Sollie Citizen Rights Compared To USA Today ...

Think of it this way. Montana and Sweden are effectively the same area.

Hmm... 450sqkm vs 380sqkm... Also, it makes some difference that Sweden is very stretched out(ie you can have twice the distance between places than you can if the area was closer to a square like Montana.

Sweden has 9X greater population than Montana

10x total, 8x on population density.

The state of Wyoming is not called "radio free" without cause. Its largest "city" is Cheyenne with a population of under 65,000. There are no "suburbs". It is half the size of Sweden.

Yeah, but that´s kinda the point, if you look at the 1/3 of Sweden that is the northern half excepting near the coast, Kiruna with its 18000 is the largest "city" until you get to Luleå at the coast, about 250km away.
And if you just go south, the next "large city" is Östersund with 44000, about 650km south.
In between those two, if you stretch the concept of "in between" enough, you can find Gällivare of 8k, Jokkmokk of <3k, Arvidsjaur of <5k, Storuman with 2k and Vilhelmina with <4k population.

~90% of the population is in the southern half of the nation. And most of that, concentrated around Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö and the Mälardalen(~Mälaren valley). Those areas has almost half the population total. Much of the rest is very spread out.

That was exactly my point: Sweden/USA are mirror scaled images of each other geographically. If you switch Sweden's S/N to the USA's E/W.

Michael Everett wrote:

HB of CJ wrote:Too many people vote. They also vote their own self interest.

<snip> Add a rider that anyone who claims benefits (as opposed to paychecks) from the Government is banned from paying taxes and you get voters who believe in the value of work and are willing to make the required financial sacrifice to attain the ability to guide the path of the country.

IIRC in the HH story about annexing the Talbot cluster, the statement was made that Manticore had a system where a person needed to pay taxes of at least one unit more than he got in benefits to vote. In Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" the requirement was that in order to vote you needed to, in actual practice, risk your life for the polity.

IMHO Fiction is our cultural imagination. Science fiction is our cultural imagination about possible futures - many of which are extremely unlikely in one way or another. But if we don't think about something in the first place, it is not possible to test it against reality. It isn't always easy; look at how long Zeno's paradox lasted before it was solidly solved.

Jerry Pournelle's suggested political 2-d graph maps the different groups in a better way than right/left.

I would like to see a solid multivariate statistical evaluation of real world results from the major different philosophies as applied over a century or so to allow time for the consequences to occur. We have a lot of history, couldn't we take the trouble to learn from it?

We have a lot of history, couldn't we take the trouble to learn from it?

Of course not, because that would suck as bad for proponents of free market economy just as badly as the most corrupt and inept planned economy ever.


And of course it would also show that corruption is the problem, not various things blamed for it, like "big government" etc...

So, the ones with money seriously does not prefer such learning to happen. And while they don´t rule, they have far too much influence, constantly corrupting the systems in place.

IIRC in the HH story about annexing the Talbot cluster, the statement was made that Manticore had a system where a person needed to pay taxes of at least one unit more than he got in benefits to vote.

One of those things that sounds ooh so pretty in theory, but once you start looking at what it actually means, it starts to smell pretty damn disgusting.

In Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" the requirement was that in order to vote you needed to, in actual practice, risk your life for the polity.

And THAT, is just outright village idiot level stupid.