Complexity used to favour the rich

Government and big business have interests that often conflict with ordinary people and smaller businesses. They habitually use complexity to benefit themselves, at the expense of small, local enterprises and natural persons.

...leading members of the [US] Senate are seriously considering giving the most profitable companies in the world a total tax holiday as a reward for their last seven years of systematic tax avoidance. Hundreds of billions of potential tax dollars would disappear from the Treasury. And there isn’t a peep from anyone, anywhere, on this issue. We’re seriously talking about defaulting on our debt, and cutting Medicare and Social Security, so that Google can keep paying its current 2.4 percent effective tax rate and GE, a company that received a $140 billion bailout en route to worldwide 2010 profits of $14 billion, can not only keep paying no taxes at all, but receive a $3.2 billion tax credit from the federal government. And nobody appears to give a ****. What the hell is wrong with people? Have we all lost our minds? Corporate tax holiday in debt ceiling deal: where's the uproar? Matt Taibbi, 22 July

Complexity, obscurity, and just the plain boredom of the policymaking process are being exploited by powerful interests. They can get away with this, because policy is expressed in terms that are so incomprehensible or vague that they deter outsiders - that's those of us who should be in uproar - from getting involved.

Social Policy Bonds would be different. They would target explicit goals that are meaningful to ordinary people: cutting the crime rate, reducing unemployment, reducing pollution, for instance. The public would take an interest because it can understand outcomes. The bonds could close the gap between the public and the policymakers, which is now not only wide, but widening. Perhaps disastrously so.