Economy Reboot
Posted: Wed Nov 12, 2008 3:13 pm
Ok, the number of people complaining about the system where erbs=vote have grown, and devaluing the erb doesn't appear to have dramatically increased our transactions. That's fine, normal micronational economies fade in prominence after a month. But we're Shireroth. I expect better of us.
I still think that Hesam was right in his original proposal that your economic strength has to be closely related to something other than merely what you can buy from normal businesses ... because as we can see, that sort of thing does tend to drop out if people don't have too much interest in making money. And I always believe that Voting is the ideal "thing" to link to for Shireroth because, unlike many other nations, we have an active legislature and we do, at times, have considerable debate on bills. Why shouldn't those citizens who have contributed the most to Shirithian development (since our major income at the moment stems from bounties) have the strongest potential say in voting? But yes, the current system can be confusing.
There are two ways we can get around this that will, I hope, make it less confusing, but also maintain the strong regional pride and economic incentives to earn money. One is, as Ari suggested, to make every law an "auction." If there's no dissent, people just "bid" 0 erb AYE, and a bill can pass with no money being used (eg in the case of a treaty). In a more controversial bill, the NAY's would have to "bid" more money than the previous AYE bid and so on. Ari's been working on the fine details so I'll leave him to explain that.
The other is a system I came up with that I'd love to try. The advantages of my system (compared to the current one, that is), is that there's no confusing changes in voting power every single time somebody spends an erb; we don't have to worry about that Baron's moving their money thing (which nobody did, anyway); we don't have to worry about people changing duchy's and messing the vote up; and it gets a great revenue stream for the government, while still leaving people money to spend on other things.
My system is this. Instead of erbs automatically = a vote, Erbs can instead be used to buy a vote. The Shirithian Government has an unlimited supply of "voting tokens". Each of these may be sold for 10 erb to a Duchy (no more of this individual voting power thing, you just buy votes for your duchy as a whole). MiniTrade will maintain an up-to-date list of votes every time they're sold (alternatively, we might be able to code this into the bank ...) and at the start of each vote, the Praetor will take the list to the Landsraad and use that one for that particular vote, like normal. But the beauty of this method is if you lose a vote, you can change your voting strength quickly. Lemme give you an example:
Say at the start voting tokens were as follows: Brookshire - 100; Elwynn - 80; Kildare - 110; Yardistan - 105; Straylight - 70. Say Straylight, Yardistan and Elwynn voted NAY and Kildare and Brookshire voted AYE. 80+70+105 = 255 > 210 = 110 + 100. The vote fails. But Brookshire and Kildare really like this bill. So they each spend another 500 erb and get another 50 votes each. Now it's 255 < 310, and the bill passes.
Over time, it'd probably even out to a position of most duchies having about the same amount of money. If a duchy pulled ahead, the others would want to catch up so they'd earn more money and buy more votes. Depending on how popular this is, we may be able to avoid taxes for some time. Also, in the above example, there weren't many votes out, so it was easy to get ahead. After a couple months, each Duchy might have 1000+ votes. Getting a lead there requires a lot more money, so the system becomes more stable as time passes.
Remember as I explain this (for those who still don't like the idea of "buying" votes) that the majority of our money comes not from businesses, or real world wealth, but from government bounties. At the moment, subtract 2000 from everyone's account (that's how much we started with in the inflation) and the amount left, people have earned. That's not money they got from "exploiting the workers" or from "inheriting a fortune" - that's money that represents the time and effort they've put into Shireroth since our economy started. Why shouldn't they get a greater say in the Landsraad?
The other advantage to this method I forgot to mention above is its implications for inactive people. At the moment, we have a number of accounts of people who were here when the economy was inflated (and therefore have money) but have since become largely inactive. The duchy's are still getting that money added to their vote. Under this system, Duke's can't really access that money (as no Duke has admin powers on the bank to force people to pay) and so the potential to add votes is restricted to active citizens. Also, Mike talked about not being willing to pay non-Brookshirithians because he didn't want his duchy to lose votes. In this system, you wouldn't. You probably had no intention to convert that money into votes, and the person you pay may have no intention to convert that money into votes. Votes are there as a big spending item, to invest in, but the normal economy can happen to the side and not be disturbed by the implications of changing vote power.
Either of the above methods also make something Hesam kinda proposed, and then Toketi evolved independently, a really viable option. Buying units for civil wars. CITRA (ignoring the bit about getting money from the land you hold, as that's not suitable for Shireroth) is a recwar system designed for internal recwars. With something similar in Shireroth, people could buy troops for their County/Barony/Duchy at their point cost in SNARL points (ie 1 erb = 1 SNARL point). We'd have to fine tune if that money goes to the government, or to various "orbat sellers", but the potential is we could each buy private armies and have a viable system to civil war in without the normal chaos. Under the current system people may be tentative about losing voting power to get an army. Under either of the above systems, you wouldn't lose any votes, and indeed, this might remove a lot of potential spending from votes. Shireroth isn't as recwar orientated as Toketi, so such a system wouldn't work as the sole basis for our economy ... but as a side to business and vote spending, I think it would be an excellent addition.
