My Ideal

230 posts just passed by, which really is only significant because its representing 10 posts for every year I've been alive. Which is not much in the end not even 1 a month.
Anyway that guy from black books I watched his stand up in Dublin where he was talking about how his ideal body would have suckers instead of teeth and an arse at the end of a long tube that was way over there so he didn't have to deal with it.
I liked how he took the catch cry of gym's possibly representing conventional wisdom and looked at it in a new way and then most importantly communicated it.
This I am bad at.
For sure I love to criticize but maybe just maybe I should expose how I think I would set things up and what I base these ideas on so I in turn can be criticized and maybe visualise a world that at the very least would be more convenient for me.

here it is.

Education:

That which underpins a society and investments have been shown to offer a 70:1 return on investment for a given economy.
So tax would go here and heavily, I can't say I do wholly agree in free education right up to undergrad I think some arbitrary payment should be absorbed by a student to incentivate them to give their education back to society, also I wouldn't want to discourage international students from using our educational institutions.
Ideally students would be able to also participate in the syllabus, learning what they want to learn and teachers play a consultative role in their development.
Why? because if kids can study what they are interested in they will be more interested, more motivated and will start to learn about not just subjects and topics but will start defining and better understanding their own personal nature.
I would hope the starting point for all this would be... philosophy!
Namely getting kids, teens and adults to determine the why's of the world around them. Objectively learning the geneaology of morality. In learning these things while technically anyone could get through the education system without learning how to read, write or arithmiticulate but I would be surprised if a childhood interest in space or even dynosaurs learnt from TV didn't result in that kid eventually studying physics.
An interest in foreign culture driving a pursuit of knowledge about the pharos of egypt (I don't know how to spell it) didn't naturully result in picking up a language, a study of history (to which reading and writing seem to naturally follow) and maybe even literature.
I guess ultimately in such an educational approach rather than simplifying and streamlining the starting point and forever pushing kids through hoops where they are categorized as stars or dunces they starting point is simply an approach.
A student defines their own values, they pursue their own interests.
Its virtually impossible to compare their progress to the fellow students because they are simply given the learning resources and teacher attention they define for themselves.
I'm sure it wont eradicate learning disabilities but it could I envision reduce drop out rates, have greater impact on people achieving job satisfaction and make students accountable for their own personal development.
You could still assess progress but also focus on setting very individual goals, furthermore it is not to say you wouldn't end up with plenty of opportunities to study in groups. It's a matter of first and foremost trusting the natural inquisitiveness of human nature.
But what about uni places? Let uni courses spend more time and resources picking their students. At the moment Uni is the first real place where a person can specialise and gain a clear perspective on how they can contribute to society (and of course apprenticeships, traineeships, tafe etc I'm just over simplifying) but apart from the umat your suitability to the course is only based on how you perform as a student in a very different system in subjects that can often have almost no relevance.
To leave it wide open it makes sense at the moment that for 80% of courses the only prerequisite subject is English (loosely enforced for international students) and then your ENTER score.
But why not have the subjects test the entrants to see how suited they are to the course, and test for all kinds of things - lateral thinking capacity, emotional intelligence etc. these things may not be perfectly testable but to look at them is broader and in my opinion better than what is done now.
Universities have a pretty high drop out rate, furthermore they are gearing towards training institutions in a lot of cases rather than education which although I haven't looked it up implies more than raw skills like 'balance sheets' or 'cash flow statements' but also teach an understanding of why these things are done. Which from my experience is deemphasised particularly in the testing stages.
Also fees would be accountable, at the moment your teacher calls in sick one day you are billed same as ever. The class is over booked and they don't let you in because of fire hazards you still get billed the same.
Every subject on earth wouldn't take 12 contact hours for 12 weeks plus an exam. Subject matter and contact hours would vary depending on what the subject demanded.
So it's an idea more than a functional system but if you put forward the specifications I'm sure societies most intelligent people could make a working system within 10 years.
For precedents of schools that have been set up as such - democratic schools

Wealth:

