It is pretty obvious we've got to stop running our various governments the way we do now. People vote, politicians spend a ridiculous amount of money and put us into debt. Our mayor keeps spending our money on legal bills because he doesn't want to let the rich white people have a dog park. The dog park is already funded because rich white people know how to get stuff done, but the mayor keeps trying to stop it from happening, and he uses city money to try and stop it. I think, in some ways, the rich white people deserve it, because at least some of them voted for this mayor.
Anyway, I was imagining what would happen if you just took everybody eligible to vote and issue stock. Presumably the stock would have some value. People would sell their stock. Some folks would buy. This is where it gets a little sticky- I want property owners, the people who get stuck with the bills, to make the decisions for the most part. Things might go haywire if pension funds or Bank of America decide to buy up the stock. Maybe not, since the corporations would have incentive to keep the value of the stock high, but maybe so, because they are divorced from the physical property in the city. They could decide to turn the place into a strip mine.
Let's presume some sort of habitation/landownership is necessary to vote. Obviously, this isn't true initially. Initially the whole point of switching from universal suffrage to stock is so that people who don't have much sense will sell their stock to people who have more sense, and hopefully, are also more invested in the area. What we want to do is create the conditions in which people are encouraged to invest heavily in their property, and by extension, the city. Considering the volatility and inevitable crash we are facing, it shouldn't be too hard to create these conditions, assuming the larger governments allowed it.
Well, I suppose it is an unlikely event, in any case, since if conditions are ripe enough for such a radical departure from current governance we could likely simply ignore universal suffrage and run the local government as a service for local property owners. Then we'd be back to the old idea of linking title to the property with stock in the city corporation.
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