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    Germany Avalon Member christian's Avatar
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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Quote Posted by shaberon (here)
    Well, I don't suppose I have any right to force you to do something like that, but, so far we have made it through a system that forces redistribution on us anyway--unfortunately it mostly went to usury and warfare. I'm guessing that the "calamities" that would result from investing this cash in general well-being are of a lesser order than the things done with military and police to benefit the rich. The amount it would take, to provide...is really so small...that I can't quite see the comparison in "the government is going to violently prosecute non-contributors" any differently than it is now.
    In other words, you're not for abolishing institutionalized slavery, you simply advocate reorganizing who's on the giving and who's on the receiving end.

    Quote Posted by shaberon (here)
    Here's capitalism: $500 million spent to establish a yogurt plant and a bunch of taxpayer money to deal with its massive water use. Small person like me looks for work there, what happened? It had already shut down in less than a year. There goes another creative, productive idea, and another few hundred people like me, who don't work, not because they're lazy, it's just not there. Production of a big empty factory, perhaps because there are not enough people who can afford the luxury of yogurt any more. And if you did work there, I think Ernie's points would apply pretty strongly.
    I'm not sure if I can follow you on the details of what happened there. Companies on the market succeed or fail, that's just life. If it's true what you say about taxpayer money that supported that company, then you have an example of Socialism, not Capitalism. Capitalism is defined by (a) private property and (b) a free market. Taxes mean taking private property by force and distorting the market by arbitrarily redistributing that money. What you describe is Socialist intervention, a planned economy. The state gives resources to certain companies it favors. And what so often happens in Socialism, the company just doesn't cut it and goes bankrupt even despite the aid it receives. Planned economies tend to support failing companies, that's the point. They also tend to support failing schemes, such as the permanent redistribution of income as in a basic income.

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Almost all major companies, at least around here, while they may be capitalist ventures, receive some form of socialist benefits, whether as free land, tax subsidies, reduction of their tax, etc. Otherwise they would go somewhere else.

    We could grandstand about how any law or tax is slavery. I didn't invent that stuff, I don't support it, all I am saying is the way it's being used is massively ineffective. I surfed around for a bit to survey some opinions, and yes, by the hundreds, they are: rich people should not have to give away their money, they worked hard for it. Some of them, of course, donate millions or billions to charities, like medical research or universities.

    What I haven't found yet is anything that substantially alleviates the increasing situations of poverty. You could give a billion dollars to diabetes causes, or simply quit manufacturing the disease and use that billion to give the homeless a place to stay. Obviously, that's an extremely unpopular idea. I don't know why we're so entrenched against feeding, clothing, and housing the needy. But yes, as long as there is a taxation system in place, I will not flinch from saying that it's the priority over 90% of what goes on.

    If we can dispose of money and government, that's fine too. It will still be the priority. You could drop all the honchos of that stuff into a wood chipper and I would look the other way.

    What I would call "slavery" might be the sugar industry in Florida. "Third world" people come in under a special visa and never...really gain any egress; hurt themselves with machetes or snakes; make next to nothing while doing some of the hardest work in the hottest heat. The corporation then gets rich, while charging Americans three times the average price for sugar, which of course we don't need very much. If this is the same condition as redirecting money from warfare and usury into food and housing, it's a pretty broad concept.

    I don't know why the particular Chobani yogurt plant folded so quickly; no, we don't have "pure" capitalism, but it was an investment by individuals seeking greater fortune. What it was not, was any kind of way to make sure that people could have a cup of yogurt every day. I don't see this happening on a voluntary basis, though its entirely possible, nor on a taxation basis, which is also possible.

    I never had much, but I gave away at least $10,000 of free housing to a few people because they were destitute. I will lose the ability, since I don't work because: the company gave the upper-management "Director" to some guy from the outside about twenty years younger than me, I guess because he came from a rich family. Couldn't do the basics of the job including hygiene, screwed up the business making a bunch of angry customers leave, then adjusted the bottom line by disposing of employees. I guess that's "the market" and "that's life", and about all that will keep me going is one person willing to give me a hideout a little further down the road.

    I will probably never pay those taxes and will wind up giving my time to the food bank or something like that. But just knowing there are many others who have no safety net, they still have the same needs as me, and since it's not handled in any meaningful way, changing the operations of a system that I did not invent or agree with, would just be working with what's available. Meanwhile, those with largesse clinging to it because "it's mine" is very disappointing. If I need to be viewed as a slaver because I believe everyone deserves some minimal basics, then so be it.

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Exactly! How is wage slavery or service in the military any different than any other kind of slavery? It's just legitimized.
    [B]
    Quote Posted by shaberon;1071902 [/B
    Well, I don't suppose I have any right to force you to do something like that, but, so far we have made it through a system that forces redistribution on us anyway--unfortunately it mostly went to usury and warfare. I'm guessing that the "calamities" that would result from investing this cash in general well-being are of a lesser order than the things done with military and police to benefit the rich. The amount it would take, to provide...is really so small...that I can't quite see the comparison in "the government is going to violently prosecute non-contributors" any differently than it is now.


    We all know that many huge corporations now which are basically running our governments are getting permission from those governments they have bought to appropriate public lands (sometimes ousting the indigenous peoples who live on them) to use up finite natural resources which rightfully belong to everyone, then charging for the products they produce to make huge profits.
    In the process, they destroy human lives, wildlife, and pollute the environment, then make the public pay for the cleanup.
    Look at fracking--according to whistleblowers, it's basically just one more Reptilian agenda to disrupt the natural energy grid to make us all less connected to the Earth and therefore more vulnerable and easily controlled.
    To add insult to injury, it pumps toxic chemicals into the water supply and poisons whole communities with almost complete impunity so far.
    And there are technologies already in use that make the whole process totally unnecessary which are also much less costly in dollars as well as cost to the environment and population.
    If that's what capitalism has led us to, you can have it.

