Tapeinocracy: Frequently Asked Questions

Questions

Answers

How could a country implement tapeinocracy?

The safest method would be a structured transition over time, such as ten years, enabling current systems to wind down and new systems to set up. This includes: switching from the current tax methods to a land value tax along with completing land valuations across the country; moving political processes to local governments; dismantling arm’s length bodies; setting up new local banks, writing new laws, writing the new constitution and more.

By creating this structured transition, it allows everyone to see the pace of changes and make plans for the future. A gradual removal of welfare gives people time to adapt rather than a sudden shock, it gives people time to move to a smaller house if they want to reduce land value tax or vice versa for people with high incomes that will no longer be punished for good wages, it gives time to plan businesses and encourage investment, banks can analyse their ledgers to adjust lending with years to prepare.

What, or who, are the main obstacles to implementing tapeinocracy?

The only people that would object to the myriad improvements provided by tapeinocracy are those that politically or financially benefit from the destructive status quo. By fixing the overwhelming majority of problems in society, some people would lose easy money or power and therefore object to implementing this model. As for what might stop tapeinocracy from becoming a reality; the current political process means it would have to be voted through both the House of Commons and the House of Lords in Parliament. Considering that tapeinocracy would result in those same people losing their guaranteed jobs and income, it would be like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. In the current system, British politicians enjoy the following privileges:

Tapeinocracy resolves all of these problems through a substantially improved political system. The unalterable constitution is the supreme authority and would have specific provisions that limit the power of politicians, alongside an independent justice system that politicians can’t control. Why would present day politicians willingly give up the existing system? The depressing reality is that a coup d’état is most likely required to fix the country but the good news is it could be achieved without spilling blood; details of how to successfully perform a bloodless coup are in the book so nobody would need to be hurt.

Who benefits and loses in tapeinocracy?

All political and economic models will benefit some people at the cost of others; be it resource allocation, power or money. Tapeinocracy is no different because this is the reality of how these systems function, thus anyone claiming to have a system that benefits every single person is lying or delusional. For tapeinocracy, an approximate list can be made of the two groups and the reader can see how his life would change in this model.

People that benefit in tapeinocracy:

People that lose in tapeinocracy:

In simple terms: the winners would be constructive people that are motivated, productive, responsible, charitable and benevolent. The losers would be destructive people that want to exploit or leech off others.

Is tapeinocracy pro or anti-democratic?

Its design has both democratic and anti-democratic elements. The combination of screening tests and sortition to elect politicians ensures a far greater minimum level of competence in all politicians, alongside a more accurate representation of the population and it nullifies pre-election bribery. This part of the process is intentionally anti-democratic and superior to the current system of the public voting for politicians based solely on their popularity. At present, the politicians that gain power are incompetent, corrupt and ideologically-driven in a bid to maximise personal gain and popularity. The existence of political parties whose structure is based upon reputation instead of ability invariably necessitates scandals and backstabbing. These combined factors all lead to politicians as the primary underlying cause of the problems in this country, hence the drastically different approach in a tapeinocracy.

As the political process in tapeinocracy must begin with citizens, it empowers almost the whole population through the proposition of ideas thus providing a level of public participation far greater than practically any other model. An additional benefit worth mentioning is the purely random element that can only come from engaging such a large population at the outset of the process. If everyone thinks or acts the same way then stagnation and decay in society is inevitable (as currently observed) so it’s important to allow ideas to be drawn from the largest possible pool at the outset.

The next step is the constitutional filter to remove bad proposals and this follows the concept of scientific rationality. The freedom exists for any citizen to propose absolutely any idea thus maximising opportunities for new innovations to be examined and tested; meanwhile any repeated ideas that are known to fail or be destructive are automatically blocked, such as socialism, religion or mass immigration. This constitutional filter saves time and resources by removing problematic proposals before politicians have to consider them and it protects society from repeating historical horrors. Zealots are free to enjoy their nonsense in private and can’t influence public life so it’s a win-win. Furthermore, it’s the proposals that are blocked and not the individual; someone can still participate in the political system with other proposals. A socialist or a religious person with a strong desire to help society can propose genuinely constructive ideas outside of his backward ideology.

When a proposal is put forth to local politicians they must vote on it with the majority as the deciding factor and an odd number of politicians to prevent ties. This is a democratic vote on a citizen’s proposal by a strongly representative group of the local region involving individual politicians motivated by civic duty rather than personal gain and possessing at least a minimum standard of intelligence. That’s undoubtedly the best possible scenario that can be realistically achieved for a democratic process through maximising it strengths and minimising its weaknesses.

