Government posts page 2

In democracy, each person gets one vote equal to every other. The votes are basically free, but some rules must be set up to ensure this. The free or open market is somewhat considered to be democracy of commerce. To take this to the extreme:

There would be a number of businesses equal to the number of citizens, each business owned and run by exactly one citizen. There would be no employees. All needs of the business that could not be completed by the owner would be outsourced to other businesses, surely creating the need for a lot of very specialized businesses. Government oversight would be needed to ensure that no mergers or pseudo mergers occur. Every business runs on its own, with no collusion, and any interactions with other businesses must be proper business transactions with dollars exchanged for goods or services and the best value chosen from multiple candidates. Each business would be required to turn, or attempt to turn, a profit, and that profit would be the sole income of the owner. Oversight would also ensure that there were a number of a given type of businesses in a given geographical region.

All of this should create somewhere near the largest amount of competition possible, and really test competition’s ability to create low costs, innovation, and good quality.

This system would certainly have many problems, especially in enforcement, but can serve for analysis of the openness of markets and the rules affecting them.

An interesting modification of this system would be to force all of this at the initialization of the system, but then remove all oversight. This would somewhat mirror the entire human history relating to economic issues, except that it would certainly go very fast. Mergers would happen all over until large companies would be formed.

Here are several ideas about money relating to the president and congressmen. They are not all directly releted, and some may negate others.

– these officials are paid the average salary of the people in the territory they represent. This will give them more reasonable wages. It will give them much more insentive to produce economic results.
– Alternativily, they are all paid the average salary of the entire United States. This would prevent them from supporting items that only benifit the area they represent.
– They are paid a fixed multiple of this average salary. Thus, they will still make a lot of money, but will also have the economic insentive to improve the economy

– they are paid no salary. They are already wealthy, and almost always have income coming in from elsewhere. It is government money that could be put to better use elsewhere.

– they may recieve no campaign funds. campaigns are set up and run in a fixed format for all candidates, payed for with tax dollars. Additional campaigning is up to them, or perhaps not allowed except for travelling and meeting people. This reduces peoples ability to influence the candidates with money.
– no one may give financial or other gifts to these people whatsoever. They may endorse them only. They may not run media adverts about them, but may be mentioned as endorsers by the candidates themselves.

Government needs to give info to the people, the people who need it, not just make it available in some document in a filing cabinet in a basement somewhere or posted on a cork board in a building few people go to. The more people given the information, the more people are liable to use it or follow its guidance. There is too much information the government has created for a person to be able to wade through it to find what applies to them, and this makes it far more difficult for people to do things.

Mailing Lists
Perhaps the government should provide one large list of the types of information they have in categories that people might be interested in them through, such as different occupations, types of residences, types of transportation. These lists would be available in townhalls or the like where people could easily access them (people should be made aware of where it is). People could go to this location and sign up for the ones they are interested, or remove themselves from ones they no longer are. They will then recieve mailings or emailings of all the laws, initiatives, and other relevant things the governemnt thinks would be of use to the people in that category. This should help people out tremendously in being informed, allow people to think about what their interests really are, and hopefully get people more involved with both the community and their field of interest.

Schools
School is a perfect place to begin providing information. They already do to some extent, but they really need to do a lot more. Schools are very focused on ‘academic’ stuff; they need to give better focus to things important to people, things to help them get jobs and to live their lives. As students grow older and make choices about what they want to do with their lives, schools should provide them with information related to their interests. Guidance counselers talk to students about what they want to do occupation wise and may provide a little insight into that occupation and into schools they may go to to learn about it; english classes have students research and write about these careers. Much more can be done. Guidance counselers should be able to provide students with a lot of helpful information on that career, perhaps packets. Libraries could have a career section with government prepared information on each of many categories of careers. Counselers should be able to point students in the direction of further resources.

Career/Government Information Libraries
Libraries and/or town halls could have a seperate libary with the government resources sorted into sections. New laws, initiatives, and other important things would be posted at a certain place in each section. People would be told where these libraries are and what resources are available for them there.

There are far too many laws, government services, and other government related things for a single person to know about even if they spend all their time researching these. One should not have to research them to find out about their existance. One should not have to fear being in violation of some small line in a giant law book somewhere without knowing it because they did not spend hours pouring over that book. One should not feel stuck in a crappy job and awful place because they don’t know that there are options available, including government help, to get them away from that. People given knowledge can use that knowledge to their advantage. If everybody is just given knowlege of how to succeed, without any effort on their part, then they will far more likely succeed than without it. They also must have the will and desire to succeed, but that is their own choice. If the government were to provide the keys to success to everyone, then everyone is a lot more likely to succeed.

