No, I'm saying that regardless of my political wants or desires, or anyone's, these deals get made in secret such that either side's reasonable arguments in public are too often pointless. Open source software (and Bitcoin) works different: anyone can audit the code, the design, and the transactions, and if you don't like the direction or outcomes you can fork. I don't get to fork my tax dollars though. 🫤
Discussion
This is true. Last summer I was thinking a lot about a society, that would live in a kind of opensource governance.
A society without a static central constitution. Rather every individual shares their version of constitutional articles and laws, thay stand for or maby what they stand hardly against. With the help of local filtering one would finde out, which society members share similar values and based on this one decides on participating in a community fitting to ones values.
Bigger groups of communities would have to make sure everyone is free to exit whatever community at will.
But I always struggled to come up with ideas for a policing system, that ensures the individual human rights. Since a comunity of extreme people could legitimate exploitation of wealthy members and hinder them from exiting by force, or other communities could conclude with racist rules.
But maby it also can work, when enough people start to apply it and make it more feasable through improving tools to express and exchange those values publicly. And maby the free entrance or exit from individuals has some selfregulating effect on the communities and their values. I would be happy to test it anyway, when I find the energy to write a proof of concept.
GK Chesterton and a few other Catholic philosophers have argued for "distributism" to answer these problems. It's not a perfect system, and probably couldn't work too well in our technologically connected world of 2025, but it does have some serious merits. Check out the quarterly "Hearth & Field". We've really enjoyed it.
Also, the Amish do manage to pull off a sort of self-policing of community values with the way they've intertwined all aspects of both social and spiritual life, although they too have plenty of complications that come along with their communities, including abuse by elders and husbands that too often goes unchecked.