(non-exhaustive and in no particular order)
These principles are expected to be true in any hypothetical society where the MSC is guaranteed universally and equally, but otherwise everything else is pretty much the same. For more information about whether or not such a society is possible in practice, see: Proving MU Viability.
These would be suitable starting points for the first laws to be passed by the initial MUG.
Open Benefitslink
Any human appearing on a street in the MU should be able to obtain food, shelter, and healthcare without needing to prove citizenship, find employment, speak the local language, or act any particular way other than simply not being aggressive. Most people will want to associate their work and purchases with their official ID, because non-essential goods and amenities need to be paid for with cash earned through wages; but anyone should be able to get a free and anonymous “public welfare pass” (or something) if they need to use public services but don’t have an official ID or somehow lost it.
Free Knowledge and Public Medialink
Intellectual property and patent law is reduced to simply expecting proper attribution/citation when something is based on someone else’s work. New ideas or inventions should be widely disseminated, and the inventor(s) should be justly compensated if their work serves a significant public interest, but unrestricted access to all human knowledge is a fundamental right of all persons.
Sustainabilitylink
It is assumed that there is a stable ecological state in which a human population can produce enough food, fresh water, power, and housing to support themselves indefinitely without causing catastrophic environmental damage or unnecessarily harming nonhuman populations. It is also assumed that current human society (in 2021) is nowhere near this ecological balance, and requires significant human effort to recover it to a stable state. The government is responsible for making employment available for environmental recovery and maintenance.
A given geographic region should have a maximum human population which it can sustainably and self-sufficiently support. Social planning should anticipate this and use non-coercive means to slow and prevent population growth well in advance of reaching this limit:
- Public outreach explaining the situation and informing people about the problem, the evidence for the problem, available solutions for mitigating it
- Increasing access to birth control
- Incentivizing movement to areas with more population support
- Prioritizing adoption from areas approaching their population limit, and encouraging adoption in other areas for people who want children
All of these strategies should be expected to take at least a full generation to have visible effects, so must be implemented far enough ahead that a full generation of current growth could still be sustained. Moreover, it cannot be rushed, or else citizens will (rightly) get the impression they are being coerced. If there is not enough time to safely implement this kind of gentle and ethical incentivization, it is because the government failed to adequately understand and predict resource usage. In such a case, it is the government’s responsibility to implement a non-coercive process for minimizing damage and returning to a sustainable level of population and services.
Work Ethiclink
A fundamental assumption of the MU is that it is possible for a modern human society to function without requiring every adult to be actively employed in producing goods or providing services. Three imaginary people illustrate the range of expected lifestyles:
- The Salad Consumer
- This person lives in a smallish but functional room, with a private bedroom but possibly shared bathroom/kitchen/utilities. They have free access to enough fresh groceries to get adequate nutrition (whether they are sedentary or active), and spend their time reading books, watching videos, and taking public transportation to visit friends, public parks, or other public recreation activities. They have the same access to healthcare, education, and other social services as anyone else. Importantly, very few people are really expected to commit to living this minimal lifestyle for their whole life; eventually they’ll want to have a pizza or travel or engage in some other non-baseline activity which encourages them to put in a couple hours as a barista at the local cafe. This lifestyle should not be stigmatized any more than the kind of polite judgment a healthy 30-year-old would get for still living with their parents in the consumer capitalist society of 2021.
- The Type A Person
- This person works frequently at a critical, high-skill job. They can afford to own a private car, live in a high rise apartment or a well-appointed-but-not-excessive rural/suburban estate, and travel or generally do whatever (non-evil) leisure activity they want without having to save up for it. They have the same access to healthcare, education, and other social services as anyone else. Once again, very few people are really expected to commit to living such a high-velocity life, but it serves as a useful reference point for setting cash allocation: how much does it cost to live an absolutely packed-full leisure life, and how much should a committed person be expected to work in order to afford it? This should never be portrayed as the “correct” way to live; it should be reasonably achievable by anyone with sufficient dedication, but society should be able to function without any Type A People.
- The Standard Person
- This person works a median number of hours at a median-skill job and engages in a median mixture of public and private leisure activities. A society made entirely of Standard People overproduces enough to have no trouble adjusting if some of them suddenly become Salad Consumers, and should not need to assume the existence of any Type A People to pick up the slack.
