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mwengler comments on Is Pragmatarianism (Tax Choice) Less Wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
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So we'd have one "voter" funding single-payer healthcare and a bridge 2 miles up the river while another voter funded health-insurance subsidies for low-income and a bridge 1 mile down the river.
You would have "single issue funders," someone who thought we weren't spending enough on the environment would go 100% into environment.
You can't find an aggregate advantage by simply summing up across the votes of people. Coming up with an even vaguely coherent plan or set of plans takes a lot of work. Without a process to do this and people to work on this, you will wind up with something even worse than a horse designed by a committee.
There must be some general term for the kind of fallacy behind pramatarianist thinking. Other examples are: 1) students should design their own curriculum to get a degree, 2) automobiles and smartphones should be designed by a focus group, actually even worse, by a focus group consisting of the entire population, 3) everybody working on a movie should vote on how the budget of that movie should be allocated between different scenes in order to produce a movie that EVERYONE will like.
By the way, there is nothing wrong with choosing your own curriculum, but you should not be able to get a degree labeled "physics BS" or "Math PhD" based on a curriculum you choose yourself.
If you think having everybody vote on what the parts of a car should look like will get you a better car, then it is reasonable to think pragmatarianism will get you a better budget. But, unfortunately, vice versa.
You're critiquing the idea of creating a market in the public sector. What's the difference between a market in the public sector and a market anywhere else? There's a difference... but your comment sure doesn't address it. Instead, you're simply critiquing a market.
Every day you participate in a market. You have your preferences and you spend your hard-earned money accordingly. The supply follows from your demand, and my demand and everybody else's demand.
Anything else is a non-sequitur. The supply either follows from our preferences... or it does not.
Right now the public sector reflects exactly what happens when the supply does not follow from our preferences. It's a given that this is going to change in logically beneficial and highly predictable ways...
Variety? Skyrocket
Quality? Skyrocket
Cost? Plummet
The public sector is going to transform from monolithic to modular. Marginal improvements are going to be quickly made as inferior components are swapped for superior components. This is exactly what happens in markets.
They did address many of the problems implicitly. One doesn't for example in a real world situation have anyone try and pay exactly what they want for the version of the movie they want. Investors pay for a series of movies, then people either buy tickets or not. This aspect is solveable if one instead has pre-set programs one can allocate tax money to.
Note also that nothing in your system deals with the problem of public goods- people can benefit from something without paying for it and for many goods that's a natural situation.