A Time and A Place

When I was young, I grew up playing civilization games, and watching my dad play them. I have always been a fan of grand strategy, politics, economics, and technological advancements. I was fascinated by how in human history, even after inventing all the pieces and discoveries required to make certain advances, how slowly technology has advanced until recent history. My father, when he played nearly any civilization game, plays the same way, he goes for early science, and then typically goes for the ability to use a republic as his form of government, then goes for a transition into democracy. When he plays, he plays as America, or as Rome or Greece. It doesn’t really matter what he does around that, or what method he uses to win in the end, but that’s the path that he goes down nearly every time. I always thought that it was fascinating that his ideological beliefs led him to never touch communism, fascism, monarchy, even in a video game, when it would lead to an advantage in the strategem he was using to win.

Ironically, this is definitely a form of toxic nationalism, which he would also stay away from, but he would certainly say that a democratic-republic is the best form of government, hands-down, no contest, and that any other form of government is in some way fundamentally wrong. Of course, when I asked him about these other forms of government, why they were wrong, or did not work, I would get non-sequitur answers, such as “because the communists in China massacred a bunch of people”, or “because they starved their people”, or “the Italian fascists were the bad guys of WWII”. While I could see that those governments did bad things to their people, it just never really explained my fundamental questions about their governments, which was how they functioned, and how their functioning could be “wrong” or “bad” in such a fundamental way. To me, all forms of government had sinned, and that governments like the USA’s were also responsible for atrocities.

It even seemed that he couldn’t accept a really basic cognitive dissonance that he had about monarchies and the monarchical language with which he would describe God, and even when I would point out this inconsistency, seemed immovable about keeping both true, that God was a good king, but there are no good monarchies, and that the system was inherently evil and tyrannical. I could never understand the fanatical devotion to his ideal of democracy and republicanism, which has morphed into something unrecognizable.

The inconsistency however, sparked my journey to look back through history, to find what actually makes a good leader. Who were the “good kings”, the “benevolent dictators”, and the “evil prime ministers”? What makes for stable government? What prevents corruption? How do we even judge such things through the lenses of history? What causes empires to fall, and for famine to overtake idealism?

I believe that the best form of government for a country is based on a combination of factors: the available resources, the level of infrastructure development, the level of technological development, and the objectives of the government. Each form of government has its drawbacks that can put it at risk of structural collapse, but with the appropriate combination of applied concepts, most of those risks can be mitigated.

For example, in a government that wishes to have a highly educated populace, with a number of high-value services, such as scientist, doctors, lawyers, programmers, engineers, and others, you would need to have a government that allows for the free exchange of ideas with few barriers, and would allow for educational support to increase the likelihood of any given citizen going into one of those professions. However, the free exchange of information allows for common people to organize, a drawback for a single-power state, as it allows for the creation of rival factions.

On the other hand, if the goal of the state was to generate wealth, you would want to have a government that strongly considers the interests of corporations, though without appropriate redistribution, and the ability for some upward mobility and support of the working populace, you could easily end up exploiting your working class too much. This is often the temptation, to drain resources in the short term, but this is always at the expense of long-term growth, and a nuanced understanding of economies tells us that poverty is a drag on society, and that you actually want economic policies that pull people from poverty to a middle-class standard to keep them content, and to ensure that they are more productive.

Because of this, sometimes the desires of a state and the ability of a state to meet those objectives are limited by the technology available. A government that had some flaws in it, such as difficulty managing bureaucracy, or distribution and allocation of resources across a state, or the necessity to divert segments of the economy towards defense, could work at a different point in history, where the circumstances have changed, such as technology, location, surrounding cultures, and societal norms. An attempt at a centralized state may work on a very small scale, but become impossible to manage without the advanced infrastructure of reliable globalized transportation that has only recently become available by land, air and sea.

It is through this lens which I look at the histories of these political empires, on scales large and small. To see what works, and what does not, and to consider counterfactual scenarios, where we can consider what things could have made it work. It is a somewhat dangerous task, I must admit, to ask questions like, “What would have made Mao’s communist China work better?” Because we must also consider the negative consequences it would have had for our own way of life now, such as a much earlier rise of China as a global power had it had access to the better agricultural and manufacturing techniques of the west just a few decades earlier, or if the state had expanded its educational system earlier, or simply had a better system of distributing resources. Would communism have had the power to sweep the globe?

It is my hope that by looking at the mistakes of governance and their successes through the ages that when the next wave of governmental experimentation occurs during the next wave of frontier exploration (space colonization of course), that we will have a more complete view of governing, and will be ready to evolve governance to its next stage. I predict this will be a hybrid model of governance which will include technology and human oversight as a part of its fundamental functions.

