Vladimir writes:
what we really need is a government which can personalize its services, and people pay for what they use.
yes, agree. In other words we need freedom for business to compete in provision of all services currently monopolised by government.
more and more this is becoming technically feasible. it will bring the potential of capitalistic competition and free markets to govt. how? well services that no one uses will tend to whither, and the healthy ones will receive greater budgets.
But also you need multiple providers of services, otherwise your freedom of choice is limited. If you can opt out of literally any goverment service, I suspect government revenues would nearly disappear. Everything they "supply" can be supplied more cheaply by business. So what government remained would have to compete on a fair basis with private industry.
the big quandary is people who can't pay for what they use like social security. ultimately the question is how much money the state has the authority to collect for this kind of thing, and the political answer has varied every year, but it has gone up every year in the 20th century generally.
I think the state should have no authority to collect anything. Charity at the point of a gun is not charity. The state is an extremely inefficient distributor of charitable funds anyway.
the big problem imho is fraud/waste/corruption in govt though. I think if a lot of it were eliminated we would be flabbergasted at how little a personal contribution it takes to take care of people who need it. bureaucracies are the most expensive thing on the planet. here's hoping that cyberspace will cut through the *ultimate* middleman: govt.
Amen to that. Adam