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For those interested in the theory of lobbying and special interest groups one of my favorite books is Mancur Olson's Rise and Decline of Nations (https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigi...). It's an incredibly approachable read that does a wonderful job digging into the incentives and explains why lobbying exists and why it works.

Tianming. If some other system governs better than democracy, then we should use it.

As Moldbug points out, the current US Govcorp is structured as an employee collective[1][2], which no competitive corporation chooses as a system of organization in the free market. As Mancur Olson points out, bureaucracies tend to get more inefficient over time[3].

I know we've all been raised to believe that democracy is love and rainbows, but maybe it's time to rethink that.

[1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/why-whe...

[2] http://foseti.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/on-government-employm...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation/d...

⬐ eli_gottlieb

>As Moldbug points out, the current US Govcorp is structured as an employee collective, which no competitive corporation chooses as a system of organization in the free market.

That's doubly inaccurate.

* Worker cooperatives don't give membership votes to non-workers, and the vast majority of American voters are not government employees.

* Many firms choose worker cooperative organization and thrive on it. The fact that many districts don't have laws for chartering cooperatives is what holds them back, not some innate untenability of the form itself.

⬐ crassus

I edited my comment with a Moldbug link. From the essay:

"So Fedco, while it still has a bit of the cooperative flavor, is mainly organized around the other model of bad corporate governance: control by contractors (essentially, employees). To be exact, most of Fedco's decisions are made by its civil service.

As a general rule, an employee-controlled enterprise will never, ever be profitable. In fact, even its bondholders are lucky if they see any payments. The primary interest of contractors is, first, if they can get away with it, in distributing profits to their own pockets; and second, if they can't, in expanding or at least protecting their own power bases. They will make as much work for themselves as they can get away with.

Of course, even the CEO of a company is a contractor. This is why corporations have boards, who work for the shareholders. (In my opinion, it's an abuse to have any corporate employees, even the CEO, on the board.)

If you combine a shareholderless governance model with an enormous revenue stream, you have the perfect recipe for massive and permanent inefficiency and incompetence, and an enormous overgrowth of pointless, self-serving tasks. This is exactly what we see in Fedco. Of course, it could just be a coincidence."

⬐ eli_gottlieb

The notion that the US Federal Government is overwhelmingly inefficient and stupid is popular wisdom. However, outside the fat-and-happy military, which is eagerly overfunded beyond even its own desires by a Congress looking to make war jobs in their districts, there is an astounding lack of evidence for the proposition.

⬐ crassus

400 million dollar websites that don't work?

⬐ eli_gottlieb

Compare to, for instance, Microsoft Bob.

The high-profile failure of one project (particularly when so much of it was carried out by private contracting, a process known to be more corrupt and wasteful than just using federal employees) is not, in and of itself, evidence that the federal civil service is abnormally wasteful or corrupt when compared to other organizations of similar size or scope, or when compared to combinations of organizations forming an interlocked unit of similar size and scope.

Basically, the federal government can trivially be labelled suboptimal, but calling it abnormally bad requires evidence that you can do better. Overwhelmingly, this is not what we see people bringing forth. The claims we see made are, "This organization is suboptimal for the job it currently does, therefore we should destroy large parts of it entirely. The important jobs done by those parts don't need to be done, because we say so."

⬐ crassus

It's amazing what the complete inability to fire anyone will do to an organization over time. All government projects have cost and time overruns, just some are worse than others.

You should click that foseti link a few comments up.

Read Rise and Decline of Nations by Mancur Olson. http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigid...

It explains this phenomenon. Basically, for a group of size n, members only get 1/n of the value they contribute towards any collective goal, so noone bothers, unless coerced, like with unions.

the government as bandit hypothesis makes a lot of sense to me. at the least it explains where money came from (did not arise naturally from barter, was originally a tally for taxes and looting).

the article was tl;dr. did they at least cite mancur olsen for the stationary bandit hypothesis? AFAIK it originated in his book the rise and decline of nations:

http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigid...

Although a nice idea, it suffers from the fact that it would be very difficult to get that many people on the same page. Smaller groups are able to come to decisions much more quickly and will be able to move faster.

The lobbiest advantage is that they can afford to raise money quickly and be able to focus it on specific issues.

Although every citizen can together raise a ton of money, once that money is raised it will be very difficult allocating it.

Imagine if people had to come together in order to raise money for museums rather than relying on large individual contributions. It's likely that many fewer museums would exist.

For a deeper look at this I recommend reading the book by Mancur Olson - The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. It takes a look at special interest groups and their effects on economic growth.

http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigid...

⬐ espeed

The people don't have to be on the same page for every issue -- some will have opposing views -- but even with opposing views, at least it's the voice of the electorate and not corporations. Contributions are made on a per-issue basis so they are self allocating.

⬐ None

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