Zompist Bboard Again

kodé wrote: ↑Fri Jan 22, 2021 10:00 pm

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Jan 22, 2021 3:54 amThe current economic wisdom is that economy isn't a zero-sum game (which is true) and that wealth accumulation isn't a problem (which is false). At any given point, there is only so much money to go around, and only so much real estate in London, San Francisco, Beijing or Delhi.

From my outsider perspective on the field, it seems that a good majority of economists believe that wealth accumulation and/or extreme inequality is a big problem (economically, not to mention humanitarian-ly). It’s the politicians (well, enough of them) who are peddling economic ideas from decades ago that have aged badly.

(Sorry if I misunderstood the referent of “current economic wisdom”)

Ah, yes, that might have been unclear. I really meant the Very Serious People.

The phrase was coined by Paul Krugman -- I often disagree with him, but I love that concept of his.

Paul Krugmant wrote:"he talks about how serious he is, and then you look at what he actually says about the economy, about economic policy -- it's all wrong. (...) Somehow in order to be considered serious in economic policy discussions, you have to ignore everything in econ 101."

Imagine yo wake up. you're in a house of some kind, that you probably had to apply for to some local housing committee which now, by virtue of living in that area, you can attend the meetings for. almost nobody does cause, mñe, who cares. Your aunt goes to her housing committee meetings (they call themselves the Sixth Avenue Housing Soviet, or SAHS), and has a few friends there. she's not supposed to do this, but she told you she could hook you up in her area with a bigger house. You've just moved into this town so you think I should probably get some sort of job. You have this card that you can use to get food, laundry detergent, and old clothes from the clothing reclamation coop a few blocks down, but what are you going to do, stay home all day? besides, card food and reclamation clothes aren't very good. you already had enought of that during covid, and even more of that after the Third War. you don't want to think about it.

there's like seventy different ways in which you could find a job: your aunt, for example, just went to the housing soviet meetings enough times that one day the president said "yo, anyone wants to be president? this was fun but I think I want to go live in the woods now.", the soviet voted and she was elected president, but you're not as personable as her and running what is essentially a neighbors association sounds like torture to you. you decide to visit your local WAB, or workforce allocation bureau.

so you take out your phone and ask for an uber. people decided to keep a lot of the old names, but now they're stupidly cheap because a) the cars drive themselves, b) there's no reason to spend quadrillions of currency in advertising or supressing competitors, and c) there's no vast managerial class drawing funds to put in their trust funds and stonks and stuff: uber is now just a P2P protocol, kinda like torrent: you say "yo I want to go to this address" and one of the cars that exist and are hooked up to the net quickly goes "kay I'll get ya there". the car actually shoots an encrypted signal to your phone over the internet, but you get the drift.

on the way you get a notification from your old job. Bruce, an old friend and former coworker still hasn't end-dated your user, apparently. it's the weekly voting thing. you click on a button and your phone is, for a bit, unable to do anything else than display the voting. votes this week are for chairman of the board, CFO and CHRO (chief human resources officer, a position that has become much more important than it was), and also for various issues and ballots and initiatives. the CFO you voted for is the one with the proposal to cut back on work hours 3%: it's risky, but you know the company can take it, and if it doesn't work next week they'll be back to normal. otherwise you decide to vote how you'd have voted before quitting and to give your weekly support token (it's a thing) to Bruce's idea of painting the walls of the IT department. Come to think of it, maybe that's why Bruce hasn't end-dated your user. sneaky bastard.

You get to the WAB wait in a waiting room after getting a number. government offices don't look that much like the old offices: the people there elect their bosses, so long gone are the days of uniform cubicles and soul-sucking form-filling and paper-shuffling. each WAB is different than the next, but in this one people apparently decided the walls had to be purple and the furniture has to be this weird all white art-deco plastic stuff. Confortable enough though. Eventually an old lady comes and sits across from where you were scrolling insta or whatever. she tells you that her job is to determine what you can do and where you'd fit. so she starts asking you all sorts of questions about your past and interests. it's a bit awkward and confusing, and the questions are different from those you heard in the age of capitalism: what kind of hours do you like to work, how much money do think you'd be cool with? do you like working in an open place where there's music and chatting all day? are you cool with working manual jobs?. you mention that you kinda want to get away from it all, you want some cool, quiet work. most jobs pay similarly, so there's no point in trying to be like a branch manager of anything if you're not into that kinda thing.

