Getting rid of corruption: Susidizing groups of experts and citizens to monitor (i.e. be with) government officials

Miscellaneous General
1

I’ve had this idea sitting in my mind for a while, a big problem with government (or any institution of that matter) is lack of oversight, why couldn’t we simply pay ourselves and give ourselves the authority to monitor these people. i.e. take a couple years off and study and hang around the place, freely without any bullshit or secrecy? Instead of having lobbyists buy laws, why not have simply draw experts in different fields to analyze laws, etc and allow anyone to come in off the street and monitor these people?

I’m of the opinion that if you’re in a position of power then you have to give up most if not all of your privacy so we can stop criminality in it’s tracks before it gets out of control. Consider you work at X job, with X amount of pay, you have the government pay your former wage while you are away and getting paid to do your civic duty, so that one doesn’t fall into economic problems while doing so, and now the people have the time to study up and inform themselves of the issues. I think voters are truly time strapped, the founding fathers of the US had a lot of time on their hands, they lived in a different more isolated world with a lot less information flying around.

I think a big problem is simply most people don’t have enough time in the day to really study and understand the issues, we could subsidize classes, etc as well for such people as well. The details of how to work it out would need to be worked out but I’ve thought about it myself, that one of the main reasons we make bad decisions is we need a lot of time to really thoroughly cover the enormous amount of issues and all of their details properly.

2

I think you’ll find that many people here believe that the biggest problem with government is that it exists.

Anyway, what do you mean by “paying ourselves?” It’s impossible to pay one’s self. When you’re talking about these kinds of subsidies, all you’re really talking about is stealing money from one group of people and giving it to another. Nobody should have to pay another person their working salary so that they can bone up on current events.

At the very core of it, though, you see the problem as being that voters don’t have enough time to look through the issues and come to a reasonable decision. Understandably, they’re focused on their own lives, which is fine. The answer to uneducated people controlling the lives of everyone else is not the lack of information to the voters. Our problems won’t be solved by bringing in experts. The problem lies with the fact that we have an institution that allows some people to tell others what to do. It’s the very structure that’s the problem.

We should get rid of these positions of power and allow people to run their own lives. If you want to consult an expert on how run your own life, that’s fine, but you shouldn’t force anybody else to do the same.

3

It’s not impossible to pay oneself, wal-mart does exactly this to avoid taxes (making shell businesses and paying themselves).

It’s only stealing if we don’t give our consent (i.e. taxation without represetnation), try to reconcieve taxes as a contract between us and a corporate entity (i.e. one person) because that’s what it really is in reality, the word “tax” should just be renamed “transfer of money via contract / consent (or not)” because that word (tax) masks the true nature of the transaction.

We could (for the sake of argument) all consent by contract to donate / pay a part of our money to this entity so that this can happen. You have a very limited view of contracts, why is government necessarily evil? If government doesn’t exist then that just means that private instutitions become competing governments in and of themselves, the whole concept of government is flawed from the outset anyway. A governing entity has political or economic power and enforces contracts, if private individuals, businesses and corporations can have private armies and private policemen, we’re just replacing one form of government for another, i.e. private monetary dictatorships, or monarchies of corporations, money and property.

The idea that government is the only governing entity is flawed from the outset anyway, all corporations are governing entities because they can and do authorize the use of force against peoples will. Most importantly most people don’t set prices for goods, a private actor setting prices for goods can easily use that power and become a market government (i.e. government by unelected commercial entities). We’re trading one gang of thugs for another.

4

But every system of values and laws does exactly this, I can’t see a society without governments at all, it would devolve into crime, how would you deal with crime and the mafia, who would control the military and nuclear weapons? How would you prevent genius’s from developing easy to make weapons of mass destruction? You couldn’t do that at all without violating your own principles. There is a point where our principles fail us completely because other people in the system do not hold the same values. It would never work, period. If we replaced government with simply businesses then their would be a revolution very quickly, I can’t see capitalism standing without government. There is way too much dissent against it once you get outside the america’s. No one in their right mind would accept corporate-government, it’s just another form of tyrannical authoritarianism. Your replacing the dictator of force, with the dictator of money and property (who obviously would also hire forces to enforce his values).

5

That’s nothing more than shuffling around numbers on paper through fancy bookkeeping. What is inherent in a subsidy is not the same. It is a transfer of wealth from one group of individuals to another.

Exactly. If I give my consent, it is not theft, but a voluntary transaction. This is how all transactions should be: voluntary. Taxes are inherently involuntary. We are all coerced into paying them whether we want to or not. The underlying reason why we pay taxes is that the government uses force against us if we do not comply.

