VirtualWelfareState

OK, let's put a few things together.

Was re-reading SteveCrossan's article on VirtualCountries

Thinking about SocialNetworkingServices like TribeNet

How soon before such services combine with MutualSocieties. For example such a network could form a buyers co-operative or group for :

• health / unemployment insurance

• pensions

• in fact anything

Put the other way, any insurance company or building society could use social networking style software to connect it's members.

Charging a fee for membership is like taxation. So could a network of "willing socialists" sign up for a network where membership was a proportion of income? Something similar may happen with certain religious networks who's members pledge a proportion of their salary.

Counter argument

I can hear the libertarian right laughing like drains as this idea spectacularly fails to take off :-) They'd love this to be tried. Because they're right. Redistribution only works when you're able to steal from the unwilling rich to distribute to the poor. The fact is that the network will be joined by a few socialist philanthropists and a lot of poor, and there won't be sufficient to redistribute.

Counter-counter-arguments

So what else is new? The super-rich already duck out of paying their taxes.

If so, that reveals the failure of philanthropy which is what the right always propose as the alternative to co-ercive redistribution

: no it doesn't, philanthropy applies the intelligent decision making of the doner, this system might fail beause the central body allocating the "tax" is inefficient.

See also TheEndOfInsurance, MoneyAsNetworkProtocol