@collapsedsquid said: That reads like an advertising brochure rather than a description of an organization
Actually, I should compare this to marketing material on the IMF
Obviously. If I knew how to actually implement OpenGov, I’d be doing it instead of speculating on the internet, but since I don’t actually know how to come up with such a system in a couple of hours (my superpower isn’t that good, and any actual implementation would require information I don’t have (YGM if I were to ever start actually doing it)), all I can do is either describe my intuitions for how OpenGov could vaguely operate in a way which sounds like an advertising brochure, or be quiet while people shoot down an idea of “wouldn’t it be cool if someone found a way to do this” with “nobody has found a way to do it yet, gtfo”.
A lot of solutions to hard problems started with someone being “there is a problem; I wonder if it could be solved in this novel way” and I want people to be able to do that thing without everyone piling up on them for not including the exact implementation of the solution in their description of it. Because sometimes someone needs to air a vague idea and someone else might get interested in it and start figuring out the engineering problems. (Def including social engineering.)
And sometimes peopse need to think aloud so their ideas will be better.
And being positioned in the intersection of “technolibertarian” and “intersectional leftist” I believe it might be possible to address the objections in a way which makes the original idea actually implementable, because the two interests (a free market with a reliable basic system, and poor people not getting looted) are not directly opposed to each other and thus win-win combinations could be done as long as the costs of implementing don’t outweigh the benefits.
The “standard silicon valley model” of these kinds of things, used by eg. what3words, seems to be to provide a non-profit version for humanitarian purposes which is subsidized as a side effect of the for-profit version for private companies (like everyone getting access to the addressing system, while the costs of running it are paid by companies using w3w’s tech to utilize it in their own operation). This is also the standard way of delivering many public goods without government; as long as some subset of private interests benefits more than the costs of providing the public good and coordinating to provide it, the public good will exist (modulo market failures etc.). A harbor builds a lighthouse to attract more paying customers, but even people who aren’t paying customers benefit from it, and so on.
So that model might be useful for the actual implementation of OpenGov. A purely philanthropy-based approach is basically just the Pirate Party or whatever, and it mostly seems to work in Iceland, but the bigger the philanthropy the less costly it is to implement OpenGov.
Now let’s look at Venezuela. Venezuela because it’s an actual shithole, I have a bit of a clue what’s going on, and it has no friends in global geopolitics so even if I talk shit about the government of Venezuela and end up outputting an actually working way to overthrow them the Mossad or CIA won’t assassinate me.
I’ll divide the society of Venezuela into roughly 3 categories: oil companies, state, and regular people. Oil companies have money and they want oil and they are evil and OpenGov mustn’t associate openly with them. The state has oil, and it wants to loot everybody to enrichen itself. The people have power, which they have been renting out to the state in exchange for bribes, and they want to live a good life. In theory the equation shoudn’t be so hard: the state sells oil to oil companies, gives money to the people, everything is basically okay. But because the state doesn’t need to fear competition (someone undercutting their rates by offering cheaper oil to oil companies and more money to the people), they have a monopoly they have been exploiting to loot the people. In theory a solution would also be elegant: bribe away the state by offering them better than what they can loot right now, sell oil to oil companies, stop looting the people, and reap the rewards of economic growth and peace and prosperity which generate enough money to pay the costs of bribing away the state. Of course, in ~*~theory~*~; this plan benefits everyone and as rational economic actors they will all support it, in other words never going to happen.
So the actual issues are “how to get from here to there”. Popular resistance is good as far as it prevents the state from just looting everyone, but popular mandate for looting “Everyone Else But Me” is bad and should be avoided. Now, I’ll totally expropriate on idea from Mencius Moldbug because why the fuck no I’m way deep in intolerable-weirdo-land already; “make your technology so that it’s inherently supportive of the kind of governance you want”. Thus, ideally OpenGov would be a technology which makes UBI possible and easy, while making other forms of government services to special interests difficult. An electronic currency for distributing UBI, and in which land value taxes and oil payments must be paid.
I’d base the state on those two: land and natural resources, as they are easy to tax and can be considered a relatively legitimate form of public ownership, definitely moreso than stealing the fruits of people’s labor (and less distortionate to the economy too). In effect a smallholder having the average amount of land (in terms of value, not area) would not pay anything, anyone having less land would be subsidized and anyone using more land needs to compensate everyone else for hoarding stuff to themselves. In exchange, the state respects land ownership. Elegant, provides redistribution and a degree of justice built-in to compensate for the historical grab of land to favored interests, and should offer a degree of legitimacy.
So that’s how we will get money. Landowners and oil companies will pay the state to protect their (least-illegitimate or most legitimate, depending on how one views the question) interests, and in exchange the state will give money to people (to bribe them to not cause trouble, or to compensate for having their rightful common property seized by private interests, however one wishes to look at the question).
We’ll build an electronic system for tracking land ownership, its value, tax status etc. and a built-in redistribution of the taxes to the citizenry. To reduce moral hazards, the land value+natural resource tax rate will be almost set in stone, requiring a significant supermajority to change. I don’t know the correct rate, but it should be enough that it generates income while not being so much that it eradicates long-term investment in land. If it can’t be done, one needs to look at alternative sources of tax revenue and establish a very set-in-stone amount of flat deduction-free tax on something that’s not easy to do tax avoidance in. We want adjusting tax rates to be as difficult as possible so the state can’t loot its citizens, and we want the taxes to be as unlikely to disastrously backfire on us after being all but set in stone as possible so we won’t end up with an unfixable pile of bullshit.
So the money flow is: Taxpayers -> People -> Government. This way because people will see their personal share of the public income as something which belongs to them, and the government budget will be shown as a fraction of one’s basic income to disincentivize waste and bullshit. But in effect the government share will be deducted from the UBI as the money is received in taxes, it will just be displayed prominently so people might be less likely to overspend. And everyone gets the same share because equality, and it also aids in transparency. There will be no regional money transfers to areas needing special attention because that way lies looting, but the taxes will be collected nationally and distributed back to people nationally so the richer areas inherently support people in poorer areas. Local governments can appropriate some of the UBI money to provide services instead if they get the democratic mandate to do so. This way we can get public goods and important services but avoid excess looting.
Next, law and order. This is important. The costs of paying for central government and national defense will be taken from the taxes, but as much should be decentralized as possible, and the central government should only mostly make sure the local governments don’t fuck shit up or disrespect human rights. Local governments should provide the actual police etc. on as low a level as possible while having only accountability enforced from up above. There will be a constitution guaranteeing the basic form of governance and human rights and a constitutional court to kick the ass of anyone violating it. The exact structure of the constitutional court is outside the scope of this document but it seems that most countries, as long as the rulers can’t intervene too directly, are capable of having a sufficiently non-shitty method of finding out people who can nerd out on the specifics of laws.
Local government. Liquid democracy could be used so people can vote on other people they trust to decide things for them, and perhaps some kind of a market system in preferences so that the majority can’t consistently override any specific minority but instead treating votes as currency would guarantee that everyone’s preferences are equally satisfied statistically. I could spend most of my vote-monies on “don’t vote on promethea’s body” and override the cissexist mob, while letting the mob vote on the colour of the bike shed and staying away from it personally. Markets are cool, markets are good when engineered properly for the situation, just ask Feeding America.
Public services. Local low-level government has the mandate to provide them, the budget taken out from the basic income of the citizens under that government. (Weird idea: let people choose which set of low-level government they want to live under by having each physical location have several competing providers overlapping geographically and thus make the system of voting with one’s feet more flexible. Imagine every US county having not only the local county, but also an option to belong to any of the neighboring counties as well. And the “counties” would be way smaller for most purposes; the size of a small city. Probably not a workable idea, but an interesting one anyway.) The services provided are decided using ~liquid democracy~ as long as they aren’t unconstitutional. Higher levels of government coordinate bigger services, still using ~liquid democracy~ all the way to the top.
Voting. Local elections every year for local candidates, who then gain mandate equivalent to their number of votes, which they can transfer upwards transparently. A voting system can have at most two of: confidentiality so others can’t see who people have voted for, flexibility so people can change their vote whenever they want, simplicity so one doesn’t need to have an IQ of 130 to exercise their democratic rights.
