling nation's actions begin to apply to foreigners. This means that for the US to act as police officer to the world implies the categorical necessity of it behaving ethically to individuals abroad for the very same reasons government ought to behave ethically to its own citizens.
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4. Excusing either corporate malfeasance or mismanagement by citing the “too big to fail” argument is extremely immoral; it effectually declares a corporation to be above the law or above the rules of fairness that everyone else abides by. It is a betrayal of the fundamental justification of capitalism to even speak this argument, for businesses that are run wrongly must be allowed to fail. There is therefore no such valid argument as “too big to fail”, and only evil results from acting otherwise. Either the corporation has become a monopoly and must be broken up, or it ought fail and its still-valuable pieces should be bought up separately. If the government wants the services to continue, it should buy up the valuable functions during bankruptcy, at a great discount and benefit to the public. Those who propose the “too big to fail” argument, absolving a corporation of mismanagement, must be viewed as nefarious agents at least—and practically treasonous—for sneakily encouraging the betrayal of the hard and noble sacrifices our ancestors made in choosing a capitalist system where they knew their livelihoods would not be protected.
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5. A government has a commitment to punish consistently in order to deter future bad behavior, regardless of whether the costs to the government are high in a particular circumstance. It cannot decide that a particular person or corporation is above the law, or that it’s so unpalatable to follow through with—or to allow—the punishment of an individual or corporation that that government instead follows its own temporarily-rational incentive in letting it off the hook. In Game-Theoretical-terminology, in a challenger-and-defender model; the defender must consistently meet the challenge even when it involves a total loss; but so does the challenger lose, which deters other challengers. When a government simply follows its short-term incentive in deciding how to cause punishment to happen, the powerful become emboldened to tie their tentacles around our necks, then act criminally. It’s a recipe for societal degradation. The same reasoning that applies to citizens must apply to corporations.
6. Governments can and do make decisions taking into account morality, for example when deciding on whom to admit to the country, how much to punish a criminal, or what to allow their agents to get away with. During the original Age of Enlightenment, in Europe and America, new ideas were adopted by the intelligentsia about morality—that it should not be thought of as topical, but, rather, as structural* in nature—and not only are these ideas about morality the guiding paradigm to understanding the purpose of government, but they are the guiding paradigm to understanding morality of individuals, from the government’s ethical, non-religious perspective.
* [“Structural”, here refers to the way that situations can be essentially mathematized in terms of individuals having different “utility” for each of those outcomes and the discrepancy can be quantified relative to each other, so the whole situation can take on a form that makes no reference to the topic anymore, and that means that two situations that deal with different topics can sometimes be seen to really have the same structure thus the same dilemmas and reasoning about them.]
7. The government has a responsibility to the citizens, as per the original political philosophy of the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment, regarding solving moral dilemmas; but the fact that it may have the power to force individuals to behave in a way that would otherwise be called "morally" does not mean that society is necessarily best served by its intervention, especially when issues of privacy or the exorbitant infiltration of society by government’s power may enter into the equation.
8. It is imperative that government not insinuate itself into society in a way that makes it difficult for citizens to ever turn it back. The ability to change course and self-correct is imperative for society; and, where not stated, that ability is assumed to rest with the citizens or entities with less-aggregated power. Once government gains the power to deny the citizens the chance to revert, all is lost, according to careful political philosophy.
9. Rights are supposed, in our understanding, to exist in reality; and unlimited violence (though only up to the degree that is required to achieve the justified result) is justified in the exercise of an inalienable right—justified, that is, in a theoretical way, but, in practice, when it is known. In order to avoid escalating toward unlimited violence, we also understand that rights do not ever overlap. That means that no one has a right to another’s work, all utility considered. No one has an inalienable right to healthcare, for example, and another: no one has a right not to be offended. What is right (in a wise—or, strategic—sense) is different from “a right”. Furthermore, a right can be intentionally extended by a person or government, but this is not the same as an inalienable right, which we suppose to exist without anything ever needing to be specified. Exercising the defense of a right with unlimited violence is considered unethical in situations where the right has yet to be determined by the best methods available to humans: in courts of law, etc., and where such a determination is clearly required.
10. Citizens’ utility is the measure of account for determining what is gained or subtracted from them. A man who pays taxes is compelled to part with physical or virtual property (such as money), yet does not necessarily lose utility if; were his fellow citizens compelled to do the same, and were the government to use the money wisely; it is spent solving a Prisoner’s Dilemma of sufficient benefit that the citizen’s utility increases as a result of that taxation. Increasing that utility is the purpose of all government action.