This is far from the idea of a contract. When did I, or anyone else for that matter, sign this contract? When was consent given? Is consent just implicit? What about those who are punished for tax evasion? They have specifically said that they do not give their consent and violence was used against them. Lysander Spooner has written extensively about the Constitution not being a contract, and you can find much of his work on this very site for free. I highly recommend it.

If we all choose to donate to this or any cause, then everything is fine. The only problem is when payment is not voluntary, as I said before. Governments are necessarily evil because they are a group of people who rules over me without my consent. They are completely unnecessary, and you are somewhat on the right track here, but not totally. There would be something like “competing governments,” private agencies that run courts, police, and defense. Again, there is much written about this subject here on this site.

It is true that in the current system we have, there are corporations that get away with some pretty nasty stuff, but this is wrong and should be corrected. Corporations, because they are nothing more than a group of individuals, has no right to use force against others against their will, unless force was first used against them. In today’s world, we don’t have a very good system of justice. People get away with hurting others all of the time. As stated earlier, having a private system of justice would be a huge improvement over the current one.

6

It would be difficult to discuss exactly how private courts/defense may look in this thread, but there is quite a lot to read out there that describes exactly this. In fact, if you do a search in this forum, i’m sure you’ll find a thread or two about it so you can see this idea in its more fleshed-out form.

I do understand that it’s a tough mental hurdle to jump over, accepting the idea that government is unnecessary. Let me tell you how the realization that the world just wouldn’t go to pieces came to me. Simply imagine the idea of secession. In a free and voluntary society, one would have to allow secession, as it is wrong to force one to associate with others against their will. Now, are you willing to draw the line at any point with regards to what extent secession is allowed? Regions? States? Counties? Cities? What about the individual?

The way I see it, a world without government, with private agencies running the justice system, is just one where individuals are constantly exercising their right to seceed every time the contract runs out and they decide to subscribe to a different company. People are entirely capable of carrying out justice and defense regardless of whether or not there are artificially divided partitions of land dictating to me to which court or which organization I must go to seek justice.

7

But who would pay for it? I can’t see a private for profit court system having any kind of legitimacy over the long term it would quickly become the point of corruption (i.e. lobbying, etc). The real problem is human beings in any possible system we create someone’s going to go “hey fuck these people!” and if enough people do it then we’re back to where we started.

8

"I do understand that it’s a tough mental hurdle to jump over, accepting the idea that government is unnecessary. Let me tell you how the realization that the world just wouldn’t go to pieces came to me. Simply imagine the idea of secession. In a free and voluntary society, one would have to allow secession, as it is wrong to force one to associate with others against their will. "

But now you’ve exposed the real problem: Who gets what property and what amount when a large group secedes? That would easily erupt into conflict I could never see someone agreeing to secede without serious conflict and underhanded tactics unless they had a decent amount of self-sufficient actual land and water resources. There is no way secession would work over the long term because secession means that someone else is going to create a state voluntarily again and we’re back at square one. People would definitely make a new state again to conquer and exploit those they disagree with, this has been a staple of human history for a long time, every single country was built on fraud, deceit and bloodshed.

Also what do we do about indirect effects of peoples voluntary transactions? (i.e. externalities, etc), no one is truly independent of the earths resources and as populations expand the are going to bump up against one another. Sure in theory people would voluntary associate, in practice we’re all stuck on planet earth and sooner or later some group we disagree with is going to breed a lot of people and those people are going to have indirect effects on us whether we like it or not.

9

I think your question can be put back against itself. Indeed the state already is a mafia in masse. Already the state has commited crime against natural law on a mass scale, examples are both world wars. Indeed the military’s existance is dependant on the state, what you are talking about is defense, and there are various means, including community watch, individual perparidness, and private companies which could provide effective defense against crime. Also, in a true free market economy, incentives for crime, including state crime, would be lower, and that, along with the increased threat of punishment, would make crime a rarity. As to the genius question, what do you think war nerds are doing in the pentagon every day? Captitalism is a natrually arising phenomina that takes place without the innitiation of aggression, so there is no “dictatorship” of money or property, whatever that means. There are only two types of dictatorships, and both are fudemintally related, a dictator of force, and a dictator who uses psycological methods of control, example Stockholm, which exists to a minor degree in a majority of state subjects, all questions answered.

10

Let us assume your pessimism to be correct, that people always screw things up and are fundementally bad. Let us also assume that accountability, that is that individuals alone suffer from the consequences of his or her actions, is preferable to reduce the probability of individuals acting aggressively or fraudulently. Indeed to have a state, one must first establish “soverienty” and this is always done through violence, or the threat thereof. You have already seen the results of this lack of accountability within a given state when you read newspapers. State killers will never be held accountable, because they are isolated from the consequences of their actions. Hence it is idiotic to have a state, because individuals who are fundementally self-interested, will isolate themselves from consequence, hence act with impunity.

