argumate:
anotherpersonhasclaimedthisus:
argumate:
@socialjusticemunchkin, I haven’t engaged with your OpenGov posts because holy hell is that a lot of text and I am a very lazy person.
but a more defensible reason is that the framing of government as software is fundamentally misguided I feel. it drags the debate in a direction that feels more comfortable to geeks (upgrade your government! open source it! hack it!) while obscuring the actual problems that need to be solved and replacing them with the vague idea that existing players are just too dumb to spot obvious wins.
like, if your proposal takes from granted axioms that aren’t even accepted by a majority of the population then it’s going to be a rocky road to acceptance, is part of what I’m saying.
from what I’ve come to expect you’re primarily concerned with the idea that things sold on geek appeal are hyped up cargo cults sans substance and so we should always defer to the interpretations of ancient mystery cults who know better
Now That’s What I Call A Charitable Interpretation, Vol. 16 :)
don’t get me wrong I am all about geek appeal when it comes to geeky things, it’s just that I know how tempting it is to ignore all the domain-specific experience in a particular area and just charge in with One Weird Trick and then be shocked when it turns out not to work (mostly because I’ve done it many times myself).
but to get back on topic, I mean governance models are not closed source, this is important as it undercuts the concept of OpenGov. anyone can grab an existing constitution and run with it, and plenty of nations do, copying bits and pieces into their own constitutions, most of which end up ignored in actual practice which is the only part of governance that actually matters. (eg. see China, where pointing out rights guaranteed in the constitution is subversive).
so the Open part of OpenGov is a misnomer, it really should be MicroGov or ExoGov to continue the software metaphor, as the purpose is to radically slim down and present a minimalist set of interfaces for other non-gov “software”.
I mean if you’re going to go geek, go full geek.
Gnondamnit if it’s a question of naming then I’m totally going to rename it all right, the OpenGov was just a reference to the “open-source platform for providing crucial technologies for governance”.
It’s sg now, in the grand tradition of suckless naming.
1 week ago · tagged #we need a suckless government #shitposting · 22 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
So, for the “what is opengov?“ question that I mention, what I want is more use cases. When I complained that what you were posting was advertising, it wasn’t the the optimism so much as the lack of a handle on what you were describing. I would need to know, who would use it and what exactly would they do? I don’t want vague algorithm descriptions, I want interfaces. I don’t want flowcharts, I want the tables. (and similar stuff for the alternate government idea)
Okay so can I actually get a specific detail I could extrapolate, despite it being totally “getting locked into details way prematurely”? I’m not really understanding the exact question (although I do have more specific possible examples of details in mind, but if I just dump them all here it would take days to get done with the post) as it seems to be similar to “my drain is clogged and I can’t open it on my own so I’ll pay some currency to someone who will unclog it” “but how exactly will your drain be unclogged then?” “I will pay currency to someone who knows how to do it” “but that isn’t details, how on earth can it get unclogged with currency?”
I also see the fucking around in the economy as something that is probably necessary. I’m not saying that every decision made is good, but I think it’s probably necessary. One of the problems I have with many of your assumptions here is that they’re made without knowledge of the counterfactual, they haven’t been tested. They’re nice and shiny and perfect in the way only ideas that haven’t actually been tried can be.
I think this is a genuine positive difference. I see most fucking around in the economy as harmful and a big cause of the need to fuck around some more later.
At the very least, your system needs to able to support a revert to a known form of government in case your ideas fail, otherwise you’d be a fool to try this. Remember, part of the this system is about getting people to use it. You say they are incentive-related reasons nobody uses your system, I say if I have any doubt that would work then there’s no way I’m letting near my government system. Your guinea pigs will be a huge population of very vulnerable people. I need more then “there are reasons to believe“
No single component of this is, in theory, that far-fetched. Liquid democracy is simply an improved version of regular representative democracy with some serious bugs ironed out. Taxing things like land and natural resources is a better form of taxation. UBI is a better form of welfare. The point is to pile on all the “better” we can so that people have less reason to demand active intervention and would be more happy to just keep their fucking hands off the moving parts.
