Bushfires, Isocracy etc, Search for A New Home

[tcpip]

The South-East Australian bushfires continued to rage during the week. Estimates of the dead are now around three hundred, although the official toll has stood at 181 for some time. The number of animals that have died is estimated to be in the millions. Apparently one needs to be university researcher to blame trees and the Greens, and divine inspiration to blame the decriminalisation of abortion.

I have started a new public policy website in accord to my 2009 plan. The idea is to combine elements of liberal, socialist and anarchist theory into a practical and results-orientated perspective. The intention is to gradually build the movement, one person at a time, into something that is both far more interesting and independent than what passes for most political organisations. On a related topic, having become frustrated over the years by the inability of semi-professional organisations to deal with IT workplace issues (wages, OH&S, collective bargaining), I have joined the ACTU-affiliated APESMA.

For sequential unix timestamp day (hat-tip to tajna for the name), caseopaya and I went to the hills to look at housing to buy despite the smell and haze of smoke that covered the city. Our landlords have increased the rent on our apartment by almost 25% and we're in the situation when where we can buy a significantly larger property with a mortgage repayment of less than we're currently paying in rent. So we had a trip out to Belgrave, Sassafras, and Mt. Dandenong and had a very late lunch outside the William Ricketts Sanctuary. No firm decisions yet from the initial scouting mission.

During the week also had a visit from hathalla and ser_pounce; it was a belated birthday gathering for the latter. I provided him a signed copy of robin_d_laws's HeroQuest and made an enormous tiramisu using a famous frou_frou recipe.

Comments

Over to you!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, as I suggested (following Arendt), constitutional limitations. And, I should perhaps add, a separation of powers (because that does seem to work). Any other suggestions?

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Defining roughly what lies in the public sphere and what lies in the private sphere would seem rather crucial to me. Governments aren't particularly inclined to make that separation on their own, since they must settle problems ad hoc, and because historically there will always be this or that set of people for whom the topic to be settled, whatever it is, lies in the private sphere. Indeed, it's reasonable to assume there will always be ample demand around for the government to take on the "private sphere."

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

A summary version can be derived from the initial statement. Self-ownership and, by extension, mutual agreement would be outside the reach of public governance. Natural resources as the source of public income; and from that public governance of the use of that income.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a planned economy.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It would seem that you've taken everything from the second sentence and nothing from the first.

More appropriately it could be described as a mixed economy, but mixed in the right places and in the right portions.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

No, I'm simply cynical about how this combination of command over land with non-command of labour would work itself out in the real world.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Except it's not a command over land; "natural resources as the source of public income".

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

What does that mean, institutionally and legally?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It means that public income is derived from unimproved site rental values.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

So the government would, essentially, be funded through its role as the universal land-lord of private business?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Businesses and individuals; otherwise that would be correct.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I'm not exactly overwhelmed, but at least this arrangement trumps many of the other alternative schemes on the market in terms of practicality. After all, it's not that much of a change compared to what we actually have already.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

One would hope it's achievable. Of course, I cannot think of a single government in the world which even introduces these ideas as core principles.