So we can separate California’s expenses into two classes: those essential or profitable for California as a business; and those that are unnecessary and wasteful, such as feeding the poor, etc, etc. Let them starve! Who likes poor people, anyway? And as for the blind, bumping into lampposts will help them build character. Everyone needs character.
I am not Steve Jobs (I would be very ill-suited to the management of California), and I have not done the math. But my suspicion is that eliminating these pointless expenses alone—without any other management improvements—would turn California, now drowning in the red, into a hellacious, gold-spewing cash machine. We’re talking dividends up the wazoo. Stevifornia will make Gazprom look like a pump-n-dump penny stock.
And suddenly, a solution suggests itself.
What we’ve done, with our separation of expenses, is to divide California’s spending into two classes: essential and discretionary. There is another name for a discretionary payment: a dividend. By spending money to heal the lame, California is in effect paying its profits to the lame. It is just doing it in a very fiscally funky manner.
Thus, we can think of California’s spending on good works as profits which are disbursed to an entity responsible for good works. Call it Calgood. If, instead of spending $30 billion per year on good works, California shifts all its good works and good-workers to Calgood, issues Calgood shares that pay dividends of $30 billion per year, and says goodbye, we have the best of both worlds. California is now a lean, mean, cash-printing machine, and the blind can see, the lame can walk, etc, etc.
Furthermore, Calgood’s shares are, like any shares, negotiable. They are just financial instruments. If Calgood’s investment managers decide it makes financial sense to sell California and buy Google or Gazprom or GE, they can go right ahead.
So without harming the poor, the lame, or the blind at all, we have completely separated California from its charitable activities. The whole idea of government as a doer of good works is thoroughly phony. Charity is good and government is necessary, but there is no essential connection between them.
Of course, in real life, the idea of Calgood is slightly creepy. You’d probably want a few hundred special-purpose charities, which would be much more nimble than big, lumbering Calgood. Of course they would be much, much more nimble than California.Which is kind of the point.
We could go even farther than this. We could issue these charitable shares not to organizations that produce services, but to the actual individuals who consume these services. Why buy canes for the blind? Give the blind money. They can buy their own freakin’ canes. If there is anyone who would rather have $100 worth of free services than $100, he’s a retard.
Some people are, of course, retards. Excuse me. They suffer from mental disabilities. And one of the many, many things that California, State of Love, does, is to hover over them with its soft, downy wings. Needless to say, Stevifornia will not have soft, downy wings. It will be hard and shiny, with a lot of brushed aluminum. So what will it do with its retards?
My suspicion is that Stevifornia will do something like this. It will classify all humans on its land surface into three categories: guests, residents, and dependents. Guests are just visiting, and will be sent home if they cause any trouble. Residents are ordinary, grownup people who live in California, pay taxes, are responsible for their own behavior, etc. And dependents are persons large or small, young or old, who are not responsible but need to be cared for anyway.
The basic principle of dependency is that a dependent is a ward. He or she surrenders his or her personal independence to some guardian authority. The guardian holds imperium over the dependent, ie, controls the dependent’s behavior. In turn the guardian is responsible for the care and feeding of the dependent, and is liable for any torts the dependent commits. As you can see, this design is not my invention.
At present, a large number of Californians are wards of the state itself. Some of them are incompetent, some are dangerous, some are both. Under the same principle as Calgood, these dependents can be spun off into external organizations, along with revenue streams that cover their costs.
Criminals are a special case of dependent. Most criminals are mentally competent, but no more an asset to California than Jew-eating crocodiles. A sensible way to house criminals is to attach them as wards to their revenue streams, but let the criminal himself choose a guardian and switch if he is dissatisfied. I suspect that most criminals would prefer a very different kind of facility than those in which they are housed at present. I also suspect that there are much more efficient ways to make criminal labor pay its own keep.
And I suspect that in Stevifornia, there would be very little crime. In fact, if I were Steve—which of course I’m not—I might well shoot for the goal of providing free crime insurance to my residents. Imagine if you could live in a city where crime was so rare that the government could guarantee restitution for all victims. Imagine what real estate would cost in this city. Imagine how much money its owners would make. Then imagine that Calgood has a third of the shares.It won’t just heal the lame, it will give them bionic wings.
This is why choosing the state as the actor that must bear unprofitable activities, regardless of on who’s behalf, seems to my sentiments less an aesthetic choice or one that should be based on historic preference but an economic question that deserves some investigation. The losses of utility over such a trivial preference seem potentially large.
Charity is good and government is necessary, but there is no essential connection between them.
I suppose it depends on what you see as “charity”. For example, free childhood vaccinations can be seen as charity—after all, why shouldn’t people just buy their own vaccines on the free market ? -- but having a vaccinated population with herd immunity is, nonetheless, a massive public good. The same can be said of public education, or, yes, canes for blind people.