A mutualist-inspired open currency that is controlled by neither bankers nor the state but mostly by its users/not that much by anybody (perhaps a bit like Ripple or something, although Ripple itself is evil for calling for regulation for basically Hamiltonian reasons) is probably the most radical idea, but considering how both bank and state control of the currency have been terrible (the first gets the euro crisis, the second gets this shit which is just mistakes on top of mistakes on a foundation of mistakes and with a glazing of fuckups; if you have official prices you’re a fuckup, if you have exchange rates that are illegal you’re a fuckup, if you have a plug-n-play system of scamming the government you’re fuck-up, if you fault people for using the incentives you’ve created while doing nothing for the incentives you’re a colossal fuckup; and the point of OG is to eliminate your ability to do those things so you can’t hurt yourself and everyone in your country that badly ever again) it’s probably not able to be quite as horrible.
When you say stuff like “it would have a crystallized core of efficient purity that prevents some harmful actions“ everything in me screams that this is going to end in massive disaster. When you imply it cannot possible go wrong, I go classic Douglas Adams and say “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.” which seems to describe your system.
All of these strict ideas, they’re massively untested, and I would guess for good reasons. This is a government, it will encounter emergencies, this is not the case for arbitrary limits on what can be done. Remember, if the system does not work, people will throw it away. You have to be better than that alternative, and if you need some grift with weird regulations to get necessary shit moving, you grift.
Okay, let’s say Venezuela somehow automagically implemented this system. The tax rates are probably not optimal but they are workable (and democracy couldn’t pick the optimal tax rate anyway). UBI takes care of a lot of problems on its own. Local governments can run services with accountability as they can’t loot distant people; the tree-shaped form of the UBI distribution and decision-making power and service-providing prevents such corruption and makes it possible to deliver the good stuff with less of the harmful.
Now what would be a thing that would end in a massive disaster that could be solved by some forbidden action, yet wouldn’t be such a dramatic thing as to justify dropping the safeguards, running things as root and taking full privileges of fucking around in the economy (even though that thing was exactly the thing which brought the previous crisis)?
So the thing about the free market delivering stuff is that the system of oil-driven welfare is sort of describing Saudi Arabia, and that’s part of the reason I’m skeptical. You say picking winners and losers fails, I say nobody notices the losers . I was suggesting that you try seeing if it works, but if it doesn’t, you need a way to adapt.
I already patched the oil dependency to be like Norway instead of Saudi Arabia. That’s obviously a part of the process; the OG platform would need to go through rigorous analysis and simulation and testing and people would be rewarded for breaking it, to ensure that as many failure modes as possible can be pre-empted and thus the controls that could be used to deal with them but the careless use of which also regularly fucks everything up could be locked behind “in case of emergency break glass” instead of being a routine thing people politically see-saw around all the time.
The lack of democracy isn’t your utopian society, it’s a revolution, and your democratic system has to establish that it’s better. That means people will vote in shit you don’t like, and that means you gotta accept you don’t always get what you want. Even without democracy, those people still exist and will enact their preferences. I could go on about how the market is a terrible system that is all about the use of violence but other have done that for me.
And I could say the same about democracy. But in a market of preferences where everyone has an actually equal say in running the show (like Feeding America’s system) there are very strong reasons for why it would be almost strictly better than regular democracy (the “almost” related to the fact that people who don’t understand how it works would be at a disadvantage but it would obviously need to be engineered to be as easy to understand as possible)
While you looking for the “the initial group of trusted people who wouldn’t be tied to local oligarchs or powerful interest groups“ then you’re going to need apretty solid barrel you’re going to spend your whole damn life looking for those people. If you could easily find people like that, you wouldn’t have a problem.
I don’t think I would have that much trouble finding such people, the actual problem is getting power to the competent ones instead of the connected ones. Sure, finding perfect people is impossible, but finding better people than the likes of Maduro wouldn’t be too hard.
The constitutional court is a similar problem, we had one here in the United States and over the years it has delivered many opinions we now consider barbaric. You basically need a solid set of people to populate it, and a solid core of people making sure that it’s dictates are enforced.
Yes. How do states normally solve that problem? Because we’re going to default to that if we can’t figure out anything better. Not that complicated.
Inflation is tricky, and I don’t claim to be able to describe it, but it’s not purely a feature of the amount of money that exists at any given time.
