michael-dean-k/

Revolutionary tax proposal #1: anything above $100m/year is taxed at 90%, but in exchange for political equity in the country (ie: delegation and voting). It formalizes lobbying and makes it transparent. To prevent the rich from steering the country too hard in their favor, there can be provisions where legislators, citizens, and oligarchs have checks and balances. Ie: to put it kidishly simple, each can have a 33% stake in directing that taxation. Another way to think of it is forced investment in pre-approved pro-American funds, companies, etc.

TBF: I have little sense of what I'm talking about in these matters. But the general context behind this is that power dynamics organically took control of the country and defied the spirit of the founding architecture. I assume there are many examples on how the Constitution and it's amendments dit not protect the original vision. And so the principal is to understand how power actually moves and work with it; don't kill it or shun it, but formalize it into legal structures, make it transparent, and then force it to comply with specific standards that muzzle and channel it's wolf power.

In "wicked domains," the only solutions are paradoxes.. It requires you to sleep with the enemy. If a problem is wicked, it means no single solution can unfuck a problem. It's an imbroglio. In every solution, everyone dies (in the extreme). Politically, the solution to wickedness is to somehow become all sides at once. We need to become far more authoritarian than is comfortable, AND simultaneously, far more libertarian than comfortable (these are opposites on the Nolan chart). It’s the paradox of being both far left and far right. We can longer exist at any one point on the Nolan chart, we need to straddle the entire diamond. We need unexpected fusions to solve the hardest problems; harnessing the best parts of each extreme, while, somehow, devising incredibly nuanced architectures to prevent the known and likely abuses.

Instead of a diamond, visualize it as a ring around the “radical center” that aims to synthesize all opposites.

Let’s assume authoritarianism and libertarianism are opposites. We have kings, and we have markets. How do you subsume a free market within a benevolent tyrant? I know the K-word (king) has a charge now, and so by even bringing this up, I assume you assume I’m a Trump apologist or something. But actually no. Rather, this comes from the fear of acceleration and Nick Land’s conclusions on capitalism. A free-market pushed to the extremes of automation creates an inhuman and pulverizing force. Alternatively, as we approach AGI/ASI, it’s possible for someone to create an open-source machine God to follow their whims. In this paradigm, decentralization might actually be more dangerous than tyranny, and so we’ll all need to unite under some centralized system that has an antibodies that can protect against the worst possible viruses (please bear the oversimplifications here...).

The general gist comes in this question: can we recreate a free-market economy within a one-world-government system, and design it in a way to prevent abuses from both ends of the spectrum? Obviously, not an ideal situation, but I think accepting paradox is the only way through.

Another problem: How do we fix the debt? Extreme taxation. But then how do we make it worthwhile to pay taxes? The rich gain formal power in government (via equity?) and the ability to control the budget (after base expenses are paid). But then how do you prevent abuses from the wealthy? You could have citizens operate as a check, to vote on and weight final allocations.

If it were ever possible to rebuild political system from scratch, I suppose it would look something like this. Paradoxical. Extreme on both poles. Obvious downsides, but then complex architecture to mitigate. This is the nature of how our species will have to respond to wicker problems and mitigate the abuses of power in the age of exponential tech.

I haven't shared with you my latest political views, but I’m exploring this idea of Radical Centrism, meaning, it might be okay to justify a centralized state-controlled media platform if that technologically and systematically guarantees a sane/just information environment. Obviously, this is hard, if not impossible, to do right.

It’s whole goal would be to invent an architecture that make it impossible for polarization or propaganda to occur. The key UI invention is that every news event would be presented as an atomic unit, with a mosaic of interpretations surrounding (not just left/right, but dozens of angles). Anyone who hits a certain POV too much would get de-ranked, so both Charlie Kirk and Jimmy Kimmel would be equally penalized because they predictably align with a faction. It would have to be structurally impossible for governments, media, money, or power to use their resources to promote a message above the system. Any media company who does not comply will be taxed into oblivion.

Of course everyone should have the right to say/think whatever they want without consequence, but the real issue isn't free speech, but in frame control.

The freedom to speak is irrelevant if no one takes seriously the imperative to think. I don’t care about Kimmel or Carlson or any pundit who gets cancelled. They are, mostly, automatons with predictable views, warped by the incentives and mind viruses of some political body. When someone gets cancelled, it’s not that we’re preventing open thought, it’s just a casualty of a two-sided ideological war. If you care about the freedom to speak and think, you should be grieving the fact that the American spirit has been dead for a century, or more accurately, it's never truly existed in mass media, never perpetuated through a democracy, only paraded around by propagandists, grieving that independent parties and voices have been systematically throttled to have no mainstream influence.

A 2015 poll said that 42% of people would go back in time and kill baby Hitler if they had the chance. Meaning, almost half of the population thinks it’s morally OK to kill a baby if they believe it could save millions of lives (a very utilitarian idea). Anyone who is celebrating and condoning the death of Charlie Kirk has been led to believe that he’s a Hitler equivalent. This is the consequence of polarizing media. Anyone can become a boogeyman worth assassinating.

I think there’s a whole cascade of moral failures happening: first, in wanting blood; second, in ragebait media; and third, in belonging to a political party and not thinking independently about what’s presented to you.

I’m at a point where I can’ stand left/right rhetoric. If you identify with either party, I can’t take you seriously as an American. Kirk was charistmatic, likable, courageoes, and fluent, but also, a one-dimensional thinker, an automaton with shallow and predictable talking points (if you can predice someone’s entire belief system from a single belief, they are an NPC). Weirdly now, people are saying that his drifting stance on Israel could’ve been what got him killed?

The American spirit resides in each person abandoning all political templates and inefficiently thinking through every issues themselves, embracing contradiction and political loneliness. It’s a big ask, and it’s probably never going to appen. Ego death? At scale? We don’t have the emotional maturity as a people to handle that. You can only fix this at the root, in how we raise and teach the next generation.

Historically, centralization has had problems, and it's easy to see today how it could lead us further into a dystopia. But decentralization, the opposite, could also bring emergent vectors of chaos that could be equally problematic. Neither tyranny or anarchy are ideal. What's required for centralization to work? Tolerance, correction, impeachment, transparency, plurality, data sovereignty, freedom from propganda—all hard, but all solvable things. To create an honest and principled centralization, leaders would need to actively build and implement systems that promote justice over power. That's only possible if citizens have the means to hold them extremely accountable. The original American project was effectively a question of "how do we design a system to centralize power without falling into despotism?" and it's time we revisit that question in a 21st-century circumstance.