I’m choosing confidentiality and simplicity, with yearly feedback helping keep representatives accountable and the absence of any other elections than the local ones reduces political deadweight loss from campaigning etc.; this also has the advantage of being doable as a paper ballot system, which is easier to understand and trust and deliver even in the shit-poor backwoods areas, than a scheme that requires an electronic system. When the votes are counted so that the people counting hate each other’s guts and would just love to catch each other for election fraud, the votes are counted honestly, and even single-party states have local conflicts so the process can’t be cartellized. When it comes to ideas I’m whipping up in a couple of hours, this should be at least a bit resistant to most of the immediate failure modes of shitholistans.
The upwards transfer of mandate works so that on each level of government the representatives choose who on the level above them gets their mandate points, culminating in the president or whatever. And the reps can use their mandate points when voting on issues, and the points are like currency in a transparent market (this one receives “flexibility, simplicity” as the reps mustn’t have confidentiality anyway) so even marginalized groups can get heard via single-issue parties, but perhaps influence scales to the square root of mandate spent to discourage fanaticism. Local-level government can also have direct votes on issues so that each citizen has one mandate point equivalent. (With paper ballots people can have a certain number of extra votes each year which they can spend on issues they care the most about, maintaining reasonable confidentiality as voting records only reveal how much person X cares about issue Y, not how they actually voted on it. With electronic systems one can use whatever clever schemes, as the exact implementation would be chosen by the local government.)
Now, feel free to poke at ALL THE HOLES in this system, but at least poke at it for the things I’m proposing instead of “you don’t have a complete bulletproof implementation when toying with interesting ideas”. For something that took me a couple of hours to come up with, this seems like a relatively not-unpleasant democracy to live under; guaranteeing both a lagom amount of social welfare and an extraordinarily free market with a political system that is at least somewhat seeking to alleviate the inherent problems of democracy.
But the implementation is literally the entire problem.
When states are kicked out of equilibrium, the problem isn’t that the re-established equilibria aren’t as efficient as they theoretically could be - the problem is that we don’t know how to reliably engineer a new equilibrium where everyone accepts the state, everyone knows that everyone else accepts the state, everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone accepts the state, and so on.
It’s not that designing an efficient government isn’t useful, I just don’t see how it’s related at all to the problem of un-failing a state, save for the fact that a government needs a bare minimum of effectiveness to not get overthrown. It’d be nice of the government Venezuela was re-established with a land value tax instead of an income tax, but focusing on that instead of the re-establishing itself seems like missing the point.
If OpenGov could establish effective and working government in one place, people could observe the results and be like “let’s do that thing which worked over there”. That’s why it needs to be as effective as possible and satisfy all legitimate interests as fully as it can. If people in Greece can look at OpenVenezuela and be like “damn, they sure solved a lot of terrible problems” it would go a long way in making it actually a solution people can agree on as a fallback if the government fails, thus solving the problem in cases 1 onwards, leaving case 0 as the only extremely difficult one.
(I’ll fully admit that my programmer instincts are making me try to solve the problem Properly once so it doesn’t need to be solved with a different terrible kludge every time, but that was kind of the idea to begin with so I’m just staying within the parameters.)
And having a general plan for an effective government would make it easier for it to get accepted. If it doesn’t rely on local conditions (or, in other words, has a built-in system to deal with local variables without compromising its ultimate nature) there’s less need to renegotiate what those are, and the better it is in a general way the more suitable it is for using as a template for a working society instead of possibly ending up as a scam that loots the country or an injustice that keeps President Nefarious in power.
How to solve it in the first case it’s something I don’t have that much information about, but historically foreign think tanks and other organizations have been able to push massive reforms in countries, even when the reforms have been shitty, so it obviously can be done, and should (a normative should, not a positive should; I’m fully willing to believe that most of the time humans will only ever accept policy that is zero-sum if not negative-sum because positive-sum is inconceivable to them) be even easier if the reforms are not shitty. Basically, “I dunno let’s imitate the shock doctrine except deliver results for people on the ground instead.” I can’t tell how to implement it because I’m not an expert on such policy, but if someone builds it it removes one part of the problem so then there will be a ready-made system that only needs the implementation.
And if it’s a general system of suckless-style governance, it can be adapted for many other possible situations as well (OpenGov moon colony? OpenGov as a decision-making platform for any sufficiently-sized organization? Spinning off the voting market part might help any coordination-of-people which has to use formalized democracy for its internal processes.). Programming has a long and proud tradition of someone solving a problem somewhere and people finding unexpected uses for it elsewhere, and if OpenGov were to pivot from rescuing failing states to running a moon colony it would be quite a great success nonetheless.
Anonymous asked: If UBI was implemented now, before the robot utopia, who would do the lousy jobs that need to be done? I mean, who's going to be a janitor or a plumber when they can get UBI for doing nothing?
I’ve also seen explanations of UBI which I think have some merit, which is just that a janitors salary + UBI is more than UBI which is usually supposed to keep you just above the poverty line, and not much else. So your janitor in a lot of cases would look at the situation and go well, I can quit my job and live just above the poverty line and be okay, but I could also keep working as a janitor and make twice that!
So the really big impact that UBI would make is that people would be more willing to leave jobs where they were being mistreated, or wouldn’t be put in the position of needing multiple jobs to survive.
Okay, this is a slightly different meaning than I thought. My understanding of UBI is “if you make less than $x, UBI will make up the difference,” not “everyone gets UBI in addition to whatever else they make.”
The second interpretation solves some problems, but makes the “where the hell is this money actually coming from” question even harder.
The average person gets a $10,000 UBI and a $10,000 increase in taxes, for a net gain of $0.
The UBI (or a negative income tax, which is a slightly different implementation of the same idea) is phased out gradually, so that you don’t get cliffs with an effective marginal tax rate of 70% or 80%, and so you always earn more money by doing more work. This is hard as hell to do with multiple welfare programs, because you have to coordinate sixty different programs, some of which only apply in some states, and it’s a huge hassle. The simplicity of only having one welfare program to do that with is one of the advantages of UBI.
Or or or or or we could just abolish all the useless and/or outright harmful programs! That way we wouldn’t need to raise taxes that much, if at all, while still being able to give people $10,000. Of course, that’s politically impossible because a lot of those programs buy a massive amount of votes from asshole rentiers, but the US could totally afford to give everyone a “free” $10k a year (compared to the status quo) if it actually tried to solve the problem.
How much do we spend on useless and/or outright harmful programs?
To pay $10k to all residents would require approximately 3.2 trillion.
Department of Health and Human Services spends 1.1 trillion. Healthcare is harmful. The Singapore model could treat the entire population for around 400 billion, of which something like 200 billion would be government spending. This would free 900B.
990B goes to social security. There are 65M beneficiaries suggesting that if all social security payments were cut by $10k a year on average it would free 650B, for a total of 1.55T so far. This would redistribute from the high-receiving people to the low-receiving people but it’s tax money and a ponzi scheme so it’s totally fair.
Defense is 560B. It’s harmful, lots of pork and inefficiency and cronyism, and then there’s also the “going to other people’s countries and killing them for no good reason” thing. Cut by 300B and nothing of value will have been lost. 1.85T
Department of Agriculture is 150B. Most of it harmful. Cut 120B, especially from subsidies. Farms can live or die on the free market, and poor people deserve to get money instead of food stamps; 1.97T.
Department of Commerce is 10B. Let’s cut it by half. 1.975T
Education is 80B. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Higher education won’t get cheaper by subsidizing it, and children’s education will be affordable with the basic income; remove 65B for 2.04T
Energy is 30B. Let’s say 10B of that is actually easy to cut. 2.05T
DHS is 50B. Kill the evil motherfucker. Cut it all. Reallocate 10B for the not-evil parts from somewhere else, but I just want to see DHS gone. 2.09T
Housing and Urban Development is 30B. Let’s leave them 5B just in case they might have a reason to exist. 2.115T
Department of Interior is small in comparison, at 15B. Cut 5B just because. 2.120T
Department of Labor is 40B. We’re going to drop 35B and downsize it to OSHA, and OSHA alone. OSHA will have its budget multiplied almost 10-fold. 2.155T
Transportation is 80B and produces an oversupply of roads. Roads are harmful. I’m an anarchist, I hate roads. Remove the road moneys of 40B and then there will be no reason for the government to exist. (disclaimer: I’m most likely not serious about that one, only about the number; toll roads paid for by their users are nice) 2.195T
EITC is 70B and its entire point is to be replaced. 2.265T
DOJ needs to end the war on drugs and adopt nordic policies towards prison terms (minimize them), and just cut the fuck out, thus saving 10B for 2.275T
Cut wages of federal employees by 25B to compensate for the free $10k they would be getting; focus especially on the most lucrative (=overpaid) jobs. 2.3T
All in all, we’re only missing 900B from being able to give everyone $10k, and we haven’t even touched state budgets. Since we’re neck-deep in fantasyland already we might as well sail the cutters to the states as well. 20B goes from replacing cash assistance. 150B from removing Medicaid as Harmful. 10B from other forms of social spending. We’re now at 720B. California spends 50B a year on education, which can be cut back somewhat as the basic income extends to children as well (or provides vouchers) and I’ll just assume the other states have enough slack in their budgets to cut a total of 220B from so now we’re at 500B. That’s the equivalent of taking the UBI away from the richest 15% of the country.
If we introduce a gradual phaseout to deal with that part, the average american will lose about $1500 of their $10k. Done. That’s it. No new taxes, other than the phaseout and some shifting from state taxes to federal taxes. A lot of utterly impossible fiscal magic, but it’s ~*~theoretically doable~*~.
Wow, if anything could convince me to be against UBI, it’s this.
Over half of the cuts you’re suggesting come from HHS (which is mostly Medicaid and Medicare) and Social Security. So you’re really talking about huge cuts to programs for the elderly, the poor, and the disabled.
In the case of Social Security (which is not a Ponzi Scheme), you’re basically talking about a 1-to-1 replacement - cut out $10,000 per person, and then give everyone a $10,000 basic income. So all else held equal, there’s nothing there to complain about, right?
Except all else isn’t being held equal. Social Security is received by the elderly and by disabled people (not exclusive categories, of course) - groups that have higher-than-average medical costs. But you’re also making huge cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, meaning that many folks will have to start spending much more of their income on medical care. The net effect is that they’ll be much poorer.
You do say “The Singapore model could treat the entire population for around 400
billion, of which something like 200 billion would be government
spending.“
The Singapore model is cheaper than the US model for a few reasons. First, because of the strong price controls the Singapore government imposes on the market. We can import that to the US, and it’s a good idea - but I get the sense that most libertarians and anarchists would oppose that idea.
Second, it’s much cheaper in Singapore because only 9% of Singapore’s population is over age 64, compared to 15% of the US population, according to the CIA World Factbook. Fewer old people to treat equals cheaper, but there’s no way to transfer that to the US system. (Nor is there any way to maintain that in Singapore - Singapore’s population is aging, and they won’t be able to sustain their current low levels of health spending).
Third, the Singapore system relies on mandatory health savings accounts, in which (iirc) people are required to put 20% of their income into special accounts that can only be accessed to pay for medical care for themselves or their family members. It works for most people because most people are pretty healthy for most of their lives, so that by the time they get old, or suffer a catastrophic health problem, they have a lot of accrued health savings that they can draw on.
But how do you switch this over to the US? Imagine that Ed was a mover for 45 years, but recently retired - his back can’t take that kind of labor anymore. In fact, he’s going to need a series of back and knee surgeries to be able to remain mobile and not in constant agony. Ed did not spend that whole 45 years putting 20% of his income aside for medical expenses in his old age.
Now we’ve yanked Medicare out from under him, and replaced it with the Singapore system, which assumes people have large savings that can only be used on medical care. How’s Ed going to manage?
Multiply Ed’s problem times hundreds of thousands of people.
Happily, there are much, much better ideas about how to pay for a Universal Basic Income. (I don’t agree with the flat tax idea, but the rest seems like a reasonable approach.)
P.S. Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s also the most effective anti-poverty program in US history. But yeah, we should totally throw it away and replace it with a program that’s never actually been tried on any significant scale. No way that could go wrong.
Don’t get me wrong - I favor UBI. But I think it should be phased in gradually, so if it fails we can back out; and I don’t think programs that have been incredibly helpful to millions of low-income people, me included, should be thrown away lightly.
Okay, I think you’re misunderstanding this very badly.
Over half of the cuts you’re suggesting come from HHS (which is mostly Medicaid and Medicare) and Social Security. So you’re really talking about huge cuts to programs for the elderly, the poor, and the disabled.
No, I’m talking about huge cuts to programs that often fail to help the elderly, the poor, and the disabled. HHS&SS is a massive money sink and if one doesn’t want to increase taxes for the sake of a demonstration (which I almost succeeded at), one has to cut from where the money is.
In the case of Social Security (which is not a Ponzi Scheme), you’re basically talking about a 1-to-1 replacement - cut out $10,000 per person, and then give everyone a $10,000 basic income. So all else held equal, there’s nothing there to complain about, right?
Except all else isn’t being held equal. Social Security is received by the elderly and by disabled people (not exclusive categories, of course) - groups that have higher-than-average medical costs. But you’re also making huge cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, meaning that many folks will have to start spending much more of their income on medical care. The net effect is that they’ll be much poorer.
My proposed cuts would increase the incomes of every SS recipient who’s getting less than $10k a year, while reducing the highest incomes. SS has a surprising degree of “not looting citizens to pay massive pensions to rich people” compared to the system in Finland, so there isn’t that much of free-lunchiness there but when it comes to tax money I’m totally going to reallocate it to poor people first.
You do say “The Singapore model could treat the entire population for around 400 billion, of which something like 200 billion would be government spending.“
That was actually my mistake. It would be $400B in government spending and around $1T in total spending; I had somehow misremembered the “public” numbers as “total” numbers and kept the ratio of public:total constant. Nonetheless, it’s way cheaper than the current system in the US.
The Singapore model is cheaper than the US model for a few reasons. First, because of the strong price controls the Singapore government imposes on the market. We can import that to the US, and it’s a good idea - but I get the sense that most libertarians and anarchists would oppose that idea.
I have no idea why libertarians would oppose an idea that would cut government costs while simultaneously reducing the distortionate effects of its involvement. Most libertarians I know agree that the Singapore system is the best state healthcare system in the world, and some have claimed that the same efficiency could be done with a totally private system as well. A hundred years ago a worker could get healthcare for an entire year at the equivalent of something like $150 in today’s prices before the government stepped in to stop such abominations, and a genuinely competitive market where the supply of doctors isn’t artifically constrained but actually matches demand would make things a lot cheaper.
Second, it’s much cheaper in Singapore because only 9% of Singapore’s population is over age 64, compared to 15% of the US population, according to the CIA World Factbook. Fewer old people to treat equals cheaper, but there’s no way to transfer that to the US system. (Nor is there any way to maintain that in Singapore - Singapore’s population is aging, and they won’t be able to sustain their current low levels of health spending).
The US is also having healthcare costs out of control, and SS costs out of control as well. That’s one reason why I want to privatize-as-in-privacy and deregulate healthcare; to make it both possible and profitable to use all genuine cost-cutting innovations people come up with, so they don’t need to resort to harmful forms of cost-cutting instead.
Third, the Singapore system relies on mandatory health savings accounts, in which (iirc) people are required to put 20% of their income into special accounts that can only be accessed to pay for medical care for themselves or their family members. It works for most people because most people are pretty healthy for most of their lives, so that by the time they get old, or suffer a catastrophic health problem, they have a lot of accrued health savings that they can draw on.
But how do you switch this over to the US? Imagine that Ed was a mover for 45 years, but recently retired - his back can’t take that kind of labor anymore. In fact, he’s going to need a series of back and knee surgeries to be able to remain mobile and not in constant agony. Ed did not spend that whole 45 years putting 20% of his income aside for medical expenses in his old age.
Now we’ve yanked Medicare out from under him, and replaced it with the Singapore system, which assumes people have large savings that can only be used on medical care. How’s Ed going to manage?
Multiply Ed’s problem times hundreds of thousands of people.
US surgeries are obscenely expensive. The system allows everyone to pass their costs to everyone else, which they promptly do. Furthermore, Singapore has a public catastrophic insurance precisely for people like Ed who have large bills they can’t pay. The big difference is in making people pay for their healthcare so they will ration their usage vs. making everyone else pay for everyone’s healthcare without even price controls intervening (downwards, that is; there are plenty of government interventions making healthcare artificially expensive). Western Europe is using “make everyone pay for everyone, but at least try to keep prices in check” and it’s better, but why settle for better when one could have the best?
And regardless, even though my calculations were incorrect, the UBI phaseout (or, in other words, income tax hike for honesty) could be increased to compensate for that. Doubling it so that the average american gets “only” $7000 more a year would provide enough money to give Singaporean healthcare to every single Ed.
Happily, there are much, much better ideas about how to pay for a Universal Basic Income. (I don’t agree with the flat tax idea, but the rest seems like a reasonable approach.)
While the link has merits, some parts of it are ridiculous. Payroll taxes are the same as income taxes, they are just hidden which is disingenuous and terrible; thus the actual income tax wouldn’t be 17% but instead 30%. Doesn’t matter that much though, as I’d totally do the same flattening of income taxes, just making them transparent instead of hiding a part in payroll taxes (seriously, this is something I will never understand of the non-hard left; why do people believe “employer pays x% of your wages” is not away from your wages? At least marxists understand it through the concept of surplus value.); and the UBI phaseout would be effectively a tax increase, I just called it by a different name to demonstrate that every taxpayer would be getting more money than they currently do.
By adding a 10% VAT one cuts everyone’s purchasing power by 10%, which is the equivalent of taking away 10% of their income. It’s not that hard. Thus the total tax is at ~40% and people are effectively getting only $900 a month’s worth because everything will be more expensive. No way around it. Still better than Finland or current US though.
(Finland is ridiculous and evil. We pay 24% VAT on most things meaning that in the US I’m like “omfg how is everything so cheap here” (except fucking healthcare, but I’ve got a nice insurance trick that gets me free-as-in-no-copays healthcare in the US for only $60 a year); then we have a 25% effective payroll tax for pensions which one is technically not allowed to opt out of (but I know a way to do it anyway because fuck that, I’m not going to get anything out of it so why should I subsidize some conservative baby boomer asshole’s tax evasion sangria in Portugal (if you’re living large on my taxes at least pay your own fucking share)), and then we have regular income tax which goes up to 50% when counting national and municipal taxes; if I made $100k a year in Finland I’d pay effectively $65k in various taxes (if I didn’t evade them, obviously; with a couple of legal tricks I could cut it down to $45k and that would make me an evil deadbeat bourgie who’s avoiding their responsibility, and I’m a person who finds “Work harder, millions of people on welfare depend on you!” sincerely inspirational).
Carbon taxes are neat, and I’d totally implement a big revenue-neutral carbon tax in my model to reduce other taxes (ideally replacing income taxes with something like the FairTax, although that would require adjusting the UBI upwards to compensate for the tax). Financial transaction taxes I don’t know about, as some people I trust to have a clue say they are terrible and others say they are good, so I’ll default to “no”.
So if I were to revise my model, it would feature a universal tax equal to something around 30% with no hidden components, correction for the healthcare miscalculation, and a slight adjustment to the SS cuts so people would have less cause to whine (perhaps making it so that everyone’s SS payments are cut by $8k so all recipients would gain $2k a year or more) combined with abolition of the mandatory pension system.
P.S. Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s also the most effective anti-poverty program in US history. But yeah, we should totally throw it away and replace it with a program that’s never actually been tried on any significant scale. No way that could go wrong.
Social security is a ponzi scheme in the sense that it’s a clever way of early adopters to loot latecomers. Don’t get me wrong, I think Bitcoin is totally a ponzi scheme in some ways too, yet I like Bitcoin.
Objectively, the amount current pensioners have paid to SS is way less than they are getting out of it, when compared to what current young people would end up paying and receiving. There’s no way around it. Finland has a similar system and I’m very familiar with how it works and it’s totally a Ponzi scheme that enrichens baby boomers at the cost of my generation. (The system in Finland is a lot worse in that aspect, but the basic nature of PAYG schemes is the same.) When the argument for “it’s not a ponzi” relies on “Private sector Ponzi schemes are also vulnerable to collapse because they cannot compel new entrants, whereas participation in the Social Security program is a condition for joining the U.S. labor force.” I think it’s pretty fair to say that it has very significant ponzi-like characteristics. Or alternatively I could say that it’s just a tool old people use to loot young people. As far as such tools go, it’s amazingly non-terrible as it doesn’t pay rich people obscene pensions (Microsoft’s Elop will be entitled to way more finnish pension moneys from his short tenure at Nokia than a poor person who’s worked their entire life could ever get), but it’s still an unsustainable system whose taxes have been increased massively over time to keep up with the promises.
Also, I find it kind of funny that you say “we’ve been giving a certain amount of money to some people, which has reduced poverty, but we shouldn’t take the risky step of giving a certain amount of money to all people because who knows what would happen”
Being a janitor or a plumber will have to pay more than the Universal Basic Income and offer some sweet perks. The job market can still exist without the “work or die” threat, it’ll just look very different.
Of course this means that hiring a janitor or plumber will be very expensive, but that’ll be all the more motivation for people to invent robo-janitors.
(Which means that former janitors will take a pay cut when they go from janitor pay to UBI, but the whole point of UBI is that it’s not poverty level and living on it is not a disaster.)
…Yeah, as before, I’m not 100% sure the math works out here, but I like to think there’s some way of transcending “we have clean toilets because we threaten people with starvation!”
Don’t get me wrong - I favor UBI. But I think it should be phased in gradually, so if it fails we can back out; and I don’t think programs that have been incredibly helpful to millions of low-income people, me included, should be thrown away lightly.
I’ve lived several years on “programs that have been incredibly helpful to low-income people” and I’d throw them away very lightly if I got the chance to implement UBI instead.
Once when I had to deposit cash to my bank account while being on the equivalent of TANF, I didn’t do it directly because they would’ve reduced my welfare as it would’ve been “income” (they scrutinize bank statements to see how much people “deserve”) but I instead bought some expensive prescription drugs I didn’t need and told them to refund those to my bank account.
And then when I hit my copayment cap on prescription drugs earlier than I would otherwise have I received that money back a second time later that year.
And in theory one could even sell the drugs to make one’s money back a third time, but I didn’t do that.
Such programs are mostly harmful, they result in utterly perverted and distorted incentives that lead to such ridiculous tricks being the best option, and they waste huge amounts of tax money and create massive incentive traps that ensure people can’t improve their situation. Money is the unit of caring; if you care about people, give them money so they can afford what they need and that’s it, most of everything else is harmful. (bednets are an outlier adn should not be counted)
@collapsedsquid said: That reads like an advertising brochure rather than a description of an organization
Actually, I should compare this to marketing material on the IMF
Obviously. If I knew how to actually implement OpenGov, I’d be doing it instead of speculating on the internet, but since I don’t actually know how to come up with such a system in a couple of hours (my superpower isn’t that good, and any actual implementation would require information I don’t have (YGM if I were to ever start actually doing it)), all I can do is either describe my intuitions for how OpenGov could vaguely operate in a way which sounds like an advertising brochure, or be quiet while people shoot down an idea of “wouldn’t it be cool if someone found a way to do this” with “nobody has found a way to do it yet, gtfo”.
A lot of solutions to hard problems started with someone being “there is a problem; I wonder if it could be solved in this novel way” and I want people to be able to do that thing without everyone piling up on them for not including the exact implementation of the solution in their description of it. Because sometimes someone needs to air a vague idea and someone else might get interested in it and start figuring out the engineering problems. (Def including social engineering.)
And sometimes peopse need to think aloud so their ideas will be better.
And being positioned in the intersection of “technolibertarian” and “intersectional leftist” I believe it might be possible to address the objections in a way which makes the original idea actually implementable, because the two interests (a free market with a reliable basic system, and poor people not getting looted) are not directly opposed to each other and thus win-win combinations could be done as long as the costs of implementing don’t outweigh the benefits.
The “standard silicon valley model” of these kinds of things, used by eg. what3words, seems to be to provide a non-profit version for humanitarian purposes which is subsidized as a side effect of the for-profit version for private companies (like everyone getting access to the addressing system, while the costs of running it are paid by companies using w3w’s tech to utilize it in their own operation). This is also the standard way of delivering many public goods without government; as long as some subset of private interests benefits more than the costs of providing the public good and coordinating to provide it, the public good will exist (modulo market failures etc.). A harbor builds a lighthouse to attract more paying customers, but even people who aren’t paying customers benefit from it, and so on.
So that model might be useful for the actual implementation of OpenGov. A purely philanthropy-based approach is basically just the Pirate Party or whatever, and it mostly seems to work in Iceland, but the bigger the philanthropy the less costly it is to implement OpenGov.
Now let’s look at Venezuela. Venezuela because it’s an actual shithole, I have a bit of a clue what’s going on, and it has no friends in global geopolitics so even if I talk shit about the government of Venezuela and end up outputting an actually working way to overthrow them the Mossad or CIA won’t assassinate me.
I’ll divide the society of Venezuela into roughly 3 categories: oil companies, state, and regular people. Oil companies have money and they want oil and they are evil and OpenGov mustn’t associate openly with them. The state has oil, and it wants to loot everybody to enrichen itself. The people have power, which they have been renting out to the state in exchange for bribes, and they want to live a good life. In theory the equation shoudn’t be so hard: the state sells oil to oil companies, gives money to the people, everything is basically okay. But because the state doesn’t need to fear competition (someone undercutting their rates by offering cheaper oil to oil companies and more money to the people), they have a monopoly they have been exploiting to loot the people. In theory a solution would also be elegant: bribe away the state by offering them better than what they can loot right now, sell oil to oil companies, stop looting the people, and reap the rewards of economic growth and peace and prosperity which generate enough money to pay the costs of bribing away the state. Of course, in ~*~theory~*~; this plan benefits everyone and as rational economic actors they will all support it, in other words never going to happen.
So the actual issues are “how to get from here to there”. Popular resistance is good as far as it prevents the state from just looting everyone, but popular mandate for looting “Everyone Else But Me” is bad and should be avoided. Now, I’ll totally expropriate on idea from Mencius Moldbug because why the fuck no I’m way deep in intolerable-weirdo-land already; “make your technology so that it’s inherently supportive of the kind of governance you want”. Thus, ideally OpenGov would be a technology which makes UBI possible and easy, while making other forms of government services to special interests difficult. An electronic currency for distributing UBI, and in which land value taxes and oil payments must be paid.
I’d base the state on those two: land and natural resources, as they are easy to tax and can be considered a relatively legitimate form of public ownership, definitely moreso than stealing the fruits of people’s labor (and less distortionate to the economy too). In effect a smallholder having the average amount of land (in terms of value, not area) would not pay anything, anyone having less land would be subsidized and anyone using more land needs to compensate everyone else for hoarding stuff to themselves. In exchange, the state respects land ownership. Elegant, provides redistribution and a degree of justice built-in to compensate for the historical grab of land to favored interests, and should offer a degree of legitimacy.
So that’s how we will get money. Landowners and oil companies will pay the state to protect their (least-illegitimate or most legitimate, depending on how one views the question) interests, and in exchange the state will give money to people (to bribe them to not cause trouble, or to compensate for having their rightful common property seized by private interests, however one wishes to look at the question).
We’ll build an electronic system for tracking land ownership, its value, tax status etc. and a built-in redistribution of the taxes to the citizenry. To reduce moral hazards, the land value+natural resource tax rate will be almost set in stone, requiring a significant supermajority to change. I don’t know the correct rate, but it should be enough that it generates income while not being so much that it eradicates long-term investment in land. If it can’t be done, one needs to look at alternative sources of tax revenue and establish a very set-in-stone amount of flat deduction-free tax on something that’s not easy to do tax avoidance in. We want adjusting tax rates to be as difficult as possible so the state can’t loot its citizens, and we want the taxes to be as unlikely to disastrously backfire on us after being all but set in stone as possible so we won’t end up with an unfixable pile of bullshit.
So the money flow is: Taxpayers -> People -> Government. This way because people will see their personal share of the public income as something which belongs to them, and the government budget will be shown as a fraction of one’s basic income to disincentivize waste and bullshit. But in effect the government share will be deducted from the UBI as the money is received in taxes, it will just be displayed prominently so people might be less likely to overspend. And everyone gets the same share because equality, and it also aids in transparency. There will be no regional money transfers to areas needing special attention because that way lies looting, but the taxes will be collected nationally and distributed back to people nationally so the richer areas inherently support people in poorer areas. Local governments can appropriate some of the UBI money to provide services instead if they get the democratic mandate to do so. This way we can get public goods and important services but avoid excess looting.
Next, law and order. This is important. The costs of paying for central government and national defense will be taken from the taxes, but as much should be decentralized as possible, and the central government should only mostly make sure the local governments don’t fuck shit up or disrespect human rights. Local governments should provide the actual police etc. on as low a level as possible while having only accountability enforced from up above. There will be a constitution guaranteeing the basic form of governance and human rights and a constitutional court to kick the ass of anyone violating it. The exact structure of the constitutional court is outside the scope of this document but it seems that most countries, as long as the rulers can’t intervene too directly, are capable of having a sufficiently non-shitty method of finding out people who can nerd out on the specifics of laws.
Local government. Liquid democracy could be used so people can vote on other people they trust to decide things for them, and perhaps some kind of a market system in preferences so that the majority can’t consistently override any specific minority but instead treating votes as currency would guarantee that everyone’s preferences are equally satisfied statistically. I could spend most of my vote-monies on “don’t vote on promethea’s body” and override the cissexist mob, while letting the mob vote on the colour of the bike shed and staying away from it personally. Markets are cool, markets are good when engineered properly for the situation, just ask Feeding America.
Public services. Local low-level government has the mandate to provide them, the budget taken out from the basic income of the citizens under that government. (Weird idea: let people choose which set of low-level government they want to live under by having each physical location have several competing providers overlapping geographically and thus make the system of voting with one’s feet more flexible. Imagine every US county having not only the local county, but also an option to belong to any of the neighboring counties as well. And the “counties” would be way smaller for most purposes; the size of a small city. Probably not a workable idea, but an interesting one anyway.) The services provided are decided using ~liquid democracy~ as long as they aren’t unconstitutional. Higher levels of government coordinate bigger services, still using ~liquid democracy~ all the way to the top.
Voting. Local elections every year for local candidates, who then gain mandate equivalent to their number of votes, which they can transfer upwards transparently. A voting system can have at most two of: confidentiality so others can’t see who people have voted for, flexibility so people can change their vote whenever they want, simplicity so one doesn’t need to have an IQ of 130 to exercise their democratic rights.
I’m choosing confidentiality and simplicity, with yearly feedback helping keep representatives accountable and the absence of any other elections than the local ones reduces political deadweight loss from campaigning etc.; this also has the advantage of being doable as a paper ballot system, which is easier to understand and trust and deliver even in the shit-poor backwoods areas, than a scheme that requires an electronic system. When the votes are counted so that the people counting hate each other’s guts and would just love to catch each other for election fraud, the votes are counted honestly, and even single-party states have local conflicts so the process can’t be cartellized. When it comes to ideas I’m whipping up in a couple of hours, this should be at least a bit resistant to most of the immediate failure modes of shitholistans.
The upwards transfer of mandate works so that on each level of government the representatives choose who on the level above them gets their mandate points, culminating in the president or whatever. And the reps can use their mandate points when voting on issues, and the points are like currency in a transparent market (this one receives “flexibility, simplicity” as the reps mustn’t have confidentiality anyway) so even marginalized groups can get heard via single-issue parties, but perhaps influence scales to the square root of mandate spent to discourage fanaticism. Local-level government can also have direct votes on issues so that each citizen has one mandate point equivalent. (With paper ballots people can have a certain number of extra votes each year which they can spend on issues they care the most about, maintaining reasonable confidentiality as voting records only reveal how much person X cares about issue Y, not how they actually voted on it. With electronic systems one can use whatever clever schemes, as the exact implementation would be chosen by the local government.)
Now, feel free to poke at ALL THE HOLES in this system, but at least poke at it for the things I’m proposing instead of “you don’t have a complete bulletproof implementation when toying with interesting ideas”. For something that took me a couple of hours to come up with, this seems like a relatively not-unpleasant democracy to live under; guaranteeing both a lagom amount of social welfare and an extraordinarily free market with a political system that is at least somewhat seeking to alleviate the inherent problems of democracy.
Who is going to be the ones enforcing the dictates of the system? Who is making sure things are done fairly? Who is adjudicating disputes? Who is making sure the power stays on and people are fed?
If you have a set of people who can do this, you don’t need the e-government. If you don’t have a set of people who can do this, the e-government isn’t necessary.
That’s why it kills me when I see this rationalist thing of political philosophizing based purely around rules and policies. That’s a way of thinking that’s good for changing the existing system, but when you need a new system, it’s all about the people, the political movement. To start with, when the system is not entrenched and everything is in flux, personal and movement loyalty becomes the deciding factor, for good or ill.
In a new system it’s not the choice of policies, it’s making sure the policies are carried
out. At the stage of forming a new government, that’s not about which
policies to choose, it’s about having trustworthy people to do it.
(policies matter in the longer term)
And that doesn’t even get into how poorly defined this “e-government“ concept seems to be, and what precisely you are expecting it do. Given what Eliezer talks about, I would worry about, say, someone using this system to implement a Junta. The e-government will be a fancy bit of political theater for people in suits to show off while they have people executed in the street.
And, after bad experiences with institutions like the IMF, any such idea is going to be incredibly toxic. The IMF has for years been forcing governments to adopt policies in exchange for aid that they now admit do not help. What do you think a e-government system would do? How would it be received? Would it be a method of helping people, or a method of facilitating looting?
The OpenGov organization. A non-profit run by a diverse coalition of various interests which are only united in their opinion that the OpenGov system is better than the existing governments of failing states.
And the OpenGov system itself is not a pre-packaged solution of “here, just give all the power to these people and everything will be fine”. It is a meta-level platform for solving those exact questions. Possibly the OpenGovOrg itself operates on OpenGov, and can act as both an example implementation and a transitory solution, with clear deterministic and trusted rules for transferring local power to locals in the process of implementing OpenGov.
OpenGovOrg has clear incentives to figure out ways to get to implement their ideas, and establish sufficient transparency to avoid corruption and juntas and looting, for otherwise people would rightfully oppose OpenGov the way they have opposed bad IMF policies (and, to be honest, sometimes good IMF policies too).
OpenGov could use TMC-style methods of humane minimally-violent policing to recreate a new system of law and order, staffed by competent locals with appropriate attitude and training, and more deserving of trust and respect. It could have a trusted organization run the courts until systems are rebuilt, or it could polycentrize them altogether. The power stays on, because OpenGov delivers safety and predictability and transparency and absence of monopoly abuse, and thus someone will pay someone else to supply electricity. People will be fed because they will pay someone to give them food; OpenGov will make it possible for that to happen, instead of having a terrible combination of expensive black markets and empty white markets where the system only hinders people. The people who can’t afford food or electricity will be provided a sufficient UBI (perhaps by a combination of OpenGov taxing something really predictable and easy, such as land ownership, and partnering with aid organizations like GiveDirectly) so they can afford them, and the UBI comes in OpenGov’s own electronic currency so it isn’t rendered worthless by the central government’s policies.
The core tenet of anarchism/minarchism/libertarianism is that people are basically decent and can get their shit together on their own as long as the environment is conductive to human flourishing and violent organizations don’t enforce harmful policies, and vicious debates between different variants are about what exactly is required for such an environment (for example: is private property a harmful policy enforced by a violent organization or not, or whether a state is necessary or harmful) but the core seems to be quite consistent. The “we don’t really know how to solve your problems, but we can help you get into a situation where you can solve them on your own” doesn’t seem like such an outrageous claim.
OpenGovOrg delivers the initial seed for a new society. Perhaps it has its own armed forces, queering the mercenary/volunteer binary, to keep away violent looters (such as gangs, PoliceMob of the previous system, or even the army of the central government if OpenGov serves the people instead of the state) until local security and defense are established. It probably has its own police and courts, into which locals will be assimilated so that they will ultimately run the system as OpenGovOrg gradually withdraws. It might have its own emergency infrastructure provision although those duties should be assumed by other private-as-in-privacy organizations, or a rebuilt local government, as soon as possible to avoid distortions.
And OpenGov’s entire “business plan” relies on them being accountable, trustworthy and non-corrupt. They don’t have the trillion-dollar-and-massive-violence backing of the IMF, and thus they actually have to deliver value to their “customers”. Yes, people would be suspicious and reluctant initially, but some place somewhere would be in dire enough straits to take the deal, and if OpenGov delivers it will gain respect, reputation, and new gigs, and if it fails, it will be discredited and cease to exist.
And who would OpenGovOrg be? Activists, hackers, tech companies, philanthropes, academicians, and people with connections to, and knowledge of, the local situations. A balance of representation that is necessary for any semblance of legitimacy to begin with, instead of being perceived as a tool of outside looters or know-it-all meddlers.
Where you are seeing unanswered questions, I’m seeing an opportunity for someone to solve them. And if that solution can’t be backed up by external violence, it inevitably needs to offer people something attractive enough that they would accept it. As long as the incentives are aligned and external violent monopolies didn’t stop it, OpenGov could exist.
And then he’s shocked and horrified when people accuse him of being a reacto
The head-slapping part of this is that it assumes that the difficult part about running a government is all the gosh-darned records processing, and not the bit about maintaining the consent of the governed.
States don’t fail because they can’t process paperwork efficiently enough, they fail because the people decide that an alternative offering is more compelling.
(or more uncharitably: this is the most ignorant post X has ever made, and will remain so until X posts again).
I think y’all are overestimating how much anyone on the ground cares about consent of the governed when basic services stop working.
Which is to say, we’re not talking about the hypothetical choice between libertarian e-state and continued liberal democracy, but rather between libertarian e-state and a likely military coup.
While there is “consent of the governed“ as a governing ideal, there’s also consent of the governed as what is needed for government to work.
“Force is always on the side of the governed“ is the classic formulation by David Hume, but I like to repurpose an old saying “If one man doesn’t pay his taxes, he’s going to have a problem. If nobody pays their taxes, then the government is going to have a problem.“
In this case, the e-government is just meaningless bits in a computer until you get people to care about them. If you could get enough people to care about the bits, then you wouldn’t have a problem in the first place.
Ah, I see. I guess I didn’t quite get the objection. Thrown off by the “reacto”, I think, but I guess not everyone’s objection is the same.
I still think it’s not so laughable in theory. What makes government institutions viable is tenuous, given that all the concrete elements needed to deliver basic serviced are pretty much still there.
A minarchist e-government, at least as an interim regime, has at least a few things going for it that are attractive in such a situation. Namely, it’s not associated with the existing government or its opposition, it’s simple, it works with minimal taxation, doesn’t have to be devised from scratch, and maybe it’d have some manner of organization baked in. It also has the distinction of not being military dictatorship.
You still have to sell it to the people, or at least government functionaries, enough to implement, yes. But we’re not talking about a program running in a server in an empty capitol. The government still exists. It’s just utterly discredited.
But a straightforward plan is exactly the sort of thing that can garner enough public trust to work, and the more it’s ready to go in its technical aspect, the more likely it is to be accepted by the people needed to get things back on track.
Here is how I see what he’s saying. He’s saying, that when the situation is dire, when the wolves are at the door, when the alternative is thugs with guns killing you and taking your possessions, we come in with an offer.
We say, we gave you your autonomy, and you made your choices, and the consequences were thus. Now you are poor and hungry and weak. Look at the past, and know it for truth: we did not afflict this upon you. You chose it, though you did not seek it.
We come with hope. We come with an offer. We will give you wealth, feed you food, we will make you strong again. We will keep the wolves from your doors. All that we ask in return is thus, that you make us stronger than we were before. That as we raise you up, you raise us up. That together, we can be better.
No, no, listen. LISTEN!This is not exploitation! You must not be jealous of our wealth! If we were not cautious with it, if we did not horde it, if we did not make sure to only give it out to those who would return it back larger (but be made larger themselves by this), this wealth would not exist! We could not help you if our greed hadn’t protected our wealth.
This is respect. You bear the consequences of your choices. But, we can make each other stronger. And you can become strong enough to survive your consequences. And we can become stronger, so that we are happy, we are pleased, we have more and our greed is satisfied. But, we do it by raising up those around us. But, because of our greed, we have wealth the next time someone needs it.
I mean, I don’t know EY’s mind, so I can’t tell you he wasn’t thinking along those lines. But I do think there are a few assumptions there that puzzle me.
First, maybe I’m projecting, but there’s nothing suggesting anyone would be making a profit off of implementing this hypothetical software. It rather seems like he’s suggesting creating something following a free software model, to be freely distributed and modified, without restriction, and, importantly, without submitting to a foreign authority. As such, I see it as something a lot closer to the way many fledgling democracies essentially took the US Constitution as a template for theirs.
Which brings me to another point. I hope we can agree that the Venezuelan government dun fucked up. When an oil-rich country can’t deliver basic goods and services to its population, then maybe its economic policies are not the best of all possible worlds (even if you think the international capitalist system is ultimately at fault). And economic policy is not an exclusively technical question, but it is largely technical. Whether a libertarian government would better provide basic services than a failed state is an empirical question. EY believes he has a better answer than the Venezuelan government. Maybe you disagree. But thinking you have a better answer than the people currently in power is kind of what much political discourse is. And literally any opinion about political economy could be framed in the same condescending tone. And, again, I don’t know his mind, but my impression of him has always been that he is entirely consequentialist, and all this business about choices and deserved consequences is very alien to his way of thinking.
My take: EY has noticed and asked a difficult question that almost no one thinks about (”what does a trauma unit for failed states look like?”), and proposed a novel, interesting answer that could plausibly outperform the status quo, though as usual implementation is unlikely.
This is good and interesting and I am glad it has been brought to my attention.
More generally, the quality of EY’s ideas varies quite a lot, which is what you should expect from someone producing genuine novelty in a casual setting (fucking Facebook, c’mon).
Instinctively shitting all over everything he says is obnoxious.
Stop, think, evaluate, and then shit all over it, at least.
And srsly, the basic idea is very powerful and interesting.
If someone came up with a way of combining simple software government with things that give it popular legitimacy, it could disrupt failed states pretty thoroughly and provide people a serious alternative.
Of course, my anarchism tends to bias me towards a more bottom-up approach (make your free-as-in-speech OpenGov a product people can adopt among themselves and fuck the state up above which doesn’t care about them, instead of being something international technocrats sell to domestic technocrats) but if someone found a way to do it in either direction we would effectively have a floor for how shitty states can be.
And furthermore, if it were the government equivalent of a first aid kit, it might be a way to actually implement alternative forms of governance without running into the trouble of “existing states don’t like competitors to their position”; an insurrection against the US government would be taken down pretty fast but selling OpenGov as a “less bad solution” for failed states (from the perspective of the State) could be an opportunity to do cool things without getting fucked with (eg. Rojava seems to be basically going for that one; “we kick ass against Daesh and keep order in our territory, you should keep us around because of those reasons even if you don’t like us”). Sufficiently non-threatening to non-failed states, while simultaneously delivering way better than failed states, might be a killer niche for governance.
In practical terms some kind of social market minarchism might be the best practical solution; enough economic freedom to create opportunities for growth, and enough welfare provisions (in the form of UBI as it’s both superior and less bureaucratic than alternatives) to ensure sufficient legitimacy so the first populist promising tons of free shit to poor people won’t fuck everything up. Someone should get a few hundred million dollars onto this.
1. You can’t say what EY said
2. Because no one (who has reputation and influence) can honestly suggest it on a major platform, there are probably great, obvious rebuttals to this idea that don’t get spread. At best, we get “Fuck off you entitled, presumptuous, condescending and probably classist techbro, it’s not worth my time to respond to you.” Followed by insinuation of nrx sympathies and status attacks.
3. Telling someone with traumatic problems on their mind that breathing deeply, counting to ten, that getting some sleep, exercising, etc will help is really unhelpful because they’ve tried all those things before and have bigger problems and it’s insulting.
But, it’s often a basic requirement for getting better and just works. This SEEMS kind of analogous as “start by resolving or implementing the basic physical level.”
4. This can’t work as it stands now. The IMF already does this - or claims to. In actuality, they use loans to control and manipulate countries for their own ends. Think less basic income and more “scared straight” or those “pray the gay away” clinics. So nobody really trusts international western institutions on this.
(I get that EYs proposed policy changes sound similar, but they’re more on the level of “electrolyte IV and some vitamins to GET YOU GOING”)
4. IMF is a monopoly that needs to be disrupted. If someone has a failing state and IMF comes with its deal of a devil, having OpenGov with its bunch of hackers and activists and “yes, sure, this project does have self-interested backers too, but at least we have better transparency and can show you they wouldn’t screw you over as hard as either of the IMF or your current government” would definitely be an improvement for the people on the bottom who suffer. Uber may be evil, but for many people it’s the least of all evils, and if Uber is making a predatory profit off poor people it means someone can be less predatory and undercut them and win both market share and benefits for poor people. Similarly, having a free market in competitive providers of governance models would probably help the customer. And distrust is an implementability problem, and figuring out ways to reduce the cause for distrust is useful and a memetic engineering question, not an absolute obstacle.
That’s also a part of my technocrat objection; having something that benefits people themselves (if one can figure out how to deliver good government as a private good it’s basically the holy grail of politics and failing states are probably the most likely places where it could happen) would be better than something that gets imposed on people from above by international western institutions.
the upsides of living with a cat who loves to bite wires in places it considers its own:
you learn a lot of opsec and electronics repair skills
the downsides of living with such a cat:
IT’S ONLY BEEN A COUPLE OF DAYS SINCE I GOT MY MODEM BACK ONLINE GIVE ME A GODDAMN BREAK SOMETIMES
@collapsedsquid said: Your cat is making you learn opsec? Is your cat a l33t hx40r?
Yes. Do not leave vulnerabilities where an adversary can access them, for the adversary will inevitably exploit them. The only real defense is eliminating the vulnerability.
And the pragmatist’s corollary: sometimes it’s sufficient to just measure it as (motivation * ability) and the only practical defense is reducing vulnerabilities to those that the adversary isn’t interested enough to exploit. Reducing motivation alongside with ability is, when dealing with Not-Mossad, sufficient to deal with the threats that are really impractical to eliminate the ability of exploiting which.
And the clockwork corollary: ultimately there is no difference between motivation and ability, and they all boil down to “how hard will you(r modem wires) be pwned” and reducing the amount of pwnage one receives is what matters.
[content warning: misandry, misogyny, violence against penises, abuse] The comments of my last post contained several people who were like “Ozy, you are excusing feminists! You would never write a post like this about MRAs!” To which I say: challenge fucking accepted. As far as I can tell, the genre of “two dozen out-of-context quotes without sources or anything” is not particularly popular among…
This is important and brilliant. Only a movement that has been hardened by the fires of truth in the crucible of accountability deserves to reign over the future.
Also, while it’s slightly off-topic I really appreciated these gems of rhetoric:
that an all-female comedy festival is exclusionary of men certainly seems prima facie plausible, but perhaps falls victim to the objection that all-male comedy festivals already exist, they are just not labeled as such.
While feminist sexism and rape apologism is shameful and “about as bad as the rest of society” is not exactly something to brag about, I do think that’s important to note.
And then he’s shocked and horrified when people accuse him of being a reacto
The head-slapping part of this is that it assumes that the difficult part about running a government is all the gosh-darned records processing, and not the bit about maintaining the consent of the governed.
States don’t fail because they can’t process paperwork efficiently enough, they fail because the people decide that an alternative offering is more compelling.
(or more uncharitably: this is the most ignorant post X has ever made, and will remain so until X posts again).
I think y’all are overestimating how much anyone on the ground cares about consent of the governed when basic services stop working.
Which is to say, we’re not talking about the hypothetical choice between libertarian e-state and continued liberal democracy, but rather between libertarian e-state and a likely military coup.
While there is “consent of the governed“ as a governing ideal, there’s also consent of the governed as what is needed for government to work.
“Force is always on the side of the governed“ is the classic formulation by David Hume, but I like to repurpose an old saying “If one man doesn’t pay his taxes, he’s going to have a problem. If nobody pays their taxes, then the government is going to have a problem.“
In this case, the e-government is just meaningless bits in a computer until you get people to care about them. If you could get enough people to care about the bits, then you wouldn’t have a problem in the first place.
Ah, I see. I guess I didn’t quite get the objection. Thrown off by the “reacto”, I think, but I guess not everyone’s objection is the same.
I still think it’s not so laughable in theory. What makes government institutions viable is tenuous, given that all the concrete elements needed to deliver basic serviced are pretty much still there.
A minarchist e-government, at least as an interim regime, has at least a few things going for it that are attractive in such a situation. Namely, it’s not associated with the existing government or its opposition, it’s simple, it works with minimal taxation, doesn’t have to be devised from scratch, and maybe it’d have some manner of organization baked in. It also has the distinction of not being military dictatorship.
You still have to sell it to the people, or at least government functionaries, enough to implement, yes. But we’re not talking about a program running in a server in an empty capitol. The government still exists. It’s just utterly discredited.