Yes, inflation is complex, but I can’t see how “we redistribute the money we get” would lead to hyperinflation if “the money we get” is defined reasonably.
The monitoring will be needed to ensure that what is occurring in the system bears any relation to events that actually occur in the world, otherwise you’ll re-enact soviet factory supervisors sending reports back to Moscow.
Yes. That’s what markets are good at; information processing. And that’s what local decision-making is less bad at. Not solving problems too far away, and not trying to solve everything, does wonders for things bearing relation to actual events.
So, I know I kinda harp on this, but the big problem is that you seem to totally eschew any necessity for emergency measures in favor of hard-coding your ideals into the system, which is absolutely unacceptable in a system where emergency handling is a main goal. I get driven nuts in my day job by programmers who make me jump through hoops to conform to their data model for biological data, and actually trying to run a government like that would make me beg for the sweet release of nuclear annihilation.
Emergency measures are one thing, but there needs to be something after the emergency measures that isn’t just more “emergency measures” until the next actual emergency arrives. Transitioning to OG would be defined by the local circumstances in which it happens, and what would be the correct procedure for Venezuela wouldn’t be the correct procedure for Greece wouldn’t be correct for North Korea, but the model of “what comes after” could be standardized into a general template for effective governance that aims to prevent crises from reoccurring and to make them less severe when they nonetheless do.
(via collapsedsquid)
1 week ago · tagged #we need a suckless government · 17 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink
argumate:
@socialjusticemunchkin, I haven’t engaged with your OpenGov posts because holy hell is that a lot of text and I am a very lazy person.
but a more defensible reason is that the framing of government as software is fundamentally misguided I feel. it drags the debate in a direction that feels more comfortable to geeks (upgrade your government! open source it! hack it!) while obscuring the actual problems that need to be solved and replacing them with the vague idea that existing players are just too dumb to spot obvious wins.
like, if your proposal takes from granted axioms that aren’t even accepted by a majority of the population then it’s going to be a rocky road to acceptance, is part of what I’m saying.
What I’m saying is that the immediate actions of USG are very much defined by the people in it (Obama has been less horrible than Bush, for example), but the fundamental character of the system and the incentives shaping the big trends are influenced by the procedures and operations which in turn are an outgrowth of the constitution and history.
Thus, focusing on people can win 4-year terms of desirable policy, but focusing on systems can win decades to centuries of subtly more desirable policy by making the government be more inherently likely to output certain things over others.
And on the other hand if I try to come up with some kind of a “source code” for a government that would inherently be less harmful, focusing on specifics is like asking the drafters of the constitution about what the requirements for drivers’ licenses would be. I’m not trying to come up with specific solutions but instead with a system of delivering certain types of specific solutions. It’s not my place to describe the daycare policy of Caracas, all I’m trying to come up with is something people in Caracas could use to determine whether they want to have a daycare policy and if they do, what would it be. Traditional democracy is shitty for solving this question anywhere resembling well, and if a better solution could be implemented it would be v v good for people.
And many of the better object-level solutions could be basically described as “hands off motherfuckers”. Eg. building codes in Finland have evolved over 50 years to never actually save any energy, and just create novel problems which the next iteration will try to patch up while causing its own. The entire country would’ve been better off with a policy of “just don’t fuck with it” because at least then well-proven construction techniques that don’t end up creating health problems for people wouldn’t be outright illegal. I want government to receive legitimacy by delivering the core goods at the expense of random populist whims, not by satisfying random populist whims and sacrificing the core goods.
Existing players being too dumb to spot obvious wins is basically the entire justification for governments; if you assume they could, then I guess you might as well go full anarchist because nobody would be required to enforce the obvious wins on people. (sry for the snark; it tru tho)
And public choice theory has pretty definite explanations for certain entire classes of failures governments consistently deliver and hardening the state against them would not prevent the previous crisis as usual; instead it could render it altogether more resistant to the next crisis, and the one after that, and the one after that…
I know it’s a programmer brains thing to describe the functionings of USG as “source code” but those functionings create an incentive landscape which people will travel and the best way to push a boulder somewhere is not to exert effort on making it go uphill, it’s making that somewhere be downhill to begin with. And understanding and controlling those systems to generate less harmful outcomes is theoretically massive leverage. And what else is leverage? Software. You can campaign for a certain candidate, or you can run google or facebook and be basically in a fuck you we make the real choice position. I know which one I would work towards. So there are certain obvious analogies. And a few shock doctrine economists had a much more massive impact than millions of voters, so this isn’t without historical precedent either.