"I'm a bit to the point, please feel free to tell me exactly how you feel about the ideas I'm gonna give you. how good are you at cleaning windows? the WAB could use a couple of those" she asks, and you can't tell if she's joking.
"pass tbh"
"you like kids?"
"hard nope"
"coding?"
"did that under capitalism" you say.
"oof. I'm sorry to hear that. you're a big fellow, ever thought about doing something athletic?"
"not in a million years lady"
"fair enough".

after that the questions get weirdly specific: how's your lower back? have you ever been an alcoholic? malbec or syrah? do you enjoy mountain scenery? do you have insomnia? what kind of videogames you play? she figures out that you're a bit of an introvert and get overwhelmed easily by being around too many people, and eventually she tells you she's got a request from some alcohol coop for someone to drive a cistern truck around. pick up wine at various small wineyards across a mountain valley nearby, check that the wine's good and then bring it up to the factory for bottling and distribution. you smile at this, you love cheap wine and mountain scenery is what you came to the town for!

"but i've never driven a car before, much less a truck"
"ah, don't worry, almost no one has these days," she reassures you. "no one from the city anyway, we have these spiffy sensor arrays that make self drivers safe. but they need workers over in the country. they say they'll teach you. hell, even certify you. you want something else?"
you decide to go for it. "na, I'll try it out. see if the whole fresh air thing is really that good for you"

She fiddles around with her smartphone, and you get a text some 9 minutes later from an unknown number.

"hey rookie, I'm Sarah. pick you up after lunch?"

That's cool! I'd like to see more of this.

communism: the conworld

Sounds like there's some social democracy and distributism going on, too.

I looked up distributism and it seems pretty much like a decentralized minarchist take on socialism (descriptions I have seen of it say that it is opposed to "socialism", but it is clear from these that they really mean state capitalism), with a Catholic flavor, aside from a few things such as treating property as a basic right (as most forms of libertarian socialism do not treat private property as a right at all, rather favoring possession as a model of ownership). Aside from the property versus possession issue, it seems like something I could support.

I'm not quite a minarchist (I'm not quite ready to label myself having any one ideology), but I think distributism is criminally underrated. The way I picture it working is fairly close to what Torco described — you can own things (the small vineyards sound like family, single-person, or small-group affairs), have cooperative things that are independent of the State (presumably, the co-ops), or work for the State (what's going on in the comfortable office place), but I also like the idea of not having to (or doing something that is beneficial, like art, but not necessarily a "job" per se, or only as much of one as you yourself choose to make it). It's also what I think a sort of Shire-esque economic philosophy might look like in practice (most day-to-day things having rather minimal interference from the State, the use of force from which is not common, with very localised structures for the maintenance of justice where necessary), and it's certainly able to tolerate traditional structures layered on top, for people groups who want them.

When one speaks of ownership, I am not against it - rather, what I am against is title, e.g. owning an enterprise or an apartment building by virtue of having a title for it, rather than owning a share based on working there or living there.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 07, 2021 4:12 pm When one speaks of ownership, I am not against it - rather, what I am against is title, e.g. owning an enterprise or an apartment building by virtue of having a title for it, rather than owning a share based on working there or living there.

This leads to some tricky questions... at least, I think they're tricky, though not impossible.

Let's say Maggie makes pancakes, and they're so good she can sell them. So long as she has no employees, I think we can agree she owns the business (of course she is subject to regulation and taxes).

She's stressed out and hires a delivery guy, Chad. Is Chad automatically a 50% partner? Even if he works 2 hours a day to her 12? Or if he only works one month a year, when business is up? Do your answers change if Chad is disabled and working 2 hours a day is all he can do?

Or, she hires a cook, Judy, who works the same hours she does. They share 50% of the profits, fine. Then they quarrel and split up. Who gets the stove and pots and supplies? They were all originally Maggie's; does Judy now get half of them?

Or: Maggie is helped by her three children. They grow up and none want to stay in the pancake business. They outvote her; can they end the business and sell everything?

Please note, I'm not asking about Bill Gates and his billions. Very small businesses are the bulk of businesses and I want to know how you handle them.

(FWIW I'm fine with Chad or Judy or the children having some "ownership share". In fact they should have one! I just don't think it's obvious how big a share that is, what conditions create or uncreate it, and how decisionmaking or disputes are handled.)

