What GOP Must Do to Avoid an American NHS

Alright, US Republicans, listen up.

You think your goal right now is to “Repeal Obamacare”.

But that has issues. Given your values, your goal should not just be to repeal Obamacare, but to prevent the emergence of a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, in which the US Federal government monopolizes 1/5th of the US economy in a botched attempt at recreating the NHS.

This does not mean trying to pass laws to sabotage the attempt. They’ll just get overturned, and that will be celebrated as a Democratic party victory.

You have to deflate the demand for single-payer healthcare. That is what is necessary for market-based healthcare to continue to exist in the United States. As long as the demand is there - and it is growing, as middle-class families come under increasing pressure - the desire for single-payer will re-emerge.

Yelling at people about how they don’t deserve healthcare because they haven’t worked hard enough will not help. You just picked up a bunch of rural voters that got laid off at the factories and can’t meet their deductibles. You have to focus on preserving the market-based allocation.

There is a simple way to do this.

Each year, every American receives a healthcare voucher for $2,500. (Maybe more - this is way below our per-capita healthcare spending - but even you can do this much.) You can hide this as an earned income tax credit for the poor, a tax deduction for the middle class, etc, if you have to.

The voucher can only be used to purchase valid medical services and medical insurance. We have licensing for doctors, so this shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.

Any of the voucher not spent rolls over into a no-tax/low-tax Health Savings Account, where it builds up.

Private money can also go into the account.
Tax is only assessed above a certain amount / on death.
By default, it goes to a zero-interest government account, but this can be changed by opening a suitable interest-earning HSA account at any American bank or credit union.

Hospitals are still required provide emergency care for the uninsured/poor, however, up to ½ of future vouchers can be garnished, proportional to the size of outstanding claims.
Vouchers and money from the HSA can be given to spouses or children for their HSAs, though not other relations (normally). It can also be disbursed in a will, but if so then it will be taxed as normal income.

Now, first objection is probably that this will bid up the price of medical care to the new floor. I believe that is unlikely - because the voucher accumulates and people don’t actually like randomly buying healthcare, it makes much more sense to save it up and spend it later as you normally would, or else just buy insurance.

Second objection is that people might launder the money to get it for themselves. In this case, the person they are screwing over is mostly their future self, so they have incentive not to do this.

Third objection, which I’m likely to get from my left-wing readers, is that this isn’t enough money. That’s probably true, but this is likely of more benefit than whatever the Republicans are currently cooking up. In the current situation we have some poor people buying the mandated insurance, but unable to actually get medical care because they cannot afford the deductible. Under this system, they can go get medical care tomorrow. Likewise, for pre-existing conditions, this ensures that at least the value of the voucher is available each year to pay for it.

Later administrations could raise the amount, but the benefit for the Republicans here is the preservation of the market mechanism. This is likely to be a popular program.

This could be coupled with a variety of other reforms to reduce overall healthcare costs, such as requiring hospitals to post information about their prices, success rates, etc. Don’t just cross your fingers and hope the market works. Education alleviates information asymmetry and lubricates markets. Create the right framework for suitable informed competition to take place in.

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ranma-official

theonion:
“WASHINGTON—After persistent efforts by Republicans to wipe out the healthcare law over the past seven years, experts warned Wednesday that the repeated attempts at eradicating Obamacare may have created an ultra-resistant super law. “Given...

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Anonymous asked:

how do I sign up for your politics

If funding could be secured, it would be possible to start a think tank, because there is a lot of work to be done. These ideas are exotic, they escape the Overton Window by travelling orthogonal to it, but they have to be refined, tested, and experimented with.

The goal would be to synthesize a new scientific art of organizational design and policy incentivization from a diverse group of fields, including political science, economics (particularly behavioral economics), psychology, philosophy, and mathematics. Most existing organizations and politics are running on pre-digital organizational technology, and very few people even think of “organizational technology” as even being a concept.

Various proposals would be drafted, analyzed, refined, and then simulated using human testers (against competing speculative policies) before being refined again cyclically and suggested for institutions smaller than the US Federal Government. To improve efficiency, various competing domain experts would be hired for short periods of time.

