Would ISPs and/or cellular service be a good example of what happens when government does not get involved? I don't follow that stuff too closely, but I think both have in fact been de-regulated?
Cell service is compeltely broken because the government "sold" radio frequency spectrum. They sold all of it. Now there is none left to sell or distribute. And now a few concentrated companies own the rights (another government construct) to broadcast on their frequencies. So there is a rigged, no competition market, because you can't erect cell towers and broadcast on any frequency anymore (at least those viable for cell service) because someone owns that frequency band.
ISPs, again, are poor government intervention - almost all of the ground wires were laid under government subsidy upwards of a hundred years ago for some phone channels, so all the current private owners of coax / phone lines almost exclusively got them from government that already laid them, and rarely ever lays them themselves (and when they do, they do slight extensions to already established backbone, they aren't laying it themselves).
In addition, these private providers will contract with local governments to provide exclusive service, and will bribe the town council to block competition from laying their own lines (or heavens forbid, the township itself own the fucking wires running under their streets). As a result, you can't lay your own cable / fiber / phone lines (unless you are Google and have billions of political pressure) and even if you could, you are at an insurrmountable competitive disadvantage because not only does your competition already have all their wire laid decades ago, they can readily drop their prices to run you out of the market because they have barely any overhead in providing your service. They are making hand over fist profit off of consistent customers that are paying year on end. And then, there is inertia, and market manipulation by the established players, to make "average joes" not consider switching providers.
On the other end of the spectrum, it is federally regulated that power companies need to be contractable, in that you can select the company you get "power" from, even though the actual power lines are carrying juice from a thousand plants at any one time, and a lot of peoples homes are feeding back into the system. It is also regulation that enables average joes to set up their own solar panels / wind turbine / generator and get reimbursed any power they feed back into the system - if power companies could do whatever they wanted, they would prevent their customers from setting up their own power backup since it hurts their profits.
In the end, it is not very complex I think - even though the examples can be - if you stifle the ability for new players to enter a market, easily, and compete with the established ones (be it through insurmountable subsidized initial investment to enter the market, actual law book regulation preventing it, or rigged business code favoring the monopoly) you direly hurt the economy by creating artificial monopolies.
Even if the monopolies do "reasonably" well (NASA, for example, basically prevented private space investment because for 30 years it was hugely funded by taxpayers to own the sector, AT&T owned phone service for 60 years by government mandate, etc) markets with only one player (don't even look further than personal computing or the Linux world - there was barely any innovation in GCC until Clang came along to provide competition, or how Firefox had to get a lot faster when Chrome became a real competitor). Competition drives innovation, and in any situation where you facilitate a one man market, you will starve innovation and improvement just by only having one force in the market, even if they have good intentions.
Competition is essential to progress. It is the fuel that produces a huge amount of improvement in every field and business. So if a government is going to craft any law, it should be to make new competition easier to found and enter a market with, not harder. The electric grid regulation makes it easier to enter the market (even if the individual power sources are heavily regulated / zoned / mandated, and the status of a player against a power company only exists for consumers to power co, not business to power co, etc - there is a lot of regulatory cruft behind the respectable outer cover) and as a result promotes competition and better prices for the consumer (the ability to "shop" your power company in a state is a huge reason US power costs are so much lower than elsewhere in the world).
It is why almost all the innovation right now is in web / computers. It is barely regulated, extremely easy to enter the market, and as a result a disproportionate amount of ideas go into it (even when other fields cry for innovation, like medicine, agriculture, telecom, etc) because the market is free and as a result it is healthy.
Usually the government selling something off is not cited as an example of government intervention. Most lazzei-faire types believe that is exactly what government should do - sell off the property to put it in the hands of the free market.
The actually problems are three-fold. 1) The government still owns large portions of spectrum that are underutilized 2) the government restricts changing the use of spectrum, such as changing UHF TV into 4G and 3) the government does not charge any sort of property tax based on the value of the spectrum, so there is no incentive for the spectrum to end up with the highest value use.
"ISPs, again, are poor government intervention - almost all of the ground wires were laid under government subsidy upwards of a hundred years ago for some phone channels, "
Most people in my state get their internet via cable wires laid in the past few decades.
"In addition, these private providers will contract with local governments to provide exclusive service, and will bribe the town council to block competition from laying their own lines (or heavens forbid, the township itself own the fucking wires running under their streets)."