Furthermore, focusing on the meta level lets me take the focus away from my popularly objectionable object-level positions to my equally objectionable meta-level positions… okay yeah I just want to spacestead okay. Then I’ll be out of the way and not complaining when people follow democratic incentives off a cliff again and again and again.
1 week ago · tagged #we need a suckless government · 22 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
argumate:
jbeshir:
argumate:
jbeshir said: To read it reasonably (not even especially charitably, it’s just the natural read when looking for truth rather than lulz), he’s clearly suggesting that if it had been built and demonstrated it would be politically acceptable because it’d be the known “schelling point” to turn to when pissed at your government. This is not a *good* answer, but the problems with it are not quite so trivial or risible.
maybe, but only if everyone is pissed at their government for being insufficiently libertarian! there are many other reasons why someone might be pissed in ways that will not be satisfied by telling them it’s okay the government is still defending property owners and student debts.
calling something that doesn’t exist a schelling point doesn’t mean it is one!
I agree that it’s a critically flawed answer and if people were agreeing with it I’d write critique of it, but the problems with it are not the ones being pointed out in the original post, and not quite so trivial or risible.
Even if you are not a fan of the “libertarian minarchist” bit because angry people with problems are probably not going to be thrilled by the government declaring it isn’t going to help them, the core point of “could we create model governments and heavily automated process models that could be pointed at as alternatives to coalesce around” is not *trivially* useless and I think is kind of interesting, kind of done already but probably poorly by ad-hoc assistance from other governments they’re on good terms with.
And there’s no reason they couldn’t include an ordained crisis team whose job was to spend money on resolving immediate needs or similar- there are flaws in that, too, but nothing obviously fatal to arriving at something workable with iteration.
This is a problem with the who-is-mockable based discourse. Since it is more about whose stuff can be mocked rather than who is genuinely failing to produce things of value, it’s basically entirely motivated misreading and error, with a “if you don’t want to be misrepresented, well then, you should have been less fun to misrepresent” attitude, and if one is unwary and takes it at face value one ends up discussing a strawman.
Even if you avoid that, you end up discussing only the flaws and how they indicate the fundamental unworthiness of the person rather than debating the interesting 90% of the idea- which means that anyone discussing questions which probably are too hard for a single person to immediately answer correctly is punished.
It also punishes making novel errors rather than the usual ones- I mean, like half the people making fun of EY here are communists, and while I don’t want to declare that their political philosophy is useless I would suggest that maybe people in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones. But because their errors and huge failures to examine critical problems are routine and EY’s are novel, they can get away with it.
(Not *the* problem with it. *the* problem is what it punishes, and how it is a jackass to people for no reason, as I wrote earlier)
I don’t believe the who-is-mockable thing holds water, as who is not mockable??
It’s not like people mock a proposal because Yudkowsky is fringe; people are mocking presidential candidates and world leaders and university professors and CEOs practically 24/7 around here as you must have noticed.
And yes Communists and Libertarians are both mockable and mocked, at least in the posts I see scrolling hurriedly past.
But I guess mainly I don’t see EY’s failures as novel, because I’ve said similar things! You know, when I was 12, after reading a few sci-fi novels and convinced that I was now smart enough to orchestrate the perfect society. (sorry)
Anyway, maybe someone should kick off a new thread making the proposal in a less risible way so we can escalate the tone of the discourse on this matter.
Anyway, maybe someone should kick off a new thread making the proposal in a less risible way so we can escalate the tone of the discourse on this matter.
You mean like my few thousand words on one version of the basic idea?
1 week ago · 23 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
sinesalvatorem:
Me: This is one of the things I’m most concerned about for having kids. If the price of college keeps ballooning stupidly, what will happen to my kids financially?
@endecision: They will be really smart and get scholarships?
Me: (I guess they’ll have to have “non-traditional” resumes, like mine :p)
@endecision: or go to App Academy
@endecision: or found a start-up or something
Me: Hopefully programming will still be a wide open free for all then, like it is now.
