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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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I think all of them should be subject to democratic control.

The three most controversial would be Property Rights, Religious Practice and Monetary Policy.

Property Rights are thoroughly undermined by taxation. What good is having 'property rights' if you're forced to give some fraction of your property to the state? You can't have a state without taxation.

Religious practice being beyond democratic control sounds good in theory but in practice it's thoroughly undermined. Polygamy is illegal in most places, as is female genital mutilation and a host of other religious practices. I'd argue that sharia law is a religious practice. There is no clear divide between religious practice and law.

There's an argument for the technocratic control of monetary policy on the basis that some pain is necessary for long-term gain, if politicians run wild they'll print too much money bribing voters. This is a legitimate argument. But technocratic control of monetary policy is just as easily undermined by lobbying and manipulation of banking and bailouts by elites. Monetary policy effectively means giving money to banks or manipulating their ability to generate money. Obviously bankers have a vested interest in this - and guess who runs central banks?

The alternative to democratic control is control by elite policymakers. These more knowledgeable actors also have their own special interests, which may diverge significantly from the rest of the country. They are often in a position to privatize the gains and socialize the losses of their decisions. They ought to be held more accountable. George W. Bush was formally responsible for starting an idiotic war on false pretences that squandered trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives and caused serious harm to US interests. And yet neither he nor Rumsfeld or anyone else was punished for this! If this was ancient Athens, he'd have been ostracised or worse. Woe to the generals who lose their wars. Even though Bush somehow managed to win the 2004 election, he wouldn't have been permanently safe. Why were so few of the Wall Street crooks who caused the GFC punished? Even if the public was prone to being deceived by the media, their anger could actually be vented on a target (including those who decieved them) after they realized what happened.

Lack of control breeds learned helplessness and indifference. Citizens should have much more power, voting via a cryptographically secured phone-app on all major issues. They decide what is a major issue by securing a certain number of votes for their suggestion. Direct digital democracy rather than leaving issues to bureaucrats.

While a cool idea, direct democracy via app would present an incredibly juicy target for cyber threats. I don't believe such a thing could be secured.

People are really pessimistic about the possibility of this because we generally suck at security, but on paper it's doable. The math primitives required exist and are routinely used for cryptocurrency stuff.

Hell arguably it's already deployed for DAOs and actual decisions that affect non trivial sums have been made from completely online and anonymous votes. It just hasn't risen to the level of politics yet.

It's not the math I doubt, just the ability of professional developers to outsmart professional threat actors. The balance is very much on the offensive side right now, especially for people with state level resources. Imagine if North Korea or China's hackers could change US policy directly.

I am quite skeptical of crypto-voting systems for many reasons (particularly user education), but high-quality first-world security researchers will voluntarily throw massive amounts of resources for free at various implementations.

We can also come up with various attack scenarios and decide which ones to particularly defend against. There are lots of systems to choose from. Each individual implementation can be reviewed, tried in small mayoral elections first, and reviewed again.

If we had to do an E2E system for some reason, we could do it.