Actually improving governance in the United States would require doing things that deeply offend both the Democratic and Republican parties and which are at odds with their ideological pre-commitments. Formation of a political party is right out due to the First Past the Post System which makes success with policies that are only inspiring to the kinds of people that read this blog extremely improbable. Policy advocacy should therefore focus on attacking avenues which are not sufficiently defended by partisan trench warfare, municipalities, and shifting politicians on individual issues through lobbying and electoral guides, functioning as a Special Interest Group.

Until then, one can follow this strange political time travel blog and dream of the future, if one wishes, in addition to whatever political activity one normally carries out.

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slartibartfastibast

Source: resistdrumpf the invisible fist the iron hand flagpost policy my politics national technocracy politics

The National Delegation

In case you haven’t noticed recently, democracy has major issues. Every major developed state is strewn with dysfunction and programs that are actively at odds with their intended purposes. Our politicians are either incompetent idiots or shrewd operators working against our interests.

Policies routinely have reasonable stated values, but terrible efficacy.

Organizations such as the RAND Corporation knew the Iraq War would be a lot tougher than the Bush administration said it would be. Policy plans coming out of think tanks seem to be better than the actual policies we get.

If we didn’t know they’d immediately get subverted, we’d almost be better off with think tanks running the country.

Better results are necessarily different results, and systems produce the outcomes they incentivize, so to change the results it is necessary to change the system.

The truth is, it may be possible to get something like think tanks in charge of the government, a hybrid between them and political parties, but we will have to add selection pressure to ensure they work towards correctness.

I propose a new legislature, composed of a new kind of corporate entity, the Delegate Candidate Organization (DCO).

Every three years, at election time, each voter delegates their vote to a DCO. The top 50 Delegate Candidate Organizations then form the legislature, becoming that term’s Delegate Organizations. This legislature is known as the National Delegation.

In a second election, those DCOs that did not make the cut delegate their votes to members of the top 50.

(In an optional alternative, the vote could be split between DCOs by categories by voters, allowing a truly innovative level of representation. Bills would have to pass on all categories to pass, and the tax category would determine how funding is obtained, but not total expenditures. Sadly, this is probably too complex for typical voters.)

A Delegate Candidate Organization receives its funding exclusively from the State. For each delegated vote it receives, the DCO receives $5 in annual funding, and an additional $5 times its percentile standing in a legislative outcome prediction market.

(That might sound like a lot. America has around 300 million people, so you could potentially be looking at three billion dollars. I would answer that the 2016 Presidential election cost $2.6 billion by itself, and that money had to come from somewhere and is already influencing our political process. The size of the US economy is $18,570 billion dollars. The real question is whether better policy by the DCOs could improve that by 0.016% or more, which would make the National Delegation pay for itself. I believe that it would.)

The key factor that makes DCOs behave more like think tanks is that a significant chunk of their funding depends on correctly estimating the outcomes of legislation. What keeps them honest? First, competition with other DCOs that will pressure them against spoiling the metrics. Second, voters.

When a piece of legislation is to be passed, DCOs make predictions on outcomes and bet on them in a virtual currency called Credibility Score (or just “Cred”). Each outcome must be represented by a basket of multiple metrics, to prevent min-maxing.

This structure allows us to build a differentiation between a policy’s values and its efficacy. Previous discourse has often viewed policy as solely a matter of efficacy, but of course in practice people have different preferences and are not a unified mass just waiting for enlightenment into [your political ideology]. Preserving the values component (in part through voting) also allows bits of efficacy that have slipped through to be represented on the other side of the equation.

The bets serve two purposes. The first is to reward policymakers that are actively effective at achieving their stated objectives, and punish policymakers that are too unaligned with reality. The second is to effectively tell voters what the plans will actually do, not just wishy washy language pols want people to hear.

“This bill will reduce gun crime.”
“By how much?”
“Uh… a, uh, lot.”

Not only can the DCO specify what its % estimate for a decrease in gun crime is, but it can also communicate its level of certainty - by how much it bets on the outcome as a percentage of its current Cred reserves, data that can be mined by political scientists and journalists.

