So long as we are forcing the subject of the Senate and the aristocrats who are supposed to inhabit it to be discussed, we must also look at the second issue that could destroy Liberland.
Uncapped voting power is also an aristocrat issue because anyone who has 70000X the voting power of another citizen is also an aristocrat.
Whatever the voting power increase is approved, it must be at a level that any citizen could easily achieve each year regardless of their income. If only a billionaire can achieve the highest voting power, that is an aristocrat system and it is unacceptable to the people.
I favor a 4X cap at voting, in return for service to the community. I know others who favor a 2X cap at voting. I don’t think I have seen any member of the LL cabinet mention that they have any interest in a cap on voting power and this is completely unacceptable.
In my opinion, every member of LL whether online or in the settlement should cease all work towards furthering the LL project until we get acceptable official responses on these 2 issues from the cabinet. Without the removal of these 2 things, LL will not be any better than any aristocratic system of the past.
LL govt separates all the simple work they need done into 4 hour blocks of community service work. If a citizen wants to do community service work to get extra voting power, they will accept a 4 hour block of work that is randomly assigned to them out of the lot.
Once the citizen completes 2 of these successfully (8 hours of work) they get 1X extra voting power in the next 3 month election. If they complete 24 hours of work in the 3 months, then they get the whole 4X voting power. Each month needs workers, so 8 hours must be completed month 1, 8 hours month 2, and 8 hours month 3.
Liberland also needs money to function, so if a wealthy individual wants to achieve extra voting power, they can pay 1000 euros per each 1X, so 3000 euros gets them the max 4X voting power for that 3 month cycle.
(1000 euros is just a placeholder amount for now, maybe it should be less, maybe more)
The randomized selection of work assures no one can get only favorable jobs. If all manual work is complete for the whole country, the citizens can be assigned to holiday celebrations or special events to make the event better for everyone and ensure high community spirit.
Every citizens history of community service work is a public record so everyone can see it and possibly use it as part of their list to vote for that person in an election.
Your ideas are sound I have proposed a quadratic voting system to limit the voting power. I calculated how effective the quadratic voting system would curb voting inequality and while it does significantly reduce the gap. At present with the current setup it is mathematically impossible for the ordinary citizens those not in the senate to collectively add all of their votes together and overturn a vote from the senators alone and that is with quadratic voting in place. Let me give you an example it would take 694 with 5,000 merits each just to outvote the president on a yes/no vote with the current LLM vote setup. If you add the rest of the senate it would take more citizens than there currently are in Liberland to outvote the senate if they all collectively vote together against the votes of all of the other citizens. This is not something we should be allowing!
Wow thanks for sharing the calculations. I did not realize it was that bad. How can they delude themselves into thinking this is acceptable? As if a wildly unequitable system is somehow going to morph into a highly equitable one later on, when has that ever happened in history?
I saw you mentioned quadratic voting before but I didn’t look up what it is until now. It is a very interesting concept. It is hard to conceptualize how it will play out in real life. Like I can already envision one scenario where schemers propose a law that is known to be hated by citizens, and then that sucks away voting power to defeat it so that the schemers can approve a different law or candidate without opposition.
I say it again, even if the Senate is dismantled, it means nothing if a handful of people still hold 99% of the voting power.
Either 1-person-1-vote, or maybe up to a max of potential 4X in voting power if the citizen contributes towards their society. Anything beyond this and you have tyranny by an aristocracy over the majority.
You make very good points on the voting power of LL even if the senate is dismantled there is still going to be an impossibly large gap between the normal people and the “whales”.
Yeah, if they don’t change these two things, there won’t be any country.
The only reason, they have gotten this far with these things unchanged is that people don’t know about them or they don’t understand the long term implications. It sounds like the settlers do understand what’s going on but they probably don’t know what to do about it.
If I were to speak to them I would tell them that one has to draw lines in the sand in life, and if someone crosses your line, you must take the action that you mentally set for yourself. If your boyfriend or girlfriend strikes you, you immediately leave them, never to return. If your politicians appoint themselves to be lifetime rulers, you withdraw any and all support for them and their society. If you do not have lines pre-drawn, you will just accept any bad behavior that someone decides to foist on you.
Can’t argue with your logic, Patrick Henry’s give me liberty or give me death rings very true and the problem I think is apathy and lack of knowledge of history to know how to change events so not repeat history over and over again.
“lack of knowledge of history to know how to change events”
This and in the past most of the methods to change tyranny were via severe violence, and with violence now being frowned on by most of society, we have had to create new methods.
It’s not an accident that most people’s reaction to an injustice happening in front of them is to grab their phone and start filming. Public exposure eventually solves many wrongs. And what isn’t solved by exposure, can be solved by withdrawing support and walking away.
I wish we could beta-test all our govt plans on a seasteading project, because if you disenfranchise any person or group in the ocean, they will just pull up anchor and sail away. If everyone sticks around, you know you’ve done a decent job planning out the society.