Local governments are much closer to small market players than they are to the leviathan state. There are thousands of towns and cities, but usually only a couple cable companies in any area. The exclusivity contracts are usually given out of position of weak bargaining power.
"and even if you could, you are at an insurrmountable competitive disadvantage because not only does your competition already have all their wire laid decades ago, they can readily drop their prices to run you out of the market because they have barely any overhead in providing your service."
And here is the problem that has nothing to do with government - broadband wired internet is a natural monopoly. There are extreme capital expenses and the company that builds the first network has a huge advantage, it is usually not profitable for a second business to enter the market.
So yeah, competition is good. But initiating competition in the cable market might require government intervention. It might require the government to subsidize a second network. It might require the government to block mergers between the cable companies and content providers. And even in the best case you are probably not going to have more than two or three broadband options in one town. So the government would probably still want to regulate the internet providers as common carriers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier ) and ensure network neutrality.
"AT&T owned phone service for 60 years by government mandate"
Keep in mind that AT&T pretty much built its monopoly on its own. The government had the choice between breaking it up, and converting it to a regulated monopoly, and chose the latter. This may have been the wrong choice, but the country was probably better off for having at least some government intervention, and not allowing the monopoly to be completely unregulated and dedicated solely towards shareholder profits.
When a government sells intangible information waveforms, I'd consider it intervention. Radio spectrum is not a finite resource. You generate radio waves with devices by producing electromagnetic radiation. The "sale" of spectrum implies that the government owns what is on the exact same scale as visible light, which is completely insane. But it is the world we live in.
> Most people in my state get their internet via cable wires laid in the past few decades.
I live on the East Coast, my experience is probably different. Do note that cable is much more modern than phone lines - what AT&T had laid a century ago, most cable is indeed decades old. My area was seeded with cable lines in the 60s, it was early at that too.
> Local governments are much closer to small market players than they are to the leviathan state. There are thousands of towns and cities, but usually only a couple cable companies in any area. The exclusivity contracts are usually given out of position of weak bargaining power.
I talk about this in another topic I made in this thread, and it mentions how economic systems larger than a political system can push around the politics to their own gains. The way cable companies extort local government is a prime example.
> And here is the problem that has nothing to do with government - broadband wired internet is a natural monopoly. There are extreme capital expenses and the company that builds the first network has a huge advantage, it is usually not profitable for a second business to enter the market.
Infrastructure is a natural monopoly. There are dramatic diminishing returns on laying a second redundant set of the same thing than using one thing. I personally think fiber / cable / phone wire should be publicly owned and maintained, and ISPs provide gateways to the Internet via the routing servers and DNS caches to their clients, but you can contract with anyone to provide you the connection to the backbone.
Roads separate man from animal, in that man will slave to lay roads that benefit others, but not lose competitive reproductive advantages as a result. Any other animal that would forge their environment to the benefit of the many of their species would die off from having less energy to spend breeding. As a species, we have a unique ability to build foundations of road, power, and network that enable magnitudes of productivity gains for little cost - if we collectively agree to pay and support it. It isn't something I feel works well in a private competitive market, but I am pretty libertarian. So the solution to me is not to try to create artificial incentives to waste resources laying redundant cable, but that the cable should never be private in the first place. It is laid under public roads, run over private property, and should be a public good. It even was, for a brief time, until most local governments sold them to greedy business. I don't know how to solve the extortion problem, unless it is mandated at a higher level that the smaller governments can't sell off public infrastructure like that.
> Keep in mind that AT&T pretty much built its monopoly on its own. The government had the choice between breaking it up, and converting it to a regulated monopoly, and chose the latter. This may have been the wrong choice, but the country was probably better off for having at least some government intervention, and not allowing the monopoly to be completely unregulated and dedicated solely towards shareholder profits.
The early years of AT&T were a mix of government incentive and business practice. They spread so fast because everyone wanted phones, and they got subsidized to provide to everyone. It is another situation I think the correct solution would have been to go the way of roads (or maybe power lines) - public infrastructure supporting private, competitive end points. The phone lines should create a market for competition, as a foundational infrastructure an industry can be built on.
It doesn't require the violence of law for people to come to compromise. Profit motive is plenty enough I think.
That doesn't magically become legal. For the same reasons you could take someone using "your" frequency right now to court, you could take someone using the frequencies you do only for the purposes of attacking the signal quality on the same basis.
