A Place You Want to Live In

tldr: A place where you would want to live is not where economy is booming or where you can be rich and all that. But where your life is predictable because there is no oppression from the government. Where you have no risk of losing your rights tomorrow.

The Place I’d Want to Live In

Imagine a tropical island. Or a village you grew up in. A home city. You and how life was careless in your childhood – you didn’t care as much because whatever dangers, you just weren’t aware of them.
You could even think that whatever you’re experiencing currently in life could last long time.

But now you are. And you know that every time your politicians collect themselves, that’s a dangerous time for you. That’s when you start to get nervous.

The place I’d want to live in isn’t perfect. It isn’t rich. It’s stable – stable in the way that matters: your rights frozen in place, protected by the government’s very inability to act quickly.

A place where you know the rules won’t change in your lifetime. Where you can buy a house, start a family, build a business – knowing the "rules of the game" won’t be rewritten by a politician in a hot tub. Where your minority group won’t be banned next year. Where your business won’t be crushed by a new law passed in six months. Where you can plan your life because nothing moves fast enough to destroy it.

That’s the place you want to live in. And you might want to live in it too.

Everyone Picks the Wrong Criteria

Everyone chooses a place to live based on economy. Jobs, safety nets, growth, opportunity.

But you cannot predict the economy. You have an expectation it would grow… but everyone has it?
Even if you could, there is no guarantee a disruption or crisis won’t come.
Maybe you know what is more stable, but that doesn’t mean you are equipped to handle it. But you can never be sure.

Even places with stable economies — the EU, the US — had crises. Every 10 years or so something happens.
All those smart pricks and yet – bam, deal with it.

All of those "highly functioning governments" and they still did nothing.
Very efficient at taking away your freedom, tho.

Economy is fundamentally the same everywhere. You can find work anywhere if you consider the whole planet. You can find a way to support yourself, be it business or employment. Economy is not something that can go away.
It can have ups and downs, some industries destroyed, some new created. But it’s not something that fundamentally can prevent your way of life entirely.
Even without an economy at all – assume you live in the woods or in a very small community without money – you can still live.

Economy is actually slower than government interference. For the economy to take effect, it usually takes at least a year or so. It is actually slow because there are millions of people involved. While a politician can wipe out your life in just a couple of months.

What can prevent your way of life is NOT economy – it’s whether your fundamental rights are preserved.

The Real Question

The fundamental guarantee is: can you continue to live in this country for the next 10, 20, or 30 years?

However, I question the very capacity to continue to live in any given place, because it all depends on whether your fundamental rights are preserved – and the current pattern is that no government is built and guaranteed to preserve them.

Everyone thought they would continue to live a good life and live happily ever after. Every election cycle.
Nobody thought to put safeguards against the next couple of Hitlers.

Can you be sure your rights won’t be taken away in 5-10 years? You can’t.
It’s already happening faster than you can blink.

Predictability of freedom is worth more than efficiency of outcomes.

Because you can build a life around "things won’t change fast". You CANNOT build a life around that while politicians can make 100 new laws a year.
You want a stable floor more than you need a high ceiling.

The Speed of Oppression

You’ve built a high-functioning government where any law can pass in a year or half a year, anything can change rapidly, there’s no public oversight, they can force their will. Any current regime or coalition can make drastic changes that massively limit your freedom in an instant – without you having any say or even the capacity to organize and stop it.

Today you thought of your plans to live here forever, to get a house, to have a family. And tomorrow your minority groups are just outright banned. Or in some other way, you can no longer function the way you did.

Your dreams of your business, your dreams of being someone are just crushed by oppression.

The same speed that lets a government provide is the speed that lets it take away.

You live in this world already. Never a week without bad news. It’s always some bad news, almost every day. Every day you find out something oppressive, something tyrannical happening.

So, do you want to continue living this life where you have to fear opening the news?
I don’t. I open my morning with terror. What is the next liberty they gonna take from us?

Frozen is Protection

I say that barely functioning governments are preferable and much better because of the staticity of change – they cannot make massive changes. Massive changes would be impossible.

Yes, a big powerful government can provide, but it can also take away with the same speed.

Barely functioning + strong freedom protection = things will absolutely not change in 10 years. Your rights as they are now will have a greater chance of preservation. No rapid changes, no new restrictions. Society evolves naturally, not by decree.