About shares, one way to approach it, as you imply, is to have them be proportional to average hours worked (yes, the case of workers who can't work more hours complicates that, but I have not thought up a better solution there).

About the other major point you bring up, what happens to the stuff when a 50% partner leaves, the solution I think of is to consider capital as belonging to the enterprise, so as long as the enterprise exists, it remains as belonging to it, regardless of who joins and who leaves. So let's say Maggie wants to retire but Judy wants to keep on working - the enterprise would still exist with its capital.

But let's say that one disagrees with that; one could argue that Maggie should be able to take out her capital when she leaves, but even in that case it should be limited to her personal contribution, not what has accumulated from profits and/or outside investment. So in the case of Judy leaving she could only take out capital she personally contributed.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 07, 2021 5:30 pm About shares, one way to approach it, as you imply, is to have them be proportional to average hours worked (yes, the case of workers who can't work more hours complicates that, but I have not thought up a better solution there).

About the other major point you bring up, what happens to the stuff when a 50% partner leaves, the solution I think of is to consider capital as belonging to the enterprise, so as long as the enterprise exists, it remains as belonging to it, regardless of who joins and who leaves. So let's say Maggie wants to retire but Judy wants to keep on working - the enterprise would still exist with its capital.

OK, I don't have a problem with your answers.

I'd point out, though, that part of the whole problem with capital is who has and who doesn't have it right now. There are large classes of people who have none, and just working for a co-op will not build up much wealth.

The usual socialist solution (I'm not saying it's yours) is "just take what the rich have, but don't teach the poor anything." It's been tried many times by now; the problem is that it destroys wealth, doesn't improve the lives of the poor much, and creates no real incentive to do anything. I'm thinking e.g. of land reform programs in Latin America. Establishing the structure of a co-op doesn't make everyone know how to make a co-op thrive.

A wealth tax could help eliminate long-term inequalities, and you probably also need a robust governmental system to help create capital. Maybe something like, the agency will buy what you need for a business, and transfer them to you if you manage to keep the business running for 5 years.

(Just to add some actual data to this: as it happens, my parents had a small restaurant when I was a teenager, and I did the accounting. It takes a surprising amount of capital to do this: as just one part of it, restaurant-level ovens/fridges cost many times the price of consumer items. Think tens of thousands of dollars, and that was 40 years ago. Salaries might be better in a co-op world, but it's not realistic to think most people would be able to afford that. On the other hand, I think the agency should not facilitate scams, like someone getting free goods and then just selling them. Thus the idea that you have to keep the business running.)

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Sun Feb 07, 2021 5:16 am Sounds like there's some social democracy and distributism going on, too.

sure, it's meant to be relatively soon after revolution, not full communism. I'm not even sure such a thing can be arrived at, what is full liberalism anyway.

I think it's at least a not uncommon view among reds that while workers are to own the means of production, there's no prima facie reason why they should own them equally. one can easily come up with frameworks for such a thing: cooperative bylaws to the effect of, I don't know, founders get one lifetime share each, senior staff get two, regular staff get one, juniors get half a one, maybe apprentices don't get one, etcetera. Chad sounds like a contractor moreso than a worker of the coop tho. I'm enough of a moderate that I could even contenance people renting stuff to the coop. for the worker ownership is more to do with economic democracy <in the realm of decisionmaking> than about absolute equality: I'd hope some workers have it better than others, just not nine hundred thousand times better.

Land reform is traumatic and sometimes devastating, but hey, so was the end of slavery in many places.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 07, 2021 5:30 pm About shares, one way to approach it, as you imply, is to have them be proportional to average hours worked (yes, the case of workers who can't work more hours complicates that, but I have not thought up a better solution there).

The solution is to not tie the ability to reproduce oneself to one's ability to work. We produce more of the necessary goods for life than we need but 21,000 people are going to die today because they lack access to food. Any rewards above and beyond would, and should, be decided democratically by the workers as well. But invariably, unlike the protestations of anti-communists, no one will be 'paid the same', shoot even in the USSR no one was 'paid the same'.

So I've been thinking up a system for a science-fictional conworld...

And then I thought it might be relevant to adapt it to a present-day setting, and present it here.
Maybe people will be interested in tearing it apart and finding out where the (doubtlessly numerous) faults are.

