Common property.
We've covered two models of property: private (a privately-owned company, for instance) or collective (a worker coop). There is in practice a certain degree of overlap between the two.
Erdani recognizes a third model, common property. These covers what economists would call common resources and public goods.
These are resources that have no clear owner: roads, railroads, the atmosphere, the justice system, public security, and so on.
One way to define property is that the owner of a resouce can demand arbitration if his property is violated and obtain compensation for that violation. You own your house because you have the right to obtain compensation if it's damaged or burned down.
We've covered the case of atmospheric pollution. Nobody owns the atmosphere, or more accurately everybody owns it.
The solution is that anyone can act as the owner; in practice a sufficient number of citizen can act legally, in front of a court, as 'owners', with the right to seek compensation for atmospheric pollution, in the legal form of an association.
Compensation for damages on pollution can go in part to the association, but not entirely. The legal owners of the atmosphere include the entire population, so compensation should in theory be redistributed to everyone.
In practice compensation is shared between the association that brought the case and a fund dedicated to a suitable public good.
That's actually pretty easy! Unlike a road, the atmosphere doesn't require maintenance. Damage to the atmosphere is easy to measure, suitable compensation can be found.
Roads
A road could be handled as private property: an entrepreneur buys up some terrain, builds the road and charges a toll. In fact it sometimes
is handled that way. There are two problems with that approach under the Erdan legal system:
- Preexisting roads. The Second Empire was responsible for road construction so technically owns all roads. The Second Empire died before settling a succession, so there's no one to buy the road from.
- Suppose you want to build a road from Ash'ashomato Yerdus. In practice there are only a few choices availables as to the path the road will take. You select one of the possible routes, buy up the terrain, build the road and collect the tolls. The problem is that you not only own the physical terrain (which is something that had a previous owner you could buy up from), but you also own the most efficient route between Aros and Yerdus. Can you own the most efficient path? It wasn't the terrain owner's, so they could not sell it to you? It's not even intellectual property (the best path is pretty trivial to figure out)
Legally speaking, there's really no way to own a road. How can we maintain them?
Under the Erdan system, this is handled by setting an ad-hoc committee and a trust fund for road maintenance. The committee is set up by petition: get enough signatures and you're in. Membership can be rescinded by petition -- or worst case scenario, setting up an alternate committee and going to court.
The committees are generally local; they federate at various levels to handle issues of greater scope; there are dedicated committee for each route of national importance (such as the Ash'ashoma - Yerdus roads).
Committees, associations and trust funds all act as proxies for the entire population -- who are the legal owners of the road.
The whole idea that ownership of the most direct path between two points is impossible is, by the way, a rationalization devised after the fact. The system was set up that way, for more prosaic reasons: the idea was that no single network could control transportation in a given part of the country, which would have upset the balance of power.
Health
Hospitally can be privately owned or collectively owned. Doctors can have a private practice.
The Erdani view is that denying medical treatment, for any reason, is equivalent to murder or injury. They also hold that labour must be compensated.
This leads to the interesting legal conclusion that doctors are entirely within their right to present a bill and expect payment, and that patients are just as entitled not to pay it if you can't afford it -- it could be equivalent to extorsion. They cannot deny treatment to patients either. They can refer them to a cheaper colleague... assuming this does not lead to a dangerous delay.
The underlying legal/ethic idea is that anyone in the position of saving someone from injury or death should do so. So doctors will argue that they have the obligation to treat the poor, but that wealthier people are under the obligation of paying the bill -- wealthier people meaning 'almost everyone', because of course people could pool resources to pay.
In practice this leads to a system where doctors are paid partly by their patient, partly by a public health fund, which makes public health, in part, common property. (There are other factors: there's an obvious cost to society if contagious diseases are not treated, there's a less obvious but just as real cost to have large portions of society suffering from preventable, severe illness or injury.)
Education
Education is in some respect similar. Schools can privately or collectively owned; Universities are each a
sui generis entity. The University of Aros in Ash'ashoma is a network in its own right, and in addition to education offers legal advice and expertise.
Teachers should be paid so, naturally enough (to the Erdan mind) schools can present a bill. The issue is that:
- Science, knowledge, the law, or anything taught by the school is common property. So in a sense charging for school mean asking for payment for access to something you already own.
- The social benefits of everyone being, at the very least, literate is obvious. To go further: Erdani as an industrialized society with a sophisticated social system would collapse were it not for widespread education.
In practice funding is arranged, in part, by education trust funds.
Generalizing; financing all this
What we see (depending on country, of course) as state function the Erdans see as very distinct problems of their own with specific constraints.
Justice and the law are handled by amateur, semi-professional or professional judges organized in concurrent networks with cooperation, when necessary, handled by national or regional conventions. The money supply is left to free market organization with some judicial oversight. Some public works are handled by assurance contracts.
Most common property (sewers, air pollution, roads, educatio, health) involve a committee-trust fund system.
To recap:
local committees are set up, with a petition system that is essentially democratic in nature (this is similar to electing a representative in a legislature); a counter-committee can be set up at any time to control the first, with help from the judiciary in deciding which of the two is right and to what extent. The committee is associated with a trust fund, and it can use the fund to either contract to have the roads built, or finance health care, or provide financing to schools.
