President Bartlet's Critique Of Pragmatarianism

For those of you that haven't watched The West Wing, Bartlet is a fictional president of the United States.  He doesn't critique pragmatarianism specifically...but this is relevant enough for me to share (context: The Lame Duck Congress)...

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Bartlet: Can I tell you something, honestly? This is one of those situations where I couldn't give a damn what the people think. The complexities of a global arms treaty, the technological, the military, the diplomatic nuances, it's staggering, Toby. 82% of the people cannot possibly be expected to reach an informed decision.  You want to call a session anyway?

Toby: No. No. If we lose, and we will, we're out of.

Bartlet: Yeah. Anything else?

Toby: No, sir. Thank you, Mr. President.

Bartlet: You know we forget sometimes, in all the talk about democracy we forget it's not a democracy, it's a republic. People don't make the decisions, they choose the people who make the decisions. Could they do a better job choosing? Yeah. But when you consider the alternatives, anyway, Abbey's in New Hampshire, you want to come up for a cigar?

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In a pragmatarian system, people would still choose the people who make the decisions. The only difference is that they would also choose how much of their own tax dollars they gave to them.

Let's consider five different boats that people could be in...

Boat 1 - "You can have my vote and all of my tax dollars"

Boat 2 - "You can have my vote and some of my tax dollars"

Boat 3 - "You can have my vote but none of my tax dollars"

Boat 4 - "You can't have my vote, but you can have my tax dollars"

Boat 5 - "You can't have my vote or my tax dollars"


So which boat would you be in?


Boat 1

- If somebody's in this boat then they truly trust their representatives.

Boat 2

- If somebody's in this boat then they kind of trust their representatives.

Boat 3

- If somebody's in this boat then they don't truly trust their representatives.

Boat 4

- If somebody's in this boat then they are probably crazy.

Boat 5

- If somebody's in this boat then they really don't trust their representatives.


The number one critique of pragmatarianism is that people are uninformed.  But if people are uninformed, and they give all their tax dollars to their impersonal shoppers (congress), then does it matter?  Not as a critique of pragmatarianism.  Being uninformed only matters if people would choose to allocate their taxes themselves.

The weight of the number one critique of pragmatarianism depends on the number of people who would choose to allocate their taxes themselves.  The more people that would choose to allocate their taxes themselves, the more weight that this critique has.  Except, the more people that would choose to allocate their taxes themselves, the less people that truly trust congress.

Basically, when somebody says, "people are too uninformed to allocate their taxes themselves" they are really saying, "people don't truly trust their representatives".

We have a system where we give a huge chunk of our hard earned money to people who we don't truly trust to spend it?  Does that make sense?  Wouldn't it make much more sense to have a system where we give our money to people we truly trust?  Maybe such a system doesn't exist?  Oh wait, it does...it's called a market.

Markets work because people have to earn our trust.  Does congress have to earn our trust?  Nope.  What about the EPA?  Nope.  What about the DoD?  Nope.  What about the IRS?  Nope.  Does any governmental organization have to earn our trust?  Nope.

If we want the government to really work then we have to create a market in the public sector.  It will be a beautiful day when public servants actually have to earn our trust.  

The Visible Hand vs the Invisible Hand

Created this awesome (hah) picture to try and help illustrate a point that I'm struggling to make in this discussion over at the Ron Paul Forums... NAP, Utilitarianism, and Natural Law: Differentiating Morality, Practicality, and Legality.  The fellow that I'm having a discussion with, ProIndividual, wants to know what the end result would be of pragmatarianism.  How could I possibly know the end result of 150 million self-interested taxpayers determining the distribution of public funds?  

Tax choice is a means to end.  The "means" are the tax allocation decisions of 150 million self-interested, utility maximizing, purposefully acting taxpayers.  Are the "means" perfect?  Definitely not.  But they might as well be when you compare them to our current "means" of 538 congresspeople spending 150 million people's taxes.

Would allowing the invisible hand to determine the distribution of public funds drive us to pragma-socialism or anarcho-capitalism or somewhere in between?  Who knows?  Who cares?  Once you understand that perspectives matter...then you'll understand the value of allowing the perspectives of 150 million taxpayers to help shape the public sector.

So let's get this Magna Carta Movement started.

The Granularity of Congress in a Pragmatarian System

It's not in the top 5 different responses to pragmatarianism...but the topic of granularity has got to be in the top 10.  Granularity basically refers to how narrowly/specifically you would be able to directly allocate your taxes.  For example, in this thread...Debunking the Crowding Out Concept...Deuce posted the following...

So wait. Under your plan people are responsible for funding individual actions by government agencies now? Like, I can fund the purchase of 10,000 M-16's for a base in Ohio but not fund an invasion of Afghanistan?