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11. Secession: all governments must allow significant portions of themselves to secede, should the people in those areas wish to. Those who secede pay the cost of separation. This is fundamental to the reasoning that underlies our most basic Western political philosophies: consent of the governed, and self-determination. The people of a land have the right of whom to exclude from the body of their own politics if they feel they deserve better than to have to include those others who, for whatever reason, would, if forced to be included with them, make the people of said land worse off than they deserve. The right to self-determination is fundamental to fairness AND is ethically imperative.
On the topic of US state secessions: it will be the stated position of this party that the US Supreme Court erred when it rendered highly-politically-charged judgments about the topic long ago—judgments that are not logically coherent. These judgments ought to be overturned in favor of a logical interpretation of our laws and history, which follows. The Articles of Confederation are still in effect because not every provision within them was overlaid by the Federal Constitution. One provision in the Articles of Confederation, repeated many times, was that the 13 original states of the United States are bound in perpetuity. The Federal Constitution, making no mention of this, could not have voided this provision, nor were the Articles of Confederation ever formally voided; so they are still in effect to the degree that they were not overlaid. This means that as of now, the 13 original states of the US cannot secede, nor did they ever have legal standing to do so after that first constitution was ratified by all. As of now, any of the 37 other states do have the right to secede and can do so simply by voting to in their legislatures.
States, also, should consider seriously the demands of enclaves within themselves that argue to break away and form their own state.
12. Any government’s purpose, being to increase the peoples’ utility by solving Prisoner’s Dilemmas (i.e., moral dilemmas), also includes solving intergenerational moral dilemmas. Because of the impetuousness of the market, a market-derived discount factor (which is a mathematical articulation of impatience) would dictate that those in control of a current government strip a country of its natural resources at the rate the market desires if not for the fact that previous generations had NOT done the same. In order to pay back ancestors’ morality, the moral responsibility is to pay it forward to the future generations and act as custodians of the natural wealth in a way that breaks with the market-determined optimal behavior. A government must, in this way and in others, act as an entity that exists with a much-different discount factor for the future than the market uses: it has a responsibility to care about the very-long-term benefit of its citizens and their offspring, and their offsprings’ offspring, etc.
Because this is true, there is an gap into which can be poured almost unlimited amounts of investment money because of the difference between the kinds of investments that the market would endorse vs those that the government should deem desirable. The government is best acting when it finds the examples that most effectively pay it forward as well as raise general quality; it should fund those best societal investments, including the building of monuments and high-quality, timeless cities, or other generationally-long-term investments in this civilization. (But such investments can only proceed when these long-term investments are thought out and executed superbly, by the most efficient and genius among the populace.)
13. Another part of the service that government does to keep society optimal in the long-run is to make sure that it never occurs for assets to landslide—in a runaway process—in favor of those who already have vast assets’. If such landslides of society’s riches into the corners of the already-rich were to occur, it would make economic slaves or indentured servants of the majority of the country;; and it would—even more alarmingly—allow the richest to threaten to leave with their accumulated assets (which are the treasure of the society); thus this threat would, in turn, force the rest of society to do anything to appease them, including—ultimately—giving up all freedoms and civic integrity. In order to make sure that such a disaster doesn’t befall the country, the government is tasked with holding the distribution of assets or incomes (or both) in balance among the population, or putting forces on them that bring them back in line with what is most ideal, according to the averaged notions of justice. Extremist notions of justice (such as those advocated by Ayn Rand’s fans, or, conversely, by those clawing for equity instead of equality—i.e., by those whose impulse is to distribute assets to anyone who has “less”) are to be eschewed. All of this means that this party finds a deep and legitimate reason for progressive taxation to be implemented.
14. It is a great waste of society’s effort to quibble over the tax rate, since the optimal tax rates for the different tax brackets change with the changing economic circumstance; and those who once knew rightly what the rate ought to be changed to may not realize that their answer is no longer valid just a short time later; thus, abundant and acrimonious dispute is created in the political realm due to outdated information about this topic. Instead, we should discuss and hash out an averaged idea of the ideal distribution of assets or income, in graphical form, and map this with an equation. We then ought to spend our efforts on best inventing an algorithm that steers our distribution of riches toward the ideal distribution, investigating how strongly to steer it there; and this algorithm is the one passed into law, which determines what economic agents owe. The tax rate thus changes, for a given income bracket, based on how far from ideal the country is, and also relevant economic variables such as how many businesses are currently falling into bankruptcy and how easy it is to make money using money.
