Picking up your own footprints

• We don't want to rob Peter to pay Paul.
• We don't want to see Paul without food, clothing, shelter, and now health care apparently. (I suppose a job will be next.)
• We especially don't want to reward laziness, recklessness, or in any way remove Paul's intrinsic responsibility to take care of his own.

On it's own, this poses quite a dilemma. Obviously we're willing to borrow enough from Peter to ensure Paul enjoys a parity of opportunity--a more than fair chance to discover a self-sustaining role in our society. This is justified as simply maximizing Paul's potential to become a productive member of society. We can even calculate the minimum amount we should be willing to invest (the loan amount that would be fairly repaid by the average person's share of GDP over their lifetime.)

Also obvious is the fact that Paul is unlikely to simply die without the basics, but will obtain them via some means that creates victims out of some of the rest of us. This seems equally irresponsible because it effectively dumps what is a problem facing all of society onto the handful of people who end up being victims (typically the most vulnerable among us.)

Even worse, it undermines our ability to do justice at all. If you force someone to steal in order to survive, and treat them as you do someone who steals out of greed, then all you've really accomplished is to tarnish the credibility of society itself. It actually forces us take the law into our own hands. (I think it might explain why people reach for a gun for protection before an exit strategy. Hostility may be a natural reaction to a needlessly unjust world. I know it makes me mad.)

While at the same time, we're looking for a way to make it harder to put a carbon dioxide molecule into the air, or to use water, energy, or any resource wastefully. We've invented some ad hoc strategies to deal with it, from tiered rates to all manner of politically charged allocation formula. But there's one strategy no one seems to mention which is odd because it seems the most obvious, most fair, and offers the most benefits.

Suppose we considered the pollution absorbing capacity of our biosphere to be something that we all owned equal shares in. If you used more than your share of any resource you would essentially be buying up someone else's share of that resource in the course of doing so. The reason to do this isn't because it elegantly solves the problem of funding the Paul's that can't cut it. The reason to do this is because it is necessary to be fair. We really do all share the air we breathe; the quality of our environment is a resource people are free to spend more than their equal share of without actually redressing the miniscule loss everyone else experiences as a consequence. This approach kills a whole flock of birds--not just the too poor and the too rich. (Another example of this is the airwaves. We are the only reason they have value; that is why we each deserve an equal share of the revenue generated by leasing them.)

A feedback mechanism is necessary to create the selective pressure--the economic opportunity--to motivate discoveries of less impactive more mutualist lifestyles, products, and social structures. It places every economic entity, from giant multi-national to the lowliest citizen (I'm sure we must have one by now) in touch with their own footprint and with a perfectly equivalent incentive to reduce it. And it does so without taking a single dollar out of the private sector--although in practice it will appear to be a tax, it honestly isn't. Every penny is returned.

Creating an income stream for everyone in the world in this way has some pretty nifty side effects. (Note that revenue generated by polluting the atmosphere in this scheme rightfully belongs to all people, not just Americans. But the revenue generated by most other things, from water to the airwaves, public lands, etc. belongs almost exclusively to Americans.) This will at least partially subsidize foreign aid (admittedly less than 1% of our budget, but every little bit helps.) It proves we're serious about being accountable for our behavior as global citizens. It earns us the respect of individuals worldwide who will immediately grasp the fairness of it and put pressure other all government to copy the policy. It even promises more tools to both document human morbidity, mortality, and rights violations data; and to prevent it.

Having a lifelong steady income stream that's inversely proportional to the impact of your lifestyle will have a vastly more dramatic effect on waste than higher prices via new taxes could. This is because there is a psychological incentive created by the awareness of where you stand with respect to average that will motivate people to beat the system by using less than their fair share and generating income from the scheme. People will not consume significantly less, just more wisely because for the first time there is a feedback loop they directly experience. The costs they cannot control today because they are collective costs to our whole society become direct costs they can and will control effortlessly. It even allows the wealthy to better enjoy their wealth knowing they are fairly redressing their huge footprint in doing so.

No other approach could be as easily or painlessly phased in. This is because the amount these shares trade at is completely arbitrary and can be very gradually adjusted to create as much or little economic pressure as we like. Some will liken it to a wealth transfer scheme--because it will indeed result in a higher level of taxes for those who consume more resources and a lower level for those who consume less. But it has nothing to do with how wealthy they might be.

I could list a lot more wonderful synergies this approach promises--from the means to make criminals fund their own incarceration, to better access for all to higher education. But this essay is already too long. And I never even got to the reason that's most important to me personally (an all too common predicament for Asperger victims:) it is an essential part of any society that wishes to allow its citizens to treat their neighbors with genuine respect.