If the proposal increases in scale from local to national then the scale of democracy increases with the number of participating politicians. This is in complete contrast to the status quo of a single central figure, the prime minister, making decisions for the whole country; equally preposterous is the requirement of over one thousand national politicians to pass legislation for a particular local issue. Tapeinocracy’s intentional design of a scaling political system ensures that local decisions are quick and easy to conclude while major decisions that could impact the nation are more thoroughly considered and difficult to pass.

This model is therefore more democratic where it matters by providing greater access to the political process for ordinary citizens and enabling them to make real changes to their local communities. It’s also less democratic by intentionally limiting democracy’s biggest flaw of popular yet destructive decisions by applying an intellectual filter to proposals and ensuring only people that exceed a minimum standard of competence can be elected as politicians. Both of these elements combined enhances the population’s involvement in politics while significantly reducing the potential damage from bad choices.

What happens to people currently on welfare?

In a tapeinocracy, welfare in the form of free money doesn’t fix anything so it’s removed. People that are genuinely keen to improve their lives can be assisted via public spending in productive forms. Community centres can be built across the country that consist of classrooms for training courses, networking opportunities with local businesses, jobs boards, access to books and computers for educational materials. These community centres would provide the means to help motivated people to get ahead, while simultaneously providing nothing to passive people as there’s no free food, cash or shelter. Similarly, social housing can be vastly improved by only allocating it on a short-term basis to people with the most realistic potential. A man that’s re-training with a new skill can be assigned to social housing for a period of time matching his initial training; boosting his personal finances from the reduction in bills thus better enabling him to afford private accommodation when he leaves. The eviction deadline ensures he stays motivated to succeed as he can’t be complacent. Once his tenancy expires, he’s forced to leave and another person with suitable potential is assigned to that accommodation. This is a far more productive use of public money as it only supports people that actively demonstrate the desire to improve their lives, allowing far less total public spending, less government involvement and a more concentrated allocation of public resources per person.

The elderly benefit, incorrectly named as the state pension, is removed and nothing replaces it. A person reaching retirement age had approximately fifty years of adulthood to sort himself out and build a reserve of funds for his twilight years. If he worked productively then the almost complete absence of taxes means he would’ve retained all of his income except if he held any land or owned a company, creating a direct positive correlation between work and money. Furthermore, if he actively pursued a healthy lifestyle then it puts him in a better position as his cash reserves will last longer, again creating a direct positive correlation between his healthy choices and his quality of life during retirement. Tapeinocracy’s altered model of public healthcare provision also means he’s the most likely to receive free healthcare within the elderly demographic, further rewarding his prior choices. On the other hand, someone that wasted those important years, refused to increase his economic value, or made unhealthy lifestyle choices must face the consequences of his actions and doesn’t pull down the rest of society with him.

There can absolutely be sympathy for people whose dire situation is purely one of bad luck rather than bad choices and depending on the individual circumstances he might qualify for public healthcare, but ultimately it’s immoral and impractical to coerce society to bear the burden. On the plus side, a society with very low taxes greatly enhances the opportunities for personal charity, allowing people to reach a point of excess money far more easily than at present, thus more likely to directly support others of their choosing without the coercion or inefficiency of the government. The evolutionary desire to help others is present in the majority of people and tapeinocracy works in alignment with that principle.

An additional bonus is the genuine human bond created by direct altruistic acts as opposed to the disconnected miasma of government systems. At present, someone paying tax is merely balancing government spending on welfare and is therefore devoid of any heartfelt connection to a real recipient.

I’m a business owner, how would tapeinocracy affect me?

First of all, you have to determine if you’re an individual or a company. An individual can run a basic business and wouldn’t pay any tax but there are a few legal restrictions such as the inability to employ anyone, you don’t qualify for business loans from banks and can’t pretend to be a subcontractor for one or two clients to avoid classification as an employee. This allows anyone to start a basic business without additional paperwork or costs, then once the business grows sufficiently to contemplate employing staff or taking out bank loans then you must register as a company.

If you own a registered business then the deed-driven variable corporation tax would apply and the monopoly tax might apply. Every company is legally required to designate in which market category it operates. If your company’s revenue as a percentage market share is under the minimum threshold then the company is completely unaffected by the monopoly tax and it can be ignored. As for the new corporation tax, it defaults to a lower base rate such as 10% and functions exactly the same. The key difference is that your company can self-report any proven positive actions to lower its tax rate, while employees, competitors and the public can report any proven negative actions to raise the company’s tax rate. Reports must provide all of the necessary evidence and they must be submitted by real people in order to qualify; false reports by anyone constitutes an automatic criminal conviction. Every local government has a guide with the tax weightings for numerous qualifying actions, enabling approximate calculations in advance for which options a company might choose or wish to avoid.

