I don’t understand how this addresses the main problems:
1) Most people are rationally irrational about politics. They have no reason to become informed about the pollution.
2) What’s to stop free-riding? Do you insist 100% sign-up from the 990? If so, none will ever get funded. If not, people can free-ride.
Also I am sceptical about the ethics of making it easier to engage in negative-sum games. I expect these would largely be to more efficiently fund the culture war.
These do look like concerns, but I’m a bit more optimistic than you.
On 1), this looks at its best on issues where they will personally benefit. People are normally better judges of things that affect them personally. And I believe it’s fairly well established that this is exactly the kind of scenario where there are political failures in the current system.
On 2), it allows free-riding. This is a problem for it, and might turn out to be too big. On the other hand some crowdfunding successes have been in cases with obvious free-riding, so this may not kill it.
The culture war can already be funded quite effectively by donating to the appropriate political parties. I expect this wouldn’t see much use in cases with sizable campaigns on both sides. However, I do think that lobbying in general is quite possibly negative sum. It might be that this proposal would be positive in the short term, but makes it harder to restrict lobbying later (maybe a good early use would be to lobby for more limits on lobbying??).
I don’t understand how this addresses the main problems:
1) Most people are rationally irrational about politics. They have no reason to become informed about the pollution. 2) What’s to stop free-riding? Do you insist 100% sign-up from the 990? If so, none will ever get funded. If not, people can free-ride.
Also I am sceptical about the ethics of making it easier to engage in negative-sum games. I expect these would largely be to more efficiently fund the culture war.
These do look like concerns, but I’m a bit more optimistic than you.
On 1), this looks at its best on issues where they will personally benefit. People are normally better judges of things that affect them personally. And I believe it’s fairly well established that this is exactly the kind of scenario where there are political failures in the current system.
On 2), it allows free-riding. This is a problem for it, and might turn out to be too big. On the other hand some crowdfunding successes have been in cases with obvious free-riding, so this may not kill it.
The culture war can already be funded quite effectively by donating to the appropriate political parties. I expect this wouldn’t see much use in cases with sizable campaigns on both sides. However, I do think that lobbying in general is quite possibly negative sum. It might be that this proposal would be positive in the short term, but makes it harder to restrict lobbying later (maybe a good early use would be to lobby for more limits on lobbying??).