: My personal favorite economic theory is one which I call
: fractal semisocialism,
: Good name. I like it. Sounds technical, and thus, as
: anyone in marketing will tell you, instantly credible.
Funny, everybody always tells me it's not a marketable name for that exact same reason.
BTW, your italicized quotes thing is really annoying. When I respond to your message it quotes your quote of me too, since it's not indented with colons
: Basically, take a fractal tier structure, which is the
: basis of all my socio-political-economic theories.
: People are the base units of small communities, which
: are the base units of cities, which are the base units
: of counties, and so on (in the complete constitution
: I'm writing, these units are dynamically determined
: every election based on population, and don't
: necessarily have a name per each level). In each tier
: level, take a base unit (person, city, etc)'s total
: income in profit and gifts recieved, subtract the
: total loss in operating expenses and gifts given, and
: call that value Net.
: This system sounds interesting, so earlier today I
: decided to run some numbers and see how it works out.
: Unfortunately I didn't have enough confirmed figures
: to come to any solid conclusions and the numbers I
: often reached were odd. I will elaborate. In order to
: come up with a Net for any income group, I need to
: subtract "operating expenses" and donations
: from income and receivables. Both gifts and income are
: pretty self-explanatory. And operating expenses are
: fairly easy to calculate for a level of government as
: well. But what constitutes operating expenses for the
: basest base-unit, a person? Every expenditure made
: through the year?
Good point, I forgot to mention that. Operating expenses are basically cost-of-living for an individual person, or operating expenses for an organization (which is treated like a person in most respects). Food, housing, transportation to work or school, things neccessary for work or school like cars or computers. I figure the level of government immediately above you will determine the average cost of living for the area and call that your deductable operating expenses.
: This is where the math begins get a little hazy as far as
: I can calculate. At one point you say to divide the
: numbers of hours considered "full time" by
: the amount worked and/or schooled. What exactly do you
: mean by "amount worked and/or schooled?" I
: work one full time job, about 2000 hours per year. For
: me, 2000 hours seems like both the amount worked and
: the hours considered "full time." When
: divided this equals 1. Would you consider this
: solution to be correct for most people? I will proceed
: assuming that it is for now. Either way, the solution
: should be positive.
Hmm... I think I either switched the two terms in the subtraction step, or phrased the end wrong (the number you get after the multiplication is the amount you owe, not what you are owed back). Just switch the sign where appropriate so that if you make more than average, you owe, and if you make less, you're owed.
[snip numbers]
: Maybe I just missed something, I'm not sure. But I
: don't see any refunds.
I think I see the flaw in your calculation. See, if everybody made the exact same amount of money, X, and you took .5X from all 10 people in the tier, which would be 2X total, and divided that backamongst the 10 people, you would give .5X back to everybody again and nobody would make or gain anything, since all you did was average the same number with a bunch of itself. But if you subtract the tier's OE Y, lets say .1X (you'll see why so low in a moment) from that 2X, then everybody is going to get less than .5X back, in this case (1.9X/10) = .45X, meaning they all owed .05X in taxes.
This makes perfect sense. In an imaginary world where everybody makes exactly the same, there is no redistribution of wealth to do; the only taxes are a percent of each person's income going to pay for the governmental operation. If some people were making more than that average X, everybody would still pay the same even share of running the government, .05X in this case, but the richer people would have some of their wealth redistributed to the poor, so anyone making less than .95X in this case would get a refund.
However, this is all presuming that this tier is operating completely in a vacuum, and not accounting for the outside rest of the system. You presumed, falsely, that the tier's OE could not be negative. I belief this is because of the way I badly worded my original description: it's not actually subtracting the tier's OE in the same sense as the base unit's OE, it is rather adding the tier's net, which I incorrectly presumed for some reason would be negative. (I've never formally written this down yet, it's the only part of the constitution I have left to write, so I'm typing all this from my head).
See, a governmental level unit has no actual operating expenses or income in the same sense that a person or organization does. Public services are all handled through charities, not the government itself. There thus are not large beauros full of people sucking off government money; there are merely congress- or parliament-like councils composed of the executives of lower-level councils (the lowest of which are composed of the people themselves). I'm thinking about 20 subunits to any given tier; that way about 5% of the system's people are "government employees", for most of whom it is a very part-time job, though higher levels take on more and more full-time duties.
These people are not even paid directly; they are counted as having worked however many hours it took them to do their government jobs and having been paid nothing, so after their taxes it is as though they were paid exactly average wages. (This is in part to discourage career politics. Always thought it was stupid that Congress got to pay themselves). So "the government" isn't directly paying for services or even salaries for it's members; all that payment is handled through the tax calculation itself.
However, each tier is ITSELF a unit of another tier. A municipality would report to it's townshed the average of the municipality's member people's Nets, as it's own Net. After the townshed runs it's tax calculation, that municipality may wind up oweing money, which means that it's Net is negative, which (with sign reversed) becomes what I described in the last message as the tier's operating expenses, and (if everybody made the same, as you presumed) the people within there owe all owe money. However, if the municipality's Net is POSITIVE, and everybody in that municipality made the same, then everybody gets a refund.
Basically it has to run all the way up and back down the system before it can really be calculated what anybody owes or is due. (I figure the time it takes to do this could possibly determine how often it is calculated). The people in this municipality send in their income/expense reports; the municipality uses those to generate it's, which it sends off to the townshed; the townshed uses all the municipalities' reports to generate it's own for the city... county... bioregion... shire... duchy... whatever levels you want to call them in between... state, region, continent, world, solar system, however high it goes. Lets say Nation is the highest, which presumably has a Net of 0 unless the entire nation as a unit has been recieving gifts from other nations (the nation as a unit cannot give gifts, because none of the money actually belongs directly to it).
The Nation can calculate now, knowing its own Net, what each of it's Regional units is due or owed (their Nets). That lets the Regions complete their calculations for the States, and so on down, until the Municipality tells you you owe or are owed this much. Then the money is sent up through the system from anybody who owes, and comes back down to whoever owes it.
The net result of this should be more or less what you would get if the highest-level tier just did the whole averaging calculation on it's own and redistributed the money, but this way you are distributing the work of gathering and distributing the money and information amongst the entire governmental structure, which reduced the risk that one central agency could somehow use this authority for nefarious purposes, and also means you don't *need* any big dedicated authority for calculating the taxes of everybody in the nation; you distribute a simple math calculation amongst all levels of government. It's distributed computing. Any one tier needs only worry about verifying and averaging a small (around 20 as I said I'm thinking) number of figures and then reporting that on to the next level up who will do the same thing, etc... It also means that people are dealing directly with local government, not a distant oppressive authority, and gives them a sense of community because you as a rich man in an on average poor neighborhood would have most of your wealth distributed back to those local to you, and not to some distant poor people in an otherwise rich neighborhood.
That's why I call it fractal semisoialism instead of just straight-up semisocialism. I basically have three governmental concepts: a structural system I call a fractal republic, a legal/judicial system I call homachy, and an economic system I call semisocialism. The constitution I'm writing (and have been assuming is the form of goverment in this discussion) is for a government that includes all three integrally, but either of the three concepts can be separated out and used with other parts of other government. You could have a semisocialist totilitarian regime, or a homarchic capitalist regime, or a purely socialist, Holy Law-based fractal republic. Mix and match government, whee!! It's Modular!
