Political Philosophy in Praxis should start with the citizen not the political structure. People in general, political philosophers, and even career politicians are almost never in a position to choose a political structure, or even change the one that they are in. Any answers to the question of what political/social organization is best for man can rarely if ever be applied. On the other hand, we always find ourselves being governed in some form or the other: democracy in all its stripes, oligarchy, aristocracy, theocracy, kleptocracy…. What capacities do citizens have to make whatever political structure they live in better? Any knowledge gained asking this question has ample opportunity to be applied and is therefore a more profitable question to ask.

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Political Science has been primarily focused on the ideal form of government for any given society. What if instead we reversed the question and asked what is the ideal citizen? Said another way, what are the skills and qualities of a citizen that make that citizen’s government responsive to it, regardless what form that government happens to take?

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In teaching non-violent civil disobedience, care must be taken not to repress violent urges. Rage and violent impulses need to be recognized as human and normal. The key then is to find ways to channel them away from political behavior.

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A nation that educates its citizenry in these techniques risks having its citizenry use those techniques against them. One can of course make this objection, but the same objections can be said of training your citizenry to use conventional weapons of warfare. In fact, training citizens in the use of weaponry was, for a long time, resisted by kings who preferred to use mercenaries.

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Could a national defense strategy be predicated on cultural achievement and nonviolent civil disobedience? Of cultural achievement, I’m thinking of examples like China, ancient Greece, and Blacks in the American South. All having lost political power, but culturally conquering their victors. Of civil disobedience, I’m thinking of the examples of India and Norway. Both of which were able to repel invaders.

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Are we at the point where it is technically possible to assess sales tax and pay fines in a progressive manner? With electronic payments, it would seem to be easy enough to scale sales tax and fines as a percent of one’s income.

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Would a tax regime that is completely Pigouvian work? The US government already uses the tax code to incentivize certain prosocial behaviors. But it still taxes income, which presumably we don’t want to discourage. It also taxes consumption which isn’t necessarily antisocial either. Why not use the tax system to guide citizens toward society’s benefit?

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Almost all social units articulate a sense of progress in outcome and process. Humans want to play “fair” and live in a social unit whose outcomes are “fair”. Both of these require coercion. Following up on note 4, I have been thinking about a system for improving our coercions. The ladder of coercion has four broad rungs: Thayler-style nudges, pigouvian taxation, fines, and violence. These run from the least to most onerous forms. The idea for whatever social target you want to hit is to simply never use a more onerous form of coercion than is necessary. 

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What if individuals (or states) were awarded votes or electoral votes inverse to their economic level? In the same way we impose progressive taxation on the economic system, what if we had a progressive voting system?

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Some people value material things more than others. Their drive to acquire a greater share is extremely productive. Not just for them, but for everyone. It increases the productive capacity of the social unit. However, there is a point at which the inequality no longer provides any marginal productivity. Further the inequality becomes politically destabilizing. The question is not how does a social unit rid itself of inequality, rather what levels are productive and stable for the social unit. 

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Much of the problem of money in politics (and vice versa) is that the two systems theoretically pretend to operate independently. Your amount of political power is not supposed to affect the amount of money you have, and the amount of money you have isn’t supposed to affect the amount of political power you have.

We all know this isn’t true in practice. Many have differing opinions about how great the effect is, but I don’t think anyone would credit that there is no effect. We need to start treating the two systems as a single dynamic system. We should not have the two sciences, Economics and Political Science. We should be looking at Political Economics. (I like Poliecon instead.)

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Justice is not an us versus them problem. It’s an us versus us problem. Any inversion of social/economic/political class just perpetuates injustice. I.e. the difference between labor/capital or high/low class is only an accident of history, not written in our biology. That is why “taking” power only results in “taking on” all the moral problems once despised in an oppressor. A deeper kind of a revolution is one that frees oppressors as well as the oppressed.

