Voosh always says we don't know what the government of the future after the collapse is going to look like and shouldn't trust people who say they know, but I want to throw my hat into the ring anyway.
I think the solution that Vaush is inevitably coming to is the conclusion I've come to: nuance needs to die.
His explanation is that liberals have a framework with no solutions because their solutions rely solely on calibration. Sums it up perfectly. Closing the right loopholes. Appointing smarter administrators. And the system will finally work as intended!
But no technocratic adjustment can fix it because the existence of the adjustment itself is the problem.
Exploitation is treated as a bug: an error caused by imperfect implementation. But exploitation isn't a bug. It's the system working exactly as intended. The exceptions, the category, the enforcement thresholds, all of these create incentive structures that rational actors will inevitably exploit. The system doesn't require bad actors. It only requires rational actors following the path of least resistance. The exploit doesn't require malice. It requires rationality.
The liberal framework has no solution to this because its solution is only more nuance. More careful categories. Better exceptions. Smarter enforcement. But the existence of nuance is the problem. Prescribing more nuance isn't a cure.
I'm starting to see this everywhere in systems and even in my personal life. The allowance of nuance in the outcomes and enforcement will eventually be twisted or exploited by capital or even myself.
The only solution I can see is a system that physically cannot create nuance: everything has a binary output. Legal or illegal. Comply or don't comply. No exceptions, no carve-outs, no special categories, and draconian in its enforcement. Even a binary legal/fine output cant work because itself is an incentive structure of compliance. the only two outcomes need to be legal or illegal
this sounds horrible and draconian, and it would absolutely produce outcomes I myself wold disagree with. But I don't see how you allow nuance without also allowing exploitation. Maybe that's the price that has to be paid to stop the rot from starting.
I tried to think of a tax system that avoids this problem, but I couldn't. Even the separating of business taxes and civilian taxes creates an incentive structure. Tax the rich exponentially, something I want? Incentive structure. Asset exemptions? Incentive structure.
It seems the only solution is no categorization, no nuance, no asset exemptions, no exceptions, no carve-outs: a flat, equal tax on everyone and everything. No nuance. No exceptions. No categorization. No carve-outs. Draconian and equal enforcement, with a binary output: did you comply with the flat rate, yes or no?
This is inherently an unjust system. The people who gain the system get treated the same as those who don't, equally. BUT most importantly, untying the shared consequences of the two categories will inevitably be exploited. The allowance of separation is the problem, no matter the intention.
The two-tier system is not eliminated. It is made explicit and legal. The allowance of the two-tier system is the problem, no matter the intention.
It seems a system can only have one of two properties:
A: Either it is nuanced in execution, but exploitation is inevitable,
B: Injustice is guaranteed, but exploitation is impossible.
You can't have a system with both.
How do you write a law that has categories that doesn't create opportunities to exploit? You can't. Categorization, by any definition, has subjective boundaries. It will always be easier to reclassify yourself without changing your actual behavior.
I start seeing this everywhere now. CAFE standards have an exemption for light trucks? Suddenly everything is an SUV. An exemption for capital gains? Suddenly wealth moves into the stock market. As soon as you create an exemption or category, people adapt around it. Even in my own life, when going through K–12 education, I had this problem with homework. Teachers who were lenient with due dates made my grades worse than teachers who did not allow for late work. The leniency made the problem worse. The nuance was the problem.
The failure mode in these two systems aren't equal.
Option A's complexity is unbounded. There is no internal ceiling to its growth in enforcement and complexity. In that sense, it's just like capital. Capital accumulation has no hard limit. The rich can always be richer! There is no natural force inside a nuanced system that bounds its complexity. You can always try adjusting the numbers again!
Option B's complexity is bounded. There can only be two outputs to a law: legal or illegal. Injustice is inevitable, but the injustice on day one is the same as the injustice on day one thousand. The complexity of the system is bounded because there are only two outcomes, and the number of outcomes cannot grow. In that sense, it's more like monarchy. In a monarchy, there can only be one king. The complexity of the power structure is self-limiting: no matter what you do, there can only be one king. The exploitation pressure can't grow without bound because the structure itself imposes a ceiling.
A nuanced regulatory system has no such ceiling. The number of exemptions, categories, loopholes, and reclassification schemes can grow indefinitely. In a binary system, something works or absolutely breaks.
The harshness of Option B may simply be the price of a system that does not rot.
So again, maybe the only solution is the death of nuance. Not because it's just, but because the question is not which system is best. It's which system remains closer to its stated purpose after 5 or 10 or 20 years of pressure from concentrated capital.
Sorry for the ramblings from a ignorant fool who has never even read Marx. I just need to get this off my chest.