I have seen your comments pushing this idea of yours on a number of economics blogs, and I have wanted to reach out to you for some time. Your idea is not obviously a bad one. It is not obviously a right one either! But it does not take such a great deal of imagining to see how allowing taxpayers to allocate their taxes could be an improvement on the current system.
However, your presentation is...imperfect. You need to realize that your idea is weird and a substantial change from the status quo. “Weird” and “change from the status quo” are difficult handicaps in the political sphere. You need to be able to articulate your most important arguments and ideas in short, powerful statements. How Robin Hanson advocates futarchy might be a model for you. I myself intend to advance some arguments that, while quite uncontroversial as derivations from economic theory, are nevertheless disapproved of within the profession, like how a mathematician starts to fidget when a physicist treats dy and dx like two different variables, only if the physicist were completely right and the mathematician knew it.… It is not easy, and it can be frustrating.
You must be prepared to do the bulk of the work in this conversation, even when you have already done the work. That means a post full of links to your other posts is insufficient even if your other posts are sufficient. And they are not. Your FAQ, for example, is woefully incomplete. It does not even explain what your idea is.
You need to engage substantively with the weakest points of your argument and the public choice literature. There is a great deal of work for you to do to fully understand this position. For example, do taxpayers vote on how the total tax fund is allocated? Or do they each choose where to send the taxes they personally pay? If the former, your core argument, that taxpayer-allocated taxes will yield improvements because the allocations will reflect the opportunity cost of the taxpayer choices, is wrong. (It is wrong or at least very incomplete in the latter case as well, but I “see what you mean” and have no desire to quibble.) If the latter, you need to explain how this choice happens. Does a form come with the income tax form allowing you to circle “military,” “environment,” “welfare,” and so on, indicating where your money should be sent? If you choose “military,” does Congress then spend the money as it pleases so long as it claims the spending is military-related, or can one then choose between “tank,” “gun,” “therapy,” and so on? How would this work for a sales tax? What if you want the money to be spent on an option Congress doesn’t offer? And so on. These are the sorts of things that should be in your FAQ.
Does this lead to better policy because it makes lobbying pointless? Or do lobbyists turn from Congress to voters, manipulating them with propaganda, advertisements, and misleading rhetoric? Do we have less war, because the voters would never choose to impose such a conflict on themselves, or do we have more war, because ignorant, uneducated voters are more subject to jingoism and outgroup-hatred than the educated members of Congress? And so on.
Will policy be worse because taxpayers are substantially ignorant about what Congress does? (Imagine their surprise when they try to lower foreign aid and end up increasing it tenfold!) Or will policy be better because Congress won’t be able to do anything taxpayers aren’t aware of? Or will it be the same because taxpayers will basically vote for the status quo? And so on.
If taxpayers don’t vote, what does this imply for your scheme?
Is your scheme always a good idea under any conditions? Would a dictatorship benefit from this kind of system? (The taxpayers can’t kick the leaders out, but they can “suggest” where money should be spent.) When is your scheme a bad idea? And so on. Try to beat your own argument.
See what people like Robin Hanson and Scott Sumner do to advance their ideas, which are a bit odd and yet substantially grounded in familiar economics, and try to sound more like them. See what they do to make their ideas strong, and try to gain that kind of strength. And so on.
Good luck. You are not obviously wrong, but you are running a marathon uphill while underwater. It is going to take a very special approach and lots of practice. Be patient, improve yourself. Expand on that FAQ so that people have some idea of what you’re talking about.
At anytime throughout the year you could go directly to the EPA website and make a tax payment of any amount. The EPA would give you a receipt and you’d submit all your receipts to the IRS by April 15. Anybody who didn’t want to shop for themselves would have the option of giving their taxes to their impersonal shoppers (congress).
For sure my presentation is imperfect. And I definitely wish I could perfectly copy Hanson and Sumner. Unfortunately, I don’t have their skills. My skill set is in researching and thinking… definitely not writing. Do I wish it was the other way around? No way. I really wouldn’t want to be Moldbug!