And no, opening up spectrum doesn't suddenly mean everyone and their mom is buying radios and spamming electromagnetic radiation, for the same reason people don't do it today, because they can be targeted for sabotage if they aren't productively using their radio usage.
It is like any other infrastructure. You should be free to use it, and punished if you abuse it.
| Keep in mind that AT&T pretty much built its
| monopoly on its own
In the major population centers the paying customer demand was easily sufficient to build the network without government. And once the network in "good" areas was built, they would still be a monopoly and be able to deny any newcomer access by dumping prices in the profitable areas if anybody would invest in a new network - if the government was weak enough to let them.
While ISPs in Canada suck, here, last mile infrastructure owners are forced to lease their infrastructure to competitors; it means that if I am unhappy with my cable provider's internet service, I can get cheaper service provided by someone else over the same physical infrastructure. As you mention, that competition is healthy, even though the infrastructure owners try to gimp their competitors in every way allowed under the law.
I believe the free market would naturally orient itself to correct for interference. Overused bands would be fled from, and the balance between saturation and diversity would be manifest by customer satisfaction. There would be frequent, instantaneous (in long run terms) moments of conflict where problems arise, but as a whole it wouldn't be a rigged, exploitable system by the corrupt that govern it.
But we have to argue in ifs, because we have the product of one chain of events. Maybe a system would have arisen with a benevolent market controller who charitably gave their artificially limited spectrum to use. Maybe we would have descended into chaos when our cell phone service got choppy.
We don't know because we never tried the alternative. We assume it is bad because in theory it sucks in the beginning, so we stick with what we know to be inherently flawed because we don't have the incentive to try to fix it.
Also, actively attacking someones broadcasts for the sole purpose of disruption is still extortion. I'm not nutty enough to think you can go total anarchy, just that artificially constructed scarcity is bad for everyone.
In the meantime, right now 300 million plus people are suffering under an artificially controlled market for a resource that has no inherent scarcity. They are crushed by the very rent seekers this article speaks of on goods they can't truly possess without the violence of law to protect their interests, and they are given artificial advantage to abuse the regulations giving them the power to extort others.
The entry barrier is capital investment in radios - if you want to use 1800 mhz GSM band, you need to buy many millions (billions for country-wide scale) worth of radios and put them up to towers. If you want to later switch to 1900 mhz band as the first one is "polluted" - tough luck, buy new gear and install it once more. Or, in practice, if you don't get a guarantee that your devices won't work, you just don't buy them and keep out of the market.
And, as soon as you call installing a device on the same spectrum "actively attacking someones broadcasts" - then it's a pure monopoly, first-come first-serve; the first one to put up the investment and put in New York some towers with ALL the frequency channels standard phones support (it's not that much, ~triple what they're normally using) gets an effective monopoly forever, since anyone putting up any GSM tower will be a disruption.
Sure, it somewhat works and if necessary, I can just go sit right next to the Wi-Fi router to watch some cat videos while warming some food. I'd rather have my cell phone always working, though.
Besides, if spectrum is unregulated, what prevents company X from interfering with routers from company Y, so that Y's products are perceived as flaky? I mean, even with regulated spectrum, there were still issues between LightSquared's planned broadband network and GPS[1], for example.
That is still sabotage and possibly extortion if they try to bribe the company. If they weren't providing a real good with the bandwidth they use I would imagine no court would find them not guilty of attacking the company they are targeting.
In a free for all spectrum, it is much harder to prove that a device is interfering with another, making prosecution lengthy and complex. In the current system, if a device emits outside of its regulated band, its certification or authorization is revoked and the device becomes illegal to sell and operate. The criteria to do so are clear and evaluable from an objective standpoint, unlike interference in a shared spectrum that may or may not be willful and debatable in court.
Besides, it's not as if spectrum being freely available will magically make anyone a wireless carrier; there is still a significant up front capital expense to erect cell phone towers, routing calls to the PSTN, handling billing and support. A further proof would be that a corporation could create their own wireless carrier over the unregulated 2.4GHz ISM band by installing Wi-Fi APs and delivering VoIP over that for much less than the cost of erecting cell phone towers over an entire city, yet nobody did that.