Mail ‘addressed’ to a person or business, not a physical address. The intended receiver is not a building, but a person or entity of some sort at that building. Each person and business would probably be assigned an id number and that is what is written on the address field of envelopes. The post office keeps track of the physical address associated with each person or business, and sends letters to that person or business at the currently specified address. When someone moves, they inform the post office, and all mail is automatically sent to the new address, without need to inform the sender. With a computer database, the system would be easy to implement and utilize with database of addresses that probably already exists. Changes to addresses associated with people would be quick and simple, and could perhaps even be done for the short term, such as while on a vacation. Of course, the current address method would need to be supported for a long time to come; it would take years for people to learn the ids of everyone, especially those they infrequently communicate with. One problem would be sending to families, though perhaps a method could be set up to designate a letter sent to a person to be meant for the whole family, such as ‘family of’ written before the number or something.

This same database could perhaps be extended to include phone numbers. Just dial some prefix (so as to allow phone dialing as normal to work) and then the persons id number and it will call their current phone. Phone numbers are already becoming crazy with cell phones, people with home and work numbers, all that stuff. This could of course create problems with which number to route through to get to the person. Perhaps each person could list multiple numbers for different locations they might be. The caller would be presented a list of these with the number to press for each (you are calling Josie Haberdash. Press 1 to call her home phone, press 2 to call her work phone). Of course, this would create privacy problems: giving out your work number would also mean giving out your home number. Perhaps the list could, if the person desired, give out only certain options, and others would require a certain, perhaps 4 digit pin or something, to be dialed in. That sounds a little too complicated though and few people would be able to remember a bunch of peoples numbers plus their pin.

Even email might benefit from this. The .name domain already has something like this, but it is not widely used, only allows for one person with each name in the world, and is a pay for service instead of a government managed system.

Patents are not always taken out by large companies that produce their inventions or use their processes everywhere they would be desirable. Small companies may not have the resources to or interest in provide their wares to anywhere but a small market. Yet if they have a patent, they may choose to prevent other companies who are not even in their intended market from marketing that product. This can cause proliferation of good products to be slowed dramatically. Many companies also like to keep patented processes to themselves, even if they can be easily reproduced elsewhere. Again, this slows proliferation. Licensing fees for use of the patented material is a good method for allowing proliferation while giving the patenting company their “incentive” for creation. It seems, though, that in many cases the licenses aren’t offered or are at such a high fee as to prevent their use.

As the patent process is designed to give companies a temporary monopoly in their market, and marketing of the patented items outside of the companies market by others should not adversly effect the companies profitability, something should be done to ensure others can recieve the benifits of the advance in technology. Patents could only apply to goods produced within the area the company is actively marketing to, allowing companies outside of the area to produce without fear of legal problems. If the patenting company moves into the other companies market area, the company may choose to: stop marketing in that area, pay the companies license fee, or sell the related factories and equipment (if dedicated to that product) to the patenting company. The companies would come to an agreement through negotiation or use third party arbitration if this fails.

the government pays the salary. Everyone recieves a salary from the government based from some determined number, perhaps $20,000 a year. This is everybody: every man, woman, and child. This base pay is modified up or down individually depending on what each person does.
-Children’s pay would be based upon their school attendance and grades. A C average grade with a decent attendance record would get the $20k. B and A average students would get more money. D and F students, and those with bad attendance records, would get less. The system would probably look at other factors as well.
-For employees, they would either need to achieve 40 hours a week to get the base $20k, or their productivity (perhaps based on a calculated independant contribution to GDP or something like that) level would determine their pay level, with some range of normal and acceptable outputs achieving the $20k base level.
-The level should not normally vary by more than perhaps +/- 50%.
-inventiveness and other such traits would reap monetary benefit. Inventors and discoverors would recieve short term spikes in thier salary based on contribition of the invention or discovery to society as a whole and their individual contribution to the project.
-Money given to children would start when they are born being split between money saved for education and their expected costs of living and small toy costs, which would be given to the parents. The money would slowly, as the children age, be given more and more directly to them.
-Other incentives and disincentives would also modify the base salary, in a similar way that they do on income tax returns now. For instance, purchase of energy efficient modifications to homes might increase salary. The children based incentives would not exist since the children make their own guarenteed money.
-There would no longer be an income tax, except on any moneys gained through other means than from the government. All government moneys would be raised from other areas.