    As for the cost of dealing with the homeless and otherwise disenfranchised, some communities have found that it's much less costly and certainly more humane to provide them with food, shelter, medical care and social services that actually help them than it is to leave them on the streets or living in squalid surroundings, served only by inadequate social services or charities.
    For one thing, they become productive again much more quickly, need less medical care in the long run, commit fewer crimes, cease being public nuisances, and add to the health, pride, hope and morale of their communities, instead of being a source of shame and guilt.

    I have a very bright and capable 26 year old young friend who confided to me the other day that her generation is BORED.
    CAPITAL B-O-R-E-D.
    This is someone who sees through the matrix, knows there is something very nefarious going on, knows that "we are not alone", is trying her best to focus on getting an education that could put her intelligence and talents to good use, but senses that she is unlikely to end up being anything but another cog in the machine.
    She's bright enough to qualify for a scholarship if there were enough of them to go around (there aren't), so she will probably have to work herself to the bone at two jobs to pay for her classes and her living expenses, jeopardizing her health and her peace of mind, so her debts won't be insurmountable once she gets a degree.
    And she'll probably never be able to devote much time to studying anything that truly interests her, because more and more, the system only rewards people who are willing to do things that the system considers essential.
    She knows she's being dumbed down by the toxins in the air, food water, technology, and she's already got health problems that may prevent her from succeeding in her schooling.
    Yet she continues to struggle with faith that things will change, that somehow she will succeed, that it's all worth the effort.
    We live in a system that fails to consider what is true wealth, but continues to squander and waste and destroy and pillage and pollute, and let's face it, it was not a system created to preserve our planet for future generations, or to benefit the human race, but a different race and agenda altogether.
    The whole system needs to be redesigned, and designed to serve the people, not the system.
    I feel for my young friend, and I try hard to encourage her and share what wisdom I have gleaned from my own struggle.
    I certainly hope that her generation will be more successful than mine in effecting change, because it may be that in my next life, I will be facing the very same challenges she is facing, and possibly worse, if things don't start changing for the better soon.
    Last edited by onawah; 2nd June 2016 at 00:11.
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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    each and every one of your posts in this thread have been fantastic. please continue sir





    Quote Posted by christian (here)
    Quote Posted by shaberon (here)
    Well, I don't suppose I have any right to force you to do something like that, but, so far we have made it through a system that forces redistribution on us anyway--unfortunately it mostly went to usury and warfare. I'm guessing that the "calamities" that would result from investing this cash in general well-being are of a lesser order than the things done with military and police to benefit the rich. The amount it would take, to provide...is really so small...that I can't quite see the comparison in "the government is going to violently prosecute non-contributors" any differently than it is now.
    In other words, you're not for abolishing institutionalized slavery, you simply advocate reorganizing who's on the giving and who's on the receiving end.

    Quote Posted by shaberon (here)
    Here's capitalism: $500 million spent to establish a yogurt plant and a bunch of taxpayer money to deal with its massive water use. Small person like me looks for work there, what happened? It had already shut down in less than a year. There goes another creative, productive idea, and another few hundred people like me, who don't work, not because they're lazy, it's just not there. Production of a big empty factory, perhaps because there are not enough people who can afford the luxury of yogurt any more. And if you did work there, I think Ernie's points would apply pretty strongly.
    I'm not sure if I can follow you on the details of what happened there. Companies on the market succeed or fail, that's just life. If it's true what you say about taxpayer money that supported that company, then you have an example of Socialism, not Capitalism. Capitalism is defined by (a) private property and (b) a free market. Taxes mean taking private property by force and distorting the market by arbitrarily redistributing that money. What you describe is Socialist intervention, a planned economy. The state gives resources to certain companies it favors. And what so often happens in Socialism, the company just doesn't cut it and goes bankrupt even despite the aid it receives. Planned economies tend to support failing companies, that's the point. They also tend to support failing schemes, such as the permanent redistribution of income as in a basic income.

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Quote Posted by onawah (here)
    As for the cost of dealing with the homeless and otherwise disenfranchised, some communities have found that it's much less costly and certainly more humane to provide them with food, shelter, medical care and social services that actually help them than it is to leave them on the streets or living in squalid surroundings, served only by inadequate social services or charities.
    For one thing, they become productive again much more quickly, need less medical care in the long run, commit fewer crimes, cease being public nuisances, and add to the health, pride, hope and morale of their communities, instead of being a source of shame and guilt.
    So Americans actually do have the option of personal sovereignty, you can take that and opt out of income taxes. If you get in a bind after that, you won't receive any free stuff--but the choice is there. Begging is also a spiritual practice and you could do it by choice (although its mostly pros that do it and then drive home in a Mercedes). Forcing you to do it would be a state religion.

    But to agree with Onawah, yes, it generally costs about 1/3 as much to simply house a person, as it does to keep processing them through jail, which sometimes they use for a shelter. There are employed people who are homeless, but not many. The reduced burden and the return to well-being diminish that 1/3 cost by untold amounts. We already have the program set up to provide housing, but it is unfunded; it hooked up a few veterans and then got the goose egg. So far, the private party who has actually done it, isn't Bill & Melinda Gates, it's the Mormons.

    There are about six places in the world that do not agree you have a right to food: Myanmar, a few African countries, and the United States.

    Most places agree you have a right to housing, but the U. S. is "exceptional" there too.

    A lot of them are probably too poor to deliver the goods, but every time I've looked at quality of living, it's always dominated by Scandinavia, which has about the biggest "nanny" states and highest taxes to be found. You can escape income taxes in the richest places like Monaco or the Cayman Islands, provided you invest $150-500,000 there, so no poor person is going to migrate for the better deal. But if a few Scandinavians want to come on and say the quality is a lie and their system is evil (aside from migration issues), that would be worth a listen.