DCOs must be able to amend predictions when new legislation is passed. A court will also be required to punish those who tamper with metrics, and resolve other disputes. The details of that are a challenge in themselves, but should be feasible to work out.

Each DO has as many votes in the legislature as have been delegated to it. A majority is required to pass legislation.

The accumulated Credibility Score/Cred across all bets is used to determine the percentile standing of all DCOs, used to determine funding (as above). Percentile standing is listed on the ballot next to the DCO’s name, but to simplify things for voters, DCOs are listed in the order of votes received in the previous election.

Practical experiments will be necessary to assess the viability of this model, but I have high hopes for it. If we want to advance as a civilization, then we must develop new organizational technologies.

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[ Values, Efficacy ]

To jump off of @the-grey-tribe‘s joke post:

I think one of the key discoveries of the 20th century that has not yet been realized is that, contrary to the beliefs of many factions, including the globalist liberals and the Communists, there is not one right way to live, one set of laws which is the correct one for all people and all groups, and that all alternatives must fall away and either die off or be destroyed.

We must recognize that political policy is not a strict hierarchy of better/worse left/right, but a vector with two components - values (or terminal goals), and the means or effectiveness of means by which those values are to be realized or achieved.

Often, the failures of politics are not the result of terrible values, but ones of effectiveness. And some of the failures of modern, “rational” planning would be mitigated by the recognition and inclusion of alternate values, alternate ways to live.

If we design the political system from this perspective, I believe we could create substantial improvements, and also, perhaps ironically, a diversity of communities which are specialized according what best fits given populations without trying to transform them all into one homogeneous mass.

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Anonymous asked:

Assuming I can shatter China, too (for the sake of sidestepping questions of likelihood-of-success, let's make that "assuming I can shatter China *first*"), any objection to me cracking the US into a few more drownable-in-a-bathtub sized chunks?

Drownable-in-a-bathtub is too small for any reasonable national government, but setting that aside…

How perceptive.

That the dominant hegemony is a democratic republic founded on liberal and enlightenment values, human rights, and democracy as ideology has some advantages. For instance, it likely plays a part in just about every autocrat having to pretend to democratic legitimacy. But those advantages are pretty intangible, so we’ll set those aside as well.

And let’s assume a breakup of Russia and India as well.

Sometimes I oppose things not just because I disagree with them on values, but because I think they won’t even work for the stated goal. (Doesn’t everyone?) So a lot of the opposition to American power wants to supplant America with Communism, or Anarchism, or smash it to bits, or dissolve it into global capitalism, or install a world government.

And while often this is based on ideological values about how people should live,

it’s also based on “OH FUCK GEORGE BUSH COULD JUST RANDOMLY INVADE SOMEWHERE AND NO ONE COULD STOP HIM.”

But while knowledge is knowing that America has hegemonic power, wisdom is knowing that that level of relative power isn’t entirely unique to America.

So not only will those ideas, like turning America Communist, be undesirable in themselves, but they will fail to actually abolish hegemony. They won’t even work for that stated purpose that was supposed to justify such a radical course of action.

For someone like me, this is a terrible deal.

So as long as anyone else has a continent-spanning superstate, I and the other American nationalists have no reason to dismantle ours.

But this question posits that a breakup of the other 9 million square kilometer nations has already happened.

At that point, I don’t really need a continent-spanning superstate. It has certain advantages, but the pressing need, to avoid living under someone else’s hegemony, is gone.

And I’m willing to make weird ideological trades. (I may be a lot less pro-immigration than most of the ratsphere, for instance, but there are conditions where I’d be willing to add all of Mexico to the United States.)

It may surprise you to learn this, but I’ve periodically thought about breaking the United States into a new level of “Regional Federalism” to deal with the increased political polarization. It wouldn’t work as well as we might like for that, due to the primary divide being urban/rural, so some other designs might have to be investigated, but I’m not as opposed to the idea as some readers may expect.

So let’s suppose we take the idea of a North American Union. There’s a sort of slider on a continuum of being more like a unified central government towards being a bunch of barely-connected separate nations. We’ll put the slider more towards the latter.

