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

[valty]

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]

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]

> 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]

> 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.

[valty]

> small government

A different spin on "small".

I wonder if you could have micro-governments instead on a per-topic basis with their own mini-budgets.

These omnibus spending bills seem absurd.

The tax should be incurred/realized at the point of the benefit received.

Imagine getting a monthly bill on your estimated tax spend with details of everything it is spent on and how that benefit flows through to you. This might make people more receptive to government.

Also thinking about a Government+ premium subscription service. How can the government offer added benefits to raise more money for things. I guess this is charity.

[fragmede]

Attribution is incredibly hard but would be amazing to see. My tax dollars 15 years ago paid for a child's education, and that child is now a productive member of society. A magic system that showed my tax dollars flowing through to that child having a stable job and a home instead of being out on the streets and committing violence, being a drug addict, would be eye opening.

The idea of Government+ rankles me. We have lost sight of the founding preamble, that all men are created equal, under God. It has evolved to include people of all color, and other genders, and religion is not as much of a focus, but those parts are okay. What i have a problem with is the idea that rich people are better than poor people. In charging money for things, the poor get excluded, and Government+ will leave them behind. Charge money for things because that's how the system works, but also recognize that having carpool lanes instead be express lanes where they just charge money to use them is classist.

[valty]

> showed my tax dollars flowing through to that child...would be eye opening

I agree. Charity's often use this for marketing. Making clear the direct human impact of your donation. Tech companies like Apple do this a lot too.

But when a government talks of its successes in statistics...I don't think about my tax spend. I think that it was my (and other people's) vote for that team that did that. And typically not even the team...rather the leadership of the political party.

It's like a shift in the marketing approach.

We sent 100bn to this country to help out with this.

vs.

Average Joe paid 10$ of his income last year which helped pay for this and that for these people. One of those people today was Sally... One of those people 15 years ago was Tracy...

[wordhydrogen]

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?

[valty]

> inherent monopolies

I've learned to be careful about this "natural monopoly" term because it turns out to be very debatable. Recently with fiber deployments is a good example...see London/UK experience.

I feel like if people realized the benefits to having many companies compete for everything, then they would choose services that did not act like monopolies and to create barriers of entry.

The consumer ultimately dictates how companies should do business. The problem is a lot of the time they are choosing the price that is in front of them, and not considering the price in the future.

If consumers were smarter they could break monopolies without government intervention necessary.

Like if there were two companies building out some critical infra...if one promised they would do it in a way that others could compete easily, and consumers valued that, then they would win the contract.

> profit above all else a good objective for government services

This doesn't need to be the case.

People already work for government without profit incentive. It's personal prestige mostly I think.

Interesting to think about what would happen if we introduced duplication and competition within government departments. It seems extremely counter-intuitive because of duplication, but its how the entire capitalist sector deliver efficiencies. Same as how open source works. People compete for prestige.

Corporates sometimes do this too. Google might have multiple teams working on the same goal.

Interesting to think about what would happen if you hired two people to do one job and made them compete against each other on every task.

[wordhydrogen]

Interesting points.

I still think some services are more prone to being naturally competitive while others are more prone to being naturally centralized. Everything is on a spectrum. Good government regulation tries to balance these natural tendencies.

I’d be curious to hear more about your thoughts on “natural monopolies”. I’ll have to look up the fiber deployment as I am not familiar with that.

> If consumers were smarter they could break monopolies without government intervention necessary.

True but that is the nature of being human. We have evolved to use heuristics and biases due to fundamental time and energy budgets with bounded computational abilities. If one looks at the assumptions made in the efficient market hypothesis it’s pretty easy to see that many of those assumptions are simply not fully true. Though they are useful simplifications for modeling at times.

> Interesting to think about what would happen if you hired two people to do one job and made them compete against each other on every task.

Oh man I’d hate to think what office politics/drama would turn into. Still would be an interesting experiment.

[withinboredom]

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?

---

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.

[valty]

> Nobody would pay for the fire department

But they essentially do via their taxes. Implying people understand they need to fund it.

If we imagine a very transparent flow of information regarding fires...people would readily see the need for it. Like how we buy insurance.

