notes-voluntarySocialism

voluntary co-op.

designed to take on the positive functions of government, in order to let governments scale back to their police and military functions -- this way, coercion is minimized (freedom is maximized).

members pay 2% of their after-tax income (they would be required to submit copies of the tax returns that they submit to their government) -- call this the dues.

children of members become members (see below). otherwise it's just an insurance plan or just something like AAA.

Provisional membership:

New people are admitted (not just anyone, only people who share the ideology of the association) to provisional membership. dues are collected, but the main benefits are not given during provisional membership (fringe benefits, like discounts, libraries, etc, are given -- but no stipend). provisional members don't have a real vote (but they have a nonbinding vote -- and possibly are expected to use it from time to time to show committment to democratic processes). after 9 years of provisional membership, members decide whether to offer them admission.

anytime during provisional members, the provisional member may decide to leave the association. in this case, they get their dues returned to them, unless the association invested them and lost the money, in which case they get a portion of their dues returned (proportional to the value of the association's investments). the association does not promise that they will get anything back, and there is no fiduciary duty. the association should try to give the member the real value of the dues (i.e. adjusted for inflation), so leavers won't have lost money due to inflation -- maybe the association should give some of the investment returns, too (but mb not, to encourage commitment).

if offered admission, they have the option of refusing it and leaving (and probably getting some money back), or accepting. if they accept, they will no longer be able to get any money back upon leaving. at this point they become junior members.

Minors may not be provisional members.

Sponsored provisional member:

A sponsored member is like a provisional member, except that they are freely chosen by their sponsors (they don't have to be admitted by the community; but when they advance to junior membership, they still must be admitted; but see below), and they may be minors.

Sponsored members are admitted automatically to junior membership at the end of their 9 years unless they have been convicted (either by the association, or by an outside court) of a crime (or infraction of the association's rules), in which case they are subject to the same admission procedure as provisional members.

Children younger than age 9 may not be sponsored provisional members (but they may be earmarked for later sponsorship in case the sponsor dies before their sponsee is 9, in which case the sponsee inherits the sponsorship at age 9).

Sponsored provisional members who are minors are not assessed dues for receiving living expenses and educational expenses (i.e. this is not counted as income).

Sposored provisional members who are minors and who choose to leave the association may choose to "pick up where they left off" later, in exchange for whatever money they were given when they left (the idea being that if some 11-year-old kid throws a pouty fit and resigns, this shouldn't invalidate the parent's sponsorship if they want to join later).

The sponsorship of Sponsored Provisional Members who are not minors and who leave reverts back to the sponsoring member, who can then sponsor someone else instead.

junior membership:

receives main benefits (stipend)

senior membership:

After 9 years of junior membership, they become senior members.

Senior members are eligible to sponsor new members. The way it works is that each senior member can sponsor one new member.

Senior members cannot sponsor anyone but their children or adopted children until they are 50 years of age (the idea being that, if they initially think they won't have children but later change their mind and want to have children, those children can be sponsored)

After their sponsorships have been used, two senior members who are younger than 65 may still both choose to give up their membership in order to sponsor one other person (in which case the sponsors are automatically re-admitted as sponsored provisional members, if they choose; however, if they re-advance to senior membership, they will not get more sponsorships -- although they may continue to give up their memberships again to create another sponsorship).

families:

So, consider a two-parent family, where each parent was a sponsored member. This means that, upon turning 9, they became Sponsored Provisional members, and then upon turning 18, (unless they behaved badly) they became Junior Members, and start receiving a stipend. They probably didn't make much up until age 18, so maybe they didn't pay much dues, but now until age 27 they are paying 2% of their after-tax income. At age 27 they start a family and have a child, which they sponsor; this consumes one parent's sponsorship. Soon after, they have a second child; this consumes the other parent's sponsorship.

If they want to sponsor a third child, both parents will have to give up their own stipend (and their vote) for 9 years (while still paying dues).

Main benefits:

For now, just the stipend. In the future, maybe health care also.

