The elephant in the room that no one – at Davos, at Westminster, in Washington, etc. – wants to acknowledge is that the current socio-institutional framework based on national laws and customs is quickly looking irredeemably anachronistic in a connected world. And trying to shoehorn the increasingly square peg into an obviously round hole just looks futile and soon will look pathetic. But turkeys (national leaders) don’t vote for Christmas, and so will almost certainly hold on desperately to the status quo well past its sell-by date. Even more so because those in power are the least well adapted (because of their age) to the new techno-economic paradigm.

This would always be culture, welfare and other soft targets that are easily dismissed by people focussing on the crisis du jour.

A government held to account by an elected body representing two or more political parties is not a perfect system, and it’s easy to find examples of it not working very well. But as Churchill said, it’s hard to think of a better one.

There’s a good reason why taxes are not currently hypothecated, and real-time decision making won’t alter that. What it might ultimately do is make the nation state look as outdated as the large corporation does at the moment.

I’m not Peter Kropotkin so I don’t know what the alternative might be, but I don’t think Sean is being radical enough…

An interesting side-effect would be that anyone who wanted to spend more on something would have to select a portfolio of things on which to spend less. Can’t remember the source or even if my memory is entirely correct but someone once proposed that the greatest change that could be made to government was that anyone who proposed to spend more money on something had to say what they would spend less on.

On the secrecy of votes and allocation issues this seems to be fundamentally one of civil liberties. The argument, as always, being that each reduction in civil liberties, freedom, individual rights and privacies leads inexorably to the next reduction and how sure are you that you can trust government not to abuse these some time in the future or even in the next five years?

“… the computer can monitor that transaction, record the information, collect the data, and assure that the transaction is carried out the way it was intended to be carried out. So one of the subtle implications of this is you can now write contracts and make contracts enforceable that simply weren’t enforceable before…”

Previously – except in very specific and highly engineered cases – politicians could largely ignore the call for debate on this kind of system because quite simply it was logistically impossible to envision. No more. Let the debate commence…

You ask if a person’s vote will remain secret. The assumption is that it is secret.

As I see it, each ballot paper is uniquely numbered for a voter. When one goes to the polling station, they verify it against a list with an official ID (although in postal voting this additional step isn’t there). Then one takes a _pencil_ and marks one’s preference and puts it into the ballot box.

Now although driven by principles, in local elections, I have always been an issue-based voter. In my 10 years of voting in various elections, I wonder how the party/ candidate I voted for _always_ knows I voted for them. It is evident in their follow-up communiques.

I once registered a protest vote against my then MP, Theresa May who was skating on a this margin of 3000. Come next election time, the party I had voted for sent me a note saying: we welcome your continued support. How do they know? And no, they were not the second party by a considerable margin.

Call me sceptical, but I find it hard to believe that my vote is secret even now. It is just that if all is on the web, I may be, as a voter, called upon to _defend_ my vote but other than that, I don’t think the web changes much else re secrecy of my voting preferences.

There is the argument provided in many forms in the comments above “What’s to prevent someone placing all their chips in their preferred basket?”….whether it is choosing their favourite charity, putting everything into policing or education or sanitation or expressways or whatever. This is the argument that suggests people may be too stupid to be able to make sensible choices.

And then we have the “normal” way. Which is to assume that people *are* too stupid to make good allocation decisions. Which is to assume that some “higher class” of person gets to decide what core infrastructure is, what merit goods are, and so on.

In the end it’s really an argument about wisdom-of-crowds versus “experts”. And I guess I’m a wisdom-of-crowds man for things like this. Of course there are many arenas, places, zones where expertise is called for. Like I don’t want wisdom-of-crowds performing open heart surgery on me as yet, and I can’t afford opensource drivers in my pacemaker as yet.

But you know what? “expertise” is overrated for much of what we call government and administration.

Just take a look around the world we live in. What hath expertise wrought?