-Businesses would pay the government employment taxes, which would provide the moneys for everyones salaries. These would probably be based on the number of employees, company productivity and/or contribution to society, and profitability, and be modified by incentives and discincentives similar to the salaries. The taxes should start out equaling approximately what companies are paying currently in wages and salaries to employees, and eventually take more and more into account the above paramaters.

-many of the non-wage or salary bearing money making methods should probably still be in existance. Entreprenuers could still start businesses and recieve profits for their effort and money invested. Money invested in stocks, bonds, or bank accounts could still earn people interest on their money and finance companies and individuals. People could still take out loans. These oppurtunities would provide the market based incentives available today. The government could possibly emulate these incentives and financial services, but probably wouldn’t be as effective.

everyone (that means everyone) makes similar wages, perhaps $10 – 20 an hour base.

-This base pay is determined by the desirability of the job to society: higher pay provides greater incentive to work the jobs. It may also be higher for more dangerous or damaging jobs, to provide for the possible medical bills or funeral expenses. Starting workers and easy no skill workers would get the lower end pay.

-This base may be modified on a person to person basis by up plus or minus 50% based on the worker’s productivity at their job. This would provide a maximum of $30 an hour in my example range for very productive workers doing those jobs most desireable to society. It may need to be watched or held to a curve of some sort to ensure companies aren’t giving the positive or negative bonuses as if they were the base pay.

-Number of hours are chosen by the worker exactly, with no overtime available. Workers so decide how much free time they have and how much money they make.

-Workers should generally be working two or more jobs. They’d work in both a low and a high profit industry (or what would currently be low and high wage jobs) and the companies would split the cost put toward the wages based on their profitability. This would ensure that companies that don’t bring in much money could still afford their labor, while highly profitable companies bringing in lots would not be raking in excessive money. For employees, this would provide a more diversified work-life and the chance to get some excersise from work even if their primary job provides none.

-The job splitting and setting-up could all be handled by a government agency to handle the splitting of hours worked by the employee and wages payed by the employers. It would be made easy to change jobs.

A list of all potential budget items is made. Individuals then choose what percantage of their income taxes goes into each listed program. Referendums and elected officials choose what programs are on the list. Low funding marks programs for removal, either by elected officials or a vote. The list is filed annually with the tax return. A change form could be used midyear.

Several different versions of each program could possibly be used, allowing voters to choose the one more accurately affecting their desires for the program. This would also allow programs that do not meet their goals to be repremanded by voters by having their budget reduced, but would split the divide money and effort towards a common or similar goal.

Advantages
This would link the resources held by each program to the voters desires for them to succeed.

Voters put their money where they want it. They see and have a better understanding of where this money is going. Confidence in the budget should increase, hopefully with less feelings of government waste.

Programs known to be wasting money will be repremanded by the public through reducal of budgets.

Disadvantages
Voters may not be good with budgeting, and will likely do a poor job of reasonably spreading funds through all programs. They will likely give certain favored programs all the money while giving others none. This may even out somewhat throughout the entire voting populace, but likely not enough, especially when certain programs are hot for debate while others are not. Alternatively, voters may vote to increase or decrease funding for different programs by varying amounts. This could become rather complex, especially if the voters must adhere to a given funding level. If they don’t, then their changes could increase or decrease taxes, giving voters direct control over this. To simplify things, ratings for each program might be done like the NPAT system, going from greatly increase to greatly decrease, perhaps numbered in counting +3 to -3. A composite of all these would then be taken and the average vote would be taken. Guidelines would need to be established for what each choice means in execution.

Some programs would likely be subject to a lot of negative feedback in the media, which wouldn’t neccisarily be well deserved. Programs doing well to achieve their goals may lose major budgeting or even be killed because of a bad incident or string of incidents that gets the public angry with them. Without the system like above with multiple options available, an entire area of government may be killed, with nothing to replace it. If, for instance, the military was seen poorly in the public eye because of a war or series of other incidents, the country may end up with no military all of a sudden. This would be alleviated somewhat by the funding modification system of above.

Programs would want to spend a lot of money on advertising, to raise public awareness in their favor, especially when a negative story is run on them in the media. If there are competing programs, a lot of mudslinging might occur. This may have to be strictly limited, or perhaps even all adverstising funding eliminated, by legislation. There could be a governemnt program, even a seperate branch of government, created to independantly inform voter about all programs.