How the creation of LL should be happening (best-case-scenario)

General
1

This post uses the example of the creation of a constitution, but it could just as well be a new police system or a new court system.

1. A person submits his idea of what the constitution should be via the forum.

2. Other people make comments adding ideas or deleting ideas from the OP.

3. A different person submits his idea of what the constitution should be.

4. People point out the similarities with previous posts, and also add or delete ideas from the newest version. New innovative ideas are proposed until a point in time where they have clearly diminished in number.

5. Over time (at least a few months but maybe several years) there is somewhat of a consensus built off of which of the previous ideas were good and which were unusable. Not everyone involved will be 100% happy, but it should be a document they are willing to live with, and an improvement over all constitutions written in previous generations.

6. A final constitution is reached, which is then voted on and since everyone got an opportunity to create ideas for it and to comment on the ideas of others, it should pass by a 90% vote easily.

Now, obviously the above steps are not happening, and so below I will list some reasons why I think that they aren’t happening:

1. Humans are at the most biologically broken-down as they have ever been. Smart phones are causing biological problems at a scale never before seen by humanity. (I try to avoid this by having a dumb phone, exercising at least once a day, eating the most high-quality/bank-account-draining food I possibly can, and avoiding toxic water)

2. Most people have not learned how to rationally present their own beliefs and to calmly stand behind the reasons they have the beliefs when others attempt to destroy their reasoning. (I’m not perfect in this, but I did “cut my teeth” in highly opinionated nutrition forums where every single person had a different viewpoint from everyone else. To gain any attention for your views, you had to make a strong clear case that wasn’t too long and used official nutrition research to prove a point because an opinion meant nothing without research to back it. Showing much emotion would immediately bias readers against you and so remaining emotionally neutral was paramount.)

3. People are feeling overwhelming powerlessness. This is happening in all countries but it is also in LL. The cabinet seems to control all direction, ideas, institutions, spending, and elections. Unless they make steps to change this, I don’t expect to see any decrease in the feeling of powerlessness in their followers, and I expect a continual drop in participation heading to zero.

4. The world is currently a confusing place. We are in the middle of a world-wide transition and most people are extremely confused about what their own beliefs should be. It used to be a safe bet to be on the side of the “authorities” and against the “conspiracy theorists”, but now the lines are blurred. We have had 6 years of lies from the “authorities”, and even their firm supporters in the past are now questioning loyalties. (I know that the so-called “conspiracy theorists” will be proven absolutely right in the end [technically, they already have proven right], but the average person does not know this, and so in their mind they only have liar or crazy to choose from)

5. People are afraid of saying one thing and then later changing their beliefs to something else, or being proven incorrect as later research is done. (Confidence comes from doing enough research into the subject where you get a sense of where the edges of the “current understanding” is. If you can understand where the limits of the “current understanding” is, then you are, in effect, a “subject matter expert” and should be able to confidently put pen to paper and state what you believe and list the reasons why you believe it (mostly because you are then part of a small group that has this understanding). If your understanding changes or later research proves you incorrect, it is easy to state that your beliefs have changed, because the underlying evidence for your beliefs has changed.

2

I had presented a huge number of revisions to the Florida Constitutional Revision Commission in 2017 when I was secretary of the Libertarian Party of Volusia County Florida public proposals 700061-700095 are all mine here is the link a few of us in the LPVC issued proposals the other names are Hoe Hannoush and Kyle Baker. I spent months formulating my proposals reading 49/50 state constitutions as well as several other countries to write the ones that I did the biggest difference from this project though is that there was an existing structure in the FL constitution that I was working under instead of from scratch like what you are attempting to do with Liberland Public Proposals - Florida CRC

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2 years prior in 2015 I also spoke before the Volusia County Charter Review Commission discussing several proposals to the County Charter https://www.volusia.org/core/fileparse.php/4142/urlt/CRC_minutes_11-9-2015.pdf

I have spoken before many boards from city, county and state levels and I will always say as a libertarian they will look at you like you are an alien from outer space with the ideas that we present because they are not the “status quo” or “inside the box” and because of that push back is what brings us all together here. I hope to be able to provide great feedback for you once you publish your first draft!

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Wow that’s pretty crazy; and you seem like maybe you were in your 20’s reading all those constitutions and submitting change proposals, that makes it extra crazy. What brought an interest in this kind of stuff back then?

