Civil Disobedience - Keeping Taxes for Ourselves

Day 3,263, 11:18 • Published in Canada Serbia • by Sever Vetrovnik

First of all, I'd like to introduce myself to the eCanadian gaming community. I came here from Serbia a few months ago, but didn't have enough time to write an article and present myself "officially". So, here I come. 🙂 I used to define myself as an e-journalist in the first place, with foreign relations as my main field of interest. After being a politician for a (too) long time, I am nothing more than a common player now, who likes his peaceful and quiet way of playing the game when and how it suits him. I hope that I would fit in. I'm not as active as I used to be, but I will contribute as much as I can to eCanada. 🙂

Now, this article presents a proposal to enrich the game with civil disobedience. The idea is to let the citizens decide whether they will pay manager taxes if a dictator is in office in their country. As I wrote in a post on the erepublik forum:

Democracy that we used to know, that was our way of governing society, has lost its purpose as many dictators have risen to power and subjugated whole nations, rendering political parties and ordinary citizens essentially powerless. We now do not have our voice in government anymore. We do not have a say in what laws will be accepted or what our foreign policy will be. Being overpowered in military terms, we can only submit to dictators as revolutions against them usually result in no more than approximately ten days of liberty.

This was my motivation for proposing civil disobedience. I believe that ordinary citizens will feel more involved in the game even if a dictator runs their country and, by definition, does not have to take their opinion into account. Of course, some nations agreed to adopt dictatorship as a governing system. To take such cases into account, I believe that refusal to pay taxes should be voluntary. That way the citizens that do not support dictatorship can effectively influence the dictator, and those that support their dictator may still pay the tax. The dictators could be offered to buy currency by special price to compensate for the lost taxes. One may argue that citizens can fight the dictator on the battlefield, but the mechanism of military coup is such that only damage matters. Theoretically, one strong player can keep dozens of other players under his power forever, with only occasional 10-day breaks to reset determination. But if those subjugated players quit the game, so will the dictator. Introducing some sort of balance between them is the way to make things more sustainable and interesting.

Now, this idea is a stubble, and may not be the best version of disobedience that one can think of. But, it does introduce new dynamics to the game, and if the game is interesting to the players, then it fulfills its purpose.

Possible modifications are:
- Letting citizens keep only half of the tax.
- Expanding this idea to democracy and not limiting disobedience to dictatorships.

Feel free to comment (and subscribe 😁. The poll in the forum is open for voting so don't forget to cast your vote. 🙂 At least, we might motivate the admins and programmers to think of and introduce something new, no matter if this very idea gets accepted or not. 🙂

Shout:

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The title says it all 🙂
https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/civil-disobedience-keeping-taxes-for-ourselves-2617991/1/20#comments

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