Selling spectrum is precisely the approach that was espoused by free-market economists since the days of Ronald Coase. It's not "rigged" or "no competition" any more than any sort of private property is that way. It's a commons resource, and that's the classical economic approach to handling commons resources: privatize them and sell them, so the market can allocate the resource to the highest-value users. You can't farm in my back yard either--that doesn't mean anything is "rigged." It just means that if your farming is higher in economic value than my use of the property, we engage in a market transaction to transfer ownership that moves the resource towards your higher value use.
So this is my little pet area of policy, and I think selling spectrum is the wrong way to go. But then again, I'm not much of a true believer in competition or the free market either.
The real free market answer is that electromagnetic radiation is information, and you can generate whatever frequency of it you want, and you assume the markets would naturally orient themselves to not interfere devices. I absolutely think that would happen - any competitive entity trying to sell radio devices would have it in their best interest to collaborate across the market to make sure device manufacturers don't interfere, but it isn't at the threat of violence but at the promise of profits people would restrict their band usage. The market would inherently optimize radio usage for the best use case of consumers, to optimize their returns. The inherent competition would create incentives to innovate ways to use less bandwidth, different bands, etc.
That is the free market approach to radio. If you start your argument with "the government starts out owning this unlimited concept of frequency" it immediately is flawed.
People can read multiple copies of a book without interfering with each other, but people can't transmit on the same frequencies without doing so, just as they can't farm the same land without interfering with each other.[2]
> The real free market answer is that electromagnetic radiation is information, and you can generate whatever frequency of it you want, and you assume the markets would naturally orient themselves to not interfere devices.
That's like saying that the real free market answer is to not enforce rights in land, and let the free market work out how to coordinate various uses of land so they don't interference with each other. There is a name for that, it's called the tragedy of the commons.
[1] A "right" deconstructed, just means some legal relationship which the government will enforce on your behalf through violence. Without government, there is no one to enforce rights, and the concept is utterly meaningless. A deer can't invoke its "right to life" when a wolf kills and eats it.
[2] This is an imperfect analogy for various reasons, but more or less true at a very coarse level of granularity.
Radio broadcasts - ie electromagnetic radiation - is energy projected onto other's people's property. The libertarian view should be that it can limit person's A right to project energy if it interferes with the rights of person B. If I aim powerful lasers at my neighbors house, the government has the right to intervene. If I broadcast loud sound waves at 3AM, the government has the right to intervene. If I want to build a nuclear plant that might irradiate everyone in my town if things go wrong, the government has the right to regulate it. When I broadcast radio, I interfere with the ability of others to broadcast and listen to radio. The purpose of a government is to mediate these conflicts. Predictable mediation requires establishing clear ownership rights.
Maybe you could argue the government should have allowed spectrum to be homesteaded, rather than purchased, but the end result would be similar.
One thing that bugs me about pro and contra libertarian debates is that both sides do something similar: imagine a kind of Year Zero world in which somehow all laws have been shipped to /dev/null. It's a dumb debate to have. Angels waltzing with strawmen on the head of a pin.
Radios are scarce, but the range and ability to produce electromagnetic waves at certain frequencies is not scarce with said radio. Computers are scarce, but digital information is infinitely reproducible and millions of people will send you a copy for free (see: torrents). This kind of stuff shouldn't be limited or restricted by artificial government constructs.
There is a difference between having a finite resource and artificially calling it "yours" and taking an infinite resource and calling it "yours. Ownership is a fundamental human right - to possess scarce resources you can call your own. It is only recently the bulk of humanity has had this right. I don't think it should be anyones right to own an infinite resource like an idea, though.
Personal opinion. I write software and think trying to sell per-copy instances of infinite information is ridiculous. In computer terms, it is the flip side to the free software coin that makes open source a whole. If you distribute a black box you shouldn't be able to try to force people to treat it some certain way, after all, you freely gave it the first time, anyone else can do with it what they will.
I still target open source since I'm not a dick and don't like giving someone a black box, but that is tangential.
Rivalrous means that, to the extent I am using or possessing some good, you are not. Excludable means that I can, as a seller, prevent you from using it without payment.
Most physical goods are rivalrous and excludable. I can keep an icecream to myself and while I am digesting it, you are not. The icecream truck can prevent you taking one without payment. This meets the definition of what people usually think of as "private property".
Radio waves are rivalrous but not excludable; economists call these "common goods". These lead to -- you guessed it -- the tragedy of the commons, where individually optimal decisions lead to globally suboptimal outcomes.
