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 do...
I sure think it is! But I could be wrong...
This is my first article/post? here and to be honest, I have this website open in another tab and I keep refreshing it to see if I still have enough points to post. I wish I would have taken a screenshot every time my karma changed. First it was 0, then it was -1, then it was back to 0, then I think it jumped up to 5. I thought I was safe but then this morning it was down to 0. So if this post seems "linky" then it might be because I'm trying to share as much information as I can while my window of opportunity is still open.
Pragmatarianism (tax choice) is the belief that taxpayers should be able to choose where their taxes go. Tax choice is the broad concept while pragmatarianism is my own personal spin on it... but sometimes I use "tax choice" when I mean pragmatarianism. Eh, at this point I don't think it's a big deal. Really the only thing nice about the word "pragmatarianism" is that it functions as a unique ID... which is extremely helpful when it comes to searches. Don't have to worry about wading through irrelevant results.
Here are some links from my blog which should help you decide whether pragmatarianism is more or less wrong...
Pragmatarianism FAQ - a good place to start. It's pretty short.
Key concepts - a work in progress. Some of the concepts are linked to entries which have PDF files with a bunch of relevant quotes and passages. If you like any of them then please share them in this thread... Quotes Repository. I shared a few but they didn't fare so well... so I'm guessing that most people here aren't fans of economics... or they aren't fans of my economics.
Progress as a Function of Freedom - hedging bets, the impossibility of hostile aliens, the problem with "rights".
What Do Coywolves, Mr. Nobody, Plants And Fungi All Have In Common? - the universal drive to choose the most valuable option, the carrying model as an explanation for our intelligence, a bit on rationality.
Builderism - where better options come from, globalization, debunking Piketty, eliminating poverty.
My Robin Hanson trilogy...
Is Robin Hanson's Path To Efficient Voting Pragmatic Or Brilliant Or Both? - maybe we should have a civic currency?
Rescuing Robin Hanson From Unmet Demand - how many other people are in the same boat?
Futarchy vs Pragmatarianism - is it logically inconsistent to support one but not the other?
/trilogy.
AI Box Experiment vs Xero's Rule - my first brainstorm attempt to wrap my mind around the idea of an AI box.
Is A Procreation License Consistent With Libertarianism? - would a procreation license be less wrong?
Why I Love Your Freedom - my critique of the best critique of libertarianism. A bit on rationality.
So what do you think? Am I in the right place?
What else? Of course I'm an atheist! And I love sci-fi... and for sure I want to live forever. The major obstacle is that too many people fail to grasp that progress depends on difference. I do my best to try and eliminate this obstacle. Unfortunately I suck at writing and my drawings are even worse. Oh well.
Let me know if you have any questions.