There’s a few differences in the reasonings I’m using than those I think you are using, and to start with I want to establish those. While win-win may be your superpower, I’m more “You can’t please anyone.” You are talking about institutional efficiency, I’m more the first goal must be resiliency, efficiency is secondary. And finally, I generally take maximin as my guide, the goal is to maximize the well being of the worst off(“Converting Hysterical Misery into Ordinary Unhappiness” as the saying goes).
I see win-win as a way to please as many as necessary to achieve good outcomes (ideally there would be no need to please any specific interest groups as the good outcomes could justify themselves but reality is reality). I see efficiency as a source of long-term resiliency (rich and well-functioning countries don’t have coups). While I don’t necessarily consider maximizing the well-being of the worst off the absolute terminal value, I consider it a nice heuristic for many purposes.
So, I’m still not sure what opengov is actually supposed to be, but I’m guessing it’s basically a property record and currency system. While you say “OpenGov would be a technology which makes UBI possible and easy, while making other forms of government services difficult.” I think that’ll lead to just people not using opengov, similarly to the way overly strict security arrangements lead to people doing stupid security stuff to bypass them. Opengov won’t solve the problem like that, you need flexibility.
It’s supposed to be basically the MVP of governance. A plug-and-play state for those too incompetent to compile and configure one themselves. A looting-minimization system. In full fantasy-land, it would be The Standard Template for governance so that when someone suggests a state that’s running a different kernel people’s reaction would be “they probably want to just loot”.
I corrected the part; UBI should be easy, and converting UBI to the good kind of services should be easy, but instituting massive wealth transfers to politically favored interests should be hard. Because I think most state intervention that isn’t pure redistribution ends up being both worse than pure redistribution in helping people, and actively harmful to the economy as it works as a tool to enrichen cronies while looting value-creators.
OpenGov’s security would be built-in in the UBI and its conversion system. Instead of enabling arbitrary fucking-around in the economy, it would have a crystallized core of efficient purity that prevents some harmful actions. It’s to government budgets what functional programming is to code. When everyone gets the same amount of money, and can vote on whether they want it in pure money or services, it’s the principle of “no taxation without representation” taken further than elsewhere. It is intended to deliver the goods of sufficient redistribution without enabling bullshit, or ‘himmeli’ systems as the Finnish language calls them. (’himmeli’ meaning a complicated sculpture of straw and string that totally falls apart if you put weight on it and it’s just hanging off somewhere weighing it down and being in the way but also pleasing people’s sensibilities)
Regional subsidies? Sorry, can’t do it, nada, impossible. Agricultural subsidies? Convince the local community to support you if you want more than your fair share. Corporate welfare? Do we look like a DC? Means-tested bureaucratic systems of welfare? Lol nope. Complex schemes of delivering cushy government jobs to cronies? At least it’ll be less easy than in regular states. Price controls and subsidies for goods, housing etc.? Banned.
When you talk about using the oil money to pay for the UBI, that’s not the priority. The priority is to avoid dutch disease and having your economy be tied to a single commodity. If a UBI system causes people to start real and profitable industries, then funneling it all to a UBI will work. If a UBI doesn’t do that, then you would do something else. If you can’t diversify, you’re screwed in the long run. If it means you have to subsidize industry and the government is picking winners and losers, I’m absolutely OK with that if it solved that problem.
The hypothesis is that a free market, with some degree of purchasing power guaranteed with the UBI, would provide the opportunity for business and industry to flourish. I see government picking winners and losers as a thing that 1) tends to be harmful 2) tends to be really hard to implement in practice because of ~international neoliberal capitalist conspiracy~ and thus relying on it to deliver good outcomes isn’t going to work. Obviously on second thoughts, the oil proceedings need to be actually put into an index fund the interest revenue from which will be paid to citizens, to avoid price shocks and provide preparedness for a post-labor future.
Land value taxes are a nice idea, but for that you need prices to be generated, and that’s not easy. I’d need to dig into the literature to see how proponents manage that. Income at least is clear, it’s denominated in currency. I’m also in favor of measures like wealth taxes that prevent consolidation of economic power, but you’ve probably seen that shit before.
The idea is to have a functioning market in land (the tax mustn’t be so high as to destroy it) the prices from which can then be used as a basis for taxes. Theoretically one could just rent each parcel to the highest bidder, but that would destroy long-term investment in stuff that can’t be moved away easily.