Commons can't work unless agents agree to constrain themselves, or are made to constrain themselves. The former can happen by agreement, the latter by regulation.
In the case of radio, regulation has been the standard model because of the nature of the usage. Voice and vision have been analogue and the human nervous system is a poor demultiplexer, so they needed bands to themselves. Similarly for many other applications (radar, for example) , the amount of information put through a certain band has historically been low but the value high. So: regulation.
Wireless networks are an example of a commons managed by agreement; or perhaps managed by emergent phenomena. Each wireless node blindly follows some simple rules (such as randomised exponential backoff) that, in practice, make a shared medium largely usable.
edits: to clarify terms a bit
If ownership only extends to things made of atoms, then you'd agree that it's totally okay for me to build my house on your land so long as it hovers an inch over the dirt and grass that comprises your ownership. Otherwise, you're claiming ownership of an incorporeal thing--the geographic coordinates that encompass not just your land but the space above it.
> Radios are scarce, but the range and ability to produce electromagnetic waves at certain frequencies is not scarce with said radio.
Ownership of spectrum is not a monopoly on the right to produce electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency. It's a monopoly on the right to invade certain areas of space with electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency. The FCC doesn't care what frequencies you transmit on in a lead-lined room on your own property.
I work in the wireless networking field, and my and my coworkers' experience is actually the complete opposite in high-density environments: there is an abundance of radios, and a scarcity of frequency.
Which, BTW, is one of the reasons wired networking consistently outperforms wireless - you have one and only one transmitter (in a full-duplex connection) on a given medium.
Frequency would be scarce in highly concentrated areas in an open-frequency region, but it would be less so than if you artificially restricted access. What would naturally follow is that the demand would distribute itself (within the realm of possibility, ultra low and high frequencies have either range or bandwidth disadvantages that make them ill suited for, say, digital packet signaling).
I also wonder what kind of innovation you might see in an open band environment in terms of wifi - if you weren't limited to the few bands of 802.11, maybe routers would pop up that dynamically enable multiple transmitters (like how a modern router would have multiple antennas to transmit in parallel, maybe you would see many-hundred low power antenna radios to interface with devices over the largest clear possible frequency range available?)
But for use cases that require consistent signaling, or really high throughput, enabling radios that utilize vast swaths of frequencies in parallel can increase the throughput.
So are coal and land and money. All property is a government construct. Stop pretending otherwise.
It is why I consider myself libertarian and not anarchist. Besides the fact I also think, like how Communism turned out, what we think in theory and what we do in practice are in conflict because people are still human and often do, even in selfish terms, illogical things.
You can not "take" someones radio wave and rob them of its possession, because when they broad cast it anyone could receive it, and if you are taking enough action to "block" its transmission you are violating many other scarce goods rights like invading their property.
All the other things you listed are scarce, not easily replicated, and taking of them means the other party loses because they are inherently scarce goods. Almost anything made of atoms is scarce, and anything made of electrons or photons is not, because as a property of the universe that made of the latter can be easily replicated for almost no effort but the former takes significant effort to reproduce from modern resources.
In the same vein, if you steal the radio, I no longer have it. If I broadcast on a frequency, I am not robbing you of your ability to use it, but it generates interference. If both parties have benevolent intentions (and in the absence of such, one can prosecute the other for sabotage and extortion for using hostile interference in the same vein that a company "owning" spectrum can sue someone for using it at all) then it is in their best interests to collaborate and mitigate the interference they impose on one another.
If they have no other option, it is not fit for a state to violently prevent one from using an infinitely reproducible resource while the other gets exclusive control over its usage.
Would you be ok with the sale of the visual light spectrum? Both radio and visible light are electromagnetic radiation. Doesn't it sound absurd to have the luminance of purple light the exclusive property of some corporate entity?
Here is another thing - the consumer electronics used in the US that are under these byzantine laws about spectrum usage are not operating in a global vacuum. They are bootlegged across India, China, and other nations that don't necessarily have rigorous spectrum laws in place that are enforced. These places self organize (with bumps and issues) into using radios without the need for control of what frequencies of electromagnetic radiation you can generate.
This sentence contradicts itself. What is "interference" if not something that robs one of one's ability to use a radio frequency?