The committee's scope depends entirely on the issue at hand. For the road system (or for that matter, the sewers, or waste collection) the organization is geographical, with the committees federating to handle larger issues. For education it's a complex combination of geography, religion, politics and network affiliation. (The Ashkaroshi handle their own schools, there is a network of secular/socialist schools, other schools will make a point of their neutrality, others are dedicated to different pedagogical approaches.) For health the divisions are geographical, but also according to medical specialty.
How is everything financed?
- Sometimes the answer is obvious. You pay a fee for use of the sewer network, and a fine if you don't use it.
- There are more elaborate variants of the above system: there's a fee/fine associated with domestic fuels that is in practice collected by sellers and producers.
- Sometimes a satisfactory, adhoc approach emerged. The judicial system charges its users; but if one of the guilty parties is clearly in the wrong, it has to pay the entire bill.
- Lotteries and gambling, a relatively painless way to raise revenue.
- Transfer of funds between different kinds of common property or committees. It makes economic sense, as an incentive, to collect fees/fines for using certain kind of fuels, but the air pollution committee has little use for the money. And in fact there are good reasons for it not to hold on to it; it may be tempted to overcharge or find pollution where there is none. So the fines they collect are distributed to other funds, typically to finance hospitals.
- Transfer of funds, again. It's understood that revenue raised for schools in a wealthy area must be shared with poorer school committees.
- Voluntary donation.
- Volunteer work. A judge or panel of judge has the customary power of selecting people, at random, as enforcers or jury. Some people won't do it; but there are enough people to accept jury or enforcer duty for it to work.
- Or simply, charging customers. Rich families pay for school; if you can afford it you'll pay for your own medical care or your insurance will. There are some toll roads.
In some cases, there's a complex combination of all, plus something else entirely. Education at the University of Aros in Ash'ashuma is free, in fact students are paid to study there. The University gets generous donations, it serves as a repository for various legal schools and offers legal advice. Students past a certain level are required to teach, do research, and for law degrees act as free judges or legal counsels. The University also rents out enforcement services. Finally the University has you sign an agreement to the effect that you're required to donate a fairly substantial sum should you become wealthy as an alumni.
Wealth redistribution
Capital and wealth are very nice things to have. I wish I had more of these myself. It comes with a number of drawbacks: wealth naturally accumulates, there are common goods/property that need funding, and besides the marginal utility of extra wealth is pretty low to his/her owner (really, does Elon Musk even notices when he loses a billion or two.)
Wealth accumulation has a negative effect: once every building in the city is owned by one of three people, there's no housing market there, unless you can keep building new condos fast enough to keep up. And as the Erdans know first-hand, if all agricultural lands is in the hands of a handful of landlords, the end result is millions of desperate people.
Here the two factions at play in Erdan history were the conservatives (who were prepared to defend private property as an absolute right) and the socialists (who wanted no capital wealth at all).
The answer is that past a certain wealth threshold, an annual donation must be made to the Petitions, a specific kind of committee (typically, the local one, but asset owners are free to choose which). The Petitions reaffects the donation to any of the various trust funds listed above, according to democratic procedure. (In practice members are elected on the understanding that they will vote for a give distribution of vote.)
It's possible for voters to challenge the Petitions Committee by setting up an alternate Committee, for instance.
Various committees may contest the Petitions' choice.
That last bit may need an example: suppose the Petitions (in accordance to the electorate, we expect) to allocate nothing to the Yerdus-Ash'ashuma highway. The Y-A committee has the right to ask for mediation on this decision. The decision has a chance to be overturned in some cases: if it's proven the highway is so underfunded and in lack of proper maintenance it's actually dangerous; or if the constant traffic there proves the highway is very much used and the voters are collectively acting as free riders.
(In practice the procedure is rarely applied)
Anyway, back to the wealth fee. The underlying reasoning is that it a) finances collective goods necessary to acquire wealth in the first place b) compensates for any collective harm that might have been done, even unknowingly, in the process of wealth acquisition. (An analogy might be zakat in Islam; I'm told zakat means purification, in the sense that purifies wealth of any evil associated with its acquisition.)
Wealth reporting is strictly voluntary, and of course tax evasion is one of those unavoidable sins. There are counter-measures if you're found out, though. There are several ways this could happen: The Petitions maintains a census board. Newspapers act as a concurrent agency. Another way is that if you list property at a given value, it expresses willingness to sell it at that price.
Say you own an apartment building, which you value at 4000 dyollasi. You sell it at 6000 dyollasi. The buyer has the opportunity to check your valuation, and sue for the 2000 dyollasi. More subtly this can apply to rent. If your tenants find out they pay collectively 600 dyollasi in rent a year, with average rental yield being at 5%, they have the right to ask for some money back. (Or more likely, decide they only owe you 400. The courts are not likely to back you if you decide to evict them.)
In practice the above was hammered out as a compromise between, again, the conservative and socialist legal school. The conservatives essentially figured out it was better to pay a little rather than have the socialist gain more control and lose everything. Ultimately it was a bad bargain; the idea of the wealth fee felt contrived to everyone at first but is now so thoroughly accepted cheating on it registers as theft. Of course organizations of socialist inspiration (the Metal Union, Land Reform) that happen to own assets have to pay the fee as well.
Another rationale was the hope that no single network could accumulate enough wealth to get a dominant position above the others.
A successful electronics company requires a lot of organization, but the organization skills required to mass produce vacuum tubes are entirely different; it's not like being a successful manufacturer gives you an edge in guerilla warfare. I don't think anyone worries about Intel organizing a coup!