by duff
Crazy anarcho-capitalist. Against coercive monopolies. Big fan of Murray Rothbard and the Austrian School of Economics. More about duff
Competitive Government vs. Democratic Government
Arnold Kling recently wrote an interesting essay in which he says:
In this essay, I will suggest that competitive government might be better than democratic government at satisfying the desires of the governed. In democratic government, people take jurisdictions as given, and they elect leaders. In competitive government, people take leaders as given, and they select jurisdictions.
As the internet becomes more widely used, folks with unpopular beliefs are finding it easier and easier to communicate and organize than ever before. I'm wondering if this improved level of communication will allow competitive government approaches like Seasteading to actually have a chance of being implemented.
One of the problems with government is that it's currently a monopoly and it doesn't need to compete. It's currently extremely difficult for the "customers" of a government to take their business elsewhere. The internet could change that.
Kling sums up the idea quite well:
The idea of competitive government is to allow constituents to use exit rather than voice as a check on concentrated power. In markets, consumer sovereignty puts firms under constant pressure to improve efficiency and tune their offerings to the wishes of individuals.
In markets, firms with unsuccessful product offerings go out of business. Voice works very poorly at shutting down unsuccessful government programs. No individual has an incentive to fight to end an obsolete or ineffective program. In fact, people whose incomes depend on the program are likely to lobby to keep it.
Comments
Fascinating idea, but does not seem that real to me. After all, we do have competitive governments already in terms of one party and administration replacing another. Now of course you can say that they are all the same, but why is that? If a couple of thousand of us who hated the status quo could colonise the moon, how different a society would we really create? And if we did manage to do some things differently, why can't we work for them in our current contexts?
posted over 3 years ago
Seems to me that, at an international level, governments are in competition with one another although they generally do not spend too much time thinking about this outside of economic considerations. However, migration is prima facie evidence of this competition and the ability of many to vote with their feet.
At a national level it is often obeserved that governments exercise a monoploy on violence which, in many cases, is a jolly good thing. The point is that this illustrates the reality that governments have to exert power and control over things in the real world (e.g. people, or buildings) - in part so that they can generate the resources (i.e. tax revenues) required to function and deliver what people want and need in the real world - health systems, law and order, border control etc. Somehow I can't see government only existing in the digital domain, or allowing itself to be exposed to domestic competition. I also think it fanciful that people could simply switch their choice of government - there is too much friction for that to happen easily (if permitted at all).
So the only way this is likely to work is via the Seasteading approach. But then who is going to defend folk against the marauding Somali pirates?
posted over 3 years ago
I think most people would agree with your statement Paul that the idea doesn't seem that real or even realistic. To me though, it doesn't seem as unrealistic as trying to actually influence our existing governments. Influencing existing governments seems like quite a daunting task.
posted over 3 years ago
I agree with you Russell that at this point seasteading seems to be the only way for the idea of competitive government to have a chance. Given that every square inch of known land is occupied by existing governments and those governments are not likely to ever give up that land, it seems that creating new land is the only way for fringe groups to experiment with different forms of government.
As far as who will defend seasteaders against pirates, it's my belief that if a group of people is radical enough to live on the ocean and create their own sovereign nation, odds are they'd be more than happy to defend themselves.
posted over 3 years ago
I suppose you're aware of Sealand? http://www.sealandgov.org/
posted over 3 years ago
To enable competitive jurisdictions, there is the requirement for open borders, low barriers to citizen migrations, good information (on the different options) and low cost transportation.
Whilst this is often true today within existing nation states between local and regional/state government areas, there are still substantial barriers to free migration across most national borders, in terms of administration, information and transportation.
While nation states do currently compete to some degree for perceived high-value citizens (business leaders and social visionaries), there is little or no interest on the part of administrations in either competing for the 'average' citizen, or providing free movement between jurisdictions for these individuals.
If the situation changed to make it easier for citizens to change national jurisdictions at will, the incentive for nations to compete on citizens may become primary - or nations could instead act to restrict free movement in order to preserve their integrity, potentially leading to less freedoms than are currently enjoyed by many (but by no means all) people around the world.
posted over 3 years ago
Slightly different take...think about Google health records or private education or the provision on nongovernment health services or maybe even microcredit...these are services increasingly testing the concept of monopolistic public services and, in the process, inventing perhaps a non-state public sphere which is taking market share from the public sector. In that sense, maybe, we are seeing the rise of 'competitive' government in the sense of a raft of new, potentially scaleable public purpose services and platforms not owned or controlled by the government and increasingly available as an alternative to mainstream public provision.
I've had a strong view for some time that the state's monopoly over many areas of public service provision, especially education in Australia, is rapidly eroding because new options are emerging that allow people to 'exit'. In the process, we are witnessing the emergence of a 'shadow' public sector that is genuinely competitive to the traditional forms of provision.
It's not quite the same angle as this discussion started with, I know, but it's another dimension of the competitive debate.
posted over 3 years ago