You can still use it, but your usage is diminished. On the electric grid, there is a peak voltage the line can feed to all recipients before it is maxed out and can't provide more juice. If I am on the grid with you, I'm diminishing the maximum power you can take off a sufficiently strained grid. It isn't stealing from you to use it though, and in the case of power there is very little litigation about people consuming too much electricity (from what I know).
Nobody owns a frequency, they have the right operate on that frequency.
It is a government construct that have no natural scarcity to them
The electromagnetic spectrum does have natural scarcity, due to interference. Have you ever had trouble getting a strong WiFi signal due to neighboring WiFi? You experienced electromagnetic spectrum scarcity. Now, you are probably going to jump in and argue that if only the government didn't constrain WiFi to 2.4GHz, there wouldn't be any scarcity. The problem is, there is still very much a finite amount of useable spectrum, and in fact a lot more of it is in use than you realize.
I agree with everything you say, but I think I come to a slightly different conclusion. It sounds like in the special case of natural monopolies, what we need is rather than simply trying not to stifle competitors, we need to work to empower competitors- because of the special nature of natural monopolies.
This is still a form of regulation, so it sounds like regulation is fine for natural monopolies, so long as it goes in the right "direction", i.e. regulation that opens up the market rather than closing it.
If the capital costs are low, this isn't as much of problem. With some understanding investors and creditors an entrant can match the incumbent.
But when you have to build millions or billions of dollars of stuff just to get started, that's much harder to arrange.
I just can't think of one. Almost any "natural" monopoly (roads, healthcare, power grid, network cable, etc) I think should be done by local government, not private business, because structural aspects of society aren't effective platforms for competition if they just supply the foundations to build markets upon.
Actually, I just thought of one - maybe agriculture. While it is structural, it isn't an inherent infrastructure because it has specialized purpose. The post green revolution has demonstrated (though I imagine it is the result of regulation this happens) that megafarms are the most efficient way to organize modern farming. This naturally leads to a few big players because the cost of equipment to properly maximize productivity of land has high expenses (though they aren't at a comparable scale to say, a road network, or laying fiber in a city - one tractor, plow, tiller, etc plus the seed, silos, barns, etc, but these are tools to maximize productivity, not infrastructure).
It might be the product of land ownership and zoning, but I'm only familiar with my local zoning code, which has a large Mennonite population, so most of the farmland in the region is restricted from being sold for other purposes. The midwest is a much different story that I'm not familiar with.
That is all I'm saying. If you agree with that, we aren't arguing anything.
... social networking?
I don't think in a decade the closed social networks will last, for the interopt reason. The value proposition of a common platform of profiles is too strong long run not to take over.
My current thinking is that the best route would be to alter corporate charters to give consumers voting power as the company increased in market share. So if a company had 70% market share, there might be a consumer elected board that had the power to veto anti-competitive acquisitions, changes to the terms of service, changes to privacy policies, revocation of open access, etc. If you have Congress trying to regulate the company, the company will end up controlling Congress. But an elected consumers board should have a better shot at representing the interests of the customers of that company.
Ultimately, I think most industries will evolve into government regulated monopolies. Consolidation is a standard part of the life-cycle for most markets. We should embrace the efficiency that dominant players can achieve.
With regard to individuals, I think a universal basic income is the long-term solution. Let a few people become billionaires, while the masses are paid to relax at home. There is a large amount of wasted resource in industries like retail, marketing and sales. Society would probably be better off if those industries shrank.
I wrote a stupidly long copy paste here: http://zannyland.blogspot.com/2012/10/political-ranting-part...
On this topic though, people should have very specific direct election of one representative, per 500 - 1500 people, who would represent them in local voting and selecting higher representatives from their elected peers (ie, a local council of 10 would select one to go to the state, the state would select maybe 3 to go federal), and higher tiers of government can't impose laws not adopted by the lower branches (1/4 of local governments can't actively oppose in legislation something proposed in the state, 1/4 of states can't oppose something federal, etc).
That way, to corrupt the whole, you need to corrupt a majority of the people to elect from themselves (because in a pool of 1500, preferably with 1 2 - 4 year office term per official, so career politicians are harder to come by) corrupt politicians to work against the publics interest. Sadly, I think the modern American public would probably do just that and fuck themselves over. It would require an independently minded, free thinking populace that can understand the world to understand forces are working against them. They aren't there now, though.