>If I say "pay me 50 dollars, and I will give you X", and then you pay me and I just grin at you, and the WORST you can do to me is to say "fine, then we won't do that again", that's not accountability.
Sure it is. You're presumably selling X to me at a profit, so if you screw me now, you're losing all of your future profits, which keeps you honest when that's worth more to you than the benefit of screwing me out of $50 once. Obviously that only works in cases where we're talking about repeat players, but it's still miles away from nothing.
>Their own consciences AND each other.
What do you think that buys you?
Here is how this would play out. A hundred honest people go to Washington. Someone suggests that they get $250,000 for their local community center. That's nothing out of the federal budget, and it seems like a worthy cause, so OK. Somebody else is a teacher and wants a million dollars for her school, same deal.
Soon people are exchanging support for each others' "worthy" pet causes. Somebody's pet cause is a sister who needs a heart transplant. It sure would be nice to get a heart transplant for everybody who needs one, though it turns out there just aren't enough donor hearts for that. But we can make an exception for this guy's sister, can't we? We need his vote to get the community center and the school money.
Eventually somebody asks for something that costs a billion dollars instead of a million and some people have reservations about spending that much on something that smells like favoritism, but the first one will be something sympathetic like a billion dollars for cancer research (which so happens to target the rare type of cancer that the bill's sponsor has). So that one gets the green light because who is going to tell a cancer patient you won't fund cancer research? And once you set the precedent for a billion dollar personal project the next thing you know federal laws are being passed which give a regulatory advantage to the company of the chosen one who works in that industry and major government contracts are being awarded on the basis of "I don't trust these low bidders I've never met but I know this guy."
Sure it is. You're presumably selling X to me at a profit, so if you screw me now, you're losing all of your future profits, which keeps you honest when that's worth more to you than the benefit of screwing me out of $50 once. Obviously that only works in cases where we're talking about repeat players, but it's still miles away from nothing.
>Their own consciences AND each other.
What do you think that buys you?
Here is how this would play out. A hundred honest people go to Washington. Someone suggests that they get $250,000 for their local community center. That's nothing out of the federal budget, and it seems like a worthy cause, so OK. Somebody else is a teacher and wants a million dollars for her school, same deal.
Soon people are exchanging support for each others' "worthy" pet causes. Somebody's pet cause is a sister who needs a heart transplant. It sure would be nice to get a heart transplant for everybody who needs one, though it turns out there just aren't enough donor hearts for that. But we can make an exception for this guy's sister, can't we? We need his vote to get the community center and the school money.
Eventually somebody asks for something that costs a billion dollars instead of a million and some people have reservations about spending that much on something that smells like favoritism, but the first one will be something sympathetic like a billion dollars for cancer research (which so happens to target the rare type of cancer that the bill's sponsor has). So that one gets the green light because who is going to tell a cancer patient you won't fund cancer research? And once you set the precedent for a billion dollar personal project the next thing you know federal laws are being passed which give a regulatory advantage to the company of the chosen one who works in that industry and major government contracts are being awarded on the basis of "I don't trust these low bidders I've never met but I know this guy."