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15. To curtail the freedom of another always requires a valid justification, positively given; freedom from real harm or control is the unadultered state; that a person has it is the prima facie position.
16. He is wrong who says his country is right whether right or wrong. It is a logical impossibility and those who support the sentiment are of either poor intellectual judgment or poor character. Nationalism is therefore eschewed by the party.
17. A harsh nobility** may be the only thing saving the human race from the road to hell, which is paved with good intentions.
18. Meritocracy is always right, and government favoritism of any subgroup of people within the population is always harmful in the long-term.
19. We must emphatically reject the Neoliberal idea that incentives can be sufficient to lead to good governance. Incentives OUGHT to be lined up with optimal behavior as well as possible, meaning that public servants, contractors, etc., find their interests/incentives aligned as often as possible with whatever behavior of theirs is in the society’s best interest; but it is certainly impossible to align the incentives well enough that self-interest can lead to an uncorrupt and fully civilized government or society. In order to have a civilized society, it is imperative that the civically-virtuous step forward to take responsibility upon themselves in ways that are not in their interest; this will always be the case. We must encourage that civic virtue, we must accept that this is what our level of civilization depends upon, and we must calculate accordingly. No deeds done in the public name will be done even close to what would be wondrous and optimal if those in power follow only their interest. This is why we cannot leave alone those powerful bodies, or even city planning divisions, to follow their interests. This is why we must support those who stick their necks out, and we must advertise and admire those who act not in their interest, but for the public’s. This is why nobility of character and consistently telling unmotivated truths (neither of which are in a person's interest) should be seen as among the most important virtues for a representative of the people.
20. In order to do great deeds on the public’s behalf; when it comes to enterprising projects, we must put trust and power into the hands of talented and virtuous individuals who have vision. There is never any likelihood that anything wondrous would ever be done otherwise. Committees, districts, and faceless groups almost never produce anything wondrous—functionary groups do mere tasks. This is especially the truth—and painfully so—when such a group's members use officialese or corporate-speak/doublespeak/management-speak/workplace-jargon/corporatese/commercialese (or whatever you wish to call it); for this type of language is most often used to absolve one's self of responsibility, and it also creates a fictitious semblance of authority, creates a fictitious belief that what the speaker wants done is what must be done, forces the listener onto the back-foot while wasting their mental time interpreting what the speaker said, encourages delusional group-thinking, or simply obfuscates the truth.
We ought name the one who is entrusted with our work and ambitions; faceless groups become a recipe for terrific losses of opportunity that only those with vision are lamenting now. The larger society has no clue about what we're constantly giving up because they, living ordinary lives, have no way to calculate. Yet when the opportunities that are being foregone are told to them in summary, and the prescription offered, they often scoff. The tragic result is the same as that which barbarian nations arrive at since they, similarly; not trusting those who have good ideas—whether out of jealousy for the power that would be given to the individual, or out of laziness to think hard and really investigate to see what is being proposed—aren't able to get the benefits of their best citizens' best efforts. We must not be like that. The only truly great and tasteful things ever done for the public are those done by visionaries imbued with power and responsibility over the project.
21. Conscription is totally wrong and unethical. If a nation cannot summon the manpower desired to fight another people, then either the fight ought not be fought, or the country of fools or cowards should fall. Using guns to force some men to fight other men with guns is exactly what tyranny looks like, and is the main enabling mechanism for endless global horror. Mankind is already naturally bloodthirsty enough; if the old men can’t find enough testosterone-amped young men to go a-killing, then something is likely very wrong with the casus belli. There is no situation in which we should think that, from a millennium-long perspective of civilizations (with their rises and falls), conscription is ever acceptable.
22. This party will never, and must never accept contractors' money. That would be a completely unethical breech by providing incentive for vast corruption and waste. Cast great shame on those who would.