Benefit Abuselink
Benefit abuse is difficult to perpetrate in a society that expects to happily provide for a certain number of [Salad Consumers][]. However, it is inevitable that a person or group of people may conspire to intentionally hoard resources or access to services to such an extent that it has a noticeable negative effect on the rest of their community. In a society whose judicial system is based on the presumption of innocence, the state should not be constantly watching each person’s benefit usage (which is coercive). This means there is a certain threshold of abuse that must be tolerated, but this is only the kind of low-level abuse that is indistinguishable from non-pernicious and non-negligent misallocation of resources. Reasonably public and non-personal data about resource usage (“how many apples were sold in this community”, “how many people live in this area”) should be enough to locate widespread or egregious abuse, and this alone should be enough to initiate an investigation with due legal process. Those investigators can use public data and reasonable, non-invasive public observation to narrow down suspects, at which point they can obtain a search warrant and eventually prosecute the offender(s) if and when they can prove that a crime was committed beyond reasonable doubt. This is theoretically exactly how justice is supposed to work in a contemporary liberal republic like the United States, if it is not corrupt. This will contribute to ensuring that MU society can coexist in such a system without requiring significant adjustment for new MU citizens.
Crime and Punishmentlink
The MSC defines a minimum set of personal rights that must be safeguarded, and which may only be minimally abridged in the interest of safeguarding those rights for everyone else. A crime is any action by an individual, or in collusion with several individuals, which significantly harms or threatens another person’s rights. Most crimes are low-impact, innocent accidents in which the state should have no interest (e.g. someone accidentally took an extra apple and didn’t notice before leaving the store). As mentioned above, public data or reporting channels should be sufficient to uncover high-impact patterns of crime which significantly affect distribution of resources and services, or the physical/emotional safety of one or more persons.
In the most extreme cases of intentional, malicious criminal activity, a person may be sentenced to involuntary confinement after due process; but the necessity of this treatment must be continually justified by regularly allowed appeals for release, and that person must still be afforded the same level of other rights as anyone else - they basically become [Salad Consumers][] without an inside door knob. The frequency of appeal for release that is allowed for involuntary confinement should never be more than one month, and then only for especially violent crimes or repeat offenders.
Violence against another person can be justified if absolutely necessary to prevent imminent casualties or in self defense, but the state is never allowed to cause physical harm through legal or judicial process. There is no need - there should always be sufficient resources to keep someone alive and comfortably and safely confined if they are unable to peacefully coexist with the rest of society, and they should still be given regular opportunities to demonstrate that they can be trusted to leave…or stay, so long as the Compulsory Salad Life appeals to them. After all, they would have basically the same life as any other unemployed person, except with a bit less privacy and autonomy.
Weaponslink
A weapon is any object that can be used by one person to do physical harm to another. One of the primary difficulties in regulating the use of weapons is that a sufficiently dedicated person can make a weapon out of pretty much anything.
Human society has proven itself quite capable of allowing people to own knives without having to worry that anyone entering a kitchen could suddenly go on a killing spree. Irresponsibly stored or handled knives can result in injury, but it is difficult to unintentionally cause serious disability or death. On the other hand, irresponsibly stored or handled firearms can (and frequently do) kill one person (or many) with the slip of a finger. It is reasonable that a society that guarantees the physical safety of its citizens should ensure that anyone in control of a firearm is trained in its safe handling and storage.
To this end, the government should be allowed to legally differentiate lethal weapons from all other objects. A lethal weapon is an object which, without proper storage and use, has an uncommonly high risk of unintentional, severe physical harm to any person. In any situation where that risk applies (such as walking around in public, or in a shared residence), the presence of a lethal weapon should be readily apparent to anyone it could threaten, and the person in control of that weapon should be able to prove that they were trained in its safe storage and use.
There is a potential conflict here with the personal right to privacy and presumption of innocence. A society which genuinely operates with due legal process cannot stop someone on the street to search them for concealed weapons without a valid search warrant. As a result, in such a society where lethal weapons also exist, there has to be some allowance for a person without proper training to nevertheless walk around with a concealed gun as long as they do not threaten anyone or show it off in public. The state’s goal should not be to root out unlicensed guns and punish those who use them, because this is merely a recipe for abuse and corruption. It should instead ensure that any person can easily get adequate training (or even make that training part of compulsory childhood education, whenever lethal weapons are sufficiently ubiquitous), and to use legal means to prosecute mishandling only when it can be proven as such in court.
Debt and Creditlink
- Credit (for consumers or businesses) as a necessary tool in a capitalist system to ensure (theoretically) equal ability to participate in the market
- That didn’t work out so well, did it?
- Just like with private schools, don’t try to ban or regulate it; focus on making sure it isn’t necessary.
Job Postings & Electionslink
- Job category defines the process by which a candidate is offered the job: standard, high-risk, elected, critical…
- Standard jobs are weighted by experience
- Elected jobs are weighted by vote
- Etc