In large part because I suck at writing… the reception to pragmatarianism has been less than positive. My perception of the immense benefits keeps me going as well as the fact that not a single critic has cited a single source which supports the idea of allowing a small group of people to allocate everybody’s taxes. Our system doesn’t exist because the evidence supports it… it exists because that’s how we’ve always done it.
Of course it was my hope that the majority of people on this website would seriously consider my evidence and arguments before they voted… but my webstats show that this is clearly not the case. Instead, people here simply showed their considerable bias. It doesn’t seem like whatever is going on here is really working. Yes, there are a few exceptions like yourself… but every forum I’ve participated on has roughly the same amount of thoughtful thinkers.
Anyways, because the evidence is on my side, it’s a given that eventually more and more people will realize this. It would happen sooner rather than later if I was a better writer but… I can’t cry over spilled milk.
You keep bringing up sucking at writing as a core reason there’s a poor reception to your ideas. This doesn’t seem correct to me, the mechanics of your writing seem fine. A couple things you could do to improve to improve your posts:
Cut the length. I’ve noticed this especially with your comments. You can’t assume a reader is going to take five minutes to really dig into what you’re saying. You need to make your basic case in the first twenty seconds or so, and keep it brisk.
Inline information. Instead of throwing a bunch of links out there, explain a little of an interesting idea, and then give the reader a link that will help them learn more.
Your tone. You can be a little heavy handed, which will discourage readers from clicking into your links. Talk less about the people in the conversation (yourself and the audience), and more about your core idea.
Learning these things was very helpful to me, and I hope I can pass that along to you.
If the value of my idea was readily apparent, then I wouldn’t be in this predicament. If people readily grasped the value of markets then socialism never would have been attempted. But here we are with a command economy in our public sector.
So it’s not just my writing… it’s also the fact that I’m trying to explain a concept that people have been struggling with for a really long time. Your suggestions are pretty reasonable but I don’t think they will boost me near enough to clear this epic obstacle. But maybe they can boost me enough to gain the attention of people who can?
Xerographica,
I have seen your comments pushing this idea of yours on a number of economics blogs, and I have wanted to reach out to you for some time. Your idea is not obviously a bad one. It is not obviously a right one either! But it does not take such a great deal of imagining to see how allowing taxpayers to allocate their taxes could be an improvement on the current system.
However, your presentation is...imperfect. You need to realize that your idea is weird and a substantial change from the status quo. “Weird” and “change from the status quo” are difficult handicaps in the political sphere. You need to be able to articulate your most important arguments and ideas in short, powerful statements. How Robin Hanson advocates futarchy might be a model for you. I myself intend to advance some arguments that, while quite uncontroversial as derivations from economic theory, are nevertheless disapproved of within the profession, like how a mathematician starts to fidget when a physicist treats dy and dx like two different variables, only if the physicist were completely right and the mathematician knew it.… It is not easy, and it can be frustrating.
You must be prepared to do the bulk of the work in this conversation, even when you have already done the work. That means a post full of links to your other posts is insufficient even if your other posts are sufficient. And they are not. Your FAQ, for example, is woefully incomplete. It does not even explain what your idea is.
You need to engage substantively with the weakest points of your argument and the public choice literature. There is a great deal of work for you to do to fully understand this position. For example, do taxpayers vote on how the total tax fund is allocated? Or do they each choose where to send the taxes they personally pay? If the former, your core argument, that taxpayer-allocated taxes will yield improvements because the allocations will reflect the opportunity cost of the taxpayer choices, is wrong. (It is wrong or at least very incomplete in the latter case as well, but I “see what you mean” and have no desire to quibble.) If the latter, you need to explain how this choice happens. Does a form come with the income tax form allowing you to circle “military,” “environment,” “welfare,” and so on, indicating where your money should be sent? If you choose “military,” does Congress then spend the money as it pleases so long as it claims the spending is military-related, or can one then choose between “tank,” “gun,” “therapy,” and so on? How would this work for a sales tax? What if you want the money to be spent on an option Congress doesn’t offer? And so on. These are the sorts of things that should be in your FAQ.