Religion could be our best invention

I believe religion is robbed of almost all of its utility by a single mistake made by its proponents: Their assertion that it's true. Without that mistake it is an invitation to contemplate a genuinely fair and just world. A challenge for our species, the starting point in understanding the evolution of our values—the basis of our concepts of justice, fairness, freedom, and responsibility. And a single thread linking the very spirt of our species from distant past to uncertain future.

This single mistake prevents religion from becoming a wonderful and useful tool to induce cooperation, kindness, and thoughtfulness throughout mankind. Even worse, it turns religion into it's own opposite, and history is littered with the horrible consequences that prove this. Searching for the god that we know doesn't exist is a pretty good description of what the most basic sciences are trying to do. That statement is almost flatly nonsensical, but I get the feeling from my study of science that almost all scientists are atheists, yet also can't help but have some notion of an underlying order and deep intelligence because the sheer beauty and outrageous elegance of our universe just seems to imply it. They look for beautiful and elegant theories rather than simply trying to fit the data for this reason. They aren't satisfied with today's standard model partly because it isn't as beautiful as they'd expected it to be.

Correct that single mistake and religion becomes a true and beautiful part of science. The study of human values, passions, and the search for that which is sacred by its nature (which I would argue is actually law, and only law. But that's off the point.) We need a god like we need the square root of negative one. But there is no number, either positive, zero, or negative, that when multiplied by itself gives negative one. Nonetheless, just by claiming there is such a beast, and using it, we can correctly solve a vast panoply of hard problems that could not be understood without that screwy figment of our imagination. That is real magic. The magic of imagination can have a power which is very real and tangible, and not the least bit impaired by our knowledge that it's only a metaphysical device, not a physical reality. Just because something is admittedly imaginary doesn't seem to limit it's utility—quite the contrary. Maybe you have to be imaginary to accomplish supernatural feats. Obviously nothing real could. Why can't imaginary things be useful, powerful, and worthy of knowing well? It isn't really possible to know something powerful very well without worshipping it in the most sincere sense.

Without the single mistaken claim, the shift moves from trying to know god, to trying to discover godliness. That's a crucial difference. We know what the former approach leads to. But consider how useful the search for godliness is, for it puts us in the position of having to think about creating a just and fair society. It lures us to see the consequences of our actions, evaluate the impact we have on each other, our children's future, etc. It leads us to forms of cooperation, measurement, and fairness. It forces religion into the very role it had originally intended to achieve: the most competent and genuine technology for discovering a very meaningful, fulfilling, and enjoyable lifestyle. And it gets there honestly—by making a legitimate science out of measuring a myriad of the most important things that are presently poorly or haphazardly measured, like human happiness, the quality of relationships, the environment created for children, etc.

By searching for godliness, instead of trying to better know the god of our ancestors, we're more apt to become better ourselves at noticing mutualistic solutions to problems rather than self-centered ones. Instead of teaching people that god wants them to love their neighbors, it asks us how we might engineer our society so that there is no need to ask. So that the very geometry of our economy and social structures make our utility to each other readily apparent—filled our lives with opportunities to cooperate rather than compete as it does now.

Converting religions into different approaches to a search for the mostly godly ways we can imagine would probably offend some of its adherents, but I think most would be deeply intrigued. If the utility really does come from faith, then it doesn't really matter whether god is real or not. Placebos are better than drugs if they work. A god that we know is imaginary, actually can be all of the things we assume God is. A faith that there is a means to empower every human born with the capacity to achieve a oneness of heart and spirit with the rest of humanity is worth working towards. Why not take it more seriously? Why not approach the challenge as we do everything else we're serious about accomplishing, using every tool and technique we've discovered in carefully measured and directed searching?

It really is impossible not to sin—not to have any negative impact on those around you, for example. What matters in that case is whether we'll take the steps to deal with it. If religion was a search for the economy that best redressed the intrinsic consequences of our choices, both positive and negative, then how could it lead us anywhere but towards the deepest mutualism, most symbiotic products, lifestyles, and perspectives. How could it leave us with anything but love and respect for each other, as well as for the imaginary god we realize is worth serving, and finally know why.

Property impairment poker

I've been trying to find ways to better illustrate an alternative approach to taxation when one popped up on television: my city is beginning another round of what appears to be a game of property impairment poker. It consists of picking the winning hand of property rights rhetoric to determine whether to issue another Conditional Use Permit. This time the unit is in a condominium complex where nearly two thirds of the units already have permits.

