I was thinking recently about socialism, fascism, and other shiny theories of goverment that collapse as soon as you apply them to imperfect people, and I had a thought. I don’t know how original it is, but it came to me so here goes.

What if, on our income tax forms, we all had a page with a series of checkboxes, allowing us to declare where we want our tax money to go? I’m envisioning general categories like “roads,” “public schooling,” etc. And, depending on how many categories there are, we would each be able to pick, I don’t know, say, three.

I know the technology is available to us now, since Safeway is able to track what brand of tomato paste we all like. But is the theory sound? Could we govern by Facebook poll?

Imagine, in this twitterocracy, not enough people in a region checked off “roads” one year. We can assume the roads would fall into disrepair, and more people would check off “roads” the following year. Areas with lots of parents would have well-funded schools. Medicine Hat would have an awesome hospital. The system should self-balance–I think.

What about the money the government needs to run itself? I doubt many people would be interested in checking off “administrative overhead.” I sure wouldn’t. I like to think that if you take away the decisions about where money should go, you could probably get away with a much smaller government, but that isn’t very practical. Better to let the administration have the tax money of those who choose not to fill their boxes in. Judging from the level of voter apathy today, that should be plenty for them.

Of course, I’d be more interested in government if I had a direct, quantifiable say in it. Would you?