Does this lead to better policy because it makes lobbying pointless? Or do lobbyists turn from Congress to voters, manipulating them with propaganda, advertisements, and misleading rhetoric? Do we have less war, because the voters would never choose to impose such a conflict on themselves, or do we have more war, because ignorant, uneducated voters are more subject to jingoism and outgroup-hatred than the educated members of Congress? And so on.
Will policy be worse because taxpayers are substantially ignorant about what Congress does? (Imagine their surprise when they try to lower foreign aid and end up increasing it tenfold!) Or will policy be better because Congress won’t be able to do anything taxpayers aren’t aware of? Or will it be the same because taxpayers will basically vote for the status quo? And so on.
If taxpayers don’t vote, what does this imply for your scheme?
Is your scheme always a good idea under any conditions? Would a dictatorship benefit from this kind of system? (The taxpayers can’t kick the leaders out, but they can “suggest” where money should be spent.) When is your scheme a bad idea? And so on. Try to beat your own argument.
See what people like Robin Hanson and Scott Sumner do to advance their ideas, which are a bit odd and yet substantially grounded in familiar economics, and try to sound more like them. See what they do to make their ideas strong, and try to gain that kind of strength. And so on.
Good luck. You are not obviously wrong, but you are running a marathon uphill while underwater. It is going to take a very special approach and lots of practice. Be patient, improve yourself. Expand on that FAQ so that people have some idea of what you’re talking about.
Thanks for your feedback. From the FAQ…
For sure my presentation is imperfect. And I definitely wish I could perfectly copy Hanson and Sumner. Unfortunately, I don’t have their skills. My skill set is in researching and thinking… definitely not writing. Do I wish it was the other way around? No way. I really wouldn’t want to be Moldbug!
In large part because I suck at writing… the reception to pragmatarianism has been less than positive. My perception of the immense benefits keeps me going as well as the fact that not a single critic has cited a single source which supports the idea of allowing a small group of people to allocate everybody’s taxes. Our system doesn’t exist because the evidence supports it… it exists because that’s how we’ve always done it.
Of course it was my hope that the majority of people on this website would seriously consider my evidence and arguments before they voted… but my webstats show that this is clearly not the case. Instead, people here simply showed their considerable bias. It doesn’t seem like whatever is going on here is really working. Yes, there are a few exceptions like yourself… but every forum I’ve participated on has roughly the same amount of thoughtful thinkers.
Anyways, because the evidence is on my side, it’s a given that eventually more and more people will realize this. It would happen sooner rather than later if I was a better writer but… I can’t cry over spilled milk.
This sentence is prima facie evidence that you’re flying off to the cloud cuckoo land...
You keep bringing up sucking at writing as a core reason there’s a poor reception to your ideas. This doesn’t seem correct to me, the mechanics of your writing seem fine. A couple things you could do to improve to improve your posts:
Cut the length. I’ve noticed this especially with your comments. You can’t assume a reader is going to take five minutes to really dig into what you’re saying. You need to make your basic case in the first twenty seconds or so, and keep it brisk.
Inline information. Instead of throwing a bunch of links out there, explain a little of an interesting idea, and then give the reader a link that will help them learn more.
Your tone. You can be a little heavy handed, which will discourage readers from clicking into your links. Talk less about the people in the conversation (yourself and the audience), and more about your core idea.
Learning these things was very helpful to me, and I hope I can pass that along to you.
If the value of my idea was readily apparent, then I wouldn’t be in this predicament. If people readily grasped the value of markets then socialism never would have been attempted. But here we are with a command economy in our public sector.
So it’s not just my writing… it’s also the fact that I’m trying to explain a concept that people have been struggling with for a really long time. Your suggestions are pretty reasonable but I don’t think they will boost me near enough to clear this epic obstacle. But maybe they can boost me enough to gain the attention of people who can?