The conceptual GeoFlux currency

[Radivis (Michael Hrenka)]

Every law has a cost for some parts of society and a benefit for other parts of society. If both of these could be calculated and the ones on the losing end compensated by the ones on the winning end, I think that’d result in a rather fair system where we only get laws that are ultimately beneficial for the society as a whole. The problem is the logistics of determining who loses and who wins and by how much. I suspect some kind of a system where people bid for or against specific laws along with simulators publicly available for simulating the effects of those laws on society might be a starting point to consider.

Of course, the costs of enforcing the law also need to be taken into consideration. Our current system seems to pretty much just ignore the costs of enforcement and other costs and just keeps on making new laws adding to the burden.

Ok, that’s pretty insightful and radical. Estimating the costs of laws for certain parts of the populace would be tremendously complex, even for a single law. And you probably can’t simply consider laws in isolation, but have to consider the system of all relevant laws. In all simulations you will have to consider that people adapt to the law that currently exists, in more or less desired ways. Many people don’t even bother with knowing the legal situation, and rather act on social norms. How do you get their behaviour into the simulations? The whole effort sounds so complex that it almost sounds easier to get a society to run on no laws at all, than to get that “law cost compensation mechanism” even approximately right.

My conclusion is that governments have the important task of minimizing all kinds of coercion that destroy value for market participants. Governments need to create freer markets before one can say that markets always create value for all involved participants.

The current track record governments have at this indicates that the current structures of governments will only be successful at this for a limited time. Eventually the government itself becomes the party that creates the most coercion on the market. I don’t disagree that this would be the ideal, but at least our current forms of government seem to be unable to provide it. They have too severe lack of garbage collection mechanisms (as in programming lingo) to be able to achieve this ideal.

I’m not sure about that. Some governments seem to do rather good jobs, for example those of Iceland, Denmark, Switzerland, Canada, or Norway, while many others fail miserably. In a globalised world it becomes increasingly difficult however to create optimal market conditions within a single nation. We’d need a global economic governance (that’s not affected very much by particular lobby interests) for optimising conditions for enabling markets to flourish. Of course, you’d need a governance with high intelligence and integrity for that purpose. AI to the rescue?

While reading this, I might have gotten an idea of how to mix the sosialist idea of everyone owning equally much of everything with the capitalistic profit motive. Basically, first encode it into consitution that everyone owns a share of the whole that is expressed as 1/population. Each person can theoretically claim complete personal control of that portion of collective resources if they want to. Alternatively (and this the key here), they can rent a portion of the share to someone else to control in their stead.

That’s a really intriguing idea. The practicalities of this system might make it too unwieldy, though. How do you rearrange shares, if population grows or shrinks? What does it really mean to own a billionth of a piece of land, or a share of a company? It’s like you own a bit of everything, but nothing in particular. I mean, it wouldn’t even make sense to allocate ownership of a brick of a factory building to anyone. Capital only makes sense, if it comes in large chunks that can be used effectively. A more reasonable interpretation would be to declare everyone to be shareholder of every company.

I think this system would require two sorts of assets. One for most important resources that produce things of value and another for consumables plus money. Only the first sort should be included in the legislated fair share. consumables and money, on the other hand, would work like today. They’re traded on the free market.

Yes, it probably needs to work that way. I’ve come to the same conclusion when thinking about my idea of “auctionism”. Only means of production are auctioned off, while consumables effectively are traded as usual.