Let’s do some [Edit: more abstract] analysis for a moment. [Edit: I suggest that] government is the entity that has been allocated the exclusive right to legitimate violence. And the biggest use of this threat of violence is compulsory taxation. Why do people put up with this threat of violence? As Thomas Hobbes says, to get out of the state of nature and into civil society. (As Moldbug says, land governed by the rule of law is more valuable than ungoverned land).
What does the government do with the money it receives. At core, it provides services to people who don’t want them. The quote mentioned letting prisoners choose their jailors. It probably would increase prisoner utility to offer the choice. It might even save money (for example, some prison systems mandate completing a GED if the prisoner lacks a high school degree). But that’s not what society wants to do to criminals. If the government uses compulsory power to fund prisons, I assert a requirement that the spending vaguely correspond to taxpayer desires for the use of the funds. (Moldbug seems to disagree).
Consider another example, the DMV. At root, the government threatens violence if you drive on the road without the required government license, on the belief that the quality of driving improves when skill requirements are imposed and the requirements will not (or cannot) be imposed without the threat of violence. It is common knowledge that going to the DMV to get the license is a miserable experience because the lines are long and the workers are not responsive to customer concerns. By contrast, the MacDonald’s next door is filled with helpful people who quickly provide you with the service desired as efficiently as possible. Why the difference? In part, it is the compulsory nature of the license and in part, it is that benefits of improved service at the DMV do not accrue to anyone working for or supervising the DMV. See James Wilson’s insightful discussion (pages 113-115 & 134-136) (There’s also an interesting discussion of the post office on pp. 122-25). I assert that much “inefficiency” in government is simply the deadweight loss inherent in compulsory taxation, which is one part of government Moldbug doesn’t want to abolish.
And there’s less justification for calling an entity with compulsory tax powers a profit making entity. In what way has Moldbug’s Calgood acted in a competitive marketplace? Voting with your feet is just as possible in the United States or Western Europe today as it would be in the patch & realm system.
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This is why choosing the state as the actor that must bear unprofitable activities, regardless of on who’s behalf, seems to my sentiments less an aesthetic choice or one that should be based on historic preference but an economic question that deserves some investigation. The losses of utility over such a trivial preference seem potentially large.
I suppose it depends on what you see as “charity”. For example, free childhood vaccinations can be seen as charity—after all, why shouldn’t people just buy their own vaccines on the free market ? -- but having a vaccinated population with herd immunity is, nonetheless, a massive public good. The same can be said of public education, or, yes, canes for blind people.
Let’s do some [Edit: more abstract] analysis for a moment. [Edit: I suggest that] government is the entity that has been allocated the exclusive right to legitimate violence. And the biggest use of this threat of violence is compulsory taxation. Why do people put up with this threat of violence? As Thomas Hobbes says, to get out of the state of nature and into civil society. (As Moldbug says, land governed by the rule of law is more valuable than ungoverned land).
What does the government do with the money it receives. At core, it provides services to people who don’t want them. The quote mentioned letting prisoners choose their jailors. It probably would increase prisoner utility to offer the choice. It might even save money (for example, some prison systems mandate completing a GED if the prisoner lacks a high school degree). But that’s not what society wants to do to criminals. If the government uses compulsory power to fund prisons, I assert a requirement that the spending vaguely correspond to taxpayer desires for the use of the funds. (Moldbug seems to disagree).
Consider another example, the DMV. At root, the government threatens violence if you drive on the road without the required government license, on the belief that the quality of driving improves when skill requirements are imposed and the requirements will not (or cannot) be imposed without the threat of violence. It is common knowledge that going to the DMV to get the license is a miserable experience because the lines are long and the workers are not responsive to customer concerns. By contrast, the MacDonald’s next door is filled with helpful people who quickly provide you with the service desired as efficiently as possible. Why the difference? In part, it is the compulsory nature of the license and in part, it is that benefits of improved service at the DMV do not accrue to anyone working for or supervising the DMV. See James Wilson’s insightful discussion (pages 113-115 & 134-136) (There’s also an interesting discussion of the post office on pp. 122-25). I assert that much “inefficiency” in government is simply the deadweight loss inherent in compulsory taxation, which is one part of government Moldbug doesn’t want to abolish.
And there’s less justification for calling an entity with compulsory tax powers a profit making entity. In what way has Moldbug’s Calgood acted in a competitive marketplace? Voting with your feet is just as possible in the United States or Western Europe today as it would be in the patch & realm system.
Max Weber was a libertarian?
Hmm. It’s embarrassing to admit I’m not as well read as I’d like. I’d only ever heard the concept in libertarian discussions. Thanks.