Any kind of market-measurable wealth the state protects could obviously be taxed as well, although there are economic efficiency concerns in taxing productive capital and taxing luxuries like yachts and mansions might direct capitalists to just invest more and keep accumulating as a tax-avoidance scheme, thus deepening the economic inequality it was intended to alleviate. A well-functioning market that gets close to a theoretically optimal free market wouldn’t have easy rentseeking opportunities anyway and competition between capitalists should keep their profits down while disruptions can take them out any time so inequality would be lesser than in a system where the state can support its favorite capitalists at the expense of everyone else.
Income taxes are obviously a possibility too, but they require the state to know how much money people are making, and there is the problem of it making inherently more difficult for people to “just do” things for each other in exchange for currency, something I consider very important and the harming of which one of the greatest tragedies of social democracies. Getting a job or running a small business needs to be as easy as possible, and not having taxes in the way is a good way to minimize paperwork. It’s possible that taxes might only be applied to big players in the industry (eg. corporations are taxed in exchange for receiving recognition as limited liability organizations) thus distorting the market in favor of smaller businesses.
I think “make sure the local governments don’t fuck shit up or disrespect human rights.” is a hard and sometimes impossible problem. The nice thing about the federal government is that it’s far away, it’s oppression is therefore muted. The local assholes can easily be a worse threat. This is one of the cases for a stronger federal authority. (To give the classic example, in the US it was the feds who forced desegregation, local governments would have none of it.) I don’t have a solid proposal about this, but it’s always something I’m worried about.
Yes, and it needs attention, and the local oppression is precisely what the constitutional court’s ass-kicking powers are for. Feds enforcing desegregation etc. is completely different from feds taxing people to wage wars and enrichen cronies.
The competing law/governments system thing never makes any sense to me, I can’t see that leading to anything but a clusterfuck as people game the system. The nice thing about the law should be it’s unambigousness.
I see competition as providing alternatives. Eg. under Jim Crow southern blacks could’ve simply started their own local governments that don’t oppress them (feds stepping in to protect that right) and enjoying the delicious white whine. A lot of societal problems between groups seems to originate from one group using the state as a tool to oppress and loot another (or being perceived as doing so), and small-scale exit rights would make that a lot harder.
Local government like that can also lead to divide-and-conquer strategies. Voting and violence are not the only way political power can be wielded, there’s also pure economic power. If you can strangle the electrical power of a community, you’ve got that community by the throat, and you need to prevent that from happening. “Voting” is merely legitimizing ritual if people know that only certain votes will get them essentials. Given that self-sufficiency is for each community is hard and terribly inefficient, you need some way of guaranteeing those essentials are met. That can include forcible nationalization if necessary.
Such monopoly abuse situations are failures of the system that would need some way of addressing without compromising the reliability of the overall system. Markets hurt monopolies, but I’ll acknowledge that even the absence of active state sponsorship may not always be enough to prevent abuse. But the cure needs to be less bad than the disease.
Locking in the tax rates/UBI is a terrible idea, and that’s because the failure case of those systems is going to be runaway inflation. Inflation destroys countries in that area of the world, and so I’m willing to tolerate a lot of otherwise suboptimal shit to prevent that from happening. That might even be a justification for measures like food stamps instead of money, I think those are less likely to cause inflation. Could also be a reason to use a job guarantee instead of a UBI. Whatever works is what you need there.
If the amount paid in UBI is (total_tax_revenue + total_circulating_currency / 50) it would produce an equilibrium with a 2% natural inflation plus whatever fluctuations happen. The exact purchasing power of that UBI would be determined by the amount of taxable economic activity. I can’t see how it would produce runaway inflation (locking in specific sums would); the actual failure modes would be “too low to prevent misery” and “too high to not strangle the economy”.
Locking in tax rates is very important as it prevents state bloat which quietly destroys economies in the North (ideally the model should be workable anywhere, from Greece to North Korea to Venezuela to the Moon) and provides a guarantee of predictable economic policy (reducing risks of investment and thus lessening the perceived need (most importantly, justification) for extra-democratic structures like investor protection courts). When taxes are locked in, people know what they are and what they will be and consistency has an excellency of its own because even if it’s not optimal, it’s constant.