11

And now, my friend, we’ve entered into the realm of economics. It just so happens that you’re in luck, as you’ve come to a very good place to get answers to these questions. These are the very same questions that countless people have asked. Who gets what property? Why? What happens when my property bumps into yours? What happens when I trade some of my property for yours? Should somebody be overseeing this transaction? These are all very huge, very important questions, and talking about them on a forum like this will not do them justice.

Really, these are the questions that everybody here has asked at some point. If you have a specific question, there’s a very good chance that there’s a good thread, article, or book about it here. If you have questions, criticisms, or comments, this is a great place to post about them. But first you have to put in the effort to understand some conclusions that we’ve reached with regards to the questions you’re asking.

It’s very difficult to give an entire breakdown of Austrian economic theory or any kind of political-social theory in any kind of depth on a forum such as this. People have done their best to point you in the direction of some very good books and articles written by some very brilliant minds. It’s incredibly frustrating when you choose to ignore or speak down to people as you did in your other thread. I’m fairly new to this forum and Austrian economics in general, but I can tell you, if you put in the time and effort to understand the theory, you will not be disappointed and your knowledge will be greatly expanded. Again, if you want answers to your questions, I’ve found that people here are more than willing to help.

If I may make a suggestion, attack the questions you have one issue at a time, especially if you’re looking for an answer on the forum.

12

Great idea! And then, we’ll have monitors of the monitors to make sure they don’t exert undue influence on the politicians they watch, and that they themselves don’t accept bribes to look the other way. Now, of course, the monitors of the monitors will need to have enforcement power over the monitors similar to that the monitors have over the politicians, and given that they could no doubt exert quite an influence over the monitors they monitor, they should themselves have monitors, the monitors of the monitors of the monitors. And so on and so forth, and soon we’d all be monitors over one monitor or another and pay ourselves from the money produced elsewhere by monitoring.

Of course, a monitor needs someone to report to, and clearly it can’t be the politicians. I suppose they could be judges or Attorney Generals or some such, who, given the fact that they would be government officials, would themselves require monitors. Of course the monitors of the people to whom the monitors report cannot be the same as those they monitor, so we would need a separate agency of judges/attorneys for them to report to. Given that these would also be government officials, we’d need yet another agency to which monitors (who need monitors of monitors) would report to, which would, itself, need monitors. And so on and so forth. So, for a little variety, if some of us were tired of monitoring politicians or monitors or those who monitors report to, we could be those who the monitors report to.

So three job options: politician, judge, or monitor, all funded through the incredible wealth-building tool that is monitoring. Now, we wouldn’t all have to work in these capacities if we could only have the various groups check each other, but of course we’ve already seen that “checks and balances” really accomplish nothing if all the different groups, or even a majority, agree to be corrupt and despotic together.

Alas, this does mean that, at about the instant the last available monitors are chosen, we will have to all shuffle jobs, because clearly the last layer of monitors/judges will not have any monitors/judges to monitor/judge them. The only really stable job would be politician. Brilliant. [:|]

13

Can’t you see how purely “rational” this is? Only a knuckle-dredging fool would deny it! [:O] What’s more, it’s implicit in the very laws of physics!

-Jon

14

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
(Who watches the watchmen?)
-Juvenal, Satires VI.347

15

Sweet =]

16

WE don’t need people to monitor the monitors because EVERYONE has access to this monitoring process, most importantly we can use the internet to broadcast everyones actions to everyone else instantaneously. And to prevent fraud we can simply design the system in such a way where we have systems in different locations monitoring people, sattelite technology and optics now allows us to view entire regions and track flows of goods and services from outer space where no one can easily monkey with the sattelites. i.e. there will be no privacy for people in power. That’s all we need, we have surveillance technology and soon enough we can build AI’s that can monitor this automatically.

So yes unfortuntaely for the critics here there are rational solutions to these problems, and some people here have a terrible lack of imagination.

17

Leave the trolling for the other thread, I came here for genuine discussion, let’s be rational, let it go, and let it be. It’s not very rational thing to hold a grudge against someone who is interested in learning of your values, just because we have fights, disagreements or conflicts, doesn’t mean we should use that as a tool of hatred and grudge bearing against those who are interested in improving themselves and their own reasoning. Which can only happen through dialogue and the practice of argument. We need to learn tolerance and humility, even when we have spats and be fools from time to time in heated arguments.

18

Oh I don’t hold a grudge against you. I just think you’re wordy and ill-informed. I don’t care enough to hold a grudge. I do, however, get defensive when I see someone saying “we”, usually when “we” implies coercing others into their moronic schemes.

-Jon