This is essentially, the unholy child of capitalism and communism, and should ideally offend people on both sides.

Let's being with the obvious.
We agree that everyone should have access to food, information, a decent place to live, education (including higher education), access to transportation and health care.

Now, let's consider an area with a relatively uniform cost of living, and play a bit with currency.

Let's average the cost of all those necessities. No, better yet, let's take the median value.

Once we have that median, let's index our currency, which we'll call the dollaruble on this median value.

For convenience sake, let's say that you need an income of 10,000 dollarubles a year. Taking a fictitious yield of 5%, we understand that we need a capital of 240,000 dollarubles to get this income per year.

Rephrasing this in terms of fundamental rights, we see that each human being, by nature, owns 240,000 dollarubles.
(There's the whole question of children. Do they own 240,000 in their own right? Or a fraction of this? I don't know. On one hand, I don't see why they shouldn't own the entire sum. On the other hand, I'm not sure the needs of a family scale linearly with the amount of children.)

Not 'has a right to', 'should have a right to', 'we should make an effort so that...'. Nope. By construction, every human being owns this much, period.

I'm not sure how much a dollaruble is worth, but many people don't have that much lying around.
What gives?
1) Either society isn't prosperous enough. Entirely possible.
2) Or that money is elsewhere.

Option 1) is kind of the default neoliberal position. Free the market enough and the economy will grow so much everyone will be rich.
I'm not entirely sure about freeing the market, but yeah, given the right incentives we can probably get richer. (Where's my positronic robot, dammit?) Plus of course, standards of living has to rise in developping countries.
Option 2) seems y'know, kind of likely. I don't have any figures on the total capital or average yield (these are hard to find, which is suspicious in itself, but I digress).
We do have GDP, though. I see for instance that France's GDP is 41,000$ per capita which, considering health care, taxes and retirement payments comes down to about minimum wage. Not something to aspire to, but decent. This includes children and retirees, though. Considering only working age adults, though, we get about 80,000 euros a year, so 51,000 counting retirement payments and health care, but before tax. Which is very decent.


We come to the conclusion that yeah, we could use a bigger pie, but some do get disproportionate share.
Considering again that each human being owns 240,000, we come to the unescapable conclusion that people who don't have that much capital have been stolen from.

How exactly that thief took place leads to endless debates, of course. That step could be interesting, but let's skip it. The culprits are probably long dead. In any case, while we can't change the past, we can make sure everyone owns at least 240,000 dollarubles.

At this point many middle-class people should start to panic. What if their home is worth more than that? Or their business? Fear not. We want to do this in the least painful way possible, and fortunately we know how to do that. Redistribution occurs on a progressive scale. That is, capital above, I don't know, the 99th percentile is seized entirely. The rate is 90% for anything above 90th percentile. The actual rates have to be calculated, but the idea is that primary residences and small-scale businesses should be left unharmed.

Of course, this means property will be sold left and right leading to a general collapse of prices. It's all right, we're interested in the actual property, not what its market prices happened to be. (We just need to readjust the value of the dollaruble accordingly.)

Note that this should include at least some proportion of assets owned overseas. (It all depends on where you made your profits. If you moved to Indonesia and made money, there, we'll leave you in peace, though you don't get the 240,000 dollarubles either)

Like I said, the higher percentiles of capital owned are, in a sense, stolen good, but no one's gonna prosecute for that. But, try and get these abroad or try and attempt tax evasion, and this is characterized theft (or fraud, at the very least) and treated as such. You are, of course, entirely free to move abroad, but any assets owned in the country are subject to the redistribution scheme.

The redistribution scheme remains in force, except it's now a tax scheme. More specifically, a progressive tax on capital. The whole idea is that further concentration of wealth can't occur again. (Likewise, tax evasion is treated as equivalent to theft. Get 1 million tax-free through creative lawyering, and you and your lawyers face the same penalties as you would if you had robbed a bank.)

The aim of the central bank (or central banks. Maybe we can set up things so that there are competing entities!) is to keep the dollaruble indexed to the cost of living and prevent inflation/deflation.
For that, it does what central banks do and play with the interest rate. It can, however, do some finer tuning. For instance, if house prices keep rising, this will lead to the dollaruble losing in value. Simply lowering interest rate might have the unintended effect of having them rise more; instead it can lower rates for new construction and transportation instead while keeping them high when taking a loan to buy existing real estate.