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Well I had always had a passion for making communities free and it started with my passion for reading history and seeing how entire over millennia countries and empires succumbed to the power of just one dictator. I wrote my first letter to the mayor of our town at the age of 17 as part of a government class project while others wrote the president, Congress, etc I went to the lowest level of elected official talking about the need for a sewer system in our town (this was in 2008) and they still don’t have one in place. I said then and while I don’t live there still now would argue that is single biggest point of why that town has had stagnated growth for decades. While other communities have ballooned in size in Florida, Pierson is still quite small.

I would also go to say that I am not a lawyer and don’t know how the law full functions I will say that the laws that do exist for the most part are horrible and don’t need to exist. A constitution that prevents the government from growing and gives the people the most absolute maximum rights that one can have that doesn’t infringe or imped on others is what Liberland and quite frankly all countries must aspire to do, but they wont because that is not where the big corporations and big government powers in the shadows want, they will do everything in their power to do the opposite, look at how wars have historically started and how they are trying to be started today it’s all for resources mostly oil in the current timeframe.

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It seems you are built for this work. Which is great because not many others seem capable of working with such big concepts. It’s interesting to think about how big a town needs to be before it has its own sewer system. What would it need to have in place prior? A town budget big enough to allocate money, elected leaders to organize the project, road crew employees or a contract company that can handle the job…

As I’m working on the constitution, I’m starting to envision a whole new type of govt. If the Constitution is “all-encompassing” enough, you don’t really need to have politicians meeting every single week and deciding on new laws. What if the govt did not do any law-making except during a mini-constitutional convention held once every 2 years, and then the entire population could be part of it. It would start with the creatives coming up with new laws or changes to the constitution for months ahead of time and then the convention could be a week or two where all the citizens meet and talk about the new ideas and then vote on the changes that the creatives have come up with.

I haven’t thought thru this idea fully, but it is a cool thing to ponder on. Maybe our current govts only need to meet so often because so many parts of daily life are actively regulated by the govt.

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You’re referencing to the Swiss Landsgemeinde which is the only truly direct democracy assembly that exists. The cantons Appenzell Innerhodden and Glarus still use it to this day and they meet annually I believe. Something like this could happen for Liberland once physical settlement and Croatian relations are “normalized” I not sure how it would look like but I see it happening in April during the anniversary celebrations.

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I didn’t know about those Cantons doing that, but it is pretty cool.

I don’t think it is enough to just “choose” from options that were created and put forth by the power-holders. They can just give you false-choice scenarios over and over.

Citizens have to be able to be a part of the creative process and submit things that must be voted on, and not just be immediately ignored like I am guessing your submissions for Florida were. In fact, I would argue that the very nature of politicians makes them incredibly poorly suited for creative work. Artists are much better suited for idea creation, but they are very unlikely to ever run for political office.

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I didn’t get credit since several commissioners had already presented one of the proposals that I had in regards to how property rights to foreign aliens known as Amendment 11. It was a late 1800’s era clause that was from the era when the Chinese and many other groups were actually prohibited from owning, inheriting, disposing, and possessing real property but like many laws it passed via bundling aka omnibus.

10

That’s quite interesting hearing about the process. And it speaks to the benefit of mandatory sunset clauses, because those laws were on the books, but apparently just ignored by law enforcement.

And thanks for mentioning “bundling” of laws, because it just got added to my constitution list. I think I will start posting about individual points in my constitution because there are many good conversations to be had there.

11

Yes antiquated “blue laws” still exist in almost every locale to some varying degrees like the no alcohol sales on a Sunday for example that’s still in force in many places.

12

It is absolutely fascinating to me that law enforcement basically just decides on their own, from street cop up to chief of police, that if they don’t want to enforce a law, they just won’t enforce it. Again, it just drives me towards having a single law document that has everything, and if you want to add laws, it is an all-citizen huge ordeal, and you have to re-write the big law document. I’m preparing a post on “ignorance of the law is no excuse” which every US kid of the 80’s or 90’s heard countless times growing up, because, never having heard of something is actually a GREAT excuse, lol.

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Ah yes I remember that phrase and yet think how many years it would take for someone to read the entire Untied States Code, state statutory codex or whatever that particular state calls and every city and county ordinance that exists. Just trust me just the length of each “law” that the US Congress passes would take someone days possibly a few weeks to read and think of the volume that the US Federal Register produces weekly it is mind boggling how much law we are expected to comply with and the quote that everyone commits 3 felonies a day on average makes this situation look even more grim. I am glad that Liberland uses the direct democracy voting system for passing laws and consent of the masses is absolutely necessary add a mandatory sunset clause to each law and you have something that has be reviewed periodically, hell I would add the constitution to the sunset in that the Constitution must be ratified every 5 or 10 years so that an entrenched elite class cannot ever occur.

