Interesting. I don’t trust large organisations, especially ones that do not have a specific requirement to serve the public interest, to do anything particularly well. I would think that we both have much in common, but yet such minor differences would probably split us fairly widely apart I think.
The problem with that of course is the unequal power of participants in such a system. What happens to those with much less power to follow their own self-interest?
I don’t trust large corporations either, but I have more choice over which of those that I deal with than my government. Where that isn’t true are cases of monopoly, and I agree with Mascot that those cannot be left to the market, although we likely disagree on how those situations should be handled.
As for the unequal power of participants, well, I’d suggest again that that concern hardly disappears in non-market systems - and indeed is frequently worse. Bureaucratic systems inevitably develop the rot of insider networks that deliver vastly differing outcomes depending on who you are.
I actually have a fairly dismal view of policy and institutional design, that virtually all systems will fail on one or more of the critical evaluation criteria, and it is really a matter of choosing on which one(s) you are willing to observe failure. Arrow’s theorem shaped a lot of my thinking, and empirically I haven’t seen much to contradict it.
You are just an all-around agreeable guy, but apparently touchy about plastic cups…
Not as agreeable as me, however
I did a Canadian version of one of these that shows your position relative to parties in 3-dimensional space as well as calculating an aggregate. Depending on which questions were on the XYZ axes, I could be placed either very close to any one party, or quite far away. I was closest in aggregate to the Bloc Quebecois, which is both amusing and not actually surprising. Obviously, that points to how important the ‘ballot box’ issue is - I don’t think I could stand to vote for the UK Conservatives, despite proximity on many issues.