Stipend:

Much of the real interest on the money accumulated by the association is dispensed evenly to each non-provisional member (the principal is never tapped). This forms a stipend.

Fringe benefits:

Besides the main benefits, some of the real interest is spent on overhead, and some of it on fringe benefits (discounts, maybe meeting space available to members, bikes to rent cheaply, AAA type stuff, etc -- also other social service-type stuff, such as addiction counseling, free lawyer consulting, etc).

Steady state:

At steady state, assuming a fixed lifespan, the sponsorship system does not grow the size of the association (since eventually the sponsoring member dies), except via the senior sacrifice mechanism. Therefore, excluding that mechanism, the stipend that can be payed per-person should not decrease over time, even if all of the real interest were paid out as stipend. In fact, it should increase over time, because every now and then some member will get rich, and their dues will exceed their stipend.

There are only two ways the system grows:

(A) new people joining as provisional members. In this case they are over 18, so they are probably making some money with which to pay dues (the association can reject applicants who don't seem likely to make money), but they are not getting a stipend. Therefore, they association is using their money to build up savings which will later generate interest from which to pay their future stipend

(B) two senior members reverting to sponsored provisional members in order to sponsor a new member. Assuming that the senior members will be making money while they are provisional members (and they will have to in order to survive, since they won't receive a stipend), and assuming that the sponsored member does not (maybe it is a child), this means that the association can start building a new pool of savings for each of the sacrificing members, and can use its saving for one of them to supply the new sponsored member with interest-earning capital with which to pay a stipend. In this case, the association profits substantially because the interest-bearing capital connected with the second sponsoring member can be put into the general pool and used to increase the stipend level for everyone. This cost serves as a disincentive for families to force the association to grow faster than replacement rate via sponsorships.

they get benefits

children of full members (up to some number of children, say, 2) automatically become members upon turning 18. (perhaps each child must be sponsored for 36 years (i.e. if two parents, 18 yrs apiece) before becoming members.

lottery in case of too many children (jen's idea)


another idea is voluntary socialism via societies like the elks with their own taxes -- the rich are incentivized to join to gain contacts. could also be libertarian lobbying groups. sounds like the Masons, etc, used to be like this (back when all the important people in a town would be members).

so how to achieve this again (the situation where so many important people are members that there's a strong selfish incentive to become one, even though you are "taxed"). mb to appeal to more people, you could get membership by donating to your charity of choice, not just to the group itself -- just like tax credits.

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ok new idea to simplify the way that you pay for people's children:

first, instead of thinking only about dues, also think about perpetuities. Attached to each member is a perpetuity that pays their stipend.

at the birth of a child, immediately 50% of each parent's membership is transferred to the child (without the parent's consent). when the child reaches 18 they get the payouts instead of their parents, but until then the parents still get them as the child's guardian.

if the child fails to qualify for membership, the membership does not revert back to the parent, it reverts back to the organization (it is consumed). This is so that the parents don't have an incentive to get their child to fail. (what if the kid dies? hmm... don't want to give the parents incentive to murder their child, but it would be sad if the kid dies and the parent then can't afford to have another. i think the killing the kid thing is unlikely, so if the kid dies the membership should revert)

so if two parents have two children, the parents are no longer members and no longer get a stipend after the kids are 18. Maybe there is some 'member emeritus' status in this case so that they continue to get the free trade provisions w/r/t trading with the community, and whatever other non-stipend services are offered; and some sort of senior support benefits that the parents get by virtue of being the parent of a member.

now what if the parents have more than two kids? we want each kid to have a whole perpetuity or none, so the first two kids become members and the rest don't.

however, if the parents can afford to, they can buy memberships for the other kids. this would support the cost of the organization buying new perpetuities in trust to them.

note that these perpetuities are held in trust for the person they are bound to, but they revert to the organization upon death of the members, or upon their expulsion, and they transfer to a child.

now what if a man has two kids but doesn't know, or doesn't tell his family, and then later has two more kids? In theory, the first two kids should get his perpetuity, and their is none left for his next two kids. But these kids may grow up expecting to have memberships and then suddenly the first two kids are revealed. So there should be some date after which the transfer to the kids becomes final even if the organization didn't know about some other prior-born children who should otherwise have gotten them.

note that this first-born-so-as-to-not-break-up-the-perpetuity is like primogeniture.

there's something else old called 'fee tail' or 'entail' to prevent property from being sold, but the perpetuity is only being held in trust anyways so i don't think that applies here.

