—“Service guarantees citizenship. – This is why I served in the US military even though I wasn’t compelled to.”—David M.
So, for use by our Corporations we have created various forms of stock: including Controlling, Various Preferred, Common, Non-Voting, and Options. These different shares roughly reflect the different value that we bring to companies. Controlling is for management and founders, preferred for professional investors (board members), common for uninformed lenders (‘pseudo-investors’ via the stock market), and non-voting (options in the event of a sale) and options (bonuses) for employees.
When we use the term ‘citizenship’ today it carries with it the current assumption that citizenship is at best equal to a common, non-voting, or option form of stock. When democratic indo europeans use that term, they mean it as a member that the corporation of the aristocracy or church has agreed to insure. In the pre-democratic era, Citizen refers to the heads of households, families or businesses, that have demonstrated investment in the corporation. In the greek era, that was less than 10% of the population (what we would consider the oligarchy (<1%) the nobility (1%), and the upper middle class (<10%)
I don’t really agree with Mencius’ approach, but if you told me instead, that we voted for ‘motions’, (internal contracts between shareholders), that any voting shareholder could put forward a motion, that such motions were perishable (had to collect votes in a specific period of time), that all voting was conducted publicly, entirely transparently, and recorded in the public block chain; that each share granted an individual one vote, and that all individuals were prohibited from possession of more than one share, and that a majority or supermajority of **each** class of shares had approve any vote, then I think that is a successful means of running some sort of juridical democracy under nomocratic rule (rule of law).
This approach, direct voting. does not eliminate public intellectuals, and their propensity to overload, lie, obscure, frame and load, but it does eliminate politicians (agents) who are subject to opaque influences. If the normative and intellectual commons is as I have stated, property that the corporation agrees to defend, and all shareholders possess standing in court in suits concerning the commons, and that we require truthful speech in all matters of the commons, because we require warranty of products, services, and public speech, then public intellectuals can be independently regulated.
Rather than classify individuals ‘as’ something or other, we can issue (and possibly limit) shares (block chain / public-ledger accounts). Shares can be earned (purchased) through demonstrated actions, but not purchased by any material exchange, not transferred, and not awarded, granted, given, for any other reason). If one has earned a higher status share, he must trade in any existing share to redeem the new one.
Repeat felons for example, are effectively wards of the corporation, as are children, not shareholders. I suspect that the class of wards would be fairly large, the class of non voting shares – non-contributing people – fairly large, voting -contributing- fairly large, preferred services shares (care-taking), preferred production(professional, business, and industry), and preferred aristocracy (military, militia, law) fairly large. The most interesting problem is the judiciary, because the law has managed to create a secular ‘priesthood’ (cult) over time due to the very high investment costs in rituals, and to self- manage that cult. Which I find fascinating. And as long as one can preserve that cult via military service, indoctrination, truth-telling, and propertarian calculation, then I think it only requires a small number of people, all of whom have extraordinary interests in it, to preserve liberty.
I will cover this idea in greater depth as we go along.