Like many cities in America, we broadcast our city council meetings so that residents can watch from home. Because Avalon is so small, it's easy to just walk up there and join the meeting if you see something you want to comment on. So when no one seemed to have a straightforward way to reach a decision, I decided to walk in and offer a rather rambling and fragmented summary of what I explain below.

Avalon's city council reviews each player's hand (seek-able video)

It's an interesting issue to me because it represents an opportunity to use the tax code to fairly resolve a conflict of interests between neighbors in a community. It is to everyone's benefit that all property be as useful as possible because that maximizes its value. In a resort community, like Avalon, this means a substantial fraction of residential properties are vacation homes owned by people who use them infrequently and rent them out like timeshares between those visits.

At the same time there are others who live here year round. Obviously the folks who come here to vacation are, well, on vacation. They're apt to party rather late into the night, wake up early to fish or hike, and generate a far greater disturbance than any normal use of that residence would. That's the conflict; allowing one person to use their property in a commercial way has an unavoidable consequence for nearby residents. Not letting them use it that way isn't fair either.

Our state government did what I think is the right thing to address this issue. It granted each city the power to decide whether or not any particular residential unit is suitable for this sort of commercial use and allows that use to be taxed. These two powers give a city government the means to regulate this sector of its economy.

Prior to our electronic age, it would have been too expensive to employ the people necessary to measure the impact that this policy has on our community. Each event is a tiny inconvenience for very few people, the overhead of even reporting it is in most cases more of a hassle than the event itself. But that is no longer true. Pressing a single button on your phone and going back to sleep isn't much to ask. Nor is emailing a cell phone photo of some minor vandalism, trash, or other nuisance. Especially when you know its because your city is trying to measure the impact that their policies are having on you so they can pay you back for it.

The Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) is intended to repay the community for the additional costs it incurs from a more commercial use of its residential property. Part of doing that must include some redress of the additional cost to residents, not just their city. I can think of no other way that genuinely treats both forms of residential property rights (income generation and use as a residence) equally. Even if we assume we'll never be able to do an adequate job of resolving the conflict between residents and permit holders, this step is still necessary to avoid the exact situation we find ourselves in now--facing yet another contest with no real basis for evaluating whether a permit should be granted or refused.

If the city commits itself to using a portion of the TOT to measure and redress the actual impact the permitted units are having on residents then there is no reason why permits could not be issued by a completely automated process that didn't require anyone to judge a particular application. The map created by measuring the impact these units have will answer that question for us. It will tell us if there are any critical densities (where the impact starts to scale nonlinearly with the number of permits, peaks, or even declines.)

Keeping track of these incidents and analyzing them periodically will allow us to estimate the true cost in dollars experienced by the residents most disturbed by these units and provide for repaying them. Whenever that cost is less than what the TOT generates to repay the neighbors, a permit should be granted. And wherever it is more the city should refuse the permit, but add the application to a list of those pending, and inform the applicant that they will be issued as soon as the TOT can be raised enough to fairly compensate the community.

This approach gives the city council a fine degree of control over the sector without having to address the individual applications. The smaller the fraction of TOT they allocate to redressing its impact on residents, the fewer units will qualify for permits, the less revenue the city will receive from the TOT, and the less incentive managers have to police their clients. Conversely, allocating more to repay the residents would have an inverse effect, enabling more properties to qualify, increasing the incentive managers had to rent only to responsible clients, and increasing the revenue raised by the city.

But best of all, this mechanism allows the city to automatically monitor all such units and maintain a map anyone can view to see the data. Such a map will give the homeowners associations and managers a greater incentive to become fiercely intolerant of rowdy clients and the basis to compete with each other more vigorously because such a clear measure of their performance is visible for all to see. Finally, it will create an objective basis for revoking permits that consistently generate the highest payments to neighbors. Perhaps all such permits should come with expiration dates or need periodic extensions.

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Additional Comments, Notes, and Links to related information

The impact on neighbors

It seems unreasonable to expect residents to just endure this trauma. Yet it must be what we expect because we have no mechanism to redress such minor injustices as being repeatedly disturbed at odd hours by partying vacationers. But why not? Because when it happens frequently enough it can become a significant but difficult to quantify impairment of a residence. The only remedy, not issuing a permit, is too severe as well.

This predicament effectively bars residents from any meaningful civil remedy and is the sort of needless systemic injustice that does a great deal more harm than we can notice. Until you experience a repeated inconvenience like this first hand it is difficult to appreciate how much stress, frustration, and anxiety it can add to one's life. But much worse than that is the way it undermines our expectations of and respect for justice and our community itself. It diminishes our interest in even looking for genuine solutions to other problems too because so much about our infrastructure is unjust it hardly seems worth fixing tiny parts of it. And it makes adversarial relationships between residents and owners more likely simply because we neglected to redress the civil as well as civic externalities with our TOT. This is an extremely expensive and socially dysfunctional dis-ease to accept for lack of the small amount of prevention it would take to fix it.