Technological Governance: Token Benefits (Encouraging Good Behavior)

It’s quite a mouthy title, to be sure, but the idea in and of itself is actually fairly straightforward. People work best under positive incentive structures, but setting up those structures in such a way as to encourage people to use them without abusing them is tricky. The benefits to cryptocurrency tokens though, is that you can pretty much put any restriction one could imagine on them.

I was considering the problem of roadside trash, and how much of a blight that it is, both aesthetically, but more importantly, ecologically. Part of me just wanted to pull over on the highway, grab a trash bag out of my car, and pick up some of the debris. However, I was presented with a number of reasons why it just wasn’t super feasible, the largest of those being that I did not have a trash bag in my car. Among others though were the sheer inconvenience of trying to pull over to park on the side of a busy, traffic-laden highway, and the one that caught myself off-guard, I had no tangible incentive, other than vague notions that my actions would “help save the environment”. However, that last reason, the lack of tangible incentive, gave me an idea. A cryptocurrency token, distributed to citizens, that had a unique property, it could not be used by the individual who receives it. A bizarre idea, to be sure, but here is the gist of how such a currency token would work.

These “Samaritan” tokens would be connected to contracts on the blockchain, which would be created by citizens. These contracts would include things like roadside trash pickup, park maintenance, or other issues that citizens desire to have taken care of. Citizens could place a “bounty” on the task, which would be searchable by location. Multiple citizens can place bounties on the task, raising the value of the task, until someone accepts the contract, and performs the work. They would then provide proof-of-work in some appropriate form (most likely photos from the contract location), and then the people who placed the bounty (some percentage or numerical threshold) would release the funds to the person who performed the work. With the tokens transferred, the individual would be able to use the tokens for anything the main governmental currency would buy.

So, what would be some of the benefits of such a type of token be? The first is that it facilitates community change from the ground level. People in communities see the needs of their communities most closely. This creates a sort of market for public works, which would be able to be undertaken by an individual, a group of individuals, or an organization, with the greatest needs in the community rising in value, to the point where it would attract the attention of those who could complete the task. The cleanup of a particular street, for example, may raise $20-50 before it becomes worth it for someone to take the contract. An pothole, on the other hand, that a city has neglected, or has been unable to fill, though, because of what it requires to fix, and depending on the severity of people’s annoyance with it, may reach hundreds of dollars before it is taken care of. The other beauty of such a system is that these numbers may be reached through the annoyance of a few people a little bit (hundreds of people putting up small bounties), or by a large annoyance by a few (a handful of people putting up $100 or more bounties).

This model is somewhat a reflection of the flexibility of the gig economy, but with the government as the issuing entity. These contracts could also be applied to privatized tasks, such as providing cleaning service for someone. Each task would be the equivalent of a tax-funded small-scale gofundme campaign. A benefit of this is that tax payers would actually see the benefits of their tax dollars at work, this would also help areas with a lot of general labor that is unused, and would be a boost to the un/under-employed. Another benefit to such a system is that it would highlight areas that need more general laborers, and would also highlight areas that need a lot of work. Areas that need a lot of work, but with little available labor would have contracts that could reach such high bounties that they could attract labor from surrounding areas, or even distant areas, which could help revitalize some communities.

Of course, there are some potential drawbacks to such a system. The first is that tax payers could end up paying more for some services than they would if those services were just performed by government maintenance on some level. This is certainly possible, though the point at which some people will perform those tasks is a lower threshold than others. This would lead one to believe that , so long as the labor efforts were not 100% coordinated, that there would be equilibrium prices that would come about for certain tasks, based on willingness to perform them, the needs of the individual, etc. Since also there would be the ability for anyone to take the contract at some point, it would be difficult for forces to extort money out of the system, unless they had a monopoly on labor. Even then, these projects would include things like, “planting trees in the local park”, or “cleaning up the streets”, “help so-and-so with their lawncare”, “host a local hobbyist group”, or other acts that aren’t necessary to continue running society. There could be some instances of trying to cheat the system that could occur, such as trying to create contracts within a family, to then give the contract to another family member. The problem with such an idea is that this could happen, but since the contract would show up to compete with the entire labor market, the amount would either be small and insignificant, or the project would be snatched up by an outside force. Even in a more complex situation, for example, a group of construction workers/families, who put their tokens into a project to fix a road or sidewalk, and then take that work themselves, yes may get the benefits of their own tokens, but they of course would also need to complete the work (assuming that they were not the only contributors to the contract), meaning that the area would get the benefit of the contract being completed anyways.

Of course, the benefit to attaching the proof-of-work and the contracts to a blockchain is also that it becomes much easier to investigate and suss out fraud in such a system, as pretty much anyone would be able to find that contract, and would be able to verify that the contract had been valid in the first place, then that the work was actually completed as stated. This reduces the amount of fraud and the scale of corruption possible under such a system.

