2. Theoretical Problems
2.1 Reviewing actions is not equivalent to reviewing governance quality
Most politician decisions are:
- highly technical,filled with tradeoffs,short-term unpopular but long-term beneficial,or long-term harmful but superficially appealing.
A review system risks:
- incentivizing symbolic gestures over structural reforms, punishing necessary but unpopular decisions, rewarding performative behavior, messaging bills, and optics.
This is Goodhart’s Law: once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
2.2 Voters are not ideal reviewers
Most voters cannot track:
- thousands of bill amendments, committee actions, procedural votes, ambiguous or strategic “no” votes.
Yeah but there very existence of such a market creates disincentive for procedural votes.
Your staff can help, but this creates a new bottleneck and potential bias injection point.
3. Incentive/Mechanism Design Issues
3.1 Sybil attacks & brigading
Unless each member is verified and contributions are identity-linked, you get:
- bot armies, partisan brigading, or billionaire-funded mass accounts.
Easy enough to prevent.
If verification is enforced, then:
- cost of membership becomes a barrier, inequalities re-emerge through “whale users”.
3.2 Transparency paradox
If all payments are public:
- politicians will optimize for visible, rewardable actions, but real governance often happens in dark, procedural corners.
Which the system will bring to light.
If payments are less transparent:
- the system becomes vulnerable to manipulation, you risk reintroducing the trustee problem.
3.3 Incentive to sensationalize
Any approval/disapproval system tends toward:
- outrage-driven feedback, shallow metrics, popularity-contest dynamics.
Feature not a bug.
You'll create a “TikTok politics” ecosystem where attention equals money.
4. Legal/Regulatory Issues (U.S.-specific)
4.1 This almost certainly counts as a coordinated expenditure
The FEC is extremely likely to treat this as:
a PAC,
- making contributions to candidates, coordinated based on explicit political actions.
Could definitely be a problem.
This could violate:
- coordination rules, contribution limits (per donor per candidate), independent expenditure restrictions, anti-bribery statutes if intent can be inferred.
The argument “it’s not bribery because it’s after the action” rarely holds legally. Quid pro quo can be inferred from patterns.
4.2 The system risks enabling legalized bribery at scale
Even if technically legal, it resembles:
- mass micro-bribery, tied to specific votes, algorithmically enforced.
So what.
Courts might strike it down or impose severe restrictions.
6.1 Tip actions indirectly via issue-area outcomes
Instead of rewarding votes:
- reward performance metrics (e.g., constituents’ economic well-being), reward bipartisan or evidence-based behaviors, reward procedural transparency.
No we are not doing Futarchy.
6.2 Use random citizen assemblies to curate review categories
Avoid direct mob dynamics by embedding deliberative mini-publics.
Nope, that gives SJWs a way in.
6.3 Introduce anti-Goodhart safeguards
For example:
- no financial rewards tied to single votes, reward accuracy in predicting bill impacts over time,
This is just a prediction market by other means.
- delay payouts until after multi-year evaluation.
This might be a good idea since it prevents Goodhart's Law but it could also water down the effect of rewards if virtue signaling gets into the mix. Perhaps speeches should only be punished and not rewarded.
6.4 Make the platform an opinion-aggregator, not a payment system
You could separate:
- user sentiment tracking, donation routing, politician engagement.
This would be more legally feasible.
Weakens the effect though.
7. Summary
Strengths
- Creative attempt to democratize political influence.
- Correct diagnosis of principal-agent and donor-class problems.
- Clever mechanism in decentralizing “trustee” authority.
- Draws on familiar user-interface paradigms.
Weaknesses
- Risks turning governance into a popularity contest.
- Highly vulnerable to manipulation and polarization.
- Legally likely to be considered coordinated bribery.
- Goodhart’s Law: incentivizes performative rather than substantive governance.
- Overestimates voter ability to review complex actions.
- Creates new bottlenecks despite attempts to remove them.
"Legally likely to be considered coordinated bribery" is a killer here.
Overall:
The idea is bold and intellectually stimulating, but in its current form it would likely produce pathological incentives, legal conflicts, and severe vulnerability to manipulation. Some elements (community-based review, decentralized tracking of politician behavior, aggregated micro-donations) are promising if restructured to avoid direct pay-for-vote dynamics.
The discussion continues here if you want to see some raw output.
What if we have three levels? If money has the most optionality, vouchers less, and votes the least, what if society is organized into levels where more power means less optionality?
In this monetary architecture, society is organized into three layers of capability objects: money, vouchers, and votes. Money is held by the poor and middle class and operates as true, unconstrained currency. It retains full optionality, meaning it can be used to buy anything, pay anyone, donate freely, invest, save, loan, with no restrictions or programming imposed by any authority. Ordinary people may hold and use money because their accumulation of it does not pose a systemic threat; their financial movements cannot distort politics or governance at scale. For them, money functions as the queen on the chessboard, the most flexible and powerful instrument in daily life.
The wealthy, by contrast, do not hold money at all once their assets exceed a certain threshold. Everything above that line is automatically converted into vouchers. These vouchers look like wealth, but they have reduced optionality and are limited by design. They can be used only inside approved domains such as capital markets, philanthropic channels, investment networks, and political review systems. They cannot buy direct political power, cannot serve as bribes, cannot be converted back into money, and cannot purchase coercive capacity. Their effectiveness is governed by a mechanism called Review Democracy, in which ordinary citizens rate wealthy actors according to transparency, fairness, trustworthiness, and behavior. The rating directly affects the strength of the vouchers: good behavior amplifies their influence, while bad behavior weakens or nullifies them. This transforms large-scale wealth into a conditional privilege rather than a blunt instrument of domination.
Politicians, in the third layer, do not use either money or vouchers. They hold votes, which are the weakest and most narrowly defined capability object. Votes can be used only within the governance system to elect internal leaders, pass internal rules, allocate budgets, and maintain the institutional charter.
To limit the corruption of politicans they get their own kind of voucher as payment for services and this voucher is not directly convertable to cash.
Together, the three layers interact through a strict one-way flow. Money may convert upward into vouchers when someone becomes wealthy, but vouchers never convert back into money. Vouchers may influence political oversight systems through review democracy, but cannot compel or corrupt politicians, whose votes remain sealed off from economic exchange. Votes (in theory) cannot convert into anything else. This sealing of each layer prevents cross-contamination and ensures that no single class of capability object can capture the entire system. The result is a private-sector order where ordinary people retain genuine monetary freedom, the rich are constrained to a supervised form of influence, politicians remain unbribable, and the overall structure prevents hierarchy from becoming abusive or self-reinforcing.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please keep it civil