k.i.s.s.

was it bill clinton that made the above famous?  or was his famous phrase about stupid and the economy?  i forget exactly, but if bill said the above, i do agree.  got a lot of respect for the man actually - a whole lot of balanced budgets and paying off debt during his presidency, which makes a whole lot of sense to me.  while i think money is a crock, the logical concept of living within your means i consider a natural law.

american politics is all very convoluted - clinton paying off debt, bush II doing various ridiculous things and simultaneously ruining the public finances, obama doing almost nothing and simultaneously further ruining the public finances....  who can you trust from that cast of fools?  in my country, the tea party is portrayed as a bunch of extremist cranks, but anyone who espouses the fundamental principle of living within ones means, they have my respect.  need more people like that in the world.  a whole bunch of their other policies i'm pretty sure i find reprehensible, however fiscal responsibility trumps it all i'm afraid.

so anyways, free markets:  really good, right up until they weren't, and how to replace that very useful signalling mechanism showing us where to allocate resources.  well obviously, you could create an app for that.  conceptually really simple - suppliers on one side, customers on the other, match them off in real time, unlimited 'products', effectively just a market without prices, just first-in-first-served.

i envisage this would need a classification system, whereby essential products or services, those needed to sustain life, get allocated first to those most in need.  but again, who decides who is most in need?  can't be a government babu, they are demonstrably useless.  perhaps you could have a version of internet democracy, whereby those 'customers' in the most need are determined by the number of likes they receive.  to further refine this system you could scale the likes, so that those from a trustworthy source (similar to ratings on ebay, combined with audits to keep bastards honest) get a higher value than a like from dodgy brothers inc.

points i intend to go into soon:  what is the motivation in selling if there is no profit?  who are these auditors i speak of?  and how do you remove the hoard mentality?