Me: But I expect the government to start regulating and licensing it, like it does with every other good profession, because regulatory capture is pure fucking evil.
Me: The people who won’t let you braid hair or unclog a toilet unless you bend over for the gatekeepers won’t keep letting people get rich without ruining themselves for very long.
@endecision: Yeah
Me: “You wouldn’t want a HACKER working for your bank, would you? Look at this poor grandma who had all her pension money stolen by an ebul hacker! If you want to keep hackers out of programming jobs, vote for prop 69 to tell all the self-taught programmers to go fuck themselves. They’re entitled Silicon Valley twats, anyway.”
stop you’re giving me nightmares
although at that point I guess we might as well just whip out the drone armies and take out the normies’ governments for good
if any normies are listening (I don’t think so but just in case) please do not force self-taught programmers to start a civil war
you would lose it and people would suffer and that would be sad
1 week ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog · 35 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink
There’s a few differences in the reasonings I’m using than those I think you are using, and to start with I want to establish those. While win-win may be your superpower, I’m more “You can’t please anyone.” You are talking about institutional efficiency, I’m more the first goal must be resiliency, efficiency is secondary. And finally, I generally take maximin as my guide, the goal is to maximize the well being of the worst off(“Converting Hysterical Misery into Ordinary Unhappiness” as the saying goes).
I see win-win as a way to please as many as necessary to achieve good outcomes (ideally there would be no need to please any specific interest groups as the good outcomes could justify themselves but reality is reality). I see efficiency as a source of long-term resiliency (rich and well-functioning countries don’t have coups). While I don’t necessarily consider maximizing the well-being of the worst off the absolute terminal value, I consider it a nice heuristic for many purposes.
So, I’m still not sure what opengov is actually supposed to be, but I’m guessing it’s basically a property record and currency system. While you say “OpenGov would be a technology which makes UBI possible and easy, while making other forms of government services difficult.” I think that’ll lead to just people not using opengov, similarly to the way overly strict security arrangements lead to people doing stupid security stuff to bypass them. Opengov won’t solve the problem like that, you need flexibility.
It’s supposed to be basically the MVP of governance. A plug-and-play state for those too incompetent to compile and configure one themselves. A looting-minimization system. In full fantasy-land, it would be The Standard Template for governance so that when someone suggests a state that’s running a different kernel people’s reaction would be “they probably want to just loot”.
I corrected the part; UBI should be easy, and converting UBI to the good kind of services should be easy, but instituting massive wealth transfers to politically favored interests should be hard. Because I think most state intervention that isn’t pure redistribution ends up being both worse than pure redistribution in helping people, and actively harmful to the economy as it works as a tool to enrichen cronies while looting value-creators.
OpenGov’s security would be built-in in the UBI and its conversion system. Instead of enabling arbitrary fucking-around in the economy, it would have a crystallized core of efficient purity that prevents some harmful actions. It’s to government budgets what functional programming is to code. When everyone gets the same amount of money, and can vote on whether they want it in pure money or services, it’s the principle of “no taxation without representation” taken further than elsewhere. It is intended to deliver the goods of sufficient redistribution without enabling bullshit, or ‘himmeli’ systems as the Finnish language calls them. (’himmeli’ meaning a complicated sculpture of straw and string that totally falls apart if you put weight on it and it’s just hanging off somewhere weighing it down and being in the way but also pleasing people’s sensibilities)
Regional subsidies? Sorry, can’t do it, nada, impossible. Agricultural subsidies? Convince the local community to support you if you want more than your fair share. Corporate welfare? Do we look like a DC? Means-tested bureaucratic systems of welfare? Lol nope. Complex schemes of delivering cushy government jobs to cronies? At least it’ll be less easy than in regular states. Price controls and subsidies for goods, housing etc.? Banned.
When you talk about using the oil money to pay for the UBI, that’s not the priority. The priority is to avoid dutch disease and having your economy be tied to a single commodity. If a UBI system causes people to start real and profitable industries, then funneling it all to a UBI will work. If a UBI doesn’t do that, then you would do something else. If you can’t diversify, you’re screwed in the long run. If it means you have to subsidize industry and the government is picking winners and losers, I’m absolutely OK with that if it solved that problem.