When it comes to granularity in a pragmatarian system...anybody's guess is as good as mine.  Just recently though I thought about granularity in terms of congress.  So far nobody has brought it up.

In a pragmatarian system, if somebody didn't want to directly allocate their taxes, then they would still be able to just give their taxes to congress.  But would any taxpayers want to only give their taxes to specific congresspeople?  

It's kind of interesting to try and imagine how that would play out.  Would you be inclined to give any congressperson your taxes?  If so, which one?  Which congressperson would receive the most/least amount of taxes?  Does the thought of any single congressperson receiving too much tax money make you nervous?  If so, what would that amount be?  

Kind of along a similar vein...in terms of how the scope of government might expand...here was my response to Daniel Kuehn's comment which he posted here...Pragmatarianism Disproved?

In my post on awesomeness spotting...I talked about how a private individual...a physician by the name of Jeffrey Brenner...completely of his own accord studied ways to reduce healthcare costs. Clearly there are very significant positive externalities associated with the success of his efforts. In a tax choice system I'd vote for him to be considered a public good. If enough other people agreed then we'd be able to directly allocate some of our taxes to him. In that case then he would be able to give his taxes back to himself. 

That's the only type of situation in which somebody would be able to give their taxes back to themselves. Of course...if Jeffrey Brenner bought a fancy car and a mansion...then he better be significantly reducing healthcare costs if he wanted taxpayers to continue supporting his efforts. 

While you're at it...try and figure out what would happen to the political parties in a pragmatarian system.  

The Devil's Advocate for Public Goods

The following represents a mash-up of my responses to these three different discussions...

• Dear Left: Corporatism is Your Fault
• The One Question that nearly everybody fails to answer
• What Crooked Timber Liberals do not want you to know

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In the Garden of Eden God instructed Adam that he could eat the fruit from ALL the trees in the garden EXCEPT for one tree....The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil...aka the Tree of Conscience. God limited Adam and Eve's freedom...but the serpent managed to convince Eve...who then managed to convince Adam...to choose to doubt God's one simple rule.

The moral of that story was that you shouldn't doubt higher authority...you shouldn't think for yourself. Instead, you should submit your will to those in charge. You should have enough faith to completely "put yourself in God's hands".

How convenient for those in charge...right? Isn't that why Marx lamented that religion is the opium of the masses? It's hard for people to revolt if they believe that heaven is the reward for submitting to a higher authority. It seems reasonable to say that progress would be severely restricted if people did not doubt commonly held beliefs. According to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr..."to have doubted one's first principles is the mark of a civilized man."

We should never take limits to our freedom for granted. The trick is understanding that we all accept different justifications for having our freedoms limited. Shemsky believes that the freedom to swing your fist ENDS where somebody else's nose begins. In other words, he believes that the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) is the only justification for limiting our freedoms. Mark Friedman, on the other hand, believes that taxes are only justified to the extent that they help protect our property from others...with a few "reasonable" exceptions. The majority of people, however, believe that taxes are only justified to the extent that they maximize the benefit to society as a whole.

There are no "natural rights" though. You can't hang out in a lion's den and expect the lions to respect the NAP. The only principle that we can observe in nature is survival of the fittest. Therefore, limits to our freedoms are only legitimate in terms of consensus.

If the consensus is for taxes to maximize the benefit to society...then why do we allow congresspeople, rather than taxpayers, to allocate taxes? Why did we ever allow a king, rather than elected representatives, to allocate taxes? The answer is that we're always in the Garden of Eden. The serpent represents those of us who fundamentally challenge the current system.

People in the middle ages were too stupid to realize that they were in the middle ages. Incidentally, does anybody know who said that? For the life of me I can't remember who it was. Anyways, the fact of the matter is that we're never "civilized"...we're always in the process of becoming civilized. Society will always be a work in progress.

There is no logical or rational explanation supporting the commonly held belief that congress can allocate taxes more efficiently than taxpayers could. We all have unique values. The only way that we can accurately convey our values is by putting our money/time where our mouths are. Each "consumer" that we take out of the picture skews the distribution of public goods. What happens when we take all but 538 consumers out of the picture? Obviously we end up with a very inefficient allocation of public goods. To steal Obama's favorite analogy...this is why the "car" ends up in the "ditch". It's why the car will always end up in the ditch...unless we somehow manage to help people understand that society as a whole will benefit by allowing taxpayers to drive.

The moral of my story is that playing the role of devil's advocate is only worthwhile if we can truly understand why people are willing to put public goods in congress's hands.

Does Congress Have More Information Than Taxpayers?

There are quite a few people who believe that the average congressperson is better informed than the average taxpayer.  While this may or may not be true pragmatarianism doesn't deal with averages...it deals with sums.

