One goal, of many, is no taxes, for anyone, for anything. Instead, I do ask for civic service, a few hours a week, let's say 5 a week, and that's it. One hour a day. Half a day a week, you pick the day, you pick the half, we just need a better way of organizing the people and resources. But regardless, this goal of no taxes won't be reached overnight, it's something we need to work towards.
How do we get there?
Two possible ways I will discuss, the slow and steady wins the race method, and the faster approach going thru elections and winning by a landslide. That's about the only way I am ok with forcing this new system on the few that are opposing the idea. And I'm sure that the top one percent will oppose and the 10% that follow them will try to help them also, and I say fuck them if we win in an election landslide victory. Otherwise, this must be democratic, this must be voluntary, people have to opt-in, we all have to choose this from a place of understanding that is live together or die alone.
One irony behind our situation on the planet is the madness of the crowds has divided us even more. Single issue politics brought big riffs into people's lives. We grouped together while separating more, torn between seeking individuality and belonging to the 'correct/appropriate/right' culture. And now, half a generation in we can't sustain anything, crumbling under pressure that any community would survive.
Nobody is looking at the next steps. Everyone is busy with the narrative of the moment, covid19, China, Russia, George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, CHAZ, Epstein, Trump, shutdown this and that, defund this and that. Who is focused on the big things that are still there, like climate change and job automation? Who is focused on making sure people have food to eat that is good and healthy and they won't become a burden on the healthcare system two or five years later?
Let's start with the slow and steady way. That's a community-driven, grassroots movement, based on food access and shelter for the people. Each small scale community group can then interact with their neighboring communities, group into larger scales, and produce more than each individual member or even smaller-scale community can achieve. As long as people are fed and don't have to worry about a roof over their heads to protect them from a cooking storm, we can achieve greatness as a group. If we only bother with quarreling and individual selfishness we will perish.
Step one is always food security. How do we feed the people around us? If my belly is full and my neighbor is starving, they're more likely to want to steal food, it's just a biological need to eat. But if I can give you a tomato from my garden, and teach you how to grow cucumber in your garden, and then with one more growing onions we are looking at a decent salad for all of us. This is not a utopian society, just one more likely to survive any situation. So the problem becomes the management of resources, people, needs, and abilities, how to form groups and mobilize towards goals that take time and require combined efforts.
Step two is a shelter for those who need it in the community. I'm not saying take care of everyone from everywhere, we will discuss immigration and migration later, that part is just a slightly different timescale after the system is stable and we know how many people we can support. Community shelters are a crappy solution. Homes for the elderly are not far off, considering the private profit motive behind them and the lack of personability they offer. Hospitals to take care of sick and those in need are another step removed from çaring for people, despite the crucial caring function they provide daily. They are impersonal, often scary and uninviting, a place to be treated more like a number being pushed around than a person going through a rough patch in life and in need of an extra special human connection to deal with a challenging situation. Halfway houses, and most other government housing projects, have proven themselves over the years as not awesome, and I will not give in to those further.
We still need to take care of people. There are plenty of situations where people need help for no fault of their own, and we have an obligation as part of this new social contract to step up and offer a helping hand and give them what they need - time, resources, food, education, shelter - on credit, until they can bounce back and have their own internal energy to help others. We are all helpless when we are born and require someone to look after us, the same can be said at the end of our lives, and in some circumstances, that's true in the middle. People in bad abusive relationships, people in bad financial situations, people who lost family suddenly and unexpectedly, without goods and services for and from a community, how can we really and seriously say we are all in this together?
Shelter for people will have to be within a community. Each to figure out how and what can be done, over how much time, and at what scales of solutions. I imagine that in some part of the country there are many empty units owned by banks or foreign investors. Once communities become big enough and self-supporting enough, grouping resources to obtain such empty units and provide shelter to human beings in need will be simple. That's why shelter is step two, it requires the community to become formidable enough. To be honest, it's a big milestone, and it will be achieved after we all get a bunch of badges under our belts. Milestones are big for each community, to have food, stores, and retail businesses, interactions between communities, emergent economies that cross communities, scale up or down the appropriate resources like clean water and electricity, sewage and garbage collection, and as I said before - housing. Slow and steady wins the race, it's amazing and surprising what we can get done in a decade.
Later I'll talk about more details about step one, how to organize, and how this process works. In a much later post, I'll discuss the election route.