The hypothesis is that a free market, with some degree of purchasing power guaranteed with the UBI, would provide the opportunity for business and industry to flourish. I see government picking winners and losers as a thing that 1) tends to be harmful 2) tends to be really hard to implement in practice because of ~international neoliberal capitalist conspiracy~ and thus relying on it to deliver good outcomes isn’t going to work. Obviously on second thoughts, the oil proceedings need to be actually put into an index fund the interest revenue from which will be paid to citizens, to avoid price shocks and provide preparedness for a post-labor future.
Land value taxes are a nice idea, but for that you need prices to be generated, and that’s not easy. I’d need to dig into the literature to see how proponents manage that. Income at least is clear, it’s denominated in currency. I’m also in favor of measures like wealth taxes that prevent consolidation of economic power, but you’ve probably seen that shit before.
The idea is to have a functioning market in land (the tax mustn’t be so high as to destroy it) the prices from which can then be used as a basis for taxes. Theoretically one could just rent each parcel to the highest bidder, but that would destroy long-term investment in stuff that can’t be moved away easily.
Any kind of market-measurable wealth the state protects could obviously be taxed as well, although there are economic efficiency concerns in taxing productive capital and taxing luxuries like yachts and mansions might direct capitalists to just invest more and keep accumulating as a tax-avoidance scheme, thus deepening the economic inequality it was intended to alleviate. A well-functioning market that gets close to a theoretically optimal free market wouldn’t have easy rentseeking opportunities anyway and competition between capitalists should keep their profits down while disruptions can take them out any time so inequality would be lesser than in a system where the state can support its favorite capitalists at the expense of everyone else.
Income taxes are obviously a possibility too, but they require the state to know how much money people are making, and there is the problem of it making inherently more difficult for people to “just do” things for each other in exchange for currency, something I consider very important and the harming of which one of the greatest tragedies of social democracies. Getting a job or running a small business needs to be as easy as possible, and not having taxes in the way is a good way to minimize paperwork. It’s possible that taxes might only be applied to big players in the industry (eg. corporations are taxed in exchange for receiving recognition as limited liability organizations) thus distorting the market in favor of smaller businesses.
I think “make sure the local governments don’t fuck shit up or disrespect human rights.” is a hard and sometimes impossible problem. The nice thing about the federal government is that it’s far away, it’s oppression is therefore muted. The local assholes can easily be a worse threat. This is one of the cases for a stronger federal authority. (To give the classic example, in the US it was the feds who forced desegregation, local governments would have none of it.) I don’t have a solid proposal about this, but it’s always something I’m worried about.
Yes, and it needs attention, and the local oppression is precisely what the constitutional court’s ass-kicking powers are for. Feds enforcing desegregation etc. is completely different from feds taxing people to wage wars and enrichen cronies.
The competing law/governments system thing never makes any sense to me, I can’t see that leading to anything but a clusterfuck as people game the system. The nice thing about the law should be it’s unambigousness.
I see competition as providing alternatives. Eg. under Jim Crow southern blacks could’ve simply started their own local governments that don’t oppress them (feds stepping in to protect that right) and enjoying the delicious white whine. A lot of societal problems between groups seems to originate from one group using the state as a tool to oppress and loot another (or being perceived as doing so), and small-scale exit rights would make that a lot harder.
Local government like that can also lead to divide-and-conquer strategies. Voting and violence are not the only way political power can be wielded, there’s also pure economic power. If you can strangle the electrical power of a community, you’ve got that community by the throat, and you need to prevent that from happening. “Voting” is merely legitimizing ritual if people know that only certain votes will get them essentials. Given that self-sufficiency is for each community is hard and terribly inefficient, you need some way of guaranteeing those essentials are met. That can include forcible nationalization if necessary.
Such monopoly abuse situations are failures of the system that would need some way of addressing without compromising the reliability of the overall system. Markets hurt monopolies, but I’ll acknowledge that even the absence of active state sponsorship may not always be enough to prevent abuse. But the cure needs to be less bad than the disease.
Locking in the tax rates/UBI is a terrible idea, and that’s because the failure case of those systems is going to be runaway inflation. Inflation destroys countries in that area of the world, and so I’m willing to tolerate a lot of otherwise suboptimal shit to prevent that from happening. That might even be a justification for measures like food stamps instead of money, I think those are less likely to cause inflation. Could also be a reason to use a job guarantee instead of a UBI. Whatever works is what you need there.
