An Extended Take on Ignorance

Very cool! Thanks for the link!

My blog entry is really lengthy but the goal was to help people seriously consider how other people’s unique values/perspectives/experiences/information all relate to the efficient allocation of resources.

The bottom line is that you just can’t allocate public goods by proxy and expect that the outcome will be efficient.

Of course it's very well possible that allowing taxpayers to directly allocate their taxes would be a mistake...but darned if I can figure how it would be a mistake to implement a system designed to lessen the negative impact of mistakes made in the public sector.

I think that gridlock does benefit everyone because the government which does the least does the best.

By the way, why was his friend named "Onion" ?

kyle...I'm pretty sure that was his last name. But it was a long time ago and I have a terrible memory. It might have also been "Caballos".

Yeah, I agree that with the current system ("radically ignorant" congresspeople in charge of allocating everybody's taxes) gridlock could easily be interpreted as the lesser of two evils.

Gridlock, however, would be a moot point in a pragmatarian system because taxpayers would be directly responsible for using their own individual, hard earned taxes to support the government organizations (GO) that they truly believed to be effective/necessary.

We would obviously still disagree over whether a GO was truly effective/necessary but nobody would be able to block you from allocating your taxes as you saw fit. This is the concept of political tolerance.

I might strongly disagree with how you allocated your taxes...but I would strongly defend your right to do so...given that I would greatly value my own freedom to directly allocate my own taxes.