    You could set up housing in conjunction with farms and workshops. We've spent many years replacing humans with machines; maybe reverse that? And you don't have to be homeless to qualify. If you look at what the poverty trap really is, if you even go a little above poverty and compare wages to the cost of living, it's ridiculous. "Trickle-down" was probably intended to lead to this, so the bluffers could get away with it for a few more years. For the thousands of dollars that have been gouged from me without permission and maybe without legitimate right, I'll back down if some 70-80% of it is actually used for something that "represents" my opinion. Give away a bunch of basically no-frills apartments, and then, if a few years down the road, someone can create a private economy that turns those places into ghost towns, I'll be impressed.

    This was nowhere near as major before the 1980s, and we can still fix it. As for the many places world wide that actually want to do it but are unable to, the I. M. F. won't do you much good; looks like the Chinese might. I wonder what the equivalent of our hundreds of international military bases would be, in terms of food and housing. Probably would have put every single person on earth in a good place.

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    The advancement of technology eg robotics and AI are probably going to be the main reason imho for the need for a 'basic income' because eventually there probably won't be many jobs that can't be done by technology.



    Quote Basic income may be needed to combat robot-induced unemployment, leading AI expert says.

    The rise of artificial intelligence could put millions of human workers out of jobs - could a basic income be a solution?

    source

    Quote Giving people free money could be the only solution when robots finally take our jobs.



    source

    Quote Autonomous Vehicles Will Replace Taxi Drivers, But That’s Just the Beginning





    source


    Published on Jun 2, 2016

    Every week Max Keiser looks at all the scandal behind the financial news headlines.

    In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max and Stacy discuss whether ‘the system’ can survive robots and whether a man can stand on his own, as the military industrial complex provides much of the technology behind the biggest success stories in Silicon Valley. In the second half, Max continues his interview with Professor Robert McChesney about his book, People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.
    Last edited by ponda; 2nd June 2016 at 14:19. Reason: add link
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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Quote Posted by shaberon (here)
    What I haven't found yet is anything that substantially alleviates the increasing situations of poverty.
    The answer is quite simple. Establish economic freedom. Let people do business freely. Get rid of institutionalized slavery, aka taxation. This is what increases wealth. Not uniformly, as the Socialists like to have it, but still across the board while Socialism in the ends always leads to inefficiency, shortages and poverty. Give people incentives to produce, then there will be more wealth. The main incentive is that they can decide themselves what they produce, how they do it and what they do with what they produce. And of course the needy will benefit from that. You can see historically that the average person was richer and needy people were better taken care of in countries and regions with a high amount of economic freedom.

    Quote Posted by shaberon (here)
    I don't know why we're so entrenched against feeding, clothing, and housing the needy.
    I'm all for it.

    Quote Posted by shaberon (here)
    If I need to be viewed as a slaver because I believe everyone deserves some minimal basics, then so be it.
    Not at all. But because you want some institution to take the minimal basics from productive people by force and then redistribute them as that institution sees fit. If you'd argue for providing for the needy voluntarily, we'd be on the same page.

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Quote Posted by shaberon (here)
    "Trickle-down" was probably intended to lead to this, so the bluffers could get away with it for a few more years.
    "Trickle-down" doesn't exist. You make some interesting points but then when you write "trickle-down", you sound like a crazy leftists.

    The 'Trickle-Down' Lie
    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...ie_121142.html

    Quote Posted by shaberon (here)
    ... but every time I've looked at quality of living, it's always dominated by Scandinavia, which has about the biggest "nanny" states and highest taxes to be found.
    ...
    But if a few Scandinavians want to come on and say the quality is a lie and their system is evil (aside from migration issues), that would be worth a listen.
    Guest intro starts at 6:30



    These might be worth a read
    The Sweden Myth - https://mises.org/library/sweden-myth
    How the Welfare State Corrupted Sweden - https://mises.org/library/how-welfar...rrupted-sweden
    Last edited by risveglio; 2nd June 2016 at 20:04.

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    McCarthy sure did a job on the American psyche. Communism is not on the table, at least not in my universe. Capitalism will always be around in some form or another for quite a bit longer, as the least of all evils. Socialism may have the right idea but it is tainted now with all kinds of extremism. So what's left?

    Institutionalized anything leads to abuse and strong-arm tactics - and favoritism.

    All of these forms of governance focuses on central control. Maybe decentralizing is the way to go. Focus on community and towns.

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    I am seeing things as needing to be two fold instead of just entirely focusing on basic income; if the income Is there, but the hours to work a job are not, then I would think, one would still not be making very much money in the long run.

    More over, there are no right to work laws any where. So maybe someone is hiring for someone to work a basic register at a grocery store, but if that store owner doesn't want to hire me, what good is it to me knowing there is a basic wage waiting ? People who work on an hourly basis constantly get screwed over by shady managers at Walmart and the like, those managers who know that an employ is close to making over 40 hrs for the week an either manages to erase a few hours, or decides to cut that persons week short so those 40 hrs are not reached. It is shady either way, what ever the reason, legal or not.... Or what about people who own their own small business , but for what ever reason, are not making ends meat... then what ?
    I suppose they could sell what ever their product is to the government for something, but would the government even be required to buy said products....

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Quote Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
    McCarthy sure did a job on the American psyche. Communism is not on the table, at least not in my universe. Capitalism will always be around in some form or another for quite a bit longer, as the least of all evils. Socialism may have the right idea but it is tainted now with all kinds of extremism. So what's left?

    Institutionalized anything leads to abuse and strong-arm tactics - and favoritism.

    All of these forms of governance focuses on central control. Maybe decentralizing is the way to go. Focus on community and towns.
    And there's the rub, the nut of it. In a way.

    It's tied to this aspect, I mentioned a few years back in the here and now thread. The magic number of approximately 10,000. Something I had noticed, tied to how human psychology works. How, when we as humans, with our unconscious (thus unrecognized) expressions into and of life...get to the point that we cannot recognize a certain person, in name or overall minor connectivity.

    When a community exceeds a population of approximately 10,000 persons, we begin to notably fall into the process of running into strangers. It is there where the sociopathy has a chance to begin the process of infiltration (or arising in people) and silently digging in. Where the common person, the average person begins to really lose track of what the immediate and loose associations are.

