The scenario described is different from a free market in that you still have to pay taxes. You just get more control over how the government can spend your tax-money. You can’t use the money to buy a flatscreen TV, but you can decide if it gets spend on healthcare, military spending, NASA...
or they could even restrict options to typical government spending.
JoshuaFox noted that the government might tack on such restrictions
That said, it’s not so clear where the borders of such restrictions would be. Obviously you could choose to allocate the money to the big budget items, like healthcare or the military. But there are many smaller things that the government also pays for.
For example, the government maintains parks. Under this scheme, could I use my tax money to pay for the improvement of the park next to my house? After all, it’s one of the many things that tax money often works towards. But if you answer affirmatively, then what if I work for some institutute that gets government funding? Could I increase the size of the government grants we get? After all, I always wanted a bigger budget...
Or what if I’m a government employee? Could I give my money to the part of government spending that is assigned as my salary?
I suppose the whole question is one of specificity. Am I allowed to give my money to a specific park, or do I have to give it to parks in general? Can I give it to a specific government employee, or do I have to give it to the salary budget of the department that employs that employee? Or do I have to give it to that department “as is”, with no restrictions on what it is spent on?
The more specitivity you add, the more abusable it is, and the more you take away, the closer it becomes to the current system. In fact, the current system is merely this exact proposal, with the specificity dial turned down to the minimum.
Think about the continuum between what we have now and the free market (where you can control exactly where your money goes), and it becomes fairly clear that the only points which have a good reason to be used are the two extreme ends. If you advocate a point in the middle, you’ll have a hard time justifying the choice of that particular point, as opposed to one further up or down.
Think about the continuum between what we have now and the free market (where you can control exactly where your money goes), and it becomes fairly clear that the only points which have a good reason to be used are the two extreme ends. If you advocate a point in the middle, you’ll have a hard time justifying the choice of that particular point, as opposed to one further up or down.
I don’t follow your argument here. We have some function that maps from “levels of individual control” to happiness outcomes. We want to find the maximum of this function. It might be that the endpoints are the max, or it might be that the max is in the middle.
Yes, it might be that there is no good justification for any particular precise value. But that seems both unsurprising and irrelevant. If you think that our utility function here is smooth, then sufficiently near the max, small changes in the level of social control would result in negligible changes in outcome. Once we’re near enough the maximum, it’s hard to tune precisely. What follows from this?
If you advocate a point in the middle, you’ll have a hard time justifying the choice of that particular point, as opposed to one further up or down.
Trouble with justifying does not necessarily mean that the choice is unjustified.
I like to wash my hands in warm water. I would have a hard time justifying a particular water temperature, as opposed to one slightly colder or slightly warmer. This does not mean that “the only points which have a good reason to be used” are ice-cold water and boiling water.
You can’t justify a point, but you could justify a range by speficfying temperatures where it becomes uncomforable. Actually, specifying a range is just specifying the give point with less resolution.
The scenario described is different from a free market in that you still have to pay taxes. You just get more control over how the government can spend your tax-money. You can’t use the money to buy a flatscreen TV, but you can decide if it gets spend on healthcare, military spending, NASA...
JoshuaFox noted that the government might tack on such restrictions
That said, it’s not so clear where the borders of such restrictions would be. Obviously you could choose to allocate the money to the big budget items, like healthcare or the military. But there are many smaller things that the government also pays for.
For example, the government maintains parks. Under this scheme, could I use my tax money to pay for the improvement of the park next to my house? After all, it’s one of the many things that tax money often works towards. But if you answer affirmatively, then what if I work for some institutute that gets government funding? Could I increase the size of the government grants we get? After all, I always wanted a bigger budget...
Or what if I’m a government employee? Could I give my money to the part of government spending that is assigned as my salary?
I suppose the whole question is one of specificity. Am I allowed to give my money to a specific park, or do I have to give it to parks in general? Can I give it to a specific government employee, or do I have to give it to the salary budget of the department that employs that employee? Or do I have to give it to that department “as is”, with no restrictions on what it is spent on?
The more specitivity you add, the more abusable it is, and the more you take away, the closer it becomes to the current system. In fact, the current system is merely this exact proposal, with the specificity dial turned down to the minimum.
Think about the continuum between what we have now and the free market (where you can control exactly where your money goes), and it becomes fairly clear that the only points which have a good reason to be used are the two extreme ends. If you advocate a point in the middle, you’ll have a hard time justifying the choice of that particular point, as opposed to one further up or down.
I don’t follow your argument here. We have some function that maps from “levels of individual control” to happiness outcomes. We want to find the maximum of this function. It might be that the endpoints are the max, or it might be that the max is in the middle.
Yes, it might be that there is no good justification for any particular precise value. But that seems both unsurprising and irrelevant. If you think that our utility function here is smooth, then sufficiently near the max, small changes in the level of social control would result in negligible changes in outcome. Once we’re near enough the maximum, it’s hard to tune precisely. What follows from this?
Hmm. To me it seemed intuitively clear that the function would be monotonic.
In retrospect, this monotonicity assumption may have been unjustified. I’ll have to think more about what sort of curve this function follows.
Trouble with justifying does not necessarily mean that the choice is unjustified.
I like to wash my hands in warm water. I would have a hard time justifying a particular water temperature, as opposed to one slightly colder or slightly warmer. This does not mean that “the only points which have a good reason to be used” are ice-cold water and boiling water.
You can’t justify a point, but you could justify a range by speficfying temperatures where it becomes uncomforable. Actually, specifying a range is just specifying the give point with less resolution.