The bottom line is that to deny someone a permit may potentially cost the applicant thousands of dollars a year in lost income. While to grant one may potentially cost their neighbors a nuisance that has a very difficult to quantify cost that is easily undervalued. I think both of these options are simply unacceptably unfair and we must develop the means to better understand what effect this use of property has on all members of our community.

What is being done isn't enough

There is no doubt that the managers do their best to mitigate these problems by educating their clientele, posting rules, inviting complaints, and issuing 24 hour response numbers to residents. They live here too, and the sort of clients that are rowdy do more damage than they're worth in revenue, so they have similar interests in avoiding these problems. But none of these things compensate the folks for being repeatedly disturbed. Instead, those nearby residents are effectively drafted into doing surveillance service for the managers; forced to notify the managers when unruly clients break their rules if they want anything done about it. This is unreasonable to ask of someone in a residential neighborhood or housing unit--mainly because our local government could fix the problem with something like the mechanism I'm proposing.

Suppose a thoughtful management company wanted to simply share a small fraction of the rental income from each unit with the neighbors as an acknowledgement of the impact and a sort of payment for their unavoidable role in helping to police them. I'm guessing a lot of us, and perhaps some of the the city council, would actually misinterpret that as a bribe. Or at least be deeply skeptical of their motives. It would most likely seem wasteful to their property owners and disadvantage that management company in competing for properties to manage. It is really only our local government itself that can mitigate the inevitable impairment the various properties experience as a consequence of its policies. Forcing the handful of residents most inconvenienced by this to suffer so that all of us can enjoy a larger economy is exactly the kind of thing our government is supposed to prevent. A just society would either fix or abolish it.

Our goal is a parity of opportunity

Suppose the city set aside a tiny portion of the Transient Occupancy Taxes collected to create both a more compelling incentive for managers to avoid the complaints, and a resource that can pay residents for the damages incurred. All the city needs is a data gathering answering machine or web site to log the complaints. At the end of each year the city council could review a summary of the events recorded that year and come up with fees for each type of incident that would redirect some portion of the refund due managers to those injured neighbors.

The whole purpose of the TOT is to redress the extra costs the commercial use of residential property imposes on the city, but it does nothing to redress similar costs faced by the nearby residents. The very purpose of government is to protect our rights. The means to do so is available and the consequences of not doing so seem very significant:

• an unavoidable nuisance befalls a very few members of our community
• a great deal of our city council and staff's time is consumed to evaluate each application
• a capricious, complicated, and expensive process awaits property owners seeking permits.

By setting aside a small portion of the TOT revenue to use as I describe, the city ensures it will collect the data needed to craft sensible and mechanical guidelines for evaluating permit requests. It gives the city a measure of the impact of different concentrations of transient housing, permits a more objective evaluation of the performance of management firms, and generates a map of the units most affected. These are the tools needed to craft a fair and objective mechanism to resolve these conflicts in property rights.

I'll bet the size of the cheque that affected residents end up receiving isn't as important as the knowledge that our city is tracking their complaints. Even if it was only a letter summarizing the impact on that resident and how it compares to the average it would go a long way towards making them feel heard, acknowledged, and offer hope that a fairer solution is in the works.

We should have a strategy that promises to get continuously better at mitigating the impact over the long term. We must convince residents that we are seriously committed to engineering solutions that protect all of our rights as efficiently and effectively as possible. Over a ten year period, I believe this approach will lead us to a permanent, simple, and extremely fair infrastructure for everyone involved. I'm only 54. But I've already noticed that people make a lot more progress when they cooperate rather than compete. Wise leadership finds a way to get everyone on the same team fighting the same enemy--in this case its the injustice. I believe this approach better aligns the interests of both the residents and managers.

Are there any reasonable objections?

In a discussion of this issue with someone after the meeting, he made the point that someone would have no recourse in dealing with a neighbor who's young children create a similar noise problem much more frequently. (I should note that his kids can scream at a pitch and volume that would easily drown out a smoke detector.) I don't regard this as a reasonable challenge for a number of reasons. Most notably that the TOT exposure is in addition to the normal noise of living in a small community of very densely packed housing.

