Could the Blockchain save us from ourselves?
The arrival of budget-making time in Washington brings out all the best qualities in our lawmakers — obfuscating, bullshitting, prevarication, storytelling (both optimistic and pessimistic), and just plain blatant thievery. It is based on a principle that would have seemed unthinkable to the Founders — namely, that each Senator, Representative, official, and Cabinet Member has as his primary mission the looting of money from the national Treasury money to the benefit of the locality political machine that sent him/her there. Elections are fought on the issues of who gets more and who gets less, not on where it might do the most good for the greatest number of folks.
If you don’t believe me, try a thought experiment : Imagine FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING! instead of BUILD THAT WALL! in the bullhorns of the red-hatted cheerleaders at one of Trump’s just inaugurated taxpayer-financed campaign rallies in undereducated blue-collar land where he can draw cheers just by claiming that people who criticize him should ‘go back home’ even if they’ve never been anywhere else in the first place . Imagine the relative decibels. Draw your own conclusions.
In our current reality-show version of reality one of the tools employed by the cheerleaders is the woeful inefficiency of our present method of evaluating one political options against each other — their costs. Promises, totals, predictions, post-dating, spin, and just plain lying make dollar-total promises ideal weapons for scammers. Costs, especially ones safely relegated to ex post facto accounting, can be misrepresented in so many ways that it might almost be said they are never much more than convenient fiction. And politicians are happy to take full advantage of that.
Campaign slogan: “A chicken in every pot.”
Underlying assumption: “I can make pots faster than you can”
This is all based on the notion that there are a fixed number of dollars to be fought for, and that they have fixed values. What if we ditched that idea? First of all it isn’t true — the ins can always just crank up the printing presses and transfer the final accounting to their (our) more and more distant great grandchildren.
The Winklevoss twins shook the foundations with their claim that a variably-valued currency (Bitcoin) could function perfectly well, if its denomination at any given moment could be speeded up. A blockchain-based system could eliminate the skullduggery associated with the phony bookkeeping. (Blockchain accounting assigns a published and unchangeable public history to every transaction — no matter how big or how small — enabling any interested party to examine it. No fudging or Mulligans. If it happened, it’s on the public record. Simplest concept since Nixon killed the gold standard.) This revelation has been greeted with something less than enthusiasm by the Timothy Geithners and IMF and central bank chieftains who feel that the survival of their personal fiefdoms is more important than the life or death of any starving Greek or Salvadoran family they can imagine. After all, their imaginations of starvation or oppression are somewhat limited by the scant personal opportunities they have had to meet ruined Greek small businessmen or starving Salvadoran refugee families in the dining halls of Yale and Harvard.
The basic idea is ridiculously simple — if the value of every dollar and ruble and yen in which national budgets are written (for convenience call them all BB’s — Budget Bitcoins) is instantaneously recalibrated to the value of all the other dollars and rubles and yen out there then we now have a means of evaluating every transaction — including the mortgage values of castles in the air — and the bullshit factor disappears.
Currency, in fact, would just be the percentage value we have assigned to it relative to whatever is the current total value of all the goods currently out there — its BB. Not ‘six hundred and forty billion dollars’ but ‘eighty-seven times what we allot to refugee relief’. We can no longer argue about how much of an effect a change in the military budget will have or won’t have on our conceptions of the proportion we have thoughtfully assigned to it in legislative deliberation. If that allocation changes we will be able to see it immediately; it won’t be hidden under a foot of paper in the annual budget bill, tucked into the spending bill in a midnight foray by a real estate developer’s paid legislator (no names, please) interested in getting a larger tax abatement for his 99 million dollar ‘slum clearance’ tower apartment that can be shopped to the newest New Delhi billionaire eager to show his bank account’s superior robustness over last month’s newest billionaire. The change will be not only obvious in the tax-abatement bill; it will simultaneously show up in the adjusted military budget as well. If we reduce the amount available for school hot meals to pay for more ICE agents, that news will instantly be available to monitoring apps at both educational and immigration agencies and — most importantly — reporters.
Call this Budget by Blockchain. Call it Honesty by Sunshine. Call it Get Your Hand out of My Pocket. Call it anything you like, but put it up there at the top of your requirements of your favorite presidential nominee.
Think about it. I’m serious. “BB” fits nicely on a square piece of Amazon cardboard.
Vance Weaver 