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even if ppl didnt pay for perpetuities upon joining: how do you prevent ppl from joining, taking the basic income, then leaving if they get rich?

one idea: as ppl consume basic income or services, they acquire debt to the organization, at a high-ish (but not illegal) interest rate. The debt comes with the following provisions: (a) any dues paid to the organization goes towards paying off this debt, (b) payment on the debt may be postponed so long as the person pays the required dues to the organization (if there is a way to do so without increasing administrative complexity too much, allow the person to pay the dues that would have been required under the current dues rules at the time the debt was acquired).

this debt might be discharged by territorial nation-states during bankruptcy, but otherwise, if a person consumes basic income while they are poor and then gets rich, they are obliged to pay high dues. If they don't want to pay them, then they must pay off the debt. The interest rate on the debt is set high enough so that the lifetime of the organization's relationship with the leaver was still profitable. So, the organization didn't participate in a VC-like way in the long tail win of the person who got rich, but at least it is making, not losing, money.

this mechanism could allow for people who do not have rich sponsors to join faster than a pure perpetuity system; the organization is in essence a bank making loans with the basic income and hoping that, on average, the population of members will earn enough in the future to make those loans profitable.

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could you make membership in such an organization open to all? Probably not if the same basic income were available to all members, because we assume that, relative to the size of the organization, there is a relatively infinite supply of poor people in the world who would wish to join if the basic income level were meaningful. However, one could possibly make membership open by giving different members different basic income based on some criterion. Some ideas for such a criterion:

Brief discussion of each of those:

Basic income benefit levels need not be partitioned into a small discrete set of membership classes; rather, they could vary continuously (or quasi-continuously, like US IRS tax tables). Instead of fixing the basic income benefit levels, one could fix a formula for determining a member's share of basic income benefits, out of a total fixed budget, based on their percentile over all members in one or more of these criteria; such a procedure could guaranteed that the sum of all basic income benefits paid out would not exceed the available budget for basic income benefits in any given time period. Or, similarly, one could simply calculate a score for each member based on one or more of these criteria, and then divide up basic income benefits in proportion to the scores. If the score was the sum of various criteria, this would be like a logical OR, and if it was the product of various criteria, this would be like a logical AND. In addition, the basic income benefits could be capped, to prevent the highest-scoring members from getting more than is needed for a 'basic income'.

For example, the score could be: c1 * (ancestral seniority + seniority) * (standardized testing and educational certifications) * (subjective appraisal) + c2*(sum of dues paid while a member) + c3*(service to the organization), where c1, c2, c3 are constants. Note that with this formula, the coefficient c2 of 'sum of dues paid while a member' should be chosen such that purchasing a membership was not cheaper than purchasing a similar perpetuity, and the coefficient c3 of 'service to the organization' should be chosen such that providing service would not 'pay better than' the market rate for private employment (which again requires estimating the discounted future cash flow of basic income benefits).

(actually i'm not sure that that formula is very good, see below)

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Let's step back for a moment and take another look at the overall premises/concept/constraints of this organization.

The idea is to provide a basic income to people by voluntary assocation, to allow them to pursue activities that they would not otherwise have time to pursue. The organziation must somehow collect enough dues to fund this basic income. This means causing those members who are making more money than the basic income to fund the others via payments to the organization. But why should they do that?

We are proposing three mechanisms.

