Legislation can help in a variety of ways, like taxing digital goods to provide work grants for open source developers. The federal government could create a public payment processor.
There are many things that can be done to help the public flourish, it's very easy if you open up your imagination.
you're just replacing the reality of a private actor deciding to ruin you for having the wrong beliefs or selling the wrong goods with a public actor deciding to ruin you for having the wrong beliefs or selling the wrong goods.
half of the country disagrees with the other half on almost every issue. the first thing a party is going to do when elected is change the nationalized payment processor's policy to ban the other half of otherwise law-abiding companies and individuals to stop them from being able to do business.
at least now with stripe there's some lead time and it takes a few years after a major political shift to feel the effects, which makes it more stable.
a better solution is to change a different piece of legislation that currently allows Stripe to choose to do business with whoever it wants, which is what allows them to ruin you. if stripe were legally required to provide you with service unless your business were proven in court to be against the law, this problem would be solved without another bulky addition to the already bloated public sector.
> if stripe were legally required to provide you with service unless your business were proven in court to be against the law, this problem would be solved without another bulky addition to the already bloated public sector.
It's not Stripe though (they do of course have their own policies, but) mostly it's the downstream financial institutions. Stripe is an API over the existing financial ecosystem, which is both incredibly regulated and somehow still the wild west.
So, you'd actually need to change the law for all financial institutions/payment processors (really it's Visa and MC that are the issues most of the time), and even then it's not that simple.
Consider, this law passes and is implemented. What do Visa/MC/Stripe/Paypal do when they identify a fraudster. Do they need to go to court to stop having them as a client? Who holds liability for any fraudulent transactions between identification and the court case.
Like, I completely agree in principle given how central internet transactions have become to all of our lives, but there's a bunch of complexity that would need to be dealt with to avoid creating a whole host of new problems.
Steve Yegge talks about this: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legal...
(funnily enough, he gives a financial system example in this blog post, which I'd entirely forgotten).
Having read the article you linked, I can see your point on complexity and how it's much easier to discuss and debate than it is to actually spec it out and drive adoption.
While I would love for these systems to be fair and righteous and all of that jazz, I soberly must recognize that I lack the resources and desire to do all or even any of that work myself, and therefore have no leg to stand on in holding others accountable for not doing so.
I don't disagree. I'm merely pointing out that it's not just a matter of technical implementation.
the government doesn't do much except wage war, arrest people, spy on them, and push paper around. everything else is done by contractors, and they're outsourcing an increasing amount of those things they actually do. why would this bottom-bidder contractor or work grant open source developer do a better job than twillio or stripe?
there are many things that can be done to help the public flourish, but the most expedient and obvious one is to stop wasting government money on poorly-managed nonsense created by committee and allow people to regain that lost value in the form of tax decreases.
if your solution to a problem involves increasing taxes for any reason, it's a bad solution.
edit: they maintain national parks. that's pretty cool, but thats like a drop in the bucket for their budget
Payment processors are courts in disguise.