Basic Human Needs
All of American law and custom is severely biased by the accidental nature of the European arrival here. There was about a century gap between the arrivals of the first explorers and the serious start of colonization, and in that gap was one of the greatest unrecorded epidemics in history – the wiping out of roughly 95% of the native population by the smallpox the explorers brought with them. The natives had been tending their food-forests for millennia, and it takes more than just a few mere decades of neglect to seriously damage a well-tended food forest. So the early European colonists here grew up with the idea that if you didn’t like the way your town was being run, it was trivial to move off into the “wilderness” where you could live off the land until you could get a European-style farm going.
That world was a one-time accident – yeah, later colonists sometimes did engage in deliberate biological warfare with infected blankets, but the big epidemic really was an accident – and nobody lives in it any more. So we-as-society have to provide what that early custom thought was provided “by nature.”
We’ve so far identified 21 basic needs that our people need to have met to reach that “natural” state:
- Homeostatic Environment (no Venusization)
- Safety from toxins such as industrial pollution
- Breathable Air
- Potable Water
- Nutritious and Nontoxic Food
- Sleep
- Shelter
- Excretion
- Physical Safety
- Health Care
- Transportation
- Education
- Communication
- Remuneration
- Occupation
- Representation
- Inspiration
- Participation
- Safe and reliable power (electricity required, augmentation by other forms possible.)
- Localized self-supporting economic system
- Community defense against organized actors
It seems impossible that more needs would *not* be discovered; we will add them as they are suggested. Got anything?