Government as profit-making enterprise

Originally posted by Teinosuke
Well, indeed, governments can ignore the will of the voters once in office. That's why it could be important to subject them to the kind of constant checks and balances that my proposal offers. Ultimately, under my scheme, government revenue would become dependent on the individual purchasing decisions of citizens. If you didn't approve of the government, ...[text shortened]... y buying decision would potentially become a political act. How is this not empowering citizens?

An interesting real-life parallel: Andrew Brown, a British journalist, lived in Sweden in the 1970s and wrote a book about his experiences, Fishing in Utopia.

He comments that there were two supermarkets in the small town in which he lived, Lilla Edet: ICA, the "bourgeois" shop and Konsum, the co-op, where the socialists shopped. "Both sold almost exactly the same range of groceries and small bits of hardware but I don't remember that they had a single brand in common." His wife's family told a story about "a local politician who had, in a hurry, gone into the wrong supermarket and bought something. He spent ten years apologising for this act." As Brown observes, "Where you shopped predicted where you lived, what you believed, and even the evening classes you attended."

Originally posted by Wajoma
There is no business the government can be in without putting legitimate private enterprises out of business. With natural resources they already clip the ticket heavily, better for them to let professionals operate the mines and then just impose duties, or taxes, or fines on whatever is being mined, risk free.

During the New Deal, private business activity expanded considerably, due to the economy being supported by the government. Without the New Deal, unemployment would have continued increasing over 25%, as it had been under fiscal conservatism, and private business activity would have continued to decline.

Originally posted by normbenign
Growing wealth disparity is not specifically a free market phenomenon. In Statist government, the differences don't grow, but nothing is produced. Eventually, two classes exist, the workers, and the politburo. The Marx hated bourgeoisie disappears.

In market driven economies great wealth can be created in every generation, and it can and often is lo ...[text shortened]... debt and poverty via inflation. By the way inflation is the real reason the gap keeps growing.

Welfare capitalism (i.e. where you have progressive taxation and a welfare state, combined with incentives being preserved, as during the New Deal era) successfully deals with income and wealth disparity, whereas excessive fiscal conservatism exacerbates it, as we've seen during the Reagan-Bush era. I'm not interested in Statist government; it's counterproductive, unnecessary, and very different from Thomas Paine and Franklin D. Roosevelt's welfare capitalism.