    In the real world, those two items, of personal knowing vs the beginnings of selfish sociopaths running under the radar, where those two cross on the chart in general averaged terms (not always the same, depends), the flip is at approximately 10,000 individual humans, in a given secluded/separate group.

    Quote The tragedy of the commons, a concept described by ecologist Garrett Hardin, paints a grim view of human nature. The theory goes that, if a resource is shared, individuals will act in their own self-interest, but against the interest of the group, by depleting that resource.

    Yet examples of cooperation and sharing abound in nature, from human societies down to single-celled bacteria.

    In a new paper, published in the journal Scientific Reports, University of Pennsylvania researchers use game theory to demonstrate the complex set of traits that can promote the evolution of cooperation. Their analysis showed that smaller groups in which actors had longer memories of their fellow group members' actions were more likely to evolve cooperative strategies.

    The work suggests one possible advantage of the human's powerful memory capacity: it has fed our ability as a society to cooperate.

    "In the past we've looked at the interactions of two players to determine the most robust evolutionary strategies," said Joshua B. Plotkin, a professor in Penn's Department of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences. "Our new analysis allows for scenarios in which players can react to the behaviors and strategies of multiple other players at once. It gives us a picture of a much richer set of social interactions, a picture that is likely more representative of the complexities of human behavior."

    Plotkin collaborated with Alexander J. Stewart, then his postdoctoral researcher and now a Royal Society research fellow at University College London, on the work, which builds on years of game theory examinations by the pair.

    In their earlier works, they used the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma scenario, in which two players face off and can choose to either cooperate or not, to understand what circumstances promote the rise of generosity versus selfishness.

    In the new paper, they added two levels of complexity. First, they used a different scenario, known as a public-goods game, which allows players to interact with more than one other player at a time. The set-up also enabled the researchers to vary the number of players in a given game. In the public-goods game, a player can contribute a certain amount of a personal resource to a public pool, which is then divided equally among all players. The greatest shared benefit comes when all players contribute generously, but that also puts generous players at risk of losing resources to selfish players, a tragedy of the commons scenario.

    The second added level of complexity was imbuing players with the capacity for long memories. That is, players could use the actions of their opponents from multiple earlier rounds of the game to inform their strategies for subsequent rounds. If a player repeatedly encountered a player in a group that frequently behaved selfishly, for example, they may be more likely to "punish" that defector by withholding resources in future rounds.

    In addition, the populations of players were permitted to "evolve," such that more successful players, those that achieve greater payoffs, are more likely to pass their strategies on to the next generation of players.

    Stewart and Plotkin found that the more players in a game the less likely that cooperative strategies could win out. Instead, the majority of robust strategies in large groups favored defection.

    "This makes intuitive sense," Plotkin said. "As a group size increases, the prospects for sustained cooperation go down. The temptation to defect and become a freeloader goes up."

    Conversely, their findings showed that giving players a longer memory, the ability to remember and base decisions on as many as 10 previous rounds of their opponents' actions, led to a greater relative volume of robust cooperative strategies. Part of the reason for this, the researchers said, was because greater memories allowed players to develop a broader array of more nuanced strategies, including ones that could punish individuals for defecting strategies and ensure they didn't take over the population

    "A stronger memory allowed players to weed out the rare defector," Plotkin said.

    In a final set of experiments, Stewart and Plotkin used computer simulations that allowed the memory capacity of players to evolve alongside the strategies themselves. They found that not only were longer memories favored, but the evolution of longer memories led to an increase in cooperation.

    "I think a fascinating takeaway from our study," Stewart said, "is that you can get a set of circumstances where there is a kind of runaway feedback loop. Longer memories promote more cooperation and more cooperation promotes longer memories. That kind of situation, where you go from a simpler system to one that is more complex, is a great example of what evolution does, it leads to more and more complexity."

    As a next step, Stewart and Plotkin would like to use human subjects to evaluate their mathematical findings.

    "We have all these results about what kinds of strategies are successful that take into account different features of players' actions," Stewart said. "We'd like to run an experiment with people to figure out what they are actually paying attention to when they're playing. Is it their payoffs? Is it their opponents' payoffs? And see how those strategies match up to those we see in our analyses."
    http://www.sciencenewsline.com/news/...118430077.html

    Thus, above that level of size community, the selfishness rises to an unacceptable level and co-operation begins to slide into serious collapse, and systems fail.

    Selfishness and co-operation can happen anywhere, and do, but social and cultural cohesion are more ephemeral, more group related in the undercurrent of interaction, they are not the immediate, not of the specific internal constant conscious awareness of self. The aspects of community and co-operation are more of the unspoken unconsciousness of self.

    And that inter-personal cohesion tends to begin the process of falling apart when a given community begins to reach a size where strangers can be seen by most people. Unknowns, like a virus, can arrive, and infiltrate, and so on.

    Essentially, one cannot speak about the idea of realities about basic income or no basic income, or capitalism, socialism and so on, without taking into account the aspects of the unconscious in mind and expression; How the undercurrent of people function in a group.

    For example, a system of population positioning on the physical surface of the correct or closer to the mean of this 10k thing, combined with governance that takes this sort of methodology to heart in it's operation, in division of governance systems, etc, we find the co-operation required to stabilize the smaller and larger group, so that social cohesion can allow for a basic income that is effectual. Not a handout to seeming abusers who are left bereft of all other integration and isolated (and the same for those paying), but a system that possesses social and cultural cohesion for the ones handing out and the ones who are recipients. basically that the one receiving and the one giving, all of them are literally aware of each others existence, in some minimal personal or minimally connected way.

    In the places where the idea of basic income is seen as a probable failure mode, those places probably have large population centers and no overall social and cultural cohesion, nor any widespread personal connectivity, except for the sociopathic capitalism (or whatever moniker 'selfishness' in that locale may wear) that they already possess.

    These undercurrents of structure need to be recognized as the root issues that they are, instead of being unrecognized by individual and group. Since social structure is largely an unconscious thing, people tend to not include it in their understanding of the origin of the issue in this given argument of being for or against a basic income.