If the amount paid in UBI is (total_tax_revenue + total_circulating_currency / 50) it would produce an equilibrium with a 2% natural inflation plus whatever fluctuations happen. The exact purchasing power of that UBI would be determined by the amount of taxable economic activity. I can’t see how it would produce runaway inflation (locking in specific sums would); the actual failure modes would be “too low to prevent misery” and “too high to not strangle the economy”.
Locking in tax rates is very important as it prevents state bloat which quietly destroys economies in the North (ideally the model should be workable anywhere, from Greece to North Korea to Venezuela to the Moon) and provides a guarantee of predictable economic policy (reducing risks of investment and thus lessening the perceived need (most importantly, justification) for extra-democratic structures like investor protection courts). When taxes are locked in, people know what they are and what they will be and consistency has an excellency of its own because even if it’s not optimal, it’s constant.
Taking away the “fuck around with the parameters of the economy every couple of years” thing hasn’t really been tried anywhere, but there are reasons to believe it could produce improved outcomes and not doing it might be a failure of incentives in public policy. OpenGov would be an excellent opportunity to provide a progressive alternative to reacto experimental governance, by shedding the shitty parts of progressivism and keeping the things that actually matter.
There’s a certain attractive combination of theoretic elegance and plausible explanation for “why it wouldn’t have been tried if it’s supposed to be so great” in the idea of crystallized “functional” governance which doesn’t have the standard option of adding himmelis every time it encounters a problem (Canada’s “each new regulation must remove one old regulation” would obviously be a feature too; the EU rules regulating the sale of cabbages are tens of thousands of words and while “the entire law fits in less space than that” is not a realistic option, there must be solid barriers that block himmelis). OpenGov wouldn’t go out with a whimper of bending under ever increasing bloat, it would stay in shape or shatter and thus there would be a reasonably good chance it could stay in shape although some kind of controlled shattering procedure should also be provided so it doesn’t fail, instead just reboots painfully or something (eg. if the locked-in tax rates prove to be terrible enough, the system could be overhauled with new initial parameters; it would be difficult enough that no normal government could do it (so they can’t hack it to provide the “fuck with settings constantly” feature) but a crisis that would risk failing the state could let people recompile it instead).
I can see what you are getting at with your voting system, but honestly I’m in favor of mandatory voting. (mandatory doesn’t mean at gunpoint, it means you pay a penalty if you don’t) It depends on what you see voting as doing, to me it’s a feedback measure rather than a privilege. I’m against the general level of complexity you are proposing in general with mandate points, because I’m of the opinion that this just leads to more stupid games being played that people may not put up with.
I see regular democracy as a stupid game being played that I’m really not willing to put up with and am only resigned to it because of threat of violence. The mandate points would lessen the games as eg. gerrymandering and fucking around with voting systems to favor those in power would be eliminated. And the influence market would ensure no majority group can consistently override minorities to screw them over. I haven’t run the math but my intuition suggests that it, along with erring on the side of subsidiarity, might go a long way in solving questions of tensions between groups and reducing risks of civil war, uprising, terrorism, oppression, and other unpleasant things which happen when people think the power is out of balance. Democracy is duct tape and a terrible kludge, not some pure system of great justice.
A lot of these things I’m saying are about monitoring and managing, and that’s ultimately what you need and opengov can’t give you. You need trustworthy, competent people to tell you what’s going on, otherwise, you’re going to be screwed regardless.
A big part of the OpenGov tech side would be to reduce the need for that monitoring and managing or to establish a meta-level system for ensuring that incentives would be aligned towards good governance. The OpenGovOrg could act as the initial group of trusted people who wouldn’t be tied to local oligarchs or powerful interest groups (the exact ones who fucked up the previous system to begin with) and who could thus be relied upon to bootstrap the better, more accountable, government. Or alternatively, for a bit more radical option, OpenGov could have a “stateless” bootstrap system that would turn good governance into a true private good which could be implemented by people on the ground even against the central government’s will but that’s an engineering feat I consider quite unlikely.
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1 week ago · tagged #we need a suckless government · 17 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink
