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 week ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower · 130 notes · source: heavilyarmedvirtue · .permalink
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argumate said: this doesn’t seem to address the Venezuela example where people are actually going hungry, and can’t just stay home and surf the internet / continue business as usual
soundlogic2236 reblogged this from argumate and added:Except… not? They should have a WELL DEFINED fallback. If you write out six decent sets of laws, and then say the law is...
- argumate said: fuck you, it was a good line! :)
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fair enough, if you drop the geek enthusiasm from the original post then you end up with a simple assertion: struggling...
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1. You can’t say what EY said2. Because no one (who has reputation and influence) can honestly suggest it on a major...
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