For months, an idea to add called the Worker’s Communes Situation sat on the Trello, which I eagerly anticipated, alongside many other fans. This was one of many missing link concepts heavily implied by content pre-existing in the game, but never properly modelled, so it’s disappointing to find it’s been struck from the docket in favour of the bafflingly enduring ‘ban strikes’, ‘deport migrants’ ‘tax haven’ and ‘militarised police’ concepts, many of which are proudly displayed in the game’s polls.
What happened there? Is this game going to keep sliding right? Will we have to rely on modders to model the left-wing parts of modern politics?
Also, you can’t ban strikes. They tried. If you could, we wouldn’t have had an industrial revolution, and you wouldn’t have an 8 hour day or a 5 day work week.
I don’t remember there being a “worker’s commune situation”. There was a “worker’s cooperative situation”. But there’s a mod which adds that in as a policy.
I can’t comment on whether the game is sliding further to the right, or whether they’re being displayed “proudly”. But it would be nice to know Ciff’s thoughts on this and on the removal of “more gender policies”.
Technically speaking, you can ban strikes, it just depends on what their effectivity is. Arguably, banning strikes is more effective in the US than it is in France.
I think that Cliff pretty much works by himself, so if he took it down, he would know why.
A similar thing happened with investigating voter elasticity. There are protest votes now, but I don’t they’re the same, they must be related but not the same.
As a “Point 0”, I want to state explicitly that my response is not a criticism of your political views, or an attack against you personally. While I can sympathise with your point that an abundance of policies in favour of one ideology could prompt Overton window issues, I think you’ve missed the mark a bit.
The fact that some policies have been on the Trello board for a long time, suggests they are not going to be implemented, or are at least very low priority. If there were a number of right-wing policies flying through the board, that would be of concern (See: Survivorship Bias). I also don’t think there is an absence of “left-wing” policies, certainly not enough to suggest claims of right-wing bias. You examples around employment rights can be countered by the existence of already existing policies. You could set ‘Labour Laws’ to maximum, along with ‘Worker Dividends’, ‘TU Board Members’, ‘Cap CEO Wage Multiplier’ etc. and that would comfortably represent what you want. There’s only so much space on the screen, and some of what you want falls under other umbrellas already.
There are also many left-wing (not even just left-of-centre) policies on top of the ones already mentioned. For example; ‘Ban Private Healthcare’, ‘Ban Private Education’, ‘Ban 2nd Home Ownership’, and ‘UBI’, as well as many policy sliders which at their extreme are left-wing.
The game itself isn’t to the right or the left. What are offered are policy options which may be left/right, auth/lib, nationalist/globalist, etc. There is no obligation for you to select those policies you don’t want.
Examples would be: “send 10% of the population to the gulags”,“death squads patrol the poorest parts of a city”, “remove all regulation from the markets”, “summarily execute members of ‘x’ group”, “ban the market”, “stop all trade”, “integrate satellite states without their consent”, “destroy all religious shrines”, “ensure strict adherance to religion by the death penalty”, “have family members spy on each other”, “establish the penultimate domination of one gender”, “give security services powers second only to the leader”, etc. The only thing that comes close is torture use by intelligence services and setting the death penalty for most crimes.