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The state of nature hypothesis, even when not explicit, haunts many theories of social organization. Man has always lived in social units whether family or clan. An analysis of ideal smaller social units and how we broaden them while keeping their virtues seems much more plausible and profitable.

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Solely focusing on finding a workable theory of a just state is a misplaced effort. Justice is one of many virtues that an ideal state balances. Take the virtue of security. It wouldn’t do to be a just state that couldn’t defend itself from foreign aggression. Just as it wouldn’t do to be a secure state that was radically unjust. 

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One is asked to imagine what kind of distribution schemes one might agree to not knowing in advance one’s place in society. I imagine pie charts of various sizes sliced in different ways floating by me. Maybe we can even add Nozick’s games and their rules into the mix. If we are not overwhelmed, we choose as scheme and are suddenly given a slice of pie or a starting position within that scheme. If one ever complains, they are reminded, ‘but this is what you chose’ and this is supposed to satisfy them. But does it really? Think how many things you have chosen that you later regret, or at least wonder about alternatives. Initially choosing a distributive scheme is not sufficient for an ideal society, we must keep choosing it. The preference has to be stable. Rawl’s original position thought problem tells us a lot about what societies we would enter into, not as much about societies we would continue to live in.

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It is important for social units of the future to include in their constitutions (written or implicit) a procedure for dissolution or secession. This procedure would aid poorly functioning units from lapsing into civil wars, and encourage emerging unions by lowering the risks of conglomeration.

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 I am a bit worried that I have been thinking about marketing all wrong. It seems as though marketing might be part of the actual product/service’s value. For an example, consider the placebo effect in relation to pharmaceuticals. What is amazing is the fact that presentation matters almost as much as content. Moreover, they reinforce each other. The greater the efficacy of a drug, the greater the placebo effect.  

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The hot thing in charity seems to be simple non-means-tested transfers, like GiveDirectly. The logic is that the people receiving the money know what will best improve their lives. The logic and the empirical results of such transfers are compelling. At the same time, I find it difficult to reconcile with what I hear about lottery winners. I’m not sure if anyone has studied it, but one hears plenty of anecdotes on how the lottery has ruined a winner’s life. One way to reconcile these two ideas is that low-level cash transfers tend to benefit people while excessive cash transfers ruin them. If this ends up being correct, is there some kind of sweet spot (percent of yearly income) where an unencumbered infusion of cash is likely to benefit one maximally?

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One point I take from Nozick’s critique of Rawls is that any distributive scheme that stipulates an ideal end state requires coercion. Given natural micro-level exchanges, any kind of distributive goal will require redistribution of goods, not just initially but in an on-going manner. It is important to recognize this, but it also works against Nozick too. There is no perfect libertarian coercion-free social unit. The market through its own actions will collapse into monopolies without coercion. We are stuck with coercion of some kind to make liberty (and our markets) work at all. The question is not how we get rid of coercion, but how we make coercion less onerous. There are many varieties of coercion, spanning from the threat of gulags to eye rolling to gentle nudges. 

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Choice is a more complicated thing than is often thought. One hears that market transactions are voluntary and therefore reflect each actor’s preference or choice. What is clear to me is that we have many preferences that often conflict. Example, one chooses to maintain one’s health and eat the cookie on the counter. I think of these preferences loosely as shorter term and longer term. The markets I am used to are very responsive to shorter term preferences. Leading to the question, how might current markets be structured to better balance the totality (often conflicting) of one’s preferences? And, are there any other methods of distribution preferential to markets?

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Many of a social unit’s most difficult moral questions occur at physical and temporal boundaries. Those members coming to be, those members that will be, those that live among us, but aren’t full members. Who should we induct as members, how many, who should we exile, what protections do we offer them? And what do we owe the members of other social units that we so drastically affect?

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Definition: There is this thing that we all do together. I would like to talk about that, all collective activities: families, clubs, organizations, firms, nation states…

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