The American states are too small to be effective countries in the way that we’d like, and many of them are landlocked - very unfair! So we break America into 3-6 countries, based on the regions. Each one has some coastline of its own (if 3-4 countries), or else, through the NAU, the Great Lakes Region gets prenegotiated access to the sea.

This gives us a group of countries which each have a power level somewhere between that of France and that of Japan.

Minimum military development spending is pegged by the NAU to some % of the GDP and is shared between all of them. Actual militaries are individual to each country. There is a mandatory mutual defense pact, and a military coordination center, but pre-emptive wars and the like are optional. If Texas decides to invade Iran, New York does not have to pay for it. Outside of this, minimum military % GDP spending is tagged to 2.5%, and NAU members can sue each other if they fail to meet it.

The US Dollar is not abolished, but becomes a basket currency based on the currencies of each of the new NAU member countries. New currencies are issued for the new countries so that their economies don’t have currency problems like the EU does.

The official language of the NAU is American English. Proficiency in English must be taught in every NAU member country. There is no prohibition on adding other languages at the member country level.

The Bill of Rights is kept.

Other than this, since we’re looking for a dismantling, the power of the NAU government is pretty limited. The number of representatives for each member country is not proportional to population.

For the individual countries, I think multi-party parliamentary systems might result in a bit less infuriating dipolar partisanship. However, to be more decisive, each should have a President elected by Approval Voting.

That’s all pretty radical, and it’s more of a rough sketch than anything, but I am willing to make ideological trades with people that are primarily anti-nationalist because of things like the Iraq War - they’re just trades that no one can realistically offer.

Then again, by the mid-century, who knows?

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Logarithmic Policing

@collapsedsquid

That’s basically just secret police
of a totally ordinary sort
that then indulge in kickbacks and protection rackets

Yeah, I realized I forgot to tag that #half shtpost, as I wasn’t being entirely serious. It’s a bit of wishful thinking.

The thing is, I don’t think we adequately police the police. We need cop cops. Metacops, if you will.

The disutility of a crime can be modeled as the risk of getting caught times the penalty for getting caught. Thus, a crime with a 5% chance of getting caught, times a 20 year sentence as penalty, is then modeled with an effective disutility of a one year sentence.

However, people tend to time discount and so on, so you might not get much more out of a 40 sentence than you would out of a 20 year sentence. They’re both “a long time.” This means that you can get more oomph out of increasing the capture & conviction rate.

Regular people, despite not being police, commit crimes for some reason. Cops, who we send to increase the chances of catching them, also commit crimes. However, since they’re the ones that we typically send to stop crimes, it’s harder to deal with this, especially when prosecutors have to work with the same police to prosecute normal cases, and thus can’t afford to anger the larger police force.

So we should have a dedicated force to investigate, police, and prosecute police misconduct. “Sting operations all the way down,” so to speak. Of course, we’ll need to have someone keep an eye on them, too.

…but won’t that result in endless layers of bureaucracy?

Not necessarily.

Just as we only need some limited factor number of police for a given population size, we only need some limited number of metaⁿ-cops to police the cops.

We can model the required number of layers of metaⁿ-cops as log_{cop_ratio}(num_cops). With a cop_ratio of 2, for instance, our total number of all metaⁿ-cops is roughly the same as our total number of non-meta cops. A more reasonable cop_ratio of 10-20 gets us a more affordable ~5-11% for a city with 10,000 cops.

The purpose of each layer is to increase the uncertainty of successfully getting away with a crime at the layer below through arrest and conviction through multiple means, including informants, patrols, sting operations, reports of suspicious activity, investigations, etc.

This would be in addition to other means, such as introducing randomness to make various forms of corruption more difficult, moving people around to prevent building up loyalty between layers, etc. We want any corrupt personnel to always have to act very carefully and in the face of a great deal of uncertainty, as anyone they are interacting with could be one of our meta-cops.

We’d have to trim some of the other laws before we enact this, though, or else be careful just what policies we’re enforcing. Some laws currently not being enforced should just not exist, and we don’t actually want them enforced.

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@remedialaction Although I guess I will add on one more thing, regarding my policy proposals not being “innovative” enough -

I’m an edgy centrist, not a far-right reactionary, extropian, or Anarcho-Lumberjack. My idea of a “cool authoritarian regime” is Singapore, which is noted for being successful, safe, fairly open, and wealthy.