    For example, in a given large grouping of people, in the millions, we can get to systemic abuse of a basic income, via the politics and corporations/individuals tied to it. where selfishness can infiltrate and parasitically feed off the attempt at a social construct. The multiple levels create complexity and distance..which make strangers of the entire chain and system.

    At such point.... trust has to be entertained by all (due to complexity and distance creating indeterminism for individuals), and the parasitical selfish have their doorway by which they can enter the system and remain in hiding, and feed themselves or hide control and infiltration aspects. The same goes for any large complex system.

    Whereas with the smaller grouping, they have no place to hide their attempts at sociopathic selfish parasitical feeding of themselves or their given corporate or fascist/oligarchical structure.

    Ie, Iceland tells the bankers to **** off. Approximately 250,000 people in Iceland. They definitely have community and connected awareness.

    Parasites and sociopaths require large human structures. Otherwise, they cannot easily control and be in hiding in the complexity of the systems. This is not specifically true in all cases, but in many to most cases, it is true. With respect to getting people to commit to obvious insanity. It is very specifically true when systems of oligarchy recognize these aspects and actively and continually infiltrate and bend these systems in a step by step advancing manner.

    As the cities and large population centers have risen into existence, so has the extremism of the parasitical controlling structure which manipulates humanity.

    Quote Today, 54 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050. Projections show that urbanization combined with the overall growth of the world’s population could add another 2.5 billion people to urban populations by 2050, with close to 90 percent of the increase concentrated in Asia and Africa, according to a new United Nations report launched today.
    The TV gets personal ----- your neighbor is a stranger. And you're ****ed.

    It's not specifically about the idea of return to rural or pastoral living.... but recognizing the root aspects, combating the holes in this newer societal urban structure where such problems can arise and hide. I'm not entirely confident that it can be done, though. We've seen many examples where there are smaller constructs within the whole and they can -and have been- 'turned' so to speak, into very messy selfish parasite enclaves. such things tend to have to do with the fact that an external sheath or cover can be drawn over the smaller grouping and it can be hidden within the still greater overall complexity. (a societal cyst, if you will-- eg: The Beltway. Within the beltway itself, we find an enclave of parasites in long term co-operation, as the the above study notes can emerge/happen. Parasites are deeply concerned about groupings and co-operation, as this is how they function. So they know exactly how to deny it [cohesion and memory] to you.)
    Last edited by Carmody; 3rd June 2016 at 13:52.
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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    I've been in the city so long I've forgotten I hate the city. But 10,000 is too small. I like around 50,000 , so I can go hide when I need to. Of course if I could generally trust those around me to be aware of and respect my boundaries and to be in conscious co-operation with me, then maybe I wouldn't need to recharge so often.

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Quote Posted by shaberon (here)
    Almost all major companies, at least around here, while they may be capitalist ventures, receive some form of socialist benefits, whether as free land, tax subsidies, reduction of their tax, etc. Otherwise they would go somewhere else.
    Then that is not really capitalism.

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Quote Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
    McCarthy sure did a job on the American psyche. Communism is not on the table, at least not in my universe. Capitalism will always be around in some form or another for quite a bit longer, as the least of all evils. Socialism may have the right idea but it is tainted now with all kinds of extremism. So what's left?

    Institutionalized anything leads to abuse and strong-arm tactics - and favoritism.

    All of these forms of governance focuses on central control. Maybe decentralizing is the way to go. Focus on community and towns.
    McCarthy has very little to do with this. I was born and raised here, my parents barely knew enough English to understand anything going on during that time as they just immigrated here. I was taught about all the wonders of how great things would be if we only became socialists in US public schools. I entered my adult hood, thinking if only we had a mixed economy that worked. My opinions on socialism changed by reading history and talking to people that left socialists countries. The IT field has a ton of Eastern Europeans and they all despise socialism. Two programmers from Brazil claim socialism ruined their country. A dutch analysts saying socialism has destroyed Amsterdam and a few Scandinavians that are glad that socialism is started to retract in Sweden since it did so much harm.

    As for Capitalism, when are we getting Capitalism? The idea that we have Capitalism is ludicrous if you know what Capitalism is supposed to mean. So yes, decentralization is the way to go and what is left is Capitalism. It is the morally superior and when allowed to function correctly it does wonders in lifting people out of poverty and giving them some self respect. Even the crony form that you call Capitalism has removed over a billion people from extreme poverty over the last 20 years.

    So I vote for Capitalism and small local governments or no government at all. I have a right to live my life as I please as long as I do not harm others. You should not get the right to harm me because there are more of you and you don't like the way I live.

    The number of family members that came over here with nothing and succeeded with no help from government is mind boggling. Maybe it is because of what Zig Zigler says about foreigners getting to experience the US for the first time, they see the opportunity while entitled US citizens are looking for handouts. I don't know.

    I also do not buy into this selfishness, at least not here. The American people give vastly more in philanthropic donations on a percentage basis than anyone in the world. This is the best-kept secret in American textbooks. I know very few socialists but from my experience, they are the selfish ones.
    Last edited by risveglio; 4th June 2016 at 15:42.

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Quote Posted by shaberon (here)
    If the dollar had retained its original value, with the "progress" of industry, we would now be able to make a living by working about ten hours a week.
    That statement is typical of money madness.

    The value of the money token has zero congruence with the marketplace of goods and services.

    FWIW - a "dollar bill" (paper) is NOT a dollar (coin). Since 1933, a "dollar bill" has had no par value (worthless), whereas a dollar coin is still worth one dollar. Finding an equitable trade between worthless paper and a dollar coin is another topic entirely.

    As to the notion that we could "make a living by working about ten hours a week" - that, too, is an artifact of money madness.

    Why?

    Based on coining all the gold in the world (5.6 billion ounces, approx), there would be $16 per capita. (Divided by 7+ billion people)

    How does possessing $16 equate to "making a living by working about ten hours a week"?

