blogospheroid comments on The Irrationality Game - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Will_Newsome 03 October 2010 02:43AM

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Comment author: blogospheroid 06 October 2010 11:18:49AM 3 points [-]

Coming from the angle of competition in governance, I think you might be mixing up a lot of stuff. A joint stock corporation which is sovereign is trying to compete in the wider world for customers , i.e. willing taxpayers.

If the people desire the values you have mentioned then the joint-stock government will try to provide those cost effectively.

Clean Air and Immunizations will almost certainly be on the agenda of a city government

Biodiversity will be important to a government which includes forests in its assets and wants to sustainably maintain the same.

A free marketplace of ideas, free education and social safety nets would purely be determined by the market for people. Is it an important value enough that people would not come to your country and would go to another? if it is, then the joint stock government would try to provide the same. If not, then they wouldn't.

Comment author: wedrifid 06 October 2010 11:30:56AM *  4 points [-]

All of this makes sense in principle.

(I'm assuming you're not thinking that any of it would actually work in practice with either humans or ideal rational agents, right?)

Comment author: Mass_Driver 06 October 2010 01:40:28PM 1 point [-]

Good response, but I have to agree with wedrifid here: you can't compete for "willing taxpayers" at all if you're dealing with hard public goods, and elsewhere competition is dulled by (a) the irrational political loyalties of citizens, (b) the legitimate emotional and economic costs of immigration, (c) the varying ability of different kinds of citizens to move, and (d) protectionist controls on the movement of labor in whatever non-libertopian governments remain, which might provide them with an unfair advantage in real life, the theoretical axioms of competitive advantage theory be damned.

I'd be all for introducing some features of the joint stock corporation into some forms of government, but that doesn't sound very much like what you were proposing would lead to peace and prosperity -- you said the jsc was better than other forms, not a good thing to have a nice dose of.