• Attempting to ascertain public or collective needs is inherently more difficult than determining private or individual needs.
• It is easy for taxpayers to feel victimized by government, even when they are not, because the free rider problem often makes it necessary to charge everyone for non-excludable good or services, even those who don’t want the service.
• Representative democracy is inherently problematic and direct democracy, even today, is only practical in a limited way.

Externalities are side effects whose costs or benefits are not included in decisions because they affect other parties without adequate compensation. The classic example of a negative externality is pollution generated a company affecting the health of people living downwind. An example of a positive externality is the increased selling price nearby home owners receive as a result of having a store or a mall being built nearby. Mechanisms need to be found to “internalize” such externalities so that when economic decisions are made they consider all the effects.

Uncompensated public costs and benefits are externalities that affect the general public rather than, or in addition to, private parties. These include environmental, economic, educational, and social effects of actions. As with externalities that affect private parties, mechanisms need to be found to internalize uncompensated public costs and benefits so that economic decisions are made with all of the effects being properly considered.

A separate branch of government needs to be established, charged with collecting the natural resource rents of land, oil, minerals, air and water as well as the left-over wealth of people no longer alive to use it (this will not include wealth clearly co-earned by spouses or others). This branch will be required to distribute all revenue except for a nominal amount needed to cover collection expenses.

Greater cost accountability needs to be established within government and among taxpayers. Instead of all the costs of various programs being aggregated into broad budgets and taxpayers paying their share of the total, the costs of various goods and services provided by government need to be separately priced with either a separate source of funding or a fixed ceiling on funding. To the extent they benefit specific individuals or groups, those private parties should pay the cost. To the extent that programs provide purely public goods or services, liability should be apportioned according to benefit. As much as possible, taxpayers should be given the opportunity to chose among service providers, benefit and cost options including no cost, no service options.

Skewed ideology needs to be centered. Currently it causes endless conflict which wastes precious resources and makes it impossible to reach agreement, let alone continuously improve systems and build on past performance.

Public costs and public needs are not adequately integrated into the economic system. Instead of government creating programs that ineffectively and inefficiently achieve their goals, the economic system should be used to achieve these goals.

Today the same is increasingly true for government and politicians as well: from the war in Iraq to Hurricane Katrina, the bird flu and global warming, the price to be paid for not anticipating problems and having systems in place ahead of time is simply too great. Our political and governmental systems need to be brought into the 21st Century before it is too late.