So, for the “what is opengov?“ question that I mention, what I want is more use cases. When I complained that what you were posting was advertising, it wasn’t the the optimism so much as the lack of a handle on what you were describing. I would need to know, who would use it and what exactly would they do? I don’t want vague algorithm descriptions, I want interfaces. I don’t want flowcharts, I want the tables. (and similar stuff for the alternate government idea)
Okay so can I actually get a specific detail I could extrapolate, despite it being totally “getting locked into details way prematurely”? I’m not really understanding the exact question (although I do have more specific possible examples of details in mind, but if I just dump them all here it would take days to get done with the post) as it seems to be similar to “my drain is clogged and I can’t open it on my own so I’ll pay some currency to someone who will unclog it” “but how exactly will your drain be unclogged then?” “I will pay currency to someone who knows how to do it” “but that isn’t details, how on earth can it get unclogged with currency?”
I also see the fucking around in the economy as something that is probably necessary. I’m not saying that every decision made is good, but I think it’s probably necessary. One of the problems I have with many of your assumptions here is that they’re made without knowledge of the counterfactual, they haven’t been tested. They’re nice and shiny and perfect in the way only ideas that haven’t actually been tried can be.
I think this is a genuine positive difference. I see most fucking around in the economy as harmful and a big cause of the need to fuck around some more later.
At the very least, your system needs to able to support a revert to a known form of government in case your ideas fail, otherwise you’d be a fool to try this. Remember, part of the this system is about getting people to use it. You say they are incentive-related reasons nobody uses your system, I say if I have any doubt that would work then there’s no way I’m letting near my government system. Your guinea pigs will be a huge population of very vulnerable people. I need more then “there are reasons to believe“
No single component of this is, in theory, that far-fetched. Liquid democracy is simply an improved version of regular representative democracy with some serious bugs ironed out. Taxing things like land and natural resources is a better form of taxation. UBI is a better form of welfare. The point is to pile on all the “better” we can so that people have less reason to demand active intervention and would be more happy to just keep their fucking hands off the moving parts.
A mutualist-inspired open currency that is controlled by neither bankers nor the state but mostly by its users/not that much by anybody (perhaps a bit like Ripple or something, although Ripple itself is evil for calling for regulation for basically Hamiltonian reasons) is probably the most radical idea, but considering how both bank and state control of the currency have been terrible (the first gets the euro crisis, the second gets this shit which is just mistakes on top of mistakes on a foundation of mistakes and with a glazing of fuckups; if you have official prices you’re a fuckup, if you have exchange rates that are illegal you’re a fuckup, if you have a plug-n-play system of scamming the government you’re fuck-up, if you fault people for using the incentives you’ve created while doing nothing for the incentives you’re a colossal fuckup; and the point of OG is to eliminate your ability to do those things so you can’t hurt yourself and everyone in your country that badly ever again) it’s probably not able to be quite as horrible.
When you say stuff like “it would have a crystallized core of efficient purity that prevents some harmful actions“ everything in me screams that this is going to end in massive disaster. When you imply it cannot possible go wrong, I go classic Douglas Adams and say “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.” which seems to describe your system.
All of these strict ideas, they’re massively untested, and I would guess for good reasons. This is a government, it will encounter emergencies, this is not the case for arbitrary limits on what can be done. Remember, if the system does not work, people will throw it away. You have to be better than that alternative, and if you need some grift with weird regulations to get necessary shit moving, you grift.
Okay, let’s say Venezuela somehow automagically implemented this system. The tax rates are probably not optimal but they are workable (and democracy couldn’t pick the optimal tax rate anyway). UBI takes care of a lot of problems on its own. Local governments can run services with accountability as they can’t loot distant people; the tree-shaped form of the UBI distribution and decision-making power and service-providing prevents such corruption and makes it possible to deliver the good stuff with less of the harmful.
Now what would be a thing that would end in a massive disaster that could be solved by some forbidden action, yet wouldn’t be such a dramatic thing as to justify dropping the safeguards, running things as root and taking full privileges of fucking around in the economy (even though that thing was exactly the thing which brought the previous crisis)?
So the thing about the free market delivering stuff is that the system of oil-driven welfare is sort of describing Saudi Arabia, and that’s part of the reason I’m skeptical. You say picking winners and losers fails, I say nobody notices the losers . I was suggesting that you try seeing if it works, but if it doesn’t, you need a way to adapt.
I already patched the oil dependency to be like Norway instead of Saudi Arabia. That’s obviously a part of the process; the OG platform would need to go through rigorous analysis and simulation and testing and people would be rewarded for breaking it, to ensure that as many failure modes as possible can be pre-empted and thus the controls that could be used to deal with them but the careless use of which also regularly fucks everything up could be locked behind “in case of emergency break glass” instead of being a routine thing people politically see-saw around all the time.
The lack of democracy isn’t your utopian society, it’s a revolution, and your democratic system has to establish that it’s better. That means people will vote in shit you don’t like, and that means you gotta accept you don’t always get what you want. Even without democracy, those people still exist and will enact their preferences. I could go on about how the market is a terrible system that is all about the use of violence but other have done that for me.
And I could say the same about democracy. But in a market of preferences where everyone has an actually equal say in running the show (like Feeding America’s system) there are very strong reasons for why it would be almost strictly better than regular democracy (the “almost” related to the fact that people who don’t understand how it works would be at a disadvantage but it would obviously need to be engineered to be as easy to understand as possible)
While you looking for the “the initial group of trusted people who wouldn’t be tied to local oligarchs or powerful interest groups“ then you’re going to need apretty solid barrel you’re going to spend your whole damn life looking for those people. If you could easily find people like that, you wouldn’t have a problem.
I don’t think I would have that much trouble finding such people, the actual problem is getting power to the competent ones instead of the connected ones. Sure, finding perfect people is impossible, but finding better people than the likes of Maduro wouldn’t be too hard.
The constitutional court is a similar problem, we had one here in the United States and over the years it has delivered many opinions we now consider barbaric. You basically need a solid set of people to populate it, and a solid core of people making sure that it’s dictates are enforced.
Yes. How do states normally solve that problem? Because we’re going to default to that if we can’t figure out anything better. Not that complicated.
Inflation is tricky, and I don’t claim to be able to describe it, but it’s not purely a feature of the amount of money that exists at any given time.
Yes, inflation is complex, but I can’t see how “we redistribute the money we get” would lead to hyperinflation if “the money we get” is defined reasonably.
The monitoring will be needed to ensure that what is occurring in the system bears any relation to events that actually occur in the world, otherwise you’ll re-enact soviet factory supervisors sending reports back to Moscow.
Yes. That’s what markets are good at; information processing. And that’s what local decision-making is less bad at. Not solving problems too far away, and not trying to solve everything, does wonders for things bearing relation to actual events.
So, I know I kinda harp on this, but the big problem is that you seem to totally eschew any necessity for emergency measures in favor of hard-coding your ideals into the system, which is absolutely unacceptable in a system where emergency handling is a main goal. I get driven nuts in my day job by programmers who make me jump through hoops to conform to their data model for biological data, and actually trying to run a government like that would make me beg for the sweet release of nuclear annihilation.
Emergency measures are one thing, but there needs to be something after the emergency measures that isn’t just more “emergency measures” until the next actual emergency arrives. Transitioning to OG would be defined by the local circumstances in which it happens, and what would be the correct procedure for Venezuela wouldn’t be the correct procedure for Greece wouldn’t be correct for North Korea, but the model of “what comes after” could be standardized into a general template for effective governance that aims to prevent crises from reoccurring and to make them less severe when they nonetheless do.
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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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