Ten random ideas that would improve current nation states:
1. **The human rights are absolute and must never be violated**: The [universal declaration of human rights](http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html) must be the basis of all laws and of all actions of the state and its citizens. These human rights must be legally binding, and any law that violates them to *any* extent must be null and void. All citizens must have the possibility to ask the courts to investigate violations of these fundamental rights; such investigations must be free of charge. Lawmakers found guilty to pass laws that violate or circumvent the basic human rights must be stripped of their position and imprisoned as traitors.
1. **Monarchy must be outlawed**: There must be no monarchy or nobility, or their equivalent, nor any special rights for them. Constitutional monarchies must be dissolved and turned into true democracies. Democracy is the only acceptable form of government.
1. **Bring back secularism**: The state must be absolutely secular. Religion must be kept completely out of politics. This ban on religious involvement must be absolute: Prayers at school must be illegal just as it must be illegal for a president of member of parliament to swear an oath by the bible.
1. **Stop special treatment for religions**: All religious organizations must obey the same rules and laws as all other private organizations. Churches must pay the same taxes as corporations. Under no circumstance must a religious organization be exempt from any laws, regulations, taxes or fees that a non-religious organization must follow. Organizations that promote religion must never be considered as non-profit organizations. All religions must be equal before the state, and the state must not recognize, support, or validate any of them. Freedom of religion must never be valued higher than any other freedoms.
1. **Politicians must never enjoy immunity**: The people who make up “the state”, its organs, ministries, parliaments, and so on, must never, under any circumstance, be immune to any laws of the nation, nor from international law. All people are equal, and this includes politicians: If a politician commits a crime in his line of office, he must be held responsible.
1. **All income of government official must be public**: If a person works for the state in any capacity, this person’s sources of income must be known to an accountancy office, to the police, to the press, and to members of the public at any time for the rest of the person’s life as a guard against corruption. Employment contracts of government officials, members of parliament, and so on, must also always be public, even after their terms of office.
1. **Equalize taxation**: Everybody must pay the same taxes, as measured as a percentage of their income (not profits). This includes all income from any source (labor, capital, gifts, inheritances). Corporations, organizations, and other legal entities must pay the same taxes as everybody else.
1. **Stop state subsidies**: The state must never gift money or other valuables to private corporations, institutions or individuals.
1. **The state must not be in debt**: The state must never, under any circumstances, spend more money than it takes in from taxation or other sources of income. The massive debts accumulated by current nations lead to huge interest payments, which causes problems for the state in the long run as a larger and larger percentage of taxation is used to pay those interests. If the state consistently takes in more than it spends, taxes must be lowered. Senselessly wasting tax money must be considered embezzlement/fraud.
1. **Insecure voting must be outlawed**: Election computers are easy to manipulate and must be outlawed. They can never be trusted to conduct elections. Elections are the basic foundation of a democracy; and they must be safeguarded against abuse. Paper is a tried and true method that is comparatively difficult to manipulate, and at any rate it is possible to verify the results of an election afterwards.
I know that some of these points are more practical than others, and it’s all terribly idealistic. I’ve wanted to include a “self defense” clause for the military, but I know that it’s easy to make any war look like self defense (cf. the War on Terror).
I also wanted to include an “absolute right to privacy”, but in the end I decided that the Human Rights cover that point: Instead, I decided that it would be better to have effective, easily-accessible methods of recourse for the citizens.
In the end, no set of laws will ever create a “perfect nation”. Utopia is impossible. What we really need are not only better laws; we need lawmakers with a conscience and with morals. They seem to be in very short supply these days.
I generally agree with your ideas but:
1. I doubt that they are “random ideas.” If they were they probably wouldn’t make much sense. They might include something like: Bloggers must never be allowed to be lonely. The state should provide them companionship at least every other weekend.
2. Item 6 conflicts with item 1. First you insist that “human rights are absolute and must never be violated” and then you say that government officials’ human rights should be violated. Many government officials are corrupt but so far all of them have been human.
3. You say that “organizations that promote religion must never be considered as non-profit organizations.” Well, what if they don’t make a profit? Would you tax them anyway? It seems to me that it would be easy for churches to show no profit each tax year. Anyway, I think that only individuals should be taxed; tax on businesses and institutions is passed on to individuals.
4. I wouldn’t make item 9 absolute. States have emergencies to deal with just like individuals. But there should be limits on how much debt the state can carry and for what reasons.
Hi Carson,
Thanks for your feedback. I called them “random ideas”, because they were just some points that disturbed me about the way our nations are being run. There are more things that need to be fixed, so the list is a bit arbitrary – random – and not the ideas themselves.
I do realize that items 6 and 1 conflict. But nobody is forced to become a public official, a politician or a government employee. Item 6 is necessary to protect the people from corruption. Corruption perverts the democratic system, and is a great danger for the nation. Laws enacted because of corruption or lobbyism are never in the interest of the people.
A person who values privacy of their income more than serving their fellow citizens can simply stay out of politics. Also note that I am limiting #6 to sources of income: What the people do with their money is still nobody’s business. It’s a compromise between the fundamental human rights of that individual, and the rights of the people as a whole. A necessary evil, if you so will. And, just for the record, I would be perfectly willing to open all my income should I ever became a member of any government (fat chance
).
“organizations that promote religion must never be considered as non-profit organizations” is probably a bad way to put it. The idea is that currently, such organizations receive all kinds of special advantages. However, by doing so, the state indirectly promotes a religion, and that is contrary to the strict separation of state and religion that I would like to see. If point #7 is realized, and taxation is done on income and not profits, then the non-profit organization issue disappears anyway.
Point #7 – the equalization of taxes – is, by the way, probably the point which I am the least certain is practicable. The idea behind it is to remove the huge overhead that tax law currently has, and to remove the ability of corporations to claim a lot of expenses to avoid paying taxes – something that individuals cannot do as easily. In effect, a salaried employee already pays taxes on their income and I don’t see why the law should provide advantages to corporations or other legal entities over individual, real people.
I actually would make #9 absolute. As soon as you allow the state to take up a credit, you’ll have to come up with some kind of sensible maximum. Which would eventually get softened up and you’d slide down a slippery slope (“If 1 billion is okay, surely 2 billion are okay too”) and you’d have the same situation as now. If the state wishes to prepare for a catastrophe, it could save up money, or maybe it could even purchase insurances. Finally, if there is a real catastrophe, I have no doubt that people would contribute voluntarily with their private finances. We see this all the time, every time there is a catastrophe somewhere: People are more than willing to help others who are in need, even if they live on the other side of the world. Why should they not do so when their own countrymen run into genuine trouble?
OK. Your response to my comments make a lot of sense.
On the “strict separation of state and religion”: Our government here in the USA has abided by that principle since its founding. But now that Islam is spreading here we might be facing a problem. They are already making demands that are inconsistent with separation of church and state. Read more on this here.
“Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people.”
— Oscar Wilde
Separation of church and state have been softened up for a while now. Key phrases are “In god we trust” and “one nation under god”. In my opinion, this should be illegal.