political-systems
The purpose of the political systems page is to describe the changes needed to political systems. This is a more difficult task than with economic systems for a number of reasons including:
- 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.
The Election Process needs to be changed to provide adequate accountability for office-holders. Mechanisms need to be created so that something close to contractual accountability exists between the public and its representatives.
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.
Most politicians, pundits, Bloggers and interest groups advocate particular policies without taking into account, or trying to change the underlying political and economic systems. As a result, those policies, at best, bring only temporary improvement or, more commonly, result in harmful unintended consequences. Such efforts are common in politics but amount to “tampering” with the system - attempting to change systems without understanding how they work or how various changes will affect output.