    Money is not prosperity.

    Prosperity is based on the production, trade and enjoyment of surplus usable goods and services.

    Now, if one can produce sufficient surplus to trade for all his needs, in about ten hours a week, regardless of only possessing $16 in gold coin, that's fine. But there is no correlation between the volume and value of money and the marketplace of goods and services.

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Some comments... but 1st:

    Begin with Freedom. If that doesn't trip your trigger, then one of us is in the wrong country.

    "Well, freedom is relative". - Bull. "Freedom is the ability to do as you damn well please - And to take the consequences." P.J. O'Rourke

    In short, unless someone sees, or can prove I've committed a serious breach of the peace (murder, rape, robbery, fraud), what I do, say, who I know, or talk to, where I go, is none of anyone else's damned business. especially government's!

    Lets deal with a few non-starters:
    Communism:
    First. Communism is kinda cool. Some people gather together, pool their stuff, and their work, and everyone gets by. All is well.

    Then comes the dawn (and human nature). Example:
    3 commies go out drinking on a Wednesday nite. Drunk as hell, they stagger home & go to bed. Next morning 2 get up feeling like hell, and go to work. Commie #3 has an "Aha! moment". "If I get up and go to work, I'm gonna feel like crap all day long. But, if I stay home & nurse my hangover, I'm gonna get the same paycheck those other two fools will get."

    Here ends productivity, and along with it, over-production, the seed from which cometh all the goodies everyone wants to give to the less fortunate. in the end, everyone becomes less fortunate.

    Second, I did say its "kinda cool", but here's the problem: Communism does NOT scale up.

    It can work for a group of, say, 5-25 families. Might even rope a few doctors, nurses, etc in to the mix and build yourself a whole community. But then you run into the fatal flaw...

    At some point (long before you reach the size of a county/parish) you're going to need someone to "manage" the agreement. Someone whose job it is to make sure the productivity/production, and whatnot, continue, and are equally divided, so that well-being & growth continues.

    At some point this will become a full time job. Your perfect world is now dead.
    Dead because what you now have in your midst is a bureaucrat. This person is not involved in the business of production, in any way. He is removed from the situation; time and human nature, will do the rest.

    If things grow further, you will have more of these, and they will need some way to ... more than advise... "coerce" maintenance of the status quo.

    This is government (the form is irrelevant) and it will need "power". Two reminders:
    "Government IS force." - G. Washington
    "Power attracts the corruptible." - Frank Herbert

    Sooner or later, you wind up with a corruptible force, able, and most willing to diddle with your every daily move. And given the choice between doing that, and going back to work at... whatever... here again I remind you of the facts of human nature.

    R.I.P. Communism.

    Socialism:
    Socialism is just Communism with manners. It does have one or two benefits over a completely market-driven society.
    1. LOCAL, publicly owned water supply.
    2. LOCAL, publicly owned generation & distribution of electricity, or whatever replaces it.



    Democracy:
    After some study, I've decided I'm not much of a fan of "Pure Democracy". Eventually you wind up with "tyranny of the majority". Human nature, again. Given the chance to vote on it, what everyone will want is... everything. And they'll have a government that will go steal it for them... for awhile. Greece comes to mind, here. Greece is the victim of two things: Democracy, and "Fiat money". But it took both to get them where they are.

    In a pure democracy, elected reps are bound to go get what the majority wants.

    One of the basic differences in a "representative republic" is that the elected are also allowed to exercise their own good judgement. I prefer this system. Though we haven't used it in decades, it is what was set up in the US Constitution. Madison did provide one warning, though:
    "The Constitution is designed to provide freedom, and government for a moral people, and totally unsuitable for any other kind."

    Good time to bring this up, by the way...:
    NEVER confuse, assign to, nor expect morality from government. No government of any kind is, has or ever will be moral (See G. Washington quote above).

    Quote But relying on government to impose compulsory charity (socialism) is not wise.
    Charity is best left to local means, and manpower. Just my belief but, once you steal the money, any notion of it being "charity" becomes null. Secondly, I think some special value is kept in the exchange, if the person who wants had to look the person who gives in the eye. Not an ego thing... call it a "reality check".

    How to generate this "largess"?
    A good ol' market-based economy; free of government crap, AND "Fiat money".
    "Paper is poverty,... it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself." - Thomas Jefferson

    Despite its many frailties, human nature can be surprising, too. An event from back in the early 70's, I think it was in Texas. Some government program distributing to the needy was about to be phased out. The local folk rallied, vowing to replace the program with stuff donated from the people themselves. What turned up was nearly 10 times the goods the gov't. program had supplied in the past.

    Unfortunately, no matter how noble it sounds, providing a "guaranteed income to every soul just isn't viable in a market economy. Sooner or later, the marketplace will absorb the entire stipend, and you'll forever be calling for a "renewal" of some sort. Just like how the US does "immigration reform" every 10 years, but nothing changes.

    This is a corollary to the notion that it is impossible to tax a corporation.

    You're gonna hate this, but, sometimes even someone you're trained to hate, is right:
    "Remember, that a government powerful enough to give you everything you want, is also powerful enough to take it all away" - Ronald Reagan

    Anyway, FWIW, my thoughts on this:
    Fred

    PS: Best line in this thread, so far:
    Quote Daozen;
    Why would we need governments to give us our own money?
    Last edited by Fredkc; 4th June 2016 at 19:34.

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Quote So I vote for Capitalism and small local governments or no government at all. I have a right to live my life as I please as long as I do not harm others. You should not get the right to harm me because there are more of you and you don't like the way I live.
    Risveglio; you posted while I was typing, damnit. Could've saved myself a lot of time.

    People do change with age, too. Attributed to Winston Churchill:
    "A young man who isn't a liberal, has no heart. An old one who isn't a conservative has no mind."
    Fred

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Quote Posted by Fredkc (here)
    Quote So I vote for Capitalism and small local governments or no government at all. I have a right to live my life as I please as long as I do not harm others. You should not get the right to harm me because there are more of you and you don't like the way I live.
    Risveglio; you posted while I was typing, damnit. Could've saved myself a lot of time.

