Thursday, July 03, 2025

Respect individual sovereignty? What would that look like?

Latitude can be offered to taxpayers, so that no person will be forced to support something that offends their conscience.

The proviso: Put the money toward alternative uses that most people agree are better for society. (An open call for people to document various things that people do to benefit society can produce a library of mini-documentaries. These can be compared randomly, in pairs, so that the best documentaries (most engaging, most informative, balanced) can be brought to the surface. These best docs, depicting various kinds of public service, can be compared, in random pairs again, in A/B testing, iterated many times, to find which kind of public service is consistently rated as more valuable to society. If someone wants to stop payment of their tax money for what they believe to be a harmful or corrupt purpose, they would see by the resulting 'gradient map' in which direction they should move those funds.

This is what we might expect to see in a society that has a high level of respect for individual sovereignty.

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