Ask HN: Why don't we turn government into a subscription service?

5 points by valty 2 years ago | 27 comments

Every service government offers today could be thought of as a subscription service which we are forced to pay for.

Every service exists to offer a benefit (direct or indirect) to the taxpayer.

Why don't we let companies compete to offer these benefits, and let people pay for what they want?

A good way to explore it is: if government ceased to exist overnight...what would be the order in which you would be impacted by the lack of services, and what steps would people take to plug these gaps, considering the fact that we live in a technological age with the internet and nascent AI.

fragmede 2 years ago |

There are two things. One is that something things it doesn't make sense to have multiple companies offering multiple versions. Specifically, right in front of my house, there's no place for a dozen companies to put multiple roads for me to get to work on. it's a highly un-free market because of physical limitations. For those, a simplistic model makes sense. Everyone contributes to a pot which is used to pay for maintenance because everyone benefits. Other things, it makes sense because the indirect nature of its benefits means the short sighted will opt out of. Eg elementary schools for children. If you don't have, and don't plan on ever having kids, you'd opt out of paying for that, but it's in your best interests not to have an uneducated population for a lot of reasons. Or take hospitals. As a young healthy person who's never needed to go to the hospital, you'd opt out of paying for them, only to have problems when you do get old and need to go to one. Hell, if I don't drive and don't have a car, I'd shortsightedly opt out of paying for road maintenance or the DMV, only to realize that I rely on that. Same for a vast number of other services that you don't see or need every day. How often do you think about the supply chain that supports the water treatment plant when you flush the toilet?

It's an interesting thought experiment, but it fundamentally misunderstands the reason for government to exist, which is not to turn a profit.

valty 2 years ago | |

> If you don't have, and don't plan on ever having kids

Then you don't pay for their services, and other people pay more.

Most people don't want an uneducated population so they pay for them.

Government is this strange beast where we continuously seem to vote and pay for all these things we value at the ballot box, but then given the individual choice we change our mind. Or its a matter of "I won't if they don't". Which I guess creates the problem of excludability...if one group is paying for something that those who don't pay for it can't be excluded from...then it's unfair. Then it kind of comes down to everything being modeled as "insurance", such that you are guessing into the future as to what might happen to you and what you might need, and paying based on that.

Maybe its a convenience thing - it takes too much time.

> if I don't drive and don't have a car, I'd shortsightedly opt out of paying for road maintenance

I mean if you drive on the road you should pay more. And with modern tech we can now track road usage very precisely.

The *shortsightedly" argument could be resolved with civic education. People need to be more informed about these things. Or its like: if you don't pay for roads, then you get surcharged by any service you use that uses the roads.

> which is not to turn a profit

Government is then essentially a bunch of not-for-profits. But instead of multiple tackling the same problem, there is only one.

Nothing implies a need to turn a profit.

Those working in the public sector are incentivized by government committee scrutiny, who are incentivized by winning elections.

So you essentially have a bunch of people who do things for reasons other than money. It's a bit like open source software.

Some people will do things simply because they see there is a better way of doing them, and they enjoy doing it, and perhaps derive secondary benefits like prestige and fame.

By not voting for the "zero tax" party, people continuously show that they derive benefit from the services that their taxes pay for.

fragmede 2 years ago | | |

> By not voting for the "zero tax" party,

In the US, one of the parties champions small government, which implies lower taxes, and they get plenty of votes.

People are generally good, but they are also selfish as all hell. Everyone could use a bit more money though, and therin lies the problem. If there's any way I can get more money, I'm going to do it. Civic education be damned, the only thing I'm going to fund is things that go back into my pocket. I don't need the police (until I do), I don't need firefighters (until I do), I don't need school teachers at all. Sure, the long term effects of that are going to be bad, but I need just a little bit of money now to help with things, and someone else is gonna pay for those things, so why should I bother. People are gonna min-max the system because they care about what they care about. Schoolteachers are going to give all their money to the schools, because it goes back into their pockets, and the military is going to fund the military.

Money itself is a construct. We could just abolish it. With machines, we have long surpassed the need for everyone to work. We can have one cadre of people who do the work of feeding and housing everyone, and then everyone else gets to go out and play. Unfortunately, reality kicks in, humans are gonna human, and that's not gonna work. So we're left with money to organize our society, and we give money to the government to spend on what they spend our taxes on.

wordhydrogen 2 years ago |

It’s an interesting thought experiment.

However there are lots of services which are in-fact inherent monopolies. Take electricity transmission or your ISP for example. They have a common set of infrastructure which is hard to share among many competing interests. Who gets to decide what should be upgraded, to what, and when? How does one divvy up costs infrastructure changes which did not benefit a significant set of participants because they are individually in the minority and unable to cooperate? If you prioritize minority participants then what about the majority participant? What about a super majority participant?

Lots of times cities will try to regulate these services tightly because past behavior has necessitated it. Though ISPs are perhaps a bad example here.