    People do change with age, too. Attributed to Winston Churchill:
    "A young man who isn't a liberal, has no heart. An old one who isn't a conservative has no mind."
    Fred
    Thanks Fredkc though I don't think I will ever be a conservative, at least not by today's definition.

    Here is the one from Muhammad Ali along the same lines. - "The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life."

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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    I was very inspired back in the 60s and 70s by the hippie back-to-Earth movement though from a more spiritual perspective, and lived for about a year in a combination Zen Center/commune in the mountains of Virginia which was life-changing.
    And I was further inspired a few years later by Dr. Christopher Hills
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hills
    in particular one book called Christ Yoga of Peace, in which he framed a blueprint for transforming the world through intentional spiritual communities.
    He founded such a community himself, the University of the Trees, which was quite successful and lasted until Dr. Hills' death.
    I spent some time there too, and lived nearby, though I never actually lived there.
    I don't think the world at large was quite ready to put the blueprint to use, but I don't think the blueprint was at fault, and it certainly was useful to other communities.
    There is still a growing movement towards creating intentional communities founded not only on principles of sustainability, but on spiritual principles as well, and it is not a lifestyle that everyone would choose, certainly, but I think it's rewarding for those who do, though challenging as well.
    I see some young people in the area where I live now following their own back-to-the-Earth blueprint, and it's encouraging to me.
    I think their ideas about spirituality are going to be much different than my generation's, however.
    They seem to be suspicious of anything that is too organized, and want to blaze their own trail.
    Quote Posted by Carmody (here)
    Quote Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
    McCarthy sure did a job on the American psyche. Communism is not on the table, at least not in my universe. Capitalism will always be around in some form or another for quite a bit longer, as the least of all evils. Socialism may have the right idea but it is tainted now with all kinds of extremism. So what's left?

    Institutionalized anything leads to abuse and strong-arm tactics - and favoritism.

    All of these forms of governance focuses on central control. Maybe decentralizing is the way to go. Focus on community and towns.
    And there's the rub, the nut of it. In a way.

    It's tied to this aspect, I mentioned a few years back in the here and now thread. The magic number of approximately 10,000. Something I had noticed, tied to how human psychology works. How, when we as humans, with our unconscious (thus unrecognized) expressions into and of life...get to the point that we cannot recognize a certain person, in name or overall minor connectivity.

    When a community exceeds a population of approximately 10,000 persons, we begin to notably fall into the process of running into strangers. It is there where the sociopathy has a chance to begin the process of infiltration (or arising in people) and silently digging in. Where the common person, the average person begins to really lose track of what the immediate and loose associations are.

    In the real world, those two items, of personal knowing vs the beginnings of selfish sociopaths running under the radar, where those two cross on the chart in general averaged terms (not always the same, depends), the flip is at approximately 10,000 individual humans, in a given secluded/separate group.

    Quote The tragedy of the commons, a concept described by ecologist Garrett Hardin, paints a grim view of human nature. The theory goes that, if a resource is shared, individuals will act in their own self-interest, but against the interest of the group, by depleting that resource.

    Yet examples of cooperation and sharing abound in nature, from human societies down to single-celled bacteria.

    In a new paper, published in the journal Scientific Reports, University of Pennsylvania researchers use game theory to demonstrate the complex set of traits that can promote the evolution of cooperation. Their analysis showed that smaller groups in which actors had longer memories of their fellow group members' actions were more likely to evolve cooperative strategies.

    The work suggests one possible advantage of the human's powerful memory capacity: it has fed our ability as a society to cooperate.

    "In the past we've looked at the interactions of two players to determine the most robust evolutionary strategies," said Joshua B. Plotkin, a professor in Penn's Department of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences. "Our new analysis allows for scenarios in which players can react to the behaviors and strategies of multiple other players at once. It gives us a picture of a much richer set of social interactions, a picture that is likely more representative of the complexities of human behavior."

    Plotkin collaborated with Alexander J. Stewart, then his postdoctoral researcher and now a Royal Society research fellow at University College London, on the work, which builds on years of game theory examinations by the pair.

    In their earlier works, they used the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma scenario, in which two players face off and can choose to either cooperate or not, to understand what circumstances promote the rise of generosity versus selfishness.

    In the new paper, they added two levels of complexity. First, they used a different scenario, known as a public-goods game, which allows players to interact with more than one other player at a time. The set-up also enabled the researchers to vary the number of players in a given game. In the public-goods game, a player can contribute a certain amount of a personal resource to a public pool, which is then divided equally among all players. The greatest shared benefit comes when all players contribute generously, but that also puts generous players at risk of losing resources to selfish players, a tragedy of the commons scenario.

    The second added level of complexity was imbuing players with the capacity for long memories. That is, players could use the actions of their opponents from multiple earlier rounds of the game to inform their strategies for subsequent rounds. If a player repeatedly encountered a player in a group that frequently behaved selfishly, for example, they may be more likely to "punish" that defector by withholding resources in future rounds.

    In addition, the populations of players were permitted to "evolve," such that more successful players, those that achieve greater payoffs, are more likely to pass their strategies on to the next generation of players.

    Stewart and Plotkin found that the more players in a game the less likely that cooperative strategies could win out. Instead, the majority of robust strategies in large groups favored defection.

    "This makes intuitive sense," Plotkin said. "As a group size increases, the prospects for sustained cooperation go down. The temptation to defect and become a freeloader goes up."

    Conversely, their findings showed that giving players a longer memory, the ability to remember and base decisions on as many as 10 previous rounds of their opponents' actions, led to a greater relative volume of robust cooperative strategies. Part of the reason for this, the researchers said, was because greater memories allowed players to develop a broader array of more nuanced strategies, including ones that could punish individuals for defecting strategies and ensure they didn't take over the population

    "A stronger memory allowed players to weed out the rare defector," Plotkin said.

