# Menagerie it seems you can edit this so long as you have a url [Leeches or Boons](https://hackmd.io/@standardyang/immigrants2) # Standard Income Share One SIS entitles the holder to 0.001% of a person's annual post tax income over $50,000 in perpetuity. For example, 1. Jeff buys 1 SIS of the Standard System (SSSIS) in 2023 2. Standard's post-tax income in 2024 is $75,000 3. Jeff receives 0.001% of $25,000 from Standard, which is $.25 # The Wealth Debates Look, nobody ever gets to a billion dollars without cheating and breaking the rules of capitalism at least once. They either: 1. Committed a real crime 2. Facilitated a real crime along the way 3. Did something that should be a crime 4. Engaged in some form of rent seeking 5. Inherited their capital from someone who did (1-4) Examples: - Anticompetitive Business Practices - Union Busting - Not internalizing negative externalities Q. Are anticompetive business practices real crimes? A. Often they're the equivalent of slashing your competitor's tires so he won't make it to a pitch meeting Q.There are so many laws that if you do something world-changing, you are guaranteed to brush up against the law simply by virtue of the scale of the endeavor. Rent-seeking is just fine in Capitalism, as is inheritance. In any case, so what? Are you suggesting that because crime is sometime A. So what? You have to compensate the victims. ## Inheritance # Dances With Windsor The Standard System has been working on trying to upzone the town. The Menagerie has been offering useful advice! These are the dialectics. **Robert:** Red Team's default assessment of you (based on ignorance) is that you are a degenerate psychopathic outsider, and thus that your anti-NIMBY efforts are just an attack against them. This impression must be corrected first before effective propaganda efforts can succeed. The order of operations matters. **Standard:** I'm going to stumble around on both paths simultaneously, because pursuing the proper order of operations is something that would make more sense if I had a small or medium-sized political machine. The SS is currently a political machine of one- but hey! someone from wetfish offered to fund my petition project so i can pay for a housing lawyer to look over the legalese. The town is run by red team, but it's still relatively pro-development in the sense that the last zoning meeting, they were talking about the "missing middle" housing and the need for duplexes. # Democracy Is The Least Bad System - A democratic process for choosing a leader is more decentralized than an oligarchic or monarchic Q. But Hitler won power in a democracy, via largely democratic means. A. For every democratically-appointed Hitler, there's ten French colonizers. Or, you know - Japanese Imperial Armies. See: Vietnam, China, the Phillipines. Or North Korea. Q. From the perspective of Mammon, people with less money literally are worth less (worthless). Thus people with more money are definitionally better, more moral, more valuable, more worth listening to. So why would Congress rationally ever listen to anyone other than the top 1% when making a decision? Mammon is a rather ... incomplete view of the concept of value. But we have no reason to think that the Congresscritters would operate from any other basis, given the selection pressures A. For capitalism to succeed and economic growth to be sustained in the long run, the economic institutions need to be controlled by a broad cross-section of society. Q. So what happens to your democracy when the media and education systems get captured by sociopaths / psychopaths? A. Less likely to happen than in an oligarchy or monarchy. Pretty sure russia has a bigger problem with the capture thing than the US. Pink News can exist in the US but not russia!