I tend to favor incremental policy rolled out experimentally, which won’t break the economy or be non-reversible. I’m proposing things that I think are likely to actually work, which in some ways means they won’t be so different in kind from existing programs. Revolution is, after all, overrated.

It’s true that in the space of all possible political policies, “ease up on zoning laws, end rent control and issue housing vouchers instead, throw on a tax based on expected new infrastructure required, then let the new housing stock roll in” is not particularly radical or revolutionary, but it’s likely to work and if it fails it isn’t likely to fail catastrophically.

It’s still innovative relative to typical American and European politics, but my goal isn’t to be an innovation-maximizer within the absolute space of all political ideas.

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Ideological Spread with Nationalist Characteristics

I was half-joking when I suggested that I’d use the statue controversy to remark on how to carry out an imperialistic foreign policy.

But I was half-serious as well.

Nationalism is one of the main drivers of imperialist foreign policy, but it is also one of the primary forms of opposition to the same.

Consider, however, an Empire with a different plan - it wants to spread not its people, nor, per se, its culture, but its ideology. (It may not even consider itself an Empire.)

The thing to do with Nationalist sentiments in other countries, then, is to merge and entangle them with the ideology to be installed (or rather, instilled). For each country, an adapted version of your ideology, fit more closely to the local needs and patterns. Not all countries need to be exactly the same. This allows you to deflect some of the popular will away from direct opposition to your imposed form of government.

This is actually part of why Democracy has had what success it has in its acts of imperialism. (And yes, Democracy as an ideology has a bit of a habit of imperialism, though a lot of that has been driven by America.)

How to interweave them?

Take elements of the local culture that are aesthetic or which are not in opposition to your ideology, and make them official and protected. (For instance, you probably want people to be timely, so if being chronically late is one of the local things, you need to get rid of that. On the other hand, architectural style can generally vary without crushing the GDP.) Pick various writers, historical works, and so on. Tie your ideology into the history of the region, as part of its self-narrative. Elevate local historical thinkers that can be described as proto-your-ideology. Build statues of locals that exemplify the positive qualities you want your ideology to represent.

You must create a new national mythology as a legitimization for the new government.

Over time, if executed well, your transplanted ideology will become part of the socially legitimized history of the country and thus gain the protection that affords.

In the meantime, most countries you could conceivably do this in are going to be relatively underdeveloped. Take advantage of the physical security you can manage to impose in order to pursue a long-term program of development.

Borrow a page from Milton Keynes and have the price of the development paid for by speculating on the values of the land to be developed. If you don’t drop the ball on this, the country is going to undergo a 7-10% annual rate of economic growth for some years. Investors would normally be skittish due to concerns about corruption and physical security, but you have the power to calm those risks.

The development doesn’t have to take place across the whole country, but a critical mass is needed so that future development will be self-propelling, and local talent must be trained (in your universities) so that it can continue to operate in the future.

Now I know this sounds incredibly expensive, and of course it is, but the goal here is to turn those countries permanently to your ideology and increase your ideology’s share of total global resource output - and that is, in itself, very valuable.

(Also, your pension funds can ride that 7-10% annual growth as your corporations are able to buy up assets at low prices.)

It also requires a great deal of political will. Will that, in Afghanistan and Iraq, America did not have.

The simultaneous cowardice, foolhardiness, and ignorance of the American political establishment and voters made for a military campaign that was not only highly aggressive, but failed to accomplish all that much for all the blood it spilled.

Something more ideologically imperialistic that sought to convert Iraq and Afghanistan into true, developed democracies, with all the basic underpinnings that required, would have been better. Alternatively, not going at all would have many advantages. Instead we get the worst of both worlds - a willingness to invade without a willingness to see a conversion through to the end, fueled by the naive belief that liberal democracy is the natural state of humanity and will flourish in all soils if it is simply unleashed.

There are, of course, far crueler ways to expand dominion if one has different goals. I will not go over them here. The age of such empires is over, now, and for the better.

politics policy national technocracy shadowed waters

ranma-official

theonion:
“SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass....

Source: theonion queue

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.