Opponents may say this is a very unstable system, but I would say on the contrary it is stable because it is frozen in place. When change requires massive friction and massive effort, there is no change at all – and you can plan for it, you can oversee it and react with plenty of time.

The stability of things not changing is the stability you can build a life on.

And for any kind of risk, you can plan, because you are living it in real time. You can always choose how you manage risk. You can predict and protect, knowing that things won’t be disturbed by any central force. You can plan your risk management strategy and build onto that.

You can adapt to this situation individually, using your own resources and unique characteristics.
Not having a single unified government response that might help in the short term but at the cost of your liberty in the long term.

You are better off managing your risk individually than relying on the government to do so, because they always do a bad job of it. The freedom is yours to adapt as you like, not theirs to push some unified way upon everyone and ruin lives in the process.

And see how, with all that speed of change you give them, we are still very slow to adapt.
Adaptation has always been your personal job. But when you allow them to decide what adaptation is, somebody gets screwed over.

Actually, it is the frequency of change which makes the world harder. Not only is there inherent drift from market changes, but also the government screwing you around. This is twice the unpredictability you have to face. But only one of them is truly destructive – because once you lose your rights, your way of life, your only option becomes to leave.

Government’s Job – Maintenance, Not Expansion

Well, it is wrong to say that a government’s job is to serve the people. It is to maintain the initial win. You have a constitution, you have basic rights, but no further encroaching over those rights is possible. No new laws can be passed with any kind of restrictions.
So whatever is left to manage is infrastructure – and it is safe because no way your rights can be taken away tomorrow.

If you know the government can’t legally change the rules in your lifetime, you can build a life around them. You can build a house, a family, and a career knowing the "rules of the game" won’t be rewritten by a politician in a hot tub.

The Time Capsule Problem

This, however, might be opposed by the time capsule effect – where if your laws are defined in their current state, then in 50 years everything changes so rapidly, it loses the point, and you’re kinda stuck in the past.

Because of that, the principles themselves are unchangeable. But the foundation of the law, which is defined once and for all, does not change with time.
So if the Constitution says freedom of speech, it doesn’t matter what form the speech takes. It’s a blog, a tweet, a neural link signal, or any kind of human creation that can exist.
It doesn’t matter what – it just asserts the fundamental freedom of any human creation in the first place.

Yes, none of the current laws or constitutions are perfect, but the current wrongful vibe is to interpret them whatever current trend is. And it is our job to change this trend towards liberty.

The principle doesn’t need updating. The form changes. The principle doesn’t.

Objections, cuties?

"But a functioning government provides services!" – Yes, and can take them away with the same speed. The provider and the oppressor are the same machine. Tomorrow you have a right to your private life and tomorrow you don’t. Some services, like hospitals, schools, roads – you can live if they degrade or disappear. There is nothing fundamentally life-threatening about that. But if at some point they decide to monitor your entire life, you have no way to escape.

"But isn’t a frozen system just dysfunction?!" – Dysfunction that protects your rights is better than efficiency that can erase them. A frozen state does not mean it stops doing its basic duties. Like having normal police, having a basic economy, building something, providing services. It does not mean that the infrastructure stops working. Everything is still expected to be kept and maintained.

"What about real emergencies?" – Oh yes, they happen, but they are always temporary. Rarely is there an emergency that lasts years and years. And this is the time you have to be extra cautious, so it doesn’t become permanent.

"Doesn’t society need to adapt?" – Society adapts through culture, technology, markets. Government doesn’t need to lead that – it needs to not get in the way. Moreover, this adaptation is stronger because everyone adapts in their own way. While some cannot adapt as quickly or have a hard time, they are still adapting using their individuality, not following some single mandate.

"We got frozen while having tyranny and have to live with it!" – Oh yes, that’s a problem. That’s why you need a system where any previous law is easier to remove, but any new law is very hard to implement.
Remember how rarely they actually work on removing laws. How little time they spend removing themselves from your life. Government overreach and bureaucracy only ever grow.

The Horror Question

Would you prefer to live in a place where tomorrow, in a month, in a year, your whole life can be made illegal?
Where you don’t read the news for a year and the next you wake up having lost half your liberty?
Where you live the normal life and tomorrow you find yourself a criminal?

You can choose. But you have to know what you’re choosing. The place you want to live in isn’t the one with the best economy. It’s the one where your life cannot be rewritten by a politician in a hot tub.