All roads could be toll roads. We have technology to track exact usage of roads. Why should cyclists pay for the entire road?

If someone doesn't pay for the roads and gets a delivery, then they delivery company passes on the cost of the road.

If we have very transparent availability of pricing then this becomes possible.

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

If people don't want pollution...they shouldn't buy from companies that pollute.

If people don't want pollution they should ban it from their private property.

With modern tech we can see the entire supply chain of these companies, so consumers can make choices.

[withinboredom]

Surely you can see how insane this idea is IRT pollution. If companies aren’t forced to NOT pollute, they will pollute. Government very rarely (at least in the West) regulates industries for the sake of regulation. Usually, those regulations exist because companies wouldn’t self-regulate and “do the right thing.” History has shown time and time again that if given the choice, a company would rather poison and kill its employees, their families, and neighboring communities (and in some cases, their customers), than lose out on profits.

IRT fires: fires are extremely unlikely to hit your specific house. You already have insurance for it. No, the fire department isn’t there to put out your fire to save your house. They are there to stop a single fire from burning down the city. I’ve seen this happen on our base in Afghanistan. It all started with a small fire, the guy ran to get a fire extinguisher, but by the time he got back, the fire was too big. In less than an hour, half the base was gone. People prioritized saving mattresses over ammo (mattresses would be the last thing replaced while ammo would be replaced immediately, and fuck sleeping on the ground).

IRT roads: you are basically saying the rich have freedom of movement but the poor do not. With taxes, more can be taken from those that have more and less can be taken from those who have less. Having mobility in a civilized society is one of the hallmarks of a civilized society instead of middle age bs.

[valty]

> If companies aren’t forced to NOT pollute, they will pollute

If no one buys their products, or any products with them in the supply chain, then they won't pollute.

Visibility into these supply chains wasn't possible before internet/technology. A free market relies on consumers paying attention which so far they haven't been, because we are too used to relying on the government...and then complain so much about government.

You definitely see consumers driving improvements through their purchasing. Definitely in areas such as sustainability.

I guess regulation addresses a time lag situation. But if a private market developed for a companies that regulates other companies with subscription fees, then this would solve the problem and do it in a better way. Although I'm not sure how the threat of jail can fit into this. Can penalties be strong enough? Is bankruptcy a strong enough disincentive to lie to private regulators.

> They are there to stop a single fire from burning down the city.

Interesting point. Definitely has non-excludability.

I remember this scene in Gangs of New York where the firemen fight each other back when it was privatized (don't know if this was real).

> rich have freedom of movement but the poor do not

A lot of transport is private. Maybe the poor have more money if they don't have to pay so much in taxes.

[acdha]

I’d also add that there are often power imbalances which are irreconcilable. If I go to buy some chicken, Tyson’s is going to laugh if I request to tour their growing facilities and processing plants. Even if I get everyone I know together to ask for it, we’re still too small a group to care about. Maybe I try organizing online, which probably goes nowhere but if it does they ask their buddies at Comcast to block access to that site, etc. Very few people have the time, energy, or resources to monitor more than a few of the thousands of companies they depend on.

[valty]

> Maybe I try organizing online, which probably goes nowhere...Very few people have the time, energy, or resources

The thing is...a sector of companies that do this is probably a good business opportunity that is being crowded out by a mandatory government monopoly.

The fact that government does this means that you are already paying for it, and maybe its not being done well.

If people care about their food, they should look for a sticker on their food, from an organization that verifies it. If other people don't have the label, and people know about it, then people won't buy from them.

And if this is too much trouble, then have another industry above this where companies offer all-encompassing ratings on a variety of different things.

With modern technology so much is possible to solve problems that otherwise were too complicated.

You could end up with a marketplace of super apps, that ensure you are completely covered across all avenues of life to the parameters that you desire.

It sounds complicated, but today its even more complicated with government where we rely on the media mostly.

[hackerlight]

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]

"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 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]

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]

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]

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.

---

...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]

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]

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]

'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]

Subscription tiers for national defense is funny to think about.

Priority assistance / 24/7 support / merch

[blacksqr]

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]

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]

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