this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
26 points (100.0% liked)

Socialism

2850 readers
1 users here now

Beehaw's community for socialists, communists, anarchists, and non-authoritarian leftists (this means anti-capitalists) of all stripes. A place for all leftist and labor news and discussion, as long as you're nice about it.


Non-socialists are welcome to come to learn, though it's hard to get to in-depth discussions if the community is constantly fighting over the basics. We ask that non-socialists please be respectful and try not to turn this into a "left vs right" debate forum by asking leading questions or by trying to draw others into a fight.


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

TED talk on quadratic funding, a non-market mechanism that a postcapitalist society could use to support a decentralized ecosystem of public goods available to each according to need

"How Quadratic Funding Could Finance Your Dreams | Kevin Owocki | TED"

https://youtu.be/1GRt0j698T4

This mechanism could be used to solve funding issues in public goods such as journalism and FOSS.

Please ignore the reference to crypto. This could be incorporated into today's voting process

@socialism

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

Great idea - the idea is to favor funding to project that a lot of people contribute a little money to over those that few people contribute a lot of money to, thereby removing rich people's money's power.

The way I see it, it's a sort of hybrid form of public funding: there's public money going to certain projects, but they go to projects that people privately put their own money into, so they have a real personal stake in it, with a bias towards funneling more public money to projects that more people want.

But I can immediately see a problem: rich people bribing enough poor people in the community to fund the stuff they want done. E.g. telling 500 people "Here's $1200: put $1000 in the golf course extension and keep $200" to get their $500,000 private golf extension funded.

The other problem I see is that for this kind of scheme to become mainstream, banks and governments will have to get onboard, and those are controlled by the rich, who obviously don't want to shoot themselves in the foot.

The third potential problem is, crypto bros are pushing this. We'd better look really REALLY closely at the proposal, because there's a really good chance there's something scammy going on in it.

Still, intriguing concept: it seems reasonable and I can see myself participating in such fundings.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 3 weeks ago

Thanks, that was a good analysis.

[–] jlou@mastodon.social 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

A variant of this should replace non-profit tax exemptions and all campaign finance rules.

The way to prevent bribing is secret and anonymous contributions. You could, for example, imagine including these contributions to your favorite media and FOSS organizations as part of your ballot.

This could be implemented by a federation of worker coops to fund local public goods that all the member coops benefit from with the matching pool coming from membership fees and Harberger leases

@socialism