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23. Voting methods are crucial in shaping the structure of politics of a country, and the health of the country’s civic discourse and leadership-selecting-structure is at stake when it comes to the method we employ to enact democracy. First-Past-The-Post voting is the simplest system, and is also nearly the worst. It creates an overwhelming strategic impulse for a two-party-system, which system always damages public discourse and shunts individuals into office who are nothing like the kinds of leaders we need; meanwhile, the system turns away sage, tempered, and virtuous individuals from the political system because their ideas happen not to mesh perfectly with what either of the two parties happen to have group-thought at the moment. Once a two-party system takes over, voices of reason and sagacity are often hard for the public to come across unless those voices come from journalists, which profession should not be the only recourse for the sages. The two-party-system is damaging in these ways and many more, to an incredible degree. Perhaps 80% of America’s biggest problems have more than 50% of their underlying causation the existence of the two-party-system. The simple voting system we’ve used for a long time is what breathes life into that two-party-system. And the two-party-system is what George Washington and his Enlightenment friends desperately hoped to avoid. The solution is not to rely upon the brute force of civic virtue and social awareness of its evils—the strategic impulse is too strong. The only way to avoid the two-party-system is to do away with FPTP in single districts as much as possible. Here is a proposal that would allow this to happen to a great degree, and would help arrange the entirety of our election system to best capitalize upon the nature and character of our country:
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1. Elect the House of Representatives via Proportional Representation.
2. Elect the US Federal Senate using very different rules. The 17th amendment was an experiment in democracy; it solved some problems but put other things out of whack, and in the end was hardly better. We need something completely different, and this will be recommended: Each state has a long senator and a short senator; the whole state legislature (including any sortition bodies mentioned in the following #6) votes upon Federal Senate candidates with a 66.666%/33.333% split between the total vote power of the regular lawmakers vs the sortition body; the short senator is elected for 3 years and the long senator is elected for 6, but both are voted upon in runoff together on the year when they both get elected to a term; and all voting is done using Even Voting**. This will break up ideologically-steamrolled states while choosing amazing candidates and not making state legislative races a proxy for Federal senate competition, as was the problem in the olden days.
3. Pass these previous two together as a single amendment to the constitution in order to appease those on the left who generally desperately would want P.R., as well as repealing the 17th, which those on the right are highly in favor of.
4. Support the movement to make every lower house of every multi-cameral legislature in the US (currently, every legislature other than Nebraska) elected via Proportional Representation (P.R.).
5. Use a better method for electing the President. Nobody in America is convinced that our system causes the greatest civic leaders to rise to the top of it to take control of the nation. Mostly, US citizens are continually dumbfounded that the two choices we are left with at the general election end up so far from ideal, despite the great talent pool in the country. (Simply use Even Voting System**.)
6. Just as the Ancient Athenians thought of a state as not being democratic if enough positions were not, to some degree, chosen by lot; we must perfect our own democracy by doing the same. Those who have a high political IQ can see that this method is the natural antidote to special interests getting involved in politics enough to bribe and over-influence. This over-influence of commercial and special interests is one of the biggest problems America faces now. Every legislature in America should therefore have an additional house added to their legislature: a council body with a small number of members who have been selected randomly—from among the larger number of election winners—to actually serve; a great, great many more ultimately not serving at all despite being elected from their respective districts. (Special interests find it unpalatable and not worth it to try to bribe and in-debt so many candidates when even the winners are highly unlikely to serve.) These councils (as part of the state legislatures) can even have a partial say in electing US senators after the repeal of the 17th, which is a fix that will dispatch the problems left over from among the criticisms of repealing the 17th amendment. (It is therefore synergistic with the repeal.) These new councils, chosen partly by lot, which resist the influence of special interests, can be relied upon not to be as biased as the other bodies in politics; thus, they’ll have multitudinous uses, such as drawing district lines to curtail gerrymandering. Such a council, at the Federal level, would be far more appropriate for the role of jury to a trial of the President than the Senate can ever be. Furthermore, such a council could have a role in confirming a US Supreme court appointee: vested with a veto power over the Senate, upon 2/3rds majority (or 3/4 majority) agreement to veto the Senate’s approval. (This use of the council would deplete the President’s dangerous power to threaten to “pack the bench” of the Supreme Court.)
These synergistic political structure changes would bring the country immensely closer to perfection than the level the current system resides at. They restore and expand the separation of powers, dissipate the most dangerous forces corroding the political realm, help better candidates to rise to the top, and reduce the energy output levels that must be spent by the civically virtuous in order to do good for the country.
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[**philosophy unveiling forthcoming]