[ExI] government corruption, was: RE: Social Mobility and Bioconservatism

Rafal Smigrodzki rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com
Fri Feb 27 07:03:09 UTC 2009


On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 6:44 AM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> A communally funded enterprise is there for the benefit of its
> members. This is how people feel about a public hospital, for example:
> it's ours, we paid for it, and it had better give us good value for
> money and good service.

### They took your money already, so you have no recourse except to
hope that they would spend it well - but if they don't, whatcha gonna
do?

The problem with communal funding is the lack of correctly weighted
fast feedback loops. On one hand they don't have to listen to you
(weak feedback - bureaucrats are not appointed by you but by other
bureaucrats, so they first of all work to satisfy bureaucrats), on the
other hand the input of anybody with political power, like a
politician, ngo activist, or other scum, is weighted very high -
inappropriately high weighting. Plus almost all the feedbacks work
very slowly. This is radically different from an individually funded
enterprise, where you can choose a competitor, providing immediate and
appropriately weighted feedback, exactly in proportion to your
importance. This, and not "greed" vs. "virtue", is the difference
between individual and communal activities. It really helps to be able
to apply dispassionate analysis, like looking at the workings of an
anthill, never letting social emotions interfere.

--------------------------
 the ultimate
> directive from the voters is to provide as good a service as possible
> for as little outlay as possible.

### Stat, "The Myth of the Rational Voter" by Bryan Caplan is directly
relevant to this remark (it rips it to shreds, in a very detailed and
well-researched line of reasoning). Even aside from the poor quality
of the voting feedback (very slow, intermittent, aggregating
everything into a single signal) compared to individual economic
feedback (fast, almost continuous, finely graded and provided in
multiple highly directed channels), the voting system is corrupted by
biases that can be detected and quantified. This book is smart and
useful.

-------------------
>
> No, I have stated repeatedly that I am a pragmatist in these matters.
> The best system is the system that works the best.

### Mhm.
----------------------

>
> But this is what the free marketeers have done in many countries with
> right wing dictatorships. Their argument goes, people can't be trusted
> with democracy because they band together into unions or vote for
> socialist policies, perverting the workings of the free market. So the
> only way to ensure continuing economic freedom is to do away with
> political freedom.

### Just for the record, right wing dictatorships (Pinochet, Franco
... who else qualifies as a right-wing dictator?) killed only an
infinitesimally small number of people compared to left wing ones
(Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Castro, Chavez .... the list could go
on). But your paragraph deserves a whole new thread and a longish
analytic response which may get written sometime later.

Rafal



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list