coregov

what type of government would i really like to have? from @/corevoting i know i would like something that 3 democratically elected representatives at the head. but what exactly is the government's core task?

so basically i expect a lot of things from it. some of my requests seem even contradicting each other. how would it provide food, housing, education and all that while being minimalistic?

if i want to simplify things, what would be the core task of a country's leadership? if it's one thing, then it should be making decisions how the money flows through it. there's a lot to unpack here.

what is money even? in general i don't really like the concept of money but i cannot deny it's a very useful abstraction. making decisions around housing, food, etc is quite hard. but money allows us to project everything's value onto a single one-dimensional scale. then comparing solutions becomes much easier. so i think of it as a simple measuring scale of complex objects.

if we want to have a simple system, i think using money or a similar token concept is useful. sure, money can corrupt people. but it's like saying knives can kill people. that's true but it doesn't mean it cannot be used as a tool. so i think it's fine to think in money when we are making decisions.

what are the decisions that the government makes? the government might choose to give food for homeless or build a school. but it's not the representatives who are going to cook the food or hammer together the school. they give money to other people to do so. so in a very high level they are just the stewards of the country's common bank account.

if that's so, we might as well make that quite formal: that's the only task of these representatives. basically they have a budget and have to approve plans in a way that the expenditures are in the budget and the people are happy.

how does the money flow? the representatives make decisions about money but it's not like they manually carry and distribute bags of money. i imagine there's a big bank account where taxpayers send their tax to. then there's a computer program that runs every day and sends money to appropriate places according to its algorithm.

so the proposals that the representatives decide on are simply changes to this algorithm. maybe today schools are financed with the formula of ($10,000 + number_of_kids * $1,000) / month. and in exchange the school must educate kids for free as best as it can from that money. that's the government's idea of investing into school. it doesn't prescribe how schools should run, it would delegate that to the local school's administration. they probably know better what their community needs. this satisfies both my requirements: investment into education yet quite minimal and not prescriptive.

and if someone wants the government to invest more into education, then they can simply send an adjustment to the formula. e.g. they can send that the formula should be ($20,000 + number_of_kids * $1,500) / month. and then the representatives can think hard if this is worth or is the budget better spent somewhere else.

the government program could then be completely open source. citizens would have then greater insight how their society is structured.

is even the tax revenue service just another company that government hires? yes!

in fact, why hire only one? it could hire two or three and then people can choose which service they use to hand in and audit the tax they owe. let people pick the nicest tax collector help them figure out the tax.

in fact, allow entrepreneurs start new tax collection service if they want to. they still need to satisfy the various regulatory requirements. but maybe they can do it in a more friendly and cheaper way than the competitors so why not. all the government needs to ensure that it approves some rules and to ensure it finds someone to enforce them. just because a government owned organization does it something it doesn't mean it will be intrinsically better or more efficient.

it doesn't work super well everywhere though. take something like the police department. i think that's a special case where having just a single organization is beneficial. but that can be modeled recursively: the government just allocates a big recurring payment to the whole department. it's then the police's department task to figure out how to further allocate that money. and given it is a separate organization funded by public money, it would have its own elected representatives managing it as they best see fit.

so the government ensures that organizations providing for basic needs are well funded. how would it decide financing experimental projects that could fix climate or take us to mars?

if the economy is doing well, there should be plenty of surplus in the budget assuming the government doesn't squander it all. at this point it should look at long-term experimental investments. maybe it could fund space tech. asteroid mining and moving thrash off the planet could give humanity a huge breathing room.

basically the representatives could gauge what future people want and allocate funds towards those goals. technically people could do this on their own with their daily choices but only to an extent. ordinarily a poor person cannot decide where the rich man's tax should be invested into. but this would give them that power in a very indirect manner. of course there's a lot of nuance to ensure this is done sensibly but that would be my rough idea. it might not be much but still better than nothing.

once the government decides to send money, say, to a school, how does it ensure that money is well spent? that's something i'd like to think about in my final post, @/coreedu.

comment #1 on 2022-10-08

Where does money ultimately come from?

comment #1 response from iio.ie

i haven't thought much about it. i suppose there could be a central bank of some sort that can create money by loaning strategically. or if cryptocurrencies ever become stable enough, maybe using one of them could be fine too. while it's an interesting question, it probably doesn't really matter that much at this high level where i already assume we have a working monetary system.

but in case money is very volatile (high inflation), maybe all accounting could be done in terms of a stable commodity such as gold. e.g. in the school example it would mean the school gets 1 ounce of gold per kid per month. and then that gets converted to whatever money that is worth before each transaction. this might seem very crazy but not sure if the proposed framework has any other stable means to deal with this problem.