I belive society should pay its more valuable members more for their services and productive activities rendered. So no communism for me. And no 'to each according to their need by each according to their ability' or whatever it is. Let the market determine wages, but wages are a small part of wealth and I don't think anyone should be working just for money, if for money at all.
Survival again is also I different issue than wealth also. If a member of society is valuable lavish gifts upon them, I would hope the most capable and able and creative end up with the most resources.
If say however that person chooses to raise their children with said resources and raise their child in a life of leisure and recreation whilst employing their ability to ensure their alotment of resources are passed on to their offspring no matter the offsprings individual value to society, well that's unethical.
This is the gist of my problem with wealth and also how money can be invested - wealth can be preserved for people who can consume societies resources while not contributing to its betterment.
Now economists have worked on the problem of being able to accumulate wealth through non productive means for a long time however to me their are two main problems
1. relative to the rest of society an individual can become too wealthy.
2. individuals are encouraged to avoid tax because of their disbelief in its effective distribution to society.
We have whole industries built on dodging tax and they are by market determination one of societies most valuable services. But why should this be?
Tax is good, it's what we all pool as a community to build communal property, things like our own personal trains, schools and hospitals for us to use.
I believe and its my personal belief that private ownership of land and resources is to blame for both wealth and poverty. I would adopt the georgist doctrine of 'pay for what you take, not what you make' which is to say resource rentals. That is to say taxing people on their useable inputs rather than on their output (income) this way people are encouraged to use resources most efficiently to achieve the maximum output from minimum input (profit maximisation) it heavily favours sustainability, it makes it harder for one to also pass on ones accumulated wealth to yon juniours who arguably haven't earnt it through luck of their birth.
I mean you can give your offspring something though, like a good education and safe home and all that, you just cant leave them land enough to accomodate 30,000 people that they can then charge rent to.
So private ownership of land is gone, it seems ignorant and naive and stupid but check out progress if you are interested in understanding how it works or the Sustainable Living Festival coming up also will have a display on it.
In this way the 'wealthy' individuals amongst us would be inspiring role models and not hollow celebrity. People who are creating innovations and improvements that are valued and bought by society.
There's also the act of speculation itself that is trying to make money without earning it. Things like gambling is speculation, and what day traders on the stock market do is also largely speculation.
As such There would be no limit to how much wealth you can earn through investment in productive activity, like on the share market where you invest in companies that create products or render services.
So to put it bluntly the system would attempt to let you be wealthy if you can earn it and not if you can't earn it.
Land taxation takes time to understand but from my personal experience is not hard to understand. You simply have to do some imagining.
In my ideal world people could be wealthy but you'd lose hopefully the poor and dispossesed and also the deadweight wealthy individuals.

Work:

Work exists to sustain human existence and give us something entertaining to do. To me personally Job Satisfaction has more a bearing on my duties to perform and my ability to maintain a balanced lifestyle than directly just income although I do like most people have lofty financial goals.
Firstly my ideal world work hours would be reduced. From 8 to 6 to the dream 4 hour day.
This isn't a costello-esque underemployment strategy such as encouraging the workforce to drop full time positions in favor of casual jobs to boost unemployment figures.
Rather full time positions are based on a 4 hour day.
The second link being a second short article from the over enthusiastic flying solo, but the 4 hour day is really for corporations or traditional employers, the 4 hour movement is a frame work for entreprenuirs to get their head around looking at productive vs non productive time they spend at work.
I believe under the common notion of Economies of scale that there are diminishing returns on time spent at work. Similar to the realisation that after a while the return you get on any given input shrinks (ie 1 worker can make 40 shoes a day on one machine 2 workers 80, 3 workers 100, 4 workers 110) if we could lose half our hours and only drop 25% in productivity their would be in my opinion few things better that we could buy than more time to ourselves.
But that's the general framework for large employers, I realise there's two diametrically opposed problems with such a simple model - 1. Some people love their work and don't mind working overtime. 2. What about self employed and small business? different jobs have different demands you can't just restrict hours like this.
They both have the same answer - don't pay people for hours, stop connecting pay with hours.
Pay is based on results, ie the actual value you generate. That is to say the attractiveness of a salary but recognition that some days you will be flat out and some days you may as well not turn up at all.
So every participant in the workforce can more effectively manage their own workload.
So what's to prevent people from being lazy? same thing as always any rational employer would fire someone who doesn't achieve the work load their given.
Furthermore recognition perhaps that anyone who consistently works overtime (4+ hours) obviously needs assistence hire someone else.
The other thing to understand is not that you are halving the productive out put (unless a person performs a machine like function) you are simply compressing the time they spend trapped in an office trying to make a good impression.
Furthermore you reorganise your productive activities into a shorter more interesting time frame.
Then you go home, or wherever.
Did you know that in order to achieve the same relative standard of living as in the 1960's single income household you now have to have a two income household.
The simple reason being there's only so many resources going around, so the advent of women entering the work force whilst achieving the most important goal of recognising the right of everyone to enter the work force and take command of the economy didn't make anyone actually richer. The right to work came at the cost of lost time overall (except one can assume the economy has become more productive) but if in fact we ran the workforce same as the 1960's with an average of 4 hours per head (every second person working an 8 hour day) we could change it to 4 hours per head now (every person working a 4 hour day).
achieving a balance of lifestyles that is favorable. And say if I worked 10-3 with an hour of exercise built into my day and an easy start to the morning I would have a lifestyle that improved a thousand fold, having more access to daylight and better energy levels as well as more productive time spent at work.
But what of the nature of job roles themselves - structure it the same as education - a democratic work place which I have gone over two times in this blog already basically to see a precedent and gain a strong understanding of how life could be simply read this guys stuff
Furthermore hopefully the basis of work itself like education would be philosophy.
eg every individual is encouraged to understand 'why I work' at the moment we are locked in a growth fetish, the irony being as we power towards a vague and ambiguous goal (trying to produce more stuff than the year before it) yet these very processs look to be causing things like climate change.
We had a whole lifecycle stage of the sun to try and live and keep living beyond to meandre towards vague goals and instead we are charging towards a 50 year doomsday deadline with current economic practices.
So why not take it easy, produce less consume less and spend more time outdoors in the garden instead of fanatically tryign to achieve things. At the very least a workplace were individuals are challanged to ask why will at least achieve what they know consciously they are trying to achieve instead of simply 'more' or 'faster' goals.

