To E/Acc: Governance? Othernance!

~ instead of political pork dictating infrastructure, let businesses pool and plan what they need, themselves ~

We do need government to protect from abusive practices, and uphold law, contract, & defense, and provide services to children and those on hard times. Yet! We also gave the Federal government the task of deciding where, when, and how to build infrastructure — and they don’t do so well with that. Instead of listening to engineers and business analysts, they listen to donors, and so their plans don’t create value for our nation’s businesses.

That lack of coherent planning reduces businesses’ demand for labor, and lowers the wages they can offer, hurting regular folks too, who then need more government assistance. In contrast, infrastructure makes all of our country’s business more profitable globally — which is what we sorely lack at the moment.

Businesses, meanwhile, have lots of private data that lets them know what would help, and it would benefit them to pool that private data, reliably and flexibly, in some way that did NOT compromise their own business to their competitors… while allowing all those businesses to pool their resources into infrastructure that boosts everyone’s margins. How might we do that?

Beneath the Federal government, create a new Node: with its own legislature and executive, to be chosen by the businesses who pay US taxes. Each business can BUY a vote toward this sub-government’s proposals; buying multiple votes on the same issue quickly becomes successively more expensive, however! Those bought votes ARE the tax upon those businesses by this new government entity, and it uses that tax-base to enact the proposed infrastructure sought by that vote. This legislature and executive have NO other powers, aside from infrastructure-related developments, and they are still sub-servient to the demands of Federal agencies (EPA, FDA, OSHA, etc.).

This pulls infrastructure plans and operations away from the bloated pork of the legislature, into the hands of the businesses who know what they would need best. This is NOT privatization of public utilities; when infrastructure is built this way, it is paid UP-FRONT with the votes bought by each business. No citizen-consumer need pay some hidden, Trillion-dollar debt.

Why Othernance?

Privatization hands-out bloated contracts to the best-brown-nose insider. Politicians only want a bridge in their state. No national plan is pursued coherently, because alternating teams win the Senate or Presidency, to over-haul all the funding. We need to insulate infrastructure-development from the whimsy of political rivalries, and place it in the hands of the folks who have ‘skin-in-the-game’ — the business owners. If THOSE business-owners are the ones paying for the infrastructure, I don’t see any reason to complain.

Those businesses SHOULD buy votes; it is that ‘skin-in-the-game’ that incentivizes them to find real solutions, for durable value-creation. And, those votes can be priced in a rapidly rising scale, to incentivize participation from smaller businesses (who have a lot of total clout!) while also giving large companies the chance to push the needle where it counts.

They should be allowed to make their own internal changes, according to their own votes, as well — they will find their own best practices, to produce coherent results, quickly. I imagine that, if they vote for Representatives, prime picks will be Jamie Dimon and the top analysts from McKinsey. Give them a government, to rule over infrastructure, paid by their own dollar votes!