How Do We Preserve Cultural Uniqueness?
We do not have a sane government. Which is why we rarely discuss sane state policies.
Even when we do consider policy positions, we often are forced to think of them within the dynamics of our current system.
“We can’t have a high trust society provisions in cities (such as goods being sold unattended or unattended book exchanges in the middle of a city), because of the crime and diversity!”
My response is always: “Well, what if we did not have the crime and the diversity?”
Or the infamous: “I’m not going to pay for other people’s welfare! They need to earn it themselves! Everyone for themselves! Bootstraps! RambleRambleRamble!”
My response: “Well, what if those you paid welfare to were actually your neighbors you cared about, and you were once again in a communitarian nation instead of an individualist one?”
It’s hard to step outside of our current degenerative state to imagine potential future policies, but I think it’s helpful to do so. Imagining future policies gives hope to the young and thought to the old. It also helps us see what is possible if we one day succeed.
Sane state policies, as I like to call them, don’t apply to the current United States. I realize functioning welfare provisions in our current condition are impossible. The same goes for having safe, low-crime cities that have high-trust society things within them. Impossible under our current system; I get it. But that does not mean they could never work. Only they cannot work until we win and create the conditions necessary for them.
We can make a communitarian, high-trust society again. Then we could have policies such as those.
With these policies, we could address the genuine, tangible issues we are facing today.
One of those issues is regional cultural preservation.
The culture of the regions within the United States has, for the most part (with a few exceptions), been eliminated by globalization. Even the holdouts like swaths of the South have been affected significantly. We don’t see the different nations very clearly any more in the United States, and that is a major problem.
Our independent nations are being transformed into a grey cosmopolitan empire of consumerism. It is horrendous to watch.
A sane state would desire to preserve their culture, and that includes their local cultures. This would not be hard to do, with just a few choice policies.
For example, an easy way to preserve culture is to incentivize sustainment of the main cultural drivers: the people themselves. Keep the people and their demographic profile, and the culture will remain. We have nations that have been around for millennia that attest to this fact.
Assuming immigration was already greatly restricted given our new system, we could still have policies that preserved local culture within the nation itself.
In the past, this was easy. Moving was difficult, expensive, and risky. You also lost your family. So few people moved.
In the modern age, it is not so. You can still connect with family through technology, and it is nowhere near as expensive nor risky. Everyone is moving all the time. Many across states and even countries. But this has caused a rapid culture loss.
It is a modern problem that requires a modern sane state solution.
One policy that could avert some of this effect would be simply changing property tax laws. Right now, property taxes are an indefinite burden until death. A sane state could offer a property tax bill for twenty years, and then be free for the rest of your life, so long as you remain in that property and do not relocate.
One could even conceive of a policy that allows you to jump properties, but you must stay within the same general community and the property tax policy benefit still applies.
This policy will lower potential revenue, but will encourage the (more important) cultural sustainment piece. Most people will find where they want to be, pay for the twenty years, and stay there. The modern problem of entire cities shifting demographics every decade or so will partially evaporate overnight.
The old will edify their community, the young will find their spot and begin the twenty-year journey.
Most people will not give up a free property tax bill without serious thought and consideration. The moving would not be so hasty, even for those that have only paid in for five or ten years.
Some may wonder how the local regions will pay for their services without the flat property tax. It’s easy to imagine the local regions shifting to other sources of revenue and in using a more communitarian approach to revenue generation in the first place under a sane system. But if I still can’t break you out of the United States current-system-only mindset: Instead of the free property tax policy above, consider a tiered version.
Something like this:
- 0-5 years: 1.5%
- 5-10 years: 1%
- 10-15 years: 0.75%
- 15-20 years: 0.5%
And so on, to an abysmal amount. This tiered variant will have the same effect of lowering revenue but increasing cultural preservation by incentivizing being a stable community member.
Either way you go, it is a simple policy. A sane policy. A policy that, paired with other similar cultural preservation policies, could actually preserve a people and their culture. (Other preservation policies, like if we fix the housing crisis, enact local-only funding on most cultural pieces, and implement a communitarian focus.) These policies will all pair nicely with each other in keeping local regions strong and culturally sound.
My point here is not to show each and every of these potential policies, but to prove that they exist. We could have them, and they could work.
Our modern problems are not impossible to overcome. We just don’t have a sane state that wants to overcome them.
The United States will never enact these, because it is not a sane state. But when we get such a state, we need to remember that we can create the conditions necessary to bring in policies like these.
Under our system, they will work, because they’ll be tied to a functioning state that shares the same root desires that the policies address.
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