Community:

One could imagine if the first couple of reforms go through there will be - more time, more evenly distributed wealth, better educated youth and so fourth. What may I hypothesise follow is a resurgance in a lot of things that dissapeared re advent of capatilist driven workaholia.
Namely spending ones time and energy on the community.
Maybe church attendance goes up as weekends decrease in value. Or maybe people watch more TV. Something I'd ideally like to see is the emergance of communal eating halls, like the bastion of the Sikh Langar which is a communal dining hall, of which every member of social strata is encouraged to eat in.
Sure maybe not stricktly vegetarian, nor with any religious overtones but otherwise I think if you have cross sections of society eating together and communicating the more closely the perceptions of different classes will match reality.
That is uneducated viewpoints are intermingled with educated viewpoints and hopefully wil result in different people educating each other. Which is to say almost everybody has a viewpoint on which they are more informed than their neighbour, hence phenomena like Wikipedia.
It also allows a community to actively define itself, and recognise its members.
With the advent of the internet which is a wonderful communication tool (people in countries all over the world are free to witness my ignorance) it also means a revolution in home delivery, now groceries can be delivered, one may never have to eat in the presence of strangers again.
I'd rather see it go the other way, my chinese friends always complain about 'white' restaurants because people are so quiet when they eat. Go to a restaurant in China town and conversation is abuzz. You can get seated next to anyone, I like it, I too am much more comfortable in this environment.
Thus I'd rather see the reverse of this trend, instead of the supermarket coming to the door, why not bring the cooking and eating to the supermarket. I think it could help a jackass like me understand what vegetables and foods are in season, reduce waste by feeding on a large scale and maximise the social aspect of dining whilst reducing the antisocial repressive relegation of a sole family member preparing food in the kitchen.
Furthermore ideally I'd like to see community ventures and enterprises. I'd rather see patriotic communities than patriotic countries.
Whether thats communal plots or gardens or community enterprises it allows for diversity and efficiency in any community seeking to better its lot by investing in itself (said land taxation reform helps a lot with this).

Religion:

This is probably where my own ignorant beliefs come in. I believe every child should be able to choose their own religious beliefs and there is no place in any spiritual practice to pass one's own religious beliefs onto their children.
Particularly if there are customs associated such as circumcission etc. But also monotheastic religions can prove themselves remarkably intolerant of other view points. I want to read up and write on religion at length but I would basically say - every individual has the right to practice their religion in a manner that is safe to those around but not to indoctrinate any party with undue influence or promote their religion to people who are vulnerable to joining the religion without conscious knowledge of the full implications.
Furthermore to me an ideal world would have less organised religions and more personal ones so more or less an extention of the self determination theme running through education and work categories.

Government:

The least important, I don't care what, or who or how long someone holds power so long as it is a reflection of competency and responsibility. So I don't really care what form government takes so long as it knows where to intervene (humanitarian crisis, environmental crisis) and where not to (national values tests, other sovereign entities) much like wealth the aim is to recognise capable individuals and weed out the incapable.
A benovolant dictator or chosen representitive of fixed term I don't really care.
So long as they are competent in administering a state.
Ultimately I believe the government needs to be beholden to regulatory bodies, that restrict them from exerting undue influence. Good governance is more about what something absolutely shouldn't do under any circumstances than what they should do.
And what a government shouldn't do is discriminate, it should maintain universal standards of treatment and endeavor to enforce these and the UN Human Rights Charter I think gets it pretty right, you know freedom of association, freedom of religion* (of course a religion shouldn't have a blank cheque in how they administer their beliefs), blah blah blah.

Media:

It's sort of happening through the internet, Youtube is going to pay contributors part of advertising revenue, the UK factors in legal mp3 downloads into the charts, but basically break the monopoly, I don't mind if the value of the entertainment industry is reduced but I'd rather see more suppliers and more risk taking.
Furthermore there needs to be a seperation of Media and State. Similar to the Church and state arguement. It underpins a healthy democracy but I'm sure could underpin healthy tyrannies and meritocracies as well.
Australia for example has government run stations that make up a small proportion of what people listen to. Which seems healthy unless you know Rupert Murdoch decides in a reversal of the conventions that started up media regulations to throw his lot in voluntarily with the government, then you have the number one source of information in an election being channelled through a bias filter.
The media should just be a seperate entity all together. Laws strong enough to require a referendum to change, not a sitting government.
The media and the government need simply to owe nothing to eachother.

Anyway, as you can see my ideals aren't really anything I created myself, really I've just heard about things other people do differently and much like shopping pulled them from here and there and put them together.
But as you could guess having to go vote on election day between a bunch of policies of no appeal I question why I turn up at all.
But it's good to just represent myself.