One, the basic income is a loan whose payment is indefinitely postponed so long as dues are paid (note that the organization makes no claim on the labor or freedom of its members; the only claim is a loan with standard terms; the option to pay dues is merely an additional option offered to members). The terms of the loan are set so that even if a member chooses simply to repay the loan and never to pay dues, the organization has made a profit on the transaction. This criteria does not by itself ensure sustainability on its own because members could remain on the basic income most of their lives and never make enough money to pay the organization back. However, it does ensure that if a member joins when poor, and then becomes rich (without going bankrupt in between), then at least with respect to that single member, the organization makes some profit.

Two, even rich members want to continue to retain their membership and pay dues because they find value in their assocation with the other members. This is because, first, the rules of the organization facilitate cooperation and trade between members; and second, because the personal caliber of members is very high, membership in the organization is valuable for business networking; and third, because the personal caliber of members is very high, membership in the organization is a signal to the outside world that the rich member exceeds this high bar, serving as both an aid to business networking/employment and also as a social status symbol.

Three, members' children can inherit (some portion of?) membership if their parents remained members until their death; so, remaining a member is something that rich members do for their family. Note, however, that this mechanism cannot stand on its own, because if there were no benefits to membership beyond the basic income itself, a parent could provide for their decendents by purchasing a perpetuity (or provide for only their children by purchasing the child an annuity), without the need for the organization. So this mechanism is dependent on mechanism #2 to work.

A fourth potential mechanism could be that it could be considered dishonorable to become rich and then to leave the association. However, imo, this would not have a strong effect; if this were all that was preventing a rich person from leaving the organization to avoid paying dues, then in many cases the rich person would be more concerned about what their close friends and family thought of that decision that about what other members of the organization thought. If the organization suceeds in sustaining itself and becomes established, then maybe at that time broader society would adopt the viewpoint that people should not become rich and then leave the organziation, but until that time i doubt that non-members would feel strongly about this. In some cases, since we assume that the rich person has been a member for awhile, some of their close friends might also be members, but in many cases, maybe not. So i think this third potential mechanism should be disregarded.

The second mechanism implies that the selection criteria for membership should be chosen so that rich members would find it valuable to associate with the other members. For example, if the non-rich membership had a high concentration of reputed artists, scientists, intellectuals, entertainers, powerful politicians, and up-and-coming businesspeople, one imagines that a certain sort of rich person might find it valuable to retain their membership, for reasons either of business networking, personal interest, or social status. However, most reputed artists, scientists, and up-and-coming entreprenurs can already support themselves or at least find sources of funding, making the organization redundant; what the organization aspires to do is to also support those who are, as yet, not so well respected so as to be able to secure funding for themselves on good terms. So, what the organization should do is attempt to identify a population containing, with high probability, an unusual concentration of future reputed artists, scientists, and entreprenurs, and invite these people to become members. Note that there is a tension between this and the idea of inherited membership; indeed in many modern cultures nepotism is considered so unrespectable that it may even be better for us to do without any inherited component whatsoever. These considerations suggest that membership should feel 'exclusive' rather than 'inclusive'.

Another method used by ancient and modern organizations to involve the rich is to involve them in the organization's higher levels of decision-making. During part of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire), the principal path to membership in the Senate was holding a Praetorship; praetors were expected to spend some of their own money on public games and public works [1]. In the modern era, often a primary criterion for membership on the Board of non-profits such as universities is the ability and inclination to make large donations to the organization.

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not on the same topic, but i think i'll write this here so that i can find it again.

an organization that wished to discourage stuff like patents could do things like an open patent patent pool, a DPL-like thing, patentleft, etc. Can this be generalized? The organization could have a libertarian-esque minarchist definition of what government 'should' do -- and then it could specify that its members agree not to sue each other for violations that are not covered by this. Eg the organization might conclude that granting patent monopolies is outside the bounds of what government should do, and therefore, although the organization is not fighting the government, its members merely agree not to sue each other for patent violations. And then extend that to things like creating and selling patents, etc, which is sort of like 'trafficing' in prohibited lawsuits indirectly.

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