But that example seems particularly inappropriate because children represent a tremendous positive externality as well--they are our future and, whether we realize, acknowledge, or even resent it--we are all part of their education. Thus we have a completely natural obligation to all children as a consequence of being adult human beings and that includes dealing patiently with issues like the noise they make. Even in the case of a recklessly inconsiderate adult neighbor, the common challenge we all face as members of a community to find ways to get along well with our neighbors seems incomparable to the uncommon burden of being forced to simply accept the consequences of the commercialization of adjacent housing.

His other objection was that it would encourage people to complain just for the compensation, and over issues they would otherwise not have considered a nuisance. I suspect this is true to some extent but would both fall off rapidly with time, and tend to reveal the unreasonable residents rather than become an intractable problem. (The city could discourage them by adopting a policy that penalized false reports by withholding the funds that person would have earned for their legitimate complaints.) I think there are also many people who don't bother to complain now because they don't like being nuisances themselves, and it doesn't really help--the noise generated by a security response might even extend the duration of a disturbance, and will almost certainly anger the visitors being interrupted and increase the potential for vandalism. A phone number where residents could leave a message (or send an email, text, or photo from a phone) without having to notify the managements security would give the city a much better idea of exactly how much impact the transient rentals are having on residents, as well as the tools needed to effectively redress that impact.

Related Information

• City of Avalon
• Council Meetings and other videos
• Catalina Island Property Owners Association (CIPOA)
• Catalina Island Vacation Rentals, Inc.
• Catalina Getaway Rentals
• tripadvisor (reviews of vacation rentals)
• California Revenue and Taxation Code Sections 7280-7283.51

Using taxes to earn respect

Taxation is the single most tangible aspect of government in most of our lives. Is it any wonder we've got a love-hate relationship with our nation--loving the theory while hating the implementation? It seems insane to me because it appears so needless and harms us so much. We have the know how to reverse that merely by tweaking the geometry of our economy. Today we tax productivity the most, and consumption the least, but why? Because by doing so we are throwing away the most powerful tool we have for evolving a more robust society. And by so recklessly and unfairly levying taxes we are needlessly alienating our own citizens and hindering the growth of our own economy and prosperity.

Taxes are disincentives. They can't help but be discouraging. Given this single fact doesn't it suggest we should tax those things with large positive externalities (like productivity) less at the expense of taxing those things that have large negative externalities (like crime) more? The very success of our society completely depends on our governments ability to define and maintain a suitable marketplace, or foundation, for us to develop commerce. This is an essential part of any serious attempt to do that. I want our leadership to connect the process of paying taxes to a new mechanism designed to protect our privacy and create a new income stream for us. Because it is necessary and because it is fair.

Taxing crime and our underground economy are easy things to accomplish in our modern world. Most of us both receive and spend most of the money we ever control electronically. The system we use today gives the banks and merchants a great deal of information about us that they can and do use to look for ways to motivate us to spend more, at best. The steps our government has taken to protect us from this exploitation are so pathetically inept they do little but add insult to injury.

Defending our privacy and property

But suppose our government allowed us to keep that information to ourselves. Suppose an agency of the government effectively stood between you and every entity you do business with. The seller gets no information from you other than what they actually need (usually just the fact that you paid,) and a code that identifies the transaction for all time. You get all of the information in a form that is completely accurate and verifiably unalterable after the fact. Rather than become a source of income for merchants, that information, or parts of it, can be sold by you in an open market of entities doing market research currently with information they purchase from merchants and banks, or by your doctor to get a sense of your lifestyle, recent travels, or other relevant data. And you also get a credit rating that is calculated by the government to open standards that academia can continuously critique and refine.

Why should our government do this? Because only it can. Because only it is in a position to craft legislation that defines such an organization in a way that convinces us it can't be abused, even by our own government. Only it can declare such a payment scheme as legal tender. And only it has the responsibility to protect our property as citizens in the first place. It currently fails badly at this, if not in a technical sense, at least in spirit. We constantly fall prey to the present accumulation of information about us by private enterprises with nothing but lip service paid to redress it. Creating an artifact to represent us in commerce is a simple, cheap, and very robust way to fix that problem immediately. It does more as well, from protecting us from pricing errors and shoddy merchants, to giving us a lot of insight on whether warranty coverage is worth buying, for example.

Constructive taxation

It's one of the reasons I think taxing the black market is such a good idea, because to do it requires that a number of other protections, like the above, be engineered into the economy all of which promise to leave us with significantly less overhead by adding a lot of negative and positive feedback in logical ways. By taking this approach to taxation we can vastly simplify the overhead necessary to pay for things (for both seller and buyer) while ensuring better information is collected and that no party (buyer, seller, or government) can be as easily defrauded or exploited.