What if people just don't work? To that I'd answer: that's kind of the point. There are endless legitimate reasons why people are unwilling or unable to work. Saying that human beings are allowed a decent standard of living regardless of how lazy or undeserving they are saves a lot of time.

Studies on universal basic income suggests there isn't that much of a disincentive to work, but that said, if there is a problem anyway, I'd suggest we let the free market take care of that.
Simple enough: if people don't want to work to your company, you raise the wages until they're convinced it's worth the effort. (Besides, given the redistribution constantly going on, company owners are very likely to draw a significant part of their income from labor themselves, they'll be more tractable to the idea).
To some extent, the central bank plays a part too. If nobody wants to work in heavy industry, they'll simply lower interest rates in that sector. The companies in essence, get free money, which they use to raise wages. (They can't divert much of it into their pockets anyway.)
Likewise, lower employments leads to a rise in inflation: there are too many people chasing too few goods; this means people get less worth from their capital, leading them to seek employment.
The system is, I believe, self-correcting.

Moreover, it sets up a positive feedback loop. People, as employers, are annoyed at the labour force, which becomes increasingly ornery and demanding as they can live without working. People, as workers, have an incentive to work as little as possible. This provides a strong incentive towards automation.

Let's posit, besides, that the public sector has the duty to intervene if something goes wrong. (If there aren't enough construction going on, public entities have to provide construction jobs themselves if free market attempts don't work).

What can people do with their capital? I think this should be somehow controlled. You don't get to spend your basic 240,000 on something with a high risk of making you lose your shirt. There is, besides, a provision that a set portion of additional income must be invested in health care and retirement funds. These are a bit freeer. Anything above that you can invest freely. Specific levels can be adjusted, depending on what is felt most necessary. Those kinds of 'mandatory investment' are democratically controlled -- there's a specific institution with democratically elected leadership that handles these. It is, I should add, independent from government.

For that matter, health care and retirement are each handled by separate organisms with their own (democratically elected) leadership.

Generally, public leadership is as distributed as possible. Instances are as democratic as we can make them, but independant from each other. The reason is simple: if the government proper wants a war, or is concerned with crime in the inner city, fine. But it doesn't get to touch health insurance without convincing the people in charge of that first.
There's also a question of accountability. In our current system, a prime minister or president can be judged positively because they handle foreign policy well, and yet fuck up health insurance, or hand out tax breaks.

I don't really care what is public or private here, ultimately the question becomes meaningless. The census, central bank (or central bank(s)), insurance companies or retirement fund can be set up however you like. The one condition I set is that they should obey the principle one person, one vote. You don't get to vote on the really important stuff with a 'per share' basis.
Do we include co-ops? You can set up a co-op if you want to. Given the capital distribution, this is probably one of the best ways to make a large company run. You can even invest your retirement money in the company if you want to.
How are companies run? That all depends on what its stakeholders(*) are and the capital structure. You get extra votes as an investors if you work at the company. If you don't, you get less of a say.
If a company potentially affects everyone (say, the power plant), the public gets more of a say.

(*) How are externalities handled? I'd say that, for instance, the atmosphere, or the climate, are considered 'owned' by the general public, represented by specialized bodies. These bodies can then decide what exactly is allowed, or not.


(A idea for "propaganda" to finish with: take a leaf out of the right-wingers' book. Talk a lot in terms of the natural law. If your socialist policies are decreed by the state, it evokes images of Soviets, grey bureaucrats and Men In Black. Don't try to demonstrate that things will work better under socialism because *boring statistics here* State that your policies derive from natural law. If you're convincing enough, it'll work. Seriously. It did at least once: none of the 'self-evident' truths in the Declaration of Independance were self-evident back in 1776.)

This is essentially, the unholy child of capitalism and communism, and should ideally offend people on both sides.

okay you have my attention

I'm not sure the needs of a family scale linearly with the amount of children.)

I can see it going either way. I myself lean towards 240.000*life expectancy/age of majority is alloted the kid and whatever economy of scale or otherwise the family makes is i guess good for them. there is not irrelevant dystopic potential in this.

This is, in a way, UBI but with extra steps, or I guess lump sum UBI plus more democratic workplaces and a many-headed government. This last part is where I get more suspicious, since while we all like checks and balances each check is a possible place for jam, or some stable gridlock kind of situation.

