@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.
1 week ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower · 17 notes · .permalink
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not-a-lizard said: I like the land tax thing, that solves a fairness problem I’ve been worrying about. Yay!
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rageofthedogstar reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:But the implementation is literally the entire problem.When states are kicked out of equilibrium, the problem isn’t that...
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