I still think that Hesam was right in his original proposal that your economic strength has to be closely related to something other than merely what you can buy from normal businesses ... because as we can see, that sort of thing does tend to drop out if people don't have too much interest in making money. And I always believe that Voting is the ideal "thing" to link to for Shireroth because, unlike many other nations, we have an active legislature and we do, at times, have considerable debate on bills. Why shouldn't those citizens who have contributed the most to Shirithian development (since our major income at the moment stems from bounties) have the strongest potential say in voting? But yes, the current system can be confusing.
There are two ways we can get around this that will, I hope, make it less confusing, but also maintain the strong regional pride and economic incentives to earn money. One is, as Ari suggested, to make every law an "auction." If there's no dissent, people just "bid" 0 erb AYE, and a bill can pass with no money being used (eg in the case of a treaty). In a more controversial bill, the NAY's would have to "bid" more money than the previous AYE bid and so on. Ari's been working on the fine details so I'll leave him to explain that.
The other is a system I came up with that I'd love to try. The advantages of my system (compared to the current one, that is), is that there's no confusing changes in voting power every single time somebody spends an erb; we don't have to worry about that Baron's moving their money thing (which nobody did, anyway); we don't have to worry about people changing duchy's and messing the vote up; and it gets a great revenue stream for the government, while still leaving people money to spend on other things.
My system is this. Instead of erbs automatically = a vote, Erbs can instead be used to buy a vote. The Shirithian Government has an unlimited supply of "voting tokens". Each of these may be sold for 10 erb to a Duchy (no more of this individual voting power thing, you just buy votes for your duchy as a whole). MiniTrade will maintain an up-to-date list of votes every time they're sold (alternatively, we might be able to code this into the bank ...) and at the start of each vote, the Praetor will take the list to the Landsraad and use that one for that particular vote, like normal. But the beauty of this method is if you lose a vote, you can change your voting strength quickly. Lemme give you an example:
Say at the start voting tokens were as follows: Brookshire - 100; Elwynn - 80; Kildare - 110; Yardistan - 105; Straylight - 70. Say Straylight, Yardistan and Elwynn voted NAY and Kildare and Brookshire voted AYE. 80+70+105 = 255 > 210 = 110 + 100. The vote fails. But Brookshire and Kildare really like this bill. So they each spend another 500 erb and get another 50 votes each. Now it's 255 < 310, and the bill passes.
Over time, it'd probably even out to a position of most duchies having about the same amount of money. If a duchy pulled ahead, the others would want to catch up so they'd earn more money and buy more votes. Depending on how popular this is, we may be able to avoid taxes for some time. Also, in the above example, there weren't many votes out, so it was easy to get ahead. After a couple months, each Duchy might have 1000+ votes. Getting a lead there requires a lot more money, so the system becomes more stable as time passes.
Remember as I explain this (for those who still don't like the idea of "buying" votes) that the majority of our money comes not from businesses, or real world wealth, but from government bounties. At the moment, subtract 2000 from everyone's account (that's how much we started with in the inflation) and the amount left, people have earned. That's not money they got from "exploiting the workers" or from "inheriting a fortune" - that's money that represents the time and effort they've put into Shireroth since our economy started. Why shouldn't they get a greater say in the Landsraad?
The other advantage to this method I forgot to mention above is its implications for inactive people. At the moment, we have a number of accounts of people who were here when the economy was inflated (and therefore have money) but have since become largely inactive. The duchy's are still getting that money added to their vote. Under this system, Duke's can't really access that money (as no Duke has admin powers on the bank to force people to pay) and so the potential to add votes is restricted to active citizens. Also, Mike talked about not being willing to pay non-Brookshirithians because he didn't want his duchy to lose votes. In this system, you wouldn't. You probably had no intention to convert that money into votes, and the person you pay may have no intention to convert that money into votes. Votes are there as a big spending item, to invest in, but the normal economy can happen to the side and not be disturbed by the implications of changing vote power.
Either of the above methods also make something Hesam kinda proposed, and then Toketi evolved independently, a really viable option. Buying units for civil wars. CITRA (ignoring the bit about getting money from the land you hold, as that's not suitable for Shireroth) is a recwar system designed for internal recwars. With something similar in Shireroth, people could buy troops for their County/Barony/Duchy at their point cost in SNARL points (ie 1 erb = 1 SNARL point). We'd have to fine tune if that money goes to the government, or to various "orbat sellers", but the potential is we could each buy private armies and have a viable system to civil war in without the normal chaos. Under the current system people may be tentative about losing voting power to get an army. Under either of the above systems, you wouldn't lose any votes, and indeed, this might remove a lot of potential spending from votes. Shireroth isn't as recwar orientated as Toketi, so such a system wouldn't work as the sole basis for our economy ... but as a side to business and vote spending, I think it would be an excellent addition.