Taking away the “fuck around with the parameters of the economy every couple of years” thing hasn’t really been tried anywhere, but there are reasons to believe it could produce improved outcomes and not doing it might be a failure of incentives in public policy. OpenGov would be an excellent opportunity to provide a progressive alternative to reacto experimental governance, by shedding the shitty parts of progressivism and keeping the things that actually matter.
There’s a certain attractive combination of theoretic elegance and plausible explanation for “why it wouldn’t have been tried if it’s supposed to be so great” in the idea of crystallized “functional” governance which doesn’t have the standard option of adding himmelis every time it encounters a problem (Canada’s “each new regulation must remove one old regulation” would obviously be a feature too; the EU rules regulating the sale of cabbages are tens of thousands of words and while “the entire law fits in less space than that” is not a realistic option, there must be solid barriers that block himmelis). OpenGov wouldn’t go out with a whimper of bending under ever increasing bloat, it would stay in shape or shatter and thus there would be a reasonably good chance it could stay in shape although some kind of controlled shattering procedure should also be provided so it doesn’t fail, instead just reboots painfully or something (eg. if the locked-in tax rates prove to be terrible enough, the system could be overhauled with new initial parameters; it would be difficult enough that no normal government could do it (so they can’t hack it to provide the “fuck with settings constantly” feature) but a crisis that would risk failing the state could let people recompile it instead).
I can see what you are getting at with your voting system, but honestly I’m in favor of mandatory voting. (mandatory doesn’t mean at gunpoint, it means you pay a penalty if you don’t) It depends on what you see voting as doing, to me it’s a feedback measure rather than a privilege. I’m against the general level of complexity you are proposing in general with mandate points, because I’m of the opinion that this just leads to more stupid games being played that people may not put up with.
I see regular democracy as a stupid game being played that I’m really not willing to put up with and am only resigned to it because of threat of violence. The mandate points would lessen the games as eg. gerrymandering and fucking around with voting systems to favor those in power would be eliminated. And the influence market would ensure no majority group can consistently override minorities to screw them over. I haven’t run the math but my intuition suggests that it, along with erring on the side of subsidiarity, might go a long way in solving questions of tensions between groups and reducing risks of civil war, uprising, terrorism, oppression, and other unpleasant things which happen when people think the power is out of balance. Democracy is duct tape and a terrible kludge, not some pure system of great justice.
A lot of these things I’m saying are about monitoring and managing, and that’s ultimately what you need and opengov can’t give you. You need trustworthy, competent people to tell you what’s going on, otherwise, you’re going to be screwed regardless.
A big part of the OpenGov tech side would be to reduce the need for that monitoring and managing or to establish a meta-level system for ensuring that incentives would be aligned towards good governance. The OpenGovOrg could act as the initial group of trusted people who wouldn’t be tied to local oligarchs or powerful interest groups (the exact ones who fucked up the previous system to begin with) and who could thus be relied upon to bootstrap the better, more accountable, government. Or alternatively, for a bit more radical option, OpenGov could have a “stateless” bootstrap system that would turn good governance into a true private good which could be implemented by people on the ground even against the central government’s will but that’s an engineering feat I consider quite unlikely.
And yes, I’m totally going full suckless in this:
Most hackers actually don’t care much about code quality. Thus, if they get something working which seems to solve a problem, they stick with it. If this kind of software development is applied to the same source code throughout its entire life-cycle, we’re left with large amounts of code, a totally screwed code structure, and a flawed system design. This is because of a lack of conceptual clarity and integrity in the development process.
Code complexity is the mother of bloated, hard to use, and totally inconsistent software. With complex code, problems are solved in suboptimal ways, valuable resources are endlessly tied up, performance slows to a halt, and vulnerabilities become a commonplace. The only solution is to scrap the entire project and rewrite it from scratch.
The bad news: quality rewrites rarely happen, because hackers are proud of large amounts of code. They think they understand the complexity in the code, thus there’s no need to rewrite it. They think of themselves as masterminds, understanding what others can never hope to grasp. To these types, complex software is the ideal.
Ingenious ideas are simple. Ingenious software is simple. Simplicity is the heart of the Unix philosophy. The more code lines you have removed, the more progress you have made. As the number of lines of code in your software shrinks, the more skilled you have become and the less your software sucks.
s/hackers/legislators && s/code/law && s/software/government
(via collapsedsquid)
1 week ago · tagged #we need a suckless government · 17 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .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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