Via Chris Bertram at CT, here’s a novel way of overcoming free-rider problems. You can promise to do something socially desirable, conditional on a certain number of other people doing the same thing. This pledge asks you to give one per cent of your income to charity.
6 thoughts on “Pledgebank”
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John Quiggin 
Indeed, it a great idea which is spreading like wildfire across literary blogs too …
BTW, Max acknowledges the importance of a certain antipodean blog – A new edition to Blogovia, the liberal hemisphere of the blogospher : Liberal or radical economists with actual credentials in the field who blog I Feel A Change In The Force
When ever I see it suggested that most things currently paid for by taxation should be paid for by voluntary payments we get the free rider argument. Some people may benefit but not pay. Hello There!!! Thats the result we get anyway.
If we abolished government funded welfare then we would immediately elliminate a lot of “free riding”.
Terje, if we did that immediately we would get a lot of transitional distress costs on top of the enduring externalised vagrancy costs, which are what social security costs compound for. Granted, transitionally we wouldn’t get a rise in crime – that would come later. If we were unwilling to register the distress of (say) unemployed people who paid more when they were in work under the former arrangements, we wouldn’t perceive a problem at all (unless we were one of them, if you’ll pardon the grammar).
Yes, once a transition ended, more people would be willing and able to enter the work force than now – but not 100% of them. This is why things like Negative Income Tax make sense in the longer term, and Professor Kim Swale’s scheme even makes sense in the short term.
I won’t beat the Swales drum again here, unless some curious cat asks for it. Craig?
Yeah, let’s absolish welfare and get back to the good old days of the i8th century. Hell we might even ,managew to catch up with such hyper-efficient small-government economies as Somalia and Congo.
IG, the point is not so much to abolish welfare as to engineer out the need for it. Done with a proper transition (starting with the Negative Payroll Tax approach), you would ideally end up starting the transition. This by itself would wind back most explicit welfare quite quickly and, implemented via anonymous transferrable vouchers, would soon be monetised into a Universal Basic Income. These resources could then be transferred to be at arms length from formal government services.
The end point – if ultimately attained – would involve households having enough of their own resources to provide an analogue of a basic but inadequate income, a modernised version of Chesterton’s and Belloc’s distributism but still not mediated via state efforts. In that ultimate scenario everyone would be able to price themselves into work as they would only need top up wages, and the household resources would provide enough of a Real Balance Effect to stabilise the economy well enough for remaining practical purposes.
P.M, we’ve discussed tihs before and are in broad agreement. however I rather think that Terje has something much simpler and more abrupt in mind.
My comments were actually intended to be directed to him and I’m sorry if that was unclear.
Most current government programs did actually start as responses to quite genuine problems. The NAIVE libertarian slash-and-burn/Government-is-evil approach fails to recognise this.