Torco wrote: ↑Mon Feb 08, 2021 8:42 pm This last part is where I get more suspicious, since while we all like checks and balances each check is a possible place for jam, or some stable gridlock kind of situation.

I agree, though I see it as sort of positive. Sometimes, gridlock is good.
I do believe that when there's no clear consensus on policy, a given government shouldn't be in a position to make sweeping changes.

One part where I agree with liberals in the wider sense of the word and anarchists is a general distrust of the state. (Remember: capitalism works because of government complicity. Honestly I'd prefer anarchism if I could figure out a way to make it work in practice.)

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue Feb 09, 2021 2:00 am

Torco wrote: ↑Mon Feb 08, 2021 8:42 pm This last part is where I get more suspicious, since while we all like checks and balances each check is a possible place for jam, or some stable gridlock kind of situation.

I agree, though I see it as sort of positive. Sometimes, gridlock is good.
I do believe that when there's no clear consensus on policy, a given government shouldn't be in a position to make sweeping changes.

One part where I agree with liberals in the wider sense of the word and anarchists is a general distrust of the state. (Remember: capitalism works because of government complicity. Honestly I'd prefer anarchism if I could figure out a way to make it work in practice.)

I am a former anarchist, and a reason why I am not an anarchist anymore is that anarchism means no regulation of enterprises, and everything that comes with that (think of what would happen if capitalism existed without regulation)... unless you go by the argument that I have heard, which is that workers' councils would provide regulation, but then, aren't the workers' councils a state in anything but name?

Same; I don't know if you can get rid of the state without reintroducing the state in some form.

It's worth noting that some of the worst excesses of capitalism came about with active state support. The army and police were used to brutally repress strikes, being found without lawful employment was considered a felony, free movement of workers was controlled...

(The state is less on the side of the wealthiest than it used to be, but to some extent, this is still true. Jeff Bezos is worth $182 billion because his claim to ownership is backed by the state. Or, in other words, because the cops will be after you if you raid an Amazon storehouse.)à

I don't believe in getting rid of the state at all; though I'd like to break it up in more manageable parts.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue Feb 09, 2021 11:13 am Same; I don't know if you can get rid of the state without reintroducing the state in some form.

It's worth noting that some of the worst excesses of capitalism came about with active state support. The army and police were used to brutally repress strikes, being found without lawful employment was considered a felony, free movement of workers was controlled...

(The state is less on the side of the wealthiest than it used to be, but to some extent, this is still true. Jeff Bezos is worth $182 billion because his claim to ownership is backed by the state. Or, in other words, because the cops will be after you if you raid an Amazon storehouse.)à

I don't believe in getting rid of the state at all; though I'd like to break it up in more manageable parts.

The state, on the other hand, in a developed country with an elected government today means, at least in theory, things such as:

1. Employers and service providers cannot discriminate against protected classes.
2. Regulations on externalities, e.g. impact on the environment and what goes into our food and water.
3. Labor regulations such as minimum wage, overtime, and safety regulations (even though there are ways around this, of course).
4. Housing regulations such as restrictions on what landlords can do.
5. And so on.

Of course, one can easily say that without the state there would be no capitalists, and without the capitalists these would not be issues in the first place, but is that true? For starters, I believe that capitalism can function without a state; instead of police and the military there would be private armies unshackled by an elected government, instead of law and order, for better or for worse, there would be unrestrained brute force, and so on. Furthermore, I don't see anarchist enterprises as necessarily being all that better, as they could discriminate based on any number of things as they see fit, and they would be unrestrained when it comes to externalities.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue Feb 09, 2021 2:00 am

Torco wrote: ↑Mon Feb 08, 2021 8:42 pm This last part is where I get more suspicious, since while we all like checks and balances each check is a possible place for jam, or some stable gridlock kind of situation.

I agree, though I see it as sort of positive. Sometimes, gridlock is good.
I do believe that when there's no clear consensus on policy, a given government shouldn't be in a position to make sweeping changes.

I agree in general but I feel that this is not that: if the healthcare department's head is a whateverian and the economic planning head is an antiwhateverian they have an incentive to each rule to the detriment of the other guy, consensus or not. then again that's a problem inherent in democracy, and so democratization perhaps just out and out comes with it.

Anarchism does not mean deregulation of private enterprise, please don't believe the "an"caps.