# politics

**STATUS**: Unedited braindump.

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Labels are imprecise and semantics are rapidly changing, so instead I'll try to describe my fantasy society.

## Monetary
- Many currencies: Imagine if each category in the CPI had its own currency.
- A basket currency can exist to aggregate these values into a collapsed unit of exchange.
- The exchange rates between industries would inform points of friction and allow us to address inflation/deflation more precisely.
- A steel shortage should not uniformly impact the purchasing power for groceries.
- Any organization can create its own currency against its assets (one click on a modern smart contract platform with no intermediary overhead) and use it with its vendors (no conversion overhead with automated market makers and allows for additional novel mechanisms, like bonds that can be used as day-to-day currency).
- Nobody needs to care what currency anyone is using, we can localize prices to whatever we want to operate in and have it converted just-in-time with AMMs.
- Taxation (negative or positive) could be applied on specific industry-currencies, to help bootstrap desirable industries or wind down undesirable industries.
- Government can issue a bond for a specific project/industry, which becomes the currency for that category. It can be backed/collateralized by other currency or assets to create a floor for its value, essentially the government acts as a baseline market maker.
- Government should participate in private markets, such as through equity investment and taking board seats, or through incubating competitors with majority-public ownership or co-operative structures, or through competing in acquisitions when it is in the public's interest (rather than blocking acquisitions).
## Taxation
- High level focus on land value and luxury consumption.
- Income is tax-free at least up to the livable income level for the region. (Unclear what additional progressions are necessary, let's assume 50% taxation over x3 livable income level just to get a sense of reference, but ideally we scale this variable based on the costs of the services we'd like to provide.)
- Capital gains tax scales on cost basis of investment, to encourage more smaller investments rather than fewer large ones.
- Principal residence gains tax scales inversely with land value. As demand for a property's land increases, the gains tax on selling it increases. This should still allow people to downsize their homes or move further away from expensive areas without additional burden.
- Co-operatives receives substantial tax benefits (over some minimum size, perhaps 10+ co-owners).
- Government provides baseline free infrastructure for managing payroll, benefits, and other things (e.g. via smart contract) which removes the need to file taxes for transactions passed through it. Third parties can extend infrastructure.
## Public Goods and Public Bads
- High level policy:
- Any industry where extractive behaviour would violate human needs should lean towards being publicly funded.
- Human needs are things that everyone relies on at some point in their life.
- Basic healthcare must be publicly funded (physical, dental, vision, mental health, including therapy and medication).
- Extended healthcare can
- Basic education must be publicly funded, but with available resources for communal education (co-operative version of home schooling) and apprenticeship/mentorship.
- Incarceration must be publicly funded.
- Judicial penalties should be heavily focused on rehabilitation, rather than punitive.
- Minimum possible reliance on deterrence, only when shown to be substantially effective.
- New kind of penalty: Increased personal taxation for income over livable income level, to help cover more costs.
- New kind of penalty: If another country is willing to sponsor refugee status for a criminal, then they can choose to be banished to that country as long as there are no outstanding externality costs (e.g. financial crimes must be repaid).
- Basic housing should be publicly funded.
- Publicly-funded development of "livable communities" (include all baseline amenities, like groceries, internet access, transit to an urban center, etc.) with subsidized relocation programs (bonus funding available for relocating as a group?).