When trying to figure out how to convey this idea I remembered a photograph that I took while stationed in Afghanistan.  It's of an American solider on one side of a make-shift seesaw with some Afghan kids on the other side.  Even though the average American solider outweighs the average Afghan kid...the cumulative weight of 5 kids equals that of the one solider.  

So the question is...how many taxpayers would it take to equal the public goods information of one congressperson?  If we say that there are around 150,000,000 taxpayers and 535 congresspeople then there are nearly 300,000 taxpayers for every congressperson.  How in the world could 1 congressperson effectively and efficiently evaluate as much information as 300,000 taxpayers could?

Even if 300,000 taxpayers only encountered 3 seconds worth of public goods information in their daily lives they would still consider 10 times more information than one congressperson working 24 hours a day could.  

Obviously we need congresspeople to write laws but there's just no way that they can allocate public resources as effectively or as efficiently as the invisible hand could.  Taxpayers should be able to choose to directly allocate their individual taxes to the various government organizations at any time throughout the year.  

What's very important to understand is that this system already works for the private sector...

As I've mentioned before, there are some major problems with gov't spending on programs. And these revolve around measurability and self-correction. When private businesses are running their businesses poorly and not delivering value, the free market drives revenues down and the business either corrects itself or it goes out of business. The gov't doesn't have such mechanisms. They often put in bogus measurements on how effective the program is, and when it doesn't work the first year, they double down and put more money into the program. No self-correction mechanism. - James L, Greta Wire Blog

The government can easily have the same self-correcting mechanism by allowing taxpayers to decide which government organizations receive their taxes.

For this is the salient point: private organizations, whether for-profit or non-profit, perform or lose their customers or their donors. When a private entity fails to deliver on its promise, or actually causes harm, it is held liable for the failure and pays the damages. When government fails, it gets a bigger budget and even more power. - Mary L. G. Theroux, Public and Private Responses to Katrina

Given the choice, would you allocate any of your taxes to a government organization that continually fails to perform?

Because of the existence of consumer and donor choice, private services are rarely offered by only one provider -- there is competition for funding which encourages both quality and affordability as service providers seek to outdo one another. Government services, however, tend to be monopolies because they do not have to fight for funding from countless individual sources. - Bryan, The Government Vs Private Charity

Giving taxpayers a choice is fundamental.  Forcing government organizations to fight for funding from countless individual taxpayers is the only way to ensure that government operates efficiently.

Charitable organizations are better than government as a source of aid. First, it is easier for donors to hold charitable organizations accountable than it is for taxpayers to hold government accountable. A failed government program can go on forever. An ineffective charity has a more difficult time obtaining funding. - Arnold Kling, Libertarianism and Poverty

It's not difficult to make it easy for taxpayers to hold government accountable.

Although the term 'NPM' suffers from a degree of concept stretch, Hood (1991) sets out some broad reformist priniciples in which the public choice heritage can be clearly observed. The first is that the focus of public sector reform should be on structural reorganization rather than policy. It is the structure of the public sector that fails to provide adequate incentives for the public sector organizations to respond to citizens' preferences for government goods and services. The provision of public services should be made more competitive, both between publilc sector providers and between the public and private sectors. Contracting out, quasi markets and seperation of the questions of who pays (public finance) from who provides (public provision), are all hallmarks of NPM. They follow from the government failure logic and the objective of greater efficiency in particular. As discussed above, individual contracts in the public sector will generally fail to provide efficiency-enhancing incentives, but the public choice view is that increased competition in the provision of public services will. - Patricia Kennett, Governance, globalization and public policy

The concepts of New Public Management (NPM) seem to be the closest to pragmatarianism.  

We have to pay taxes but there's no reason why the act of paying taxes can't simultaneously force government to be accountable to the people who fund its existence.   

Power and Control

Politics is all about power and control...which is why we need checks and balances.

Frank Herbert -  "He who controls the spice, controls the universe!" - Dune

Pragmatarianism would transfer some control of taxes from congress to taxpayers.  The amount of control transfered would be determined by taxpayers themselves and would reflect their confidence in congress.  This check on the power of congress would have been supported by Herbert Spencer.

Herbert Spencer 

     When that "divinity" which "doth hedge a king," and which in our day has left a glamour around the body inheriting his power, has quite died away - when it begins to be seen clearly that, in a popularly-governed nation, the government is simply a committee of management; it will also be seen that this committee of management has no intrinsic authority. The inevitable conclusion will be that its authority is given by those appointing it; and has just such bounds as they choose to impose. Along with this will go the further conclusion that the laws it passes are not in themselves sacred; but that whatever sacredness they have, is entirely due to the ethical sanction - an ethical sanction which, as we find, is derivable from the laws of human life as carried on under social conditions. And there will come the corollary that when they have not this ethical sanction they have no sacredness, and may be rightly challenged.