I've mentioned several things in this blog that have this property, like our medical records, that are handled somewhat recklessly today for mostly historical reasons. This is a mechanism similar to the universal health care transactor I proposed to protect and maintain the privacy and integrity of our medical records and reduce the overhead of providing medical care. Throwing in our consumption data benefits everyone significantly. It gives medical researchers more information to look for correlations between lifestyle and health. It makes the information we have to sell more valuable to scientists, market researchers, and most of all us.

You might wonder why I'm so anxious to associate taxation with protecting your privacy. It's because I believe it's the right place to begin reforming the very soul of taxation--how we experience it. I want it to become something we take great pride in and feel wonderful about paying. I think the government should be giving us awards each time we achieve a new milestone in overall taxes paid. Starting with something as simple as a t-shirt proclaiming that a grateful nation thanks you for your first $10,000 contribution, to an annual parade for whomever manages to pay the most taxes concluding with an honorary dinner at The White House. I think there should be an academic industry that studies nothing but the externalities created by the way our taxes are apportioned and how perfectly they are collected, and a department of government independent of all the others for adjusting the tax code to match spending. It is an inherent conflict of interest to allow the people deciding what and how to spend to also decide where to get the funds. That seems unwise because it can only pollute the perspective they need to objectively decide what and how to spend. Only an independent and transparent agency is fit to determine how to most fairly levy the tax burden. It's an ongoing academic issue that can only be refined via careful study.

A bill for services

The deep fix for taxation is to transform it from a vague cloud that funds government into a bundle of connections that link benefits with the party enjoying them in ways we can explore and verify. This gives us so much more than the mere ability to feel better about paying them--it helps us make lifestyle choices and craft enterprises that are more inherently synergistic. It creates a whole new way to address issues like health care, social security, and welfare. It also forces government to come clean about how it uses it's non-tax revenue (which is probably a lot more than you might expect, easily more than $500/person/year today.)

The synergies go on. When all of these things are combined new opportunities are created. For example, with this approach the income from things like leasing the nations airwaves would ultimately become a credit in our tax accounts. For a minor it can do nothing but accumulate while compounding interest. This is an asset the state could use to fund incarceration of that individual should it become necessary, or to recover damages. Or it could fund a zero interest loan for education or to buy a home. It's a better way to incentivize good behavior from citizens; a carrot instead of a stick. It if was never allowed to go higher than what it would cost to purchase an insurance policy that covered your potential future liability to society, then it would become a source of income fastest to those of us who didn't get into trouble. And protect society from the cost of dealing with those that do.

Engendering love with respect

When it is possible to see exactly how our taxes are apportioned, managed, and spent--in great detail--we will be a position to feel better about paying them. When we can see that the apportionment has been carefully crafted to be as fair as we're capable of achieving then I believe people will honestly feel good about paying them. And when we experience taxation via a mechanism that is creating an income stream for us and protecting our privacy, then I think we'll actually look forward to it as a sort of score--or measure of our value to those who don't know us.

I believe a government that defines itself as being of the people, by the people, and for the people would realize that making all taxes voluntary is a relatively easy way to ensure that happens. And such a government would look for a way to make paying most taxes collectively voluntary simply because it realized that any government that isn't loved enough by its own citizens to compel them to pay for it really shouldn't last. This is a step towards unwinding the very need for as much government as we have now because it embeds some of the function of government into the process of just doing business.

Cornering rascals

I wish President Obama would realize that he needs to look for better ways to motivate congress. He needs to make it easier for us to directly pressure our legislature. Take health care for example. Congress's vested interest is to structure all legislation to best suit the industries that most support them. These are the ones that generate the most profits and will always be things like financial services, or insurance, and never things like health care.

To overcome this tendency Obama must find a very straightforward way to measure their performance. In the case of health care reform this seems easy. Ask the GAO for a pie chart that shows all of the things health care dollars are spent on; from doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators, to marketers, insurance brokers, financial analysts, lawyers, and lobbyists. Color every slice with either blue or red depending on whether it represents an activity that actually delivers health care. Put in on a prominent web site with the simple promise to veto any legislation that does not leave us with a significantly smaller red area--at least 25% smaller.

Directly below it there should be two pie charts, one for each party, that represent how the allocation would change under the solutions they're each proposing (according to the GAO.) That would leave them with few options but to look for ways to outdo each other cutting the fat out of health care infrastructure or risk being replaced by people from the other team in the upcoming election. He should make it easy for us to email our representatives to let them know we're watching them via the web page and do indeed intend to replace them if they lose the contest.

And he should advertise the site relentlessly begging us to let them know that this new mechanism is going to be steadily refined and gradually evolve into something that enables citizens to more objectively measure the performance of their elected representatives and find out what they are presently working on. He should challenge congress to do the same thing to him as well; find ways to objectively record the alternatives he faced for each choice made.