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Yeah I wouldn’t even know where to go to find all the laws. Like are all of one city’s laws found in one place? State? Federal?

You just gave me an idea. Have a Constitutional Convention involving the whole citizenry every 10 years. All laws passed in in-between years are automatically sunset laws terminating at the next Convention. Either the laws are deemed successful and they can be entered into the Constitution at the convention, or they can be pro-actively extended one time as laws until the next convention (to gather more data on successfulness) or the 3rd option is the law evaporates.

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Fascinating idea for sure!

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It could work well for a small country like LL where the constitution could contain the entire body of laws.

For a larger country with fed, state, and local govts, it would be cool if we could pretty much remove the entire fed govt and replace it with this idea of a constitution and a convention every 10 years. It would take care of the big stuff at the fed level and leave the states and local govts to run their areas. If this was done in the US, it might return us to the state we were at the late 1700’s when the states ceded their power to a federal govt that they never could have imagined would grow into the labyrinth that it now is.

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Yes Liberland could very well do this and I think the best way of going about this is first laying down a very robust and firm constitution in a convention, second if a need arises where a law is necessary in the interim between conventions it must be voted on via direct democracy by all citizens, such law must sunset unless it is included in the constitution at the next convention OR it is decided at the convention that while such a law may be necessary it doesn’t arise to the level of constitutional law and should instead remain at the level of a law or a regulation which is lower than a law.

However one looks at the convention though it must look like the Swiss Landsgemeinde or the New England Town Meeting where the people directly decide how the governing document will look like for the next 10 years. The mode of meeting I am not as concerned about and I feel that the blockchain will be crucial because one can see who backs a statist agenda versus a more free or hands off government. There cannot be any back room deals because you would have to stake your name or reputation to any proposal and if one attempts to use a scapegoat it would t work because in my mind the more backers of a particular motion you have the higher of a priority it becomes in the convention versus those motions in which a single person supports thoughts?

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This is a very fun idea that I can see us playing around with for a long time. I agree with what you say about having backers to an idea, and I will propose a very different constitutional convention compared to what most people are probably thinking.

The problem I’m trying to solve is: we can’t have voters voting on 1000 different things. That is just too much, even for a once every 10 years event.

So I’m thinking of a constitutional convention that works a lot like the Crossfit Games, which is an athletic competition that anyone can enter. They have a bunch of local competitions, the winners of which go to multiple regional competitions, the winners of which go to the final competition. I think ideas can work the same way.

In order for any citizen to be able to submit ideas, and therefore, in total, potentially getting several thousand ideas, it must operate in voting stages and multiple group sizes. So a big question would be: how do you group together the smaller and medium sized group votes so that the process works well and there are no more than 50 ideas (maybe) at the final vote? And how would you do it, in LL specifically, where the citizenry is scattered across the world.

19

Interesting idea I see a situation where we would have to do this based on varying geographical areas and group then accordingly like here in the USA we would have to group several states together whereas in say Czech Republic you would have to group people by city since Czechs are the most numerous cohort. And then regionally by continent/region and then the actual convention itself? The number of levels shouldn’t be complex either but I think 3 would be a sufficient number.

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Yeah I suppose it would be quite obvious how to do it for other countries.

For LL, since it will be done online, I suppose we could randomly assign citizens into groups of 50 people, they vote on around 50 ideas submitted by their own group, but can only pass a certain number of the ideas.

Assuming 10000 citizens, this will make 200 groups of 50 citizens. Each citizen can submit an idea for 50 total per group. Each group can pass 25 ideas. As the number of citizens increases, the number of ideas passed in this round will drop until it reaches 5, and then a new round would have to be added.

5000 ideas from the first round. 50 groups of 200 citizens. Each group can pass 5 ideas.

500 ideas from the second round. 10 groups of 1000 citizens each evaluate 50 ideas per group. Each group may pass 5 ideas per group. This leaves 50 ideas total for the final round.

Then in the final round, all citizens vote on the final 50 ideas. Any of the 50 could be passed or not passed.

BOOM! An entire constitutional convention done without any need for politicians, and just a few govt workers to operate the tech and organize everything. Of course, we have to add in the previously passed laws somewhere into this process, so they can either be passed into the Constitution or thrown out.

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