     The function of Liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to the powers of kings. The function of true Liberalism in the future will be that of putting a limit to the powers of Parliaments - Contemporary review, Volume 46

For a few weeks now a Marxist concept that I learned while studying International Development at UCLA has been on my mind but the word wasn't even on the tip of my tongue.  Surprisingly, I just remembered it..."comprador bourgeoisie".  Basically, they were well-connected, upper class, middlemen in developing countries.  A multinational corporation (MNC) would go into a developing country and deal with the local comprador bourgeoisie...who would help "facilitate" the MNC's exploitation of local resources.  The MNCs and the comprador bourgeoisie would get rich and very little, if any, money would trickle down to the proletariat.

Is it a bit much to think of congress as comprador bourgeoisie?  Perhaps...but, in a pragmatarian system, that would be up to each taxpayer to decide.  I kind of just wanted to write it down in case I forgot it again.

Another term that I struggled to remember was "moral hazard".  I'll just be lazy and grab this one from Wikipedia...

Moral hazard also arises in a principal-agent problem, where one party, called an agent, acts on behalf of another party, called the principal. The agent usually has more information about his or her actions or intentions than the principal does, because the principal usually cannot completely monitor the agent. The agent may have an incentive to act inappropriately (from the viewpoint of the principal) if the interests of the agent and the principal are not aligned.

It's straightforward to see that the interests of congress (the agent) and taxpayers (the principle) are not completely aligned.  The primary goal of politicians is to be (re)elected so their interests are strongly aligned with whoever will finance their campaign.

Guido Calabresi 

In a market regime, some are made richer and some made poorer; in a command structure, some have greater authority and some less. It is equally clear that, in an all-market regime, wealth constitutes authority, and that, in an all-command structure, authority results in wealth. Also true, but perhaps less plain, is the fact that in mixed systems like ours people will use their distributional advantage in one medium to overcome their distributional disadvantage in the other by 'altering' or 'corrupting' that other medium. The use of money to influence or 'corrupt' those in authority is easy enough to understand, whether through bribes or campaign contributions.- The Origins of Law and Economics: Essays by the Founding Fathers

This is also know as rent-seeking behavior...when special interest groups and big business attempt to influence congress.

Some decades before Herbert Spencer was worrying about how the power of parliament would be limited...Alexis de Tocqueville was worrying about tyranny of the majority.  

Alexis de Tocqueville

Again, it may be objected that the poor are never invested with the sole power of making the laws; but I reply, that wherever universal suffrage has been established the majority of the community unquestionably exercises the legislative authority; and if it be proved that the poor always constitute the majority, it may be added, with perfect truth, that in the countries in which they possess the elective franchise they possess the sole power of making laws. But it is certain that in all the nations of the world the greater number has always consisted of those persons who hold no property, or of those whose property is insufficient to exempt them from the necessity of working in order to procure an easy subsistence. Universal suffrage does therefore, in point of fact, invest the poor with the government of society. - Democracy in America

As I pointed out in my entry on taxpayers, taxpayers are better educated than the general public.  Therefore, pragmatarianism would help function as a check against any possible tyranny of the majority.

To review, pragmatarianism would...

1. help check the power of congress
2. help check tyranny of the majority
3. result in an optimal division of labor between the private and public sector
4. ensure that public goods would be produced with maximum efficiency
5. ensure levels of all public goods would accurately reflect society's values
6. provide greater freedom
7. allow taxpayers to joyfully contribute to public goods 

Uninformed Taxpayers

One criticism of pragmatarianism that crops up fairly frequently is that "other" people would make uninformed allocation decisions with their taxes.  To address this criticism we can compare three different groups...the general public, taxpayers and congress.  

Taxpayers are better educated than the general public.  In fact, the more educated somebody is the more money they earn and the more money they earn the more taxes they have to pay.  Here's a diagram from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that illustrates the strong correlation between education and income...

To give you an idea of how much taxes the general public would have to work with...the bottom 40% of the US population owns less than 1% of the wealth.  

Would taxpayers make more informed allocation decisions than congress?  In a pragmatarian system every taxpayer would ask themselves that question.  If they answered "no" then they would give all or some of their taxes to congress.  If they answered "yes" then they would allocate their taxes themselves.

Of course, the tax allocation decisions of congress are also a public good.  The total quantity of revenue congress received would reflect how much taxpayers valued that public good.

It's important to note that just because somebody is educated doesn't necessarily mean that they are informed.  It just means that they have reasonable critical thinking skills.  Lobbyists currently provide congress with information in order to help make them make informed decisions.  In a pragmatarian system lobbyists would also be motivated to share that information with taxpayers.

Congress as a group can only process a certain amount of information.  Allowing taxpayers to decide how their taxes are allocated would expand the quantity of information that factors into how taxes are allocated.  It would also more accurately reflect the values of taxpayers.