But a straightforward plan is exactly the sort of thing that can garner enough public trust to work, and the more it’s ready to go in its technical aspect, the more likely it is to be accepted by the people needed to get things back on track.
Here is how I see what he’s saying. He’s saying, that when the situation is dire, when the wolves are at the door, when the alternative is thugs with guns killing you and taking your possessions, we come in with an offer.
We say, we gave you your autonomy, and you made your choices, and the consequences were thus. Now you are poor and hungry and weak. Look at the past, and know it for truth: we did not afflict this upon you. You chose it, though you did not seek it.
We come with hope. We come with an offer. We will give you wealth, feed you food, we will make you strong again. We will keep the wolves from your doors. All that we ask in return is thus, that you make us stronger than we were before. That as we raise you up, you raise us up. That together, we can be better.
No, no, listen. LISTEN!This is not exploitation! You must not be jealous of our wealth! If we were not cautious with it, if we did not horde it, if we did not make sure to only give it out to those who would return it back larger (but be made larger themselves by this), this wealth would not exist! We could not help you if our greed hadn’t protected our wealth.
This is respect. You bear the consequences of your choices. But, we can make each other stronger. And you can become strong enough to survive your consequences. And we can become stronger, so that we are happy, we are pleased, we have more and our greed is satisfied. But, we do it by raising up those around us. But, because of our greed, we have wealth the next time someone needs it.
I mean, I don’t know EY’s mind, so I can’t tell you he wasn’t thinking along those lines. But I do think there are a few assumptions there that puzzle me.
First, maybe I’m projecting, but there’s nothing suggesting anyone would be making a profit off of implementing this hypothetical software. It rather seems like he’s suggesting creating something following a free software model, to be freely distributed and modified, without restriction, and, importantly, without submitting to a foreign authority. As such, I see it as something a lot closer to the way many fledgling democracies essentially took the US Constitution as a template for theirs.
Which brings me to another point. I hope we can agree that the Venezuelan government dun fucked up. When an oil-rich country can’t deliver basic goods and services to its population, then maybe its economic policies are not the best of all possible worlds (even if you think the international capitalist system is ultimately at fault). And economic policy is not an exclusively technical question, but it is largely technical. Whether a libertarian government would better provide basic services than a failed state is an empirical question. EY believes he has a better answer than the Venezuelan government. Maybe you disagree. But thinking you have a better answer than the people currently in power is kind of what much political discourse is. And literally any opinion about political economy could be framed in the same condescending tone. And, again, I don’t know his mind, but my impression of him has always been that he is entirely consequentialist, and all this business about choices and deserved consequences is very alien to his way of thinking.
My take: EY has noticed and asked a difficult question that almost no one thinks about (”what does a trauma unit for failed states look like?”), and proposed a novel, interesting answer that could plausibly outperform the status quo, though as usual implementation is unlikely.
This is good and interesting and I am glad it has been brought to my attention.
More generally, the quality of EY’s ideas varies quite a lot, which is what you should expect from someone producing genuine novelty in a casual setting (fucking Facebook, c’mon).
Instinctively shitting all over everything he says is obnoxious.
Stop, think, evaluate, and then shit all over it, at least.
And srsly, the basic idea is very powerful and interesting.
If someone came up with a way of combining simple software government with things that give it popular legitimacy, it could disrupt failed states pretty thoroughly and provide people a serious alternative.
Of course, my anarchism tends to bias me towards a more bottom-up approach (make your free-as-in-speech OpenGov a product people can adopt among themselves and fuck the state up above which doesn’t care about them, instead of being something international technocrats sell to domestic technocrats) but if someone found a way to do it in either direction we would effectively have a floor for how shitty states can be.
And furthermore, if it were the government equivalent of a first aid kit, it might be a way to actually implement alternative forms of governance without running into the trouble of “existing states don’t like competitors to their position”; an insurrection against the US government would be taken down pretty fast but selling OpenGov as a “less bad solution” for failed states (from the perspective of the State) could be an opportunity to do cool things without getting fucked with (eg. Rojava seems to be basically going for that one; “we kick ass against Daesh and keep order in our territory, you should keep us around because of those reasons even if you don’t like us”). Sufficiently non-threatening to non-failed states, while simultaneously delivering way better than failed states, might be a killer niche for governance.
In practical terms some kind of social market minarchism might be the best practical solution; enough economic freedom to create opportunities for growth, and enough welfare provisions (in the form of UBI as it’s both superior and less bureaucratic than alternatives) to ensure sufficient legitimacy so the first populist promising tons of free shit to poor people won’t fuck everything up. Someone should get a few hundred million dollars onto this.
Anonymous asked: Is it possible or advisable to not have a dominant set of sex hormones - like, to have a hormone system that can't be described as "estrogen dominant" or "testosterone dominant"?
My understanding is that it is possible, but you run a risk of osteoporosis and other health problems in the long-term. That’s really something you want to talk to an endocrinologist about, not me– it’s p experimental.
Actually, as long as your overall amount of the hormones affecting those things is sufficient, there will be no specific health problems. Having no dominant type of hormone most commonly occurs in the absence of both, which is less healthy in the very long term, but it’s perfectly possible to have some amount of both instead (eg. afab with a reference model endocrine system taking a light amount of testosterone, or amab using partial doses of antiandrogens along with estrogen). Or one can supplement with SARMs and SERMS to target the specific locations to avoid problems while having low overall levels of regular testosterone and estrogen (eg. increasing bone density without having that many effects elsewhere by targeting the hormone receptors in bones).
Of course, this is all ~purely academic~, as I may not give medical advice and am thus not giving medical advice to anyone on the topic. And taking medical advice from strange convicted medical criminals on the internet is inadvisable anyway, and if one takes my words as medical advice it’s their own damn fault even though I definitely try to be v v responsible with my words so that in the case someone were to take them as medical advice nonetheless (even though it’s v v unadvisable to do so) they would not suffer from it too badly.
Nonetheless, I can very much describe the things someone wanting to do such things might do. So if you want to hear a quite detailed description of what someone (who is definitely just an abstract hypothetical person and definitely not you) might do if they wanted to have a hormone system without a dominant hormone, you should probably contact a promethea.
ISFJ: please don’t ask them out unless you’re 100% sure they like you back. They’ll feel guilty and they’ll pity date you and it’ll be awful for everyone involved and their grandmother.
ISTJ: “what are your intentions? Are you serious about this? What are your plans for the future?”
ESFJ: Picky af. If you’re down for constant “adjustments” to your character and appearance then go for it.
ESTJ: Surprisingly shy when it comes to romance. Ask them out. Ask them and watch how they get all stuttery and red in the face. So cute…and hilarious. Please take pictures for me.
ISFP: The closest thing to an idealist without the wishy-washyness. Suckers for all things love. If you’re into gushy and sickeningly sweet, this is your match.
ISTP: Dating them is like being their best friend…with benefits. What are you waiting for?
ESFP: They’re often very popular and desirable. If you’re the jealous clingy type, spare yourself and the esfp and forget the whole thing.
ESTP: Okay first of all, don’t try to compete for their love because you’ll never be able to love them as much as they love themselves. Also, if you’re looking for consistency, look elsewhere.
INFP: They’ll love you for you. 100% genuine. But their feelings are very intense. These are deep waters, you sure you can swim well?
INFJ: These ones are surprisingly ambitious. If your plans don’t fit into their “vision”, just walk your separate ways. They might wind up loving you with all of their heart, but Ni comes first. It’s nothing personal.
ENFP: This is the guy/girl that made you question your sexuality, isn’t it? Well guess what? They’ll probably also be down for helping you “figure it out”. Seize the opportunity!
ENFJ: So hot. I totally get why you’re interested in them. They’re a walking, talking paradox though. Helloo, is it confusion you’re looking for?
INTP: Lmao. Okay try to befriend them first then we’ll talk. This one could take years. Good luck, you poor thing.
INTJ: If you want someone who’ll constantly express their undying love for you then please don’t bother them.
ENTP: Go ahead. They’re pretty easy going and down for whatever. And even if they turn you down, they’ll do it so smoothly you’ll wonder if it ever even happened.
ENTJ: If you actually manage to score this one then you’ve successfully found yourself a sugar daddy. Niiice.
….ouch.
?NT? here and 100% accurate, would get confirmation biased again 5/5