I read an article somewhere talking about a study where privatized healthcare resulted in increased profits but patient services suffered. Is profit above all else a good objective for government services?

withinboredom 2 years ago |

Nobody would pay for the fire department, yet they'll have to come put out the fire anyway, so it doesn't destroy civilization.

Would all roads become toll roads? Do we just let the bridges crumble because there aren't enough people driving on them?

If you pay for your police and I don't, am I the one arrested even though you were the one who broke into my house?

Are companies that don't pay for the EPA allowed to pollute to their heart's content?

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The entire point of a government is that it can make long-term (generation spanning) decisions that might cost money and would never return a profit.

hackerlight 2 years ago |

One area where this already exists is private schooling.

In practice it leads to underfunding of public schools because the people with money are the people with political power. If their kids went to purely taxpayer-funded schools they would be higher quality and everyone would be getting a better education. (I know in the US things are a bit different, and there are are high quality public schools).

The argument then has two sides. One side is the freedom argument: parents should be able to do what they want within reasonable bounds. Seems valid and clear-cut. But then the other side points to the long-term consequences of having a bad education system. Lower economic growth, more populism if you have a stupid population with poor media literacy skills, and all the associated unpredictable unintended consequences that don't fit nicely into the whole "freedom" discussion. What was that freedom worth if I now have to live in a dictatorship because of all the accumulated unintended side effects that boiled over?

Bostonian 2 years ago | |

"One area where this already exists is private schooling.

The threat of students leaving for private school and reducing funding for public schools (since their funding is based partly on enrollment) likely causes public schools to be better than if there were no alternative.

valty 2 years ago | |

Schooling is a tricky one for the free market, and it ultimately gets a bit morally dubious.

I guess you are trying to sell the benefit of a highly-educated country to those who choose private schooling, and getting them to pay for this.

It boils down to how much are you willing to pay for another child's education and what is the acceptable standard of that education.

But if we think about the supply of education, a lot of it is about good teachers, and ultimately someone has to be stuck with the worst teacher in the country. And also class sizes.

bell-cot 2 years ago |

I'll assume that you're at least vaguely familiar with European-style (government) healthcare, and also American-style (corporate) healthcare.

If you are one of the few, who are getting a good cut of the every-growing profits, then the latter is nice. More so if you're one of the very few, who are too rich to care how much the "best care" often costs in America.

valty 2 years ago | |

I'm interested to dive into this healthcare topic a bit deeper.

To find out what a true free market of healthcare looks like.

Often you find that government intervention distorts markets.

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...and this looks like the case.

For example, people complain that benefits are tied to employers. But this was caused by the government capping wage increases to combat inflation in 1942, which resulted in companies offering pre-tax health benefits.

This looks like it is changing as people are like: wtf this makes no sense and creates so many bad incentives.

It looks like market forces will fix the system in the end, maybe it just takes 50 years or so.

disadvantage 2 years ago |

As someone who abhors subscriptions, I think it's a bad idea. This is why I love pay-as-you go electricity meters and pay-as-you-go phone plans, and sometimes lifetime purchases of software licenses. I also detest 'bills' which force you to cough up money and get disconnected from the service if you don't.

With pay-as-you-go if you don't have the funds, you simply bear with the circumstances until you can afford it. For example, if my electricity is cut, I am forced to use a duvet with two blankets on top to stay warm when if I had the funds, I don't need to, since the heat is paid for.

Same with Internet. I sometimes have no Internet for the day, but when funds arrive I can get back online. But those moments are teachable: I simply read a book, or clean the house when there's no Internet. Subscriptions are a marketer's dream. They want you hooked. Fuck that.

threesevenths 2 years ago |

This is self representation with extra steps. The idea is that technology has made it possible for every citizen to represent their interests directly rather than requiring a representative.

Try getting a bridge built to the other side of the river where no one lives to expand the city.

Bostonian 2 years ago |

'Why don't we let companies compete to offer these benefits, and let people pay for what they want?'

That's what education vouchers do, and many Republicans do support them. For national defense there is a free rider problem -- the military would protect your country regardless of whether you individually "subscribed". The general answer to your question is that the federal government largely exists to transfer money to the poor and the elderly. Big taxpayers are not paying primarily for services but for such transfers.

valty 2 years ago | |

Subscription tiers for national defense is funny to think about.

Priority assistance / 24/7 support / merch

blacksqr 2 years ago |

Yes of course! And why stop there? For those who can't afford the services they need, we could offer a special deal where people exchange their and their descendants' labor in perpetuity for a basic package of food, housing and clothing... we could call it the Subsidized Labor Assistance Voucher Empowerment program.

neximo64 2 years ago |

Arent you describing some things which people don't like such as public transport. Public transport works the way you describe with private companies and there are lots of unhappy people with it

082349872349872 2 years ago |

In a sense government already is a subscription service: where you are domiciled (among other things) determines in which jurisdictions you pay.