Realistically, most small businesses will pay the lower default base rate or less by performing proven charitable actions in their local community, while large companies or corporations will be strongly motivated by profit-seeking to perform positive actions and the ability for other people to raise a corporation’s taxes ensures overall good behaviour with a minimum floor of standards through self-regulation. This functions in alignment with maximising business profits through constructive means and punishes profit-seeking through destructive means.

Additionally, because this system moves the role of regulation to the company and any affected people, it means all of the current pointless government departments, arm’s length bodies and associated bureaucracy can be thrown in the bin. Rather than every company having to submit governance or compliance paperwork to the government every five seconds, especially when most companies already behave, it now means every company self-regulates to ensure nobody can submit a negative report to raise its tax. Any complacent or destructive company can no longer simply bribe government officials and any repeated bad behaviour reported by disgruntled employees, rival competitors seeking an edge, or members of the public will result in ever-increasing tax rates to the point of financial collapse.

Tapeinocracy does something truly revolutionary: it treats people like the adults they are, allowing freedom to make choices and the responsibility to deal with the consequences.

I’m employed by a company, how would tapeinocracy affect me?

Tapeinocracy doesn’t have any personal income taxes (except during a prolonged war) so you pay nothing for being employed. Likewise, your employer isn’t punished for hiring you as currently exists through National Insurance. As an individual, the only tax you could pay is if you personally hold any land. If you hold the land on which your house is built then you’ll pay LVT, whereas if you rent on someone else’s land then you don’t pay LVT directly and the landholder can try to pass it on through your rent. This introduces competition between landholders in the form of the amount of LVT that can reasonably be passed on, itself determined by factors such as the number of properties on a plot. A landholder with one tenant in a single house on the land plot is far less competitive than a landholder with a tower block of one hundred tenants.

In other words, you don’t pay any tax except for any held land so your take home pay will be significantly higher and your rent might increase depending on where you live.

I’m a parent, how would tapeinocracy affect me?

It depends entirely upon your situation. If you work then you’ll have more money due to the absence of taxes on employed work or lower taxes on your registered company. Your money will go further when spending due to the absence of VAT and other consumption taxes. On the other hand, welfare is removed so if you rely on government money then it’s time to step up with personal responsibility. If you don’t have an income and still decided to start a family with the expectation that society would provide everything for free then you have to face the consequences of your negligence.

Schools would default to private operation and each local government has the ability to make its own choices regarding public spending on education, depending on tax revenue. A parent with citizenship can propose changes directly to local government allowing the opportunity for change, meanwhile the system of local governments means any parent that doesn’t like the choices made by a particular local government can move to a more suitable county.

Healthcare and other amenities follow the same path; it’s private by default and each local government can vote on public spending. In tapeinocracy, a public healthcare system is based upon reality and prioritises those with the most to realistically gain from treatment thus placing most children near the top of the list. For example: any severe accidents that require medical help would be performed quickly and effectively by highly motivated staff with increased resources, whereas problems caused by childhood obesity would likely be ignored as an unsuitable use of resources and parents bear responsibility.

In simple terms, parents that work productively will keep significantly more of their own money allowing a greater quality of life for their children whereas parents that expect the rest of society to raise their children for them will receive a harsh wake-up call. Having children is one of the most life-changing decisions a person can make and tapeinocracy correctly helps responsible people by removing obstacles and avoids subsidising irresponsible people.

If the United Kingdom uses tapeinocracy, could it be part of the European Union?

No, absolutely not. The EU was originally created after the Second World War in an attempt by France and Germany to resolve the problem of repeated wars between the two countries and avoid future wars. Initially, this is a perfectly noble endeavour that tapeinocracy recognises and fixes by decentralising power as much as possible, removing populism from the election process, forcing the frequent turnover of all politicians, restricts the inevitable consolidation of power through a strict constitution and designs its systems to be as simple and transparent as possible.

Post-war European politicians chose a completely different approach by making a colossal error with their underlying assumption: they blamed the freedom of individual nations as the source of warmongering instead of authoritarianism through centralised power and human nature. As a result, Robert Schuman proposed the coal and steel industries of European countries should be merged in a great bureaucracy so “any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.” (Schuman Declaration) If this principle is maintained over time then bureaucratic entities can only ever expand because it believes the underlying cause of all problems is individual differences, ergo the solution is always to create a supranational bureaucracy to remove individuality.

