Chapter 10-I-k
The Stabilizing and Moderating Influence of Dues


Establishing and collecting dues can provide many benefits to an organization beyond their primary purpose of providing money for operations.

One benefit is to qualify members. We think that an organization made up of a smaller number of citizen-members who are highly enough committed to the organization and its goals to the extent of paying regular dues will be stronger than an organization with a larger number of members many of whom are only marginally committed to the organization’s goals.

Regular dues will also serve to provide a measure of protection for the group, particularly in its early stages of development when it is most vulnerable to organized disruption from hostile political entities. In its early days, the organization will be more vulnerable to organized exploitation of the group’s democratic system to mount hostile takeover attempts. Other measures, in addition to dues, might be necessary in the very early life of the organization, to thwart attempts of this sort, but dues themselves will go a long ways toward preventing large enough numbers of hostile people from joining with the intent to either disrupt, or take over control of the organization, for a hostile purpose.

We think that dues will also tend to unify the organization around its core message, and the agenda that naturally flows from it. People whose beliefs are less consistent with the organization’s Basic Message will be far less likely to hang around if they are required to pay dues to do so.

We also think that dues might serve to moderate the public message that the organization puts out. It will be more likely to stick to a broadly appealing Basic Message promoting Democracy, and the concept of the Common Good, and the need to ‘take back America’ from the clutches of powerful special interests, and less likely to begin preaching extremist messages, if it realizes that extremism is going to cost it members, and therefore dramatically lessen its power by reducing its dues revenues.

Once the organization is fully functional, we, as conveners, plan to try very hard, by exercising our own democratic rights, to convince the citizen-membership that a course that sticks to a simple and powerful Basic Message, and allows that message time to evolve in the public consciousness into a more complex agenda, will be more effective than promoting a complex agenda of positions on controversial issues from the outset, which the broad public consciousness is not yet ready to accept, and will therefore regard as ‘extremist’.

But if we are not successful, and the will of The People takes the organization in a different direction, perhaps the effect of limited growth, or a shrinking membership and dues base, will serve to make our point for us. Leadership is crucially important in a democracy, (as it is in all human endeavors), and we hope that the organization can identify and authorize effective democratic leaders, who can steer the organization, through reasoned persuasion, in effective directions, before it leads itself astray. But we think that the hard-wired structural effects imparted within an organization by a dues-supported nature will themselves tend to moderate the organization's Basic Message to have the broadest and most universal moral appeal.


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