The compensation model

The course’s name for the arrangement installed in the Spanish colonial town, and the single most useful idea in Level 1.

Four features, and they only work together. The office collects the state’s money. The state pays it almost nothing. The holder is exempt from the tax he collects. And the job passes by heredity, and later can be bought.

Under those four conditions, private extraction is not a deviation from the job. It is the compensation. Nothing has to be broken for money to stay in the collector’s hands, and a holder who took nothing extra would be funding a town personally while working unpaid.

The test it gives you is portable. Take any office handling public money and ask what the person in it is actually paid against what the job costs them to do. Where the answer is a gap, honesty is being charged to the individual, and it will keep being charged until somebody changes the design.

Source: Course-coined for this build. It compresses the analysis in this course’s history research map, which sets out the four features from the Blair and Robertson documents: Philip II’s royal order of 11 June 1594, Charles II’s cedula of 22 March 1697, the de privilegio y gratis tribute exemption, the gobernadorcillo’s nominal 24 pesos a year, and the opening of membership by purchase under the Maura Law of 1893.

First used in: 1.2 · The office that was paid by the people it governed