    In a final set of experiments, Stewart and Plotkin used computer simulations that allowed the memory capacity of players to evolve alongside the strategies themselves. They found that not only were longer memories favored, but the evolution of longer memories led to an increase in cooperation.

    "I think a fascinating takeaway from our study," Stewart said, "is that you can get a set of circumstances where there is a kind of runaway feedback loop. Longer memories promote more cooperation and more cooperation promotes longer memories. That kind of situation, where you go from a simpler system to one that is more complex, is a great example of what evolution does, it leads to more and more complexity."

    As a next step, Stewart and Plotkin would like to use human subjects to evaluate their mathematical findings.

    "We have all these results about what kinds of strategies are successful that take into account different features of players' actions," Stewart said. "We'd like to run an experiment with people to figure out what they are actually paying attention to when they're playing. Is it their payoffs? Is it their opponents' payoffs? And see how those strategies match up to those we see in our analyses."
    http://www.sciencenewsline.com/news/...118430077.html

    Thus, above that level of size community, the selfishness rises to an unacceptable level and co-operation begins to slide into serious collapse, and systems fail.

    Selfishness and co-operation can happen anywhere, and do, but social and cultural cohesion are more ephemeral, more group related in the undercurrent of interaction, they are not the immediate, not of the specific internal constant conscious awareness of self. The aspects of community and co-operation are more of the unspoken unconsciousness of self.

    And that inter-personal cohesion tends to begin the process of falling apart when a given community begins to reach a size where strangers can be seen by most people. Unknowns, like a virus, can arrive, and infiltrate, and so on.

    Essentially, one cannot speak about the idea of realities about basic income or no basic income, or capitalism, socialism and so on, without taking into account the aspects of the unconscious in mind and expression; How the undercurrent of people function in a group.

    For example, a system of population positioning on the physical surface of the correct or closer to the mean of this 10k thing, combined with governance that takes this sort of methodology to heart in it's operation, in division of governance systems, etc, we find the co-operation required to stabilize the smaller and larger group, so that social cohesion can allow for a basic income that is effectual. Not a handout to seeming abusers who are left bereft of all other integration and isolated (and the same for those paying), but a system that possesses social and cultural cohesion for the ones handing out and the ones who are recipients. basically that the one receiving and the one giving, all of them are literally aware of each others existence, in some minimal personal or minimally connected way.

    In the places where the idea of basic income is seen as a probable failure mode, those places probably have large population centers and no overall social and cultural cohesion, nor any widespread personal connectivity, except for the sociopathic capitalism (or whatever moniker 'selfishness' in that locale may wear) that they already possess.

    These undercurrents of structure need to be recognized as the root issues that they are, instead of being unrecognized by individual and group. Since social structure is largely an unconscious thing, people tend to not include it in their understanding of the origin of the issue in this given argument of being for or against a basic income.

    For example, in a given large grouping of people, in the millions, we can get to systemic abuse of a basic income, via the politics and corporations/individuals tied to it. where selfishness can infiltrate and parasitically feed off the attempt at a social construct. The multiple levels create complexity and distance..which make strangers of the entire chain and system.

    At such point.... trust has to be entertained by all (due to complexity and distance creating indeterminism for individuals), and the parasitical selfish have their doorway by which they can enter the system and remain in hiding, and feed themselves or hide control and infiltration aspects. The same goes for any large complex system.

    Whereas with the smaller grouping, they have no place to hide their attempts at sociopathic selfish parasitical feeding of themselves or their given corporate or fascist/oligarchical structure.

    Ie, Iceland tells the bankers to **** off. Approximately 250,000 people in Iceland. They definitely have community and connected awareness.

    Parasites and sociopaths require large human structures. Otherwise, they cannot easily control and be in hiding in the complexity of the systems. This is not specifically true in all cases, but in many to most cases, it is true. With respect to getting people to commit to obvious insanity. It is very specifically true when systems of oligarchy recognize these aspects and actively and continually infiltrate and bend these systems in a step by step advancing manner.

    As the cities and large population centers have risen into existence, so has the extremism of the parasitical controlling structure which manipulates humanity.

    Quote Today, 54 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050. Projections show that urbanization combined with the overall growth of the world’s population could add another 2.5 billion people to urban populations by 2050, with close to 90 percent of the increase concentrated in Asia and Africa, according to a new United Nations report launched today.
    The TV gets personal ----- your neighbor is a stranger. And you're ****ed.

    It's not specifically about the idea of return to rural or pastoral living.... but recognizing the root aspects, combating the holes in this newer societal urban structure where such problems can arise and hide. I'm not entirely confident that it can be done, though. We've seen many examples where there are smaller constructs within the whole and they can -and have been- 'turned' so to speak, into very messy selfish parasite enclaves. such things tend to have to do with the fact that an external sheath or cover can be drawn over the smaller grouping and it can be hidden within the still greater overall complexity. (a societal cyst, if you will-- eg: The Beltway. Within the beltway itself, we find an enclave of parasites in long term co-operation, as the the above study notes can emerge/happen. Parasites are deeply concerned about groupings and co-operation, as this is how they function. So they know exactly how to deny it [cohesion and memory] to you.)
    Last edited by onawah; 5th June 2016 at 03:52.
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    Default Re: Push To Implement Basic Income For All

    Quote Posted by Fredkc (here)
    One of the basic differences in a "representative republic" is that the elected are also allowed to exercise their own good judgement. I prefer this system. Though we haven't used it in decades, it is what was set up in the US Constitution. Madison did provide one warning, though:
    "The Constitution is designed to provide freedom, and government for a moral people, and totally unsuitable for any other kind."
    Short reply:
    Actually, Americans are promised a republican form of government.
    A republican form of government is NOT synonymous with a "representative republic" nor is it a "constitutional republic." (Those refer to the indirect democratic form of government)

    Long reply here:
    Republican Form
    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...-of-Government

    Birthright of Sovereignty
    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...of-Sovereignty

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