While this originally started with coal and steel, it predictably expanded to cover everything else. If coal and steel is controlled then why not also agriculture and energy? If the EU controls numerous major industries then it should probably control trade between countries to remove individual differences and in order to achieve this it needs to control the laws used in those countries. Member states have their own currencies; another problematic individual difference so the EU needs a single currency controlled by yet another centralised supranational bureaucratic entity, the European Central Bank. This process continues forever because individual differences persist: the EU adds more departments, more countries, more paperwork, more pen-pushers and more regulations.

A bureaucratic system designed to encompass the entirety of Europe and remove all individual differences is extremely dystopian and completely denies reality. Humans exist as individuals and each person is different due to untold millions of influencing factors such as genetic variations, location of birth, local natural resources, social events that occurred throughout life, purely random events and more. As a result the EU is a farcical, destructive organisation that takes decades to make a single decision because it can’t tolerate individual differences and must whittle everything down to the broadest consensus, creating results that please nobody except the automata that inhabit the EU’s institutions. Meanwhile, the Kafkaesque bureaucracy and authoritarianism strangles all of its citizens because any deviation from the general consensus must be eradicated.

The EU is a stagnant centralised tyranny in which nothing can be achieved and nothing is allowed to change because everything and everyone must be identical in the form of a grey miasma of general consensus. Supporters of this cancerous bureaucracy might try to argue that the EU achieved its original goal of preventing further war between France and Germany but all it’s achieved is the same destruction of Europe through paperwork and stagnation instead of munitions.

This broken system is utterly incompatible with tapeinocracy, which provides flexibility, efficiency, adaptation, continuous refinement, progression through decentralised power, freedom, an acceptance of reality and a rejection of ideology. No country with such a positive, constructive model of tapeinocracy can be part of the EU with its endless meetings, directives and inertia.

Is tapeinocracy left-wing, centrist or right-wing?

None, because it’s not an ideological model that fits in any of those rigid categories. Tapeinocracy focuses on whatever works and discards what doesn’t work through a continuous process of feedback and refinement. Logic and morality places the individual as the sovereign entity, only limited by the reality of addressing unscrupulous people; similarly the issues of power and human nature are recurring themes of major problems so this makes tapeinocracy incompatible with any authoritarian ideologies. As for traditional left or right notions, tapeinocracy provides the freedom to try any justified new ideas, rejects old ideas that are proven failures and allows society to experiment because that’s how progress occurs.

If something works well then it’s kept until something better comes along to replace it. This is the whole point of following the scientific method of proposing ideas, testing them as objectively as possible and then accepting, refining or rejecting them. The use of decentralised local governments and the political process always starting with citizens makes tapeinocracy arguably the best model for enabling experimentation and progress. If one local government tries something that doesn’t work then it can be fixed and the rest of the country knows to avoid that idea; the opposite is true as a local government that finds great success with a new idea can be copied by other local governments.

Politics is the means by which society should be able to move forwards one step at a time and tapeinocracy absolutely achieves this, in sharp contrast to current politics that’s merely a childish game of factions trying to score imaginary points against each other.

What would happen to the royal family?

Not much would change with regard to the royal family’s daily activities but there would be important structural changes. It would be completely separated from the political process, so all that would change is removing the ceremonial element of the monarch rubber-stamping legislation or delivering parliamentary speeches pre-written by the government. Another important yet practically invisible change would be the removal of the monarch as the head of the Church of England, as religion can’t be part of public life nor can it hold any privileged positions. The Church of England, along with all religions and related sects, would be entirely private organisations. No special treatments, no public funding, nothing. Religion can be freely practiced in one’s personal life but it can’t extend beyond that.

Regardless of the existence of the royal family, or other countries that adopt this model, tapeinocracy proposes a head of state that’s utterly devoid of political power for positive pragmatic reasons. People need positive role-models in life and this is something that’s sadly absent in modern society as figures promoting civic duty have been replaced with narcissistic celebrities, plus the number of single-parent families has skyrocketed over the last century. Existing national symbols, such as flags, are vague and can be manipulated in their meaning; this is resolved by using a real person as a personification of the nation's best attributes.

A head of state can be chosen that epitomises the best qualities of the nation and demonstrates them on a daily basis, serving as a role-model that’s available to every citizen at all times. The constitution can define exclusionary criteria to ensure a head of state meets the necessary high standards, while the use of a real person also shows the reality that nobody is perfect. If a role-model faces a major challenge in his life and overcomes that challenge then it can further encourage everyone that no problem is insurmountable. Flexibility ensures the head of state can play to his strengths and isn’t coerced into a particular job: he could be a doctor in a hospital, an engineer designing public buildings, a charity worker, any type of benevolent role would suffice.

For the UK specifically, the royal family would focus entirely on its major strengths of connecting people for charitable work, using its platform to shine a spotlight on lesser known social issues and serve as a positive role-model to the population for civic duty.

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