Finally, don't clutter any site with a lot of distractions, like ads, pleas for campaign contributions, links to irrelevant affiliates or party propaganda, etc. Keep it simple, bipartisan, and deeply focused on the specific major issues presently before congress. If you give the American people a tight enough set of reins, I'm almost certain we could get some useful work out of those unbroken beasts on the hill.

Let's call it The Civilitary

Every year there are natural disasters and accidents all over our world that do more damage to lives and property than any other kind of external threat. Yet we spend a tiny fraction of what we spend on the military to mitigate that far greater exposure. And many of those lives are lost simply because we cannot respond massively enough, quickly enough, or lack the logistics, technology, or equipment necessary to prevent it.

At the same time we have a world of nations growing ever more intwined and interdependent economically after having emerged from a long competitive adolescence of imperialism, nationalism, and xenophobia. They seem today more like a group of young adults impatient to thrive. There is a lot of rivalry, past grudges, and ideological bickering still going on, but its as if they've realized the only lasting way to settle their differences is to prepare to make some compromises and work them out. Fighting terrorism is police work; it should never be perceived as war because that legitimizes it as a tactic when it is nothing but a heinous crime. (If you hadn't noticed, the bushwhack blowback boondoggle backfired. Badly.)

We are presently looking for clever ways to collectively rid ourselves of the most aggressive and indiscriminate weapons because they honestly have no real utility for any nation anymore. (It may only be because killing enemies indiscriminately loses some appeal when they become customers, but lets count our lucky stars no matter what the reason!)

The first generation of kids to have grown up with the internet are starting to emerge into to a world with far less respect for the ideological baggage of their cultures. They see a world filled with avenues for creativity, enterprise, and discovery rather than sufficient reasons for conflict or hatred.

And we have a military-industrial complex that represents an enormously valuable intellectual property--a highly organized, coordinated, and deeply empowered team that could build a lot more than weapons. They could apply that expertise to engineering ways to save lives just as easily as take them. Well, okay, so maybe it's not just as easy. They'll still rise to the challenge and we'll have a more valuable MIC after they've mastered engineering things like levees that can be setup in minutes, spill containment and recovery systems, emergency structure reinforcement, massive rescue/evacuation and temporary housing deployment, mine collapse recovery equipment, etc. Whatever they can imagine that would be useful to save lives or property.

We should be looking for ways to create more meaningful connections between the people of all these nations and I started this blog by noting one of them: the need for an independent international organization to hold all free elections. (I think we need it here in America just as much as Iran apparently does--I'm not convinced our elections are completely kosher.) And if we're going to build an organization that we trust enough to conduct our elections, doesn't it make sense to add emergency response and recovery as well?

The world as a whole can afford a far better response capability than any single nation. There is no easier time to overcome one's prejudices than during an emergency when something clicks and people instantly morph into something more like ants--willing to give their all to work together with someone they despised just a moment earlier. It's an amazing thing, an emergency. Because a bond formed that way doesn't break very easily. The respect earned in those moments seems to permanently undermine the ability to restore any prior alienation.

There has never been a time better suited to form an organization like the civilitary I'm trying to describe here. A sort of mirror image of the military. Instead of a bunch of competing enterprises looking for the best ways to defeat each other, they are one cooperating team of people independent of all nations and looking to protect mankind as a whole. I imagine it would be more rigorous, lower paying, and even riskier than a military career. Because we won't need a lot to attract people. A civilitary would most likely become the most sought after employment there is because of the enormous honor that serving in and later being a veteran of it would convey. If there is honor in being willing to die to defend your nation by preparing and standing ready to fight its human enemies, there must be more in taking the same steps to defend all nations and people against the many natural enemies our world periodically manufactures. I'm betting that engineering better ways to save lives is just a lot more fun than looking for more efficient ways to destroy them.

I see it as an enterprise designed to train and deploy some fraction of the world's young adults for two to six years after high school, keeping the best of them for permanent roles. For them it's an unbelievable chance to travel around the world, get to know many cultures from the perspective of an ambassador of aid, form lasting ties with other young people from all over the world, and learn skills that will remain useful all their lives. For the rest of us it's a better solution to a threat we all face every day. We benefit the most by having a lot more response for the same or lower cost. We benefit from the cross pollination of perspectives, ideas, and cultures that the returning veterans will bring back with them. There will be more marriages between peoples from different nations, and a steadily growing awareness of the entire community of mankind by all nations. It would be a large step towards engineering a new world order that finds cooperation enormously easier than conflict.