As for how much should be actually given to citizens each month to allocate to these tasks, and what should be done about benefits that are unused over long periods of time, those are problems for a system that is more seriously considering the proposal, and would need to be based on the amount that individuals would receive in other benefits. However, a number around $100/month in current year terms would probably have enough distributive force to allow for this to work on at least small-scale projects, as would be appropriate for the general labor projects that these would likely cover.

What do you think? Would you clean up your streets if your neighbors paid you to? Would you use such a benefit? See anything I missed? Tell me what you think.

A Blockchain Government: Voting

Blockchain technology has the possibility to secure information, to create transparent government, and to reduce bureaucratic overhead. One of the ways this can happen is by assigning blockchain identities to citizens, giving them a unique fingerprint, like a social security number, but more secure. This would act somewhat like a cryptowallet, specifically one with tokenization capabilities. This would allow for tokens to be created for a large variety of different kinds of projects. It could be used to distribute specific categories of welfare that could only be used for those goods or services, such as a housing token that could only be used for paying rents, or a food stamp-like token that could only be used for the purchase of food goods, etc.

It could also though, be used for voting.

There are a number of ways that you could design the system, depending on how transparent or secretive the ballot process is decided to be. Of course, the more secretive methods could be used by authoritarian states to theoretically rig elections, though that level of control could be made difficult.

One way that such a voting system could work would be that citizens were given “vote tokens”, an amount of tokens representing the number of categories to vote for, or could be used in a ranked-choice voting system. The citizens would then vote for their desired choices of candidates or policy decisions, and those tokens would be transferred to the appropriate “vote wallet”. Simply, between the vote wallets, the options with the most tokens win.

Now, how the votes are verified could be done a number of ways, and on different levels, depending on the level of ballot secrecy required. The transaction records could be encrypted, but the token totals available for view, with the system itself verifying the transactions on the network behind the scenes, which has the benefit of an attacker required to hijack the whole network to make any changes to the transaction records, though if this did occur, there would be no way to verify it until after the fact. Another way this could be done is by allowing the transaction records to be seen, which would allow individuals to verify their own vote records on the blockchain, though this has the drawback of making it possible for other people to potentially see another person’s voting record given the right set of information. Lastly, you could just open up the whole system, so that you can see the ID numbers of every person who voted for what category and at what rank. This has the advantage of total vote transparency. A discrepancy between someone’s vote and their record of that vote would be readily available, though this does provide lists of people who might have voted for the wrong person in the case of a more oppressive regime.

So it matters how these technologies are implemented greatly, if we want to leverage the power of technology in government, but this one example  shows the ways that such a technology could be used to both make democracy transparent, or to create an all-knowing techno-fascist state.

 

Democrats who fail to learn the lessons of the January shutdown are doomed to repeat them.

As of writing, Democrats and Republicans are once again in heated debate over funding the government. Only two days out from a shutdown, there has yet to be a deal announced to keep the government open. However, there has been recent reporting suggesting a number of solutions that are being discussed. What is apparent though on the Republican front: they expect Democrats to capitulate.

In the House, Rep. Paul Ryan is planning to introduce a funding bill that would keep the government open until March 23rd. This is notably after Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, agreed to have an immigration deal voted on, which has not made progress yet towards a solution. The bill in the House includes funding for the military until the end of the year, with an increase in funding from the previous year’s levels. This is in spite of the red-line drawn by Democratic leadership refusing to vote on another continuing resolution unless it included a provision that took care of DREAMers, or that increases in military spending would require commesurate increases in domestic spending to get Democratic votes.

So once again, the government is on the brink, but this time, GOP leadership believes Democrats will cave under pressure as they did under the previous shutdown, where they accepted a funding deal in exchange for 6 years of funding the children’s health insurance program. There are important differences this time that will likely affect the outcome differently than previously.

In the previous shutdown, Democratic representatives were unsure how the liberal base would react to a government shutdown, and who would receive the blame if a shutdown occurred. We saw that Democrats panicked and struck a deal before the effects of the shutdown were really even felt. We also saw that as that weekend came to a close, that data showing blame on the Republican Congress had just started to be represented in polling data. However, Democrats took the deal on CHIP, and delayed the fight on DACA. As a result, much of the base was furious, saying that they had the leverage to hold out for more.

This time however, there is no distraction to sidetrack negotiations. Nothing is higher on the docket for the left as a priority than immigration. This is it, this is the fight for the future of DACA recipients, and so far Schumer and Pelosi seem to realize this. If House Democrats want to keep their base energized, and engaged, and want to keep their seats, they’ll need to do more than sign a CR, they’ll need to hold out for what the people want, or come November, they could lose their seats to challengers from further left.

As of now, a shutdown seems the best way to preserve momentum for the left, hopefully they won’t let this opportunity to use the little leverage they have, go to waste.