Lastly, it generates a deep and meaningful hope across mankind just by proposing it. And at a time when such a jolt would do a lot all by itself to stimulate the world's gloomy economies and spark a more intense flame to illuminate other opportunities to engineer peace. It would be many months before talks could even begin to flesh out the form and legal status of such an organization. And many years before all the treaties and physical infrastructure necessary to deploy it could be ready. But from day one the economic impact would kick in, from simply uplifting the spirits of everyone on earth, to mobilizing the entire world's current rescue and recovery infrastructure into studying how to make such a transition. And periodic stories of the progress would renew that optimism throughout its development.

The crisis in Iran proved something fundamental has already changed about our world--those lines you see on the map are beginning to fade. The vast bulk of humanity is growing weary of all the many ways our ancestors found to artificially divide us. They can see we're all the same. We all just want the opportunity to live in peace and pursue our dreams. Let's seize the genuine reasons we have to work together by more aggressively developing them.

My mother's main meme

“Everything brings about its own opposite”

That single idea pretty much sums up my mother's entire philosophy. I was about six or seven when I first heard it, and had no idea what the hell it could mean. But there was definitely something very special about that particular bit of knowledge and somehow that was communicated to me by the way she said it. I can't remember how I knew it was enormously real and significant to her, like a treasure. I just did.

Her home always has fresh flowers.

I remember how much it bothered me though. How can you get anywhere if everything you head towards leaves you somewhere you didn't want to go? It seemed so unfair and irrational for the world to be this way. How could my mother drop a bomb like this so casually? I'm sure I didn't know about the word cryptic at that age, but I can still remember the resentment created by feeling short changed by all of her explanations. I could tell this bothered her more than me too. Sometimes I think my mother's greatest burden is that she knows so much more than she knows how to say.

She said it so often too, offered usually as an answer to some question I'd asked that most parents answered with god only knows. I did like her answer better than what essentially means don't bother asking because no one will ever know. And my interpretation of what it meant gradually took shape--it was a template that I could use to explain many things; like a NAND gate for the phenomenological.

I noticed the process at work almost everywhere I looked for it. From our perspective, we own our stuff and totally control it. But from our stuff's perspective, it owns us in more or less the same way. We'll do what we must to clean, maintain, house, protect, and utilize our stuff all on its terms. Likewise, and far more sobering to contemplate, with what we think we know. It seems to own us far more than we own it--it shapes the way we see things, what we'll choose to do, what will be interesting to us, all sorts of things. We are, in a very real way, the unwitting robots of whatever knowledge has taken up residence in our brains.

It is probably going to take many months or years of blogging to fully reveal the enormous impact those six words had on my life. That poem on the right was written in my late teens. But I didn't even see the connection when I wrote it. The meme had already buried itself so deeply in my consciousness that I didn't even notice the way it was organizing all the knowledge in my head. Or how it had drifted to accommodate everything I had learned. Today it's more like a loose sort of faith that most things really are deeply entangled with their opposites, and that looking for those relationships is usually a fruitful approach for understanding something well enough to model in your minds' eye. It is the most useful heuristic I know.

But there was something even more wonderful and beautiful hidden unstated in that screwball meme and reflected in everything my mother did. Its the premise that explanations for everything exist and merely need to be discovered or deduced. And that they are fully understandable and very worthy of trying to understand. It more or less forces you to be as objectively observant as you can be. It's a lot easier to have the courage to keep looking for something very hard to find if you're absolutely certain it must be there. Just ask the folks at CERN.

I started this essay hoping to explain how to leverage the utility of a mechanism that taxes the underground economy into a gentle selective pressure that leaves everyone more predisposed to find an attractive productive niche for themselves in society, but ended up only explaining how my mom's main meme made me. (They're probably opposites somehow!)

I guess I must think you're entitled to know a lot more about me if I'm expecting you to take such unusual suggestions seriously. Her name is Elliette by the way. Most people know of her from the dresses she designed and manufactured for many years mostly under the Miss Elliette label. A Google search produced 3,640 references. If you ever need either a tomato, or a picture of a tomato, she's the lady to ask.

After writing this, I asked her for some photos to put in it, and she balked out of modesty. Then, she sent me the photos above, pointing out how rare it is to have a single stem with sixteen roses all blooming simultaneously. Most of our ensuing conversation was about the flowers and tomatoes, and whether I could use the photo from the cover of her autobiography. I thought it better suited to a wikipedia entry about her company, which I plan to do when I get the facts and photos rounded up. Then yesterday someone else wrote about my mother in their blog. So I thought I should post this one now, rather than wait for a more typical photo of her since he's posted one.