Let's assume that, somehow, a utilitarian party comes to power in a western industrialised country. What do you think it would or should do in its first term?

Just curious. Large hikes in the foreign aid budget? Anti-speciesist laws?

(It's a bit silly, but it does raise the issue of whether utilitarian goals can be explicitly incorporated into electoral politics).

spindoctor wrote:Let's assume that, somehow, a utilitarian party comes to power in a western industrialised country. What do you think it would or should do in its first term?

Ban any and all commercial processes that rely on routine infliction of suffering on sentient entities, especially factory farming. Channel research funding into fields with high expected utility, including hedonic enhancement possibilities.

This is a fantastic opportunity to us all to fill in our favorite political philosophies and go utterly mad and end up hating each other. But I'm going to reply anyway.

Repeal most laws regarding illicit drug use and replace them with a legal regulation system.
Implement CAK for all birds, phasing out other methods of slaughter.
Slash military budget (assuming U.S. or UK or somewhere)
Throw small amounts of money (a few million $) at util research projects (what suffers etc.)
Rights for Great Apes?
Set in motion long-term plans to outlaw factory farming (do it slowly, lots of gradual reforms)
Fund in-vitro meat research
Fund biotech research (a la David Pearce)
Perhaps look into x-risks

This all kind of depends on whether we have to worry about re-election. In the real world, obviously, we'd be able to do almost nothing. Passing anti-speciesist laws, for example, would probably result in riots.

Exactly, Gedusa. Re-election! To be re-elected, for every utilitarian policy, we need to introduce a populist one. i.e. first we increase foreign aid... and lower the tax on petrol! Well, putting the issue of re-election aside, I'd suggest the following...

Charity
1. Increase foreign aid budget
2. Redirect foreign aid budget away from political interests .e.g neighbours and those on the frontier of the 'war on terror' towards countries most in need e.g. sub saharan africa
3. Strip churches of their tax-exempt status. Reduce tax breaks for donations to other ineffective charities
4. Increase tax breaks for people who donate to effective organisations

Human equality
1. legalise gay marriage

Anti-speciesism:
1. Ban meat
2. Introduce labelling for items in supermarkets that specifies how much production techniques hurt animals
3. Ban the exporting of live animals.
4. Greatly strengthen animal cruelty laws
5. Make human research applications easier and animal research applications harder.

Health & Biotech
1. Ration health care. Only cost-effective treatment (measured by DALY /$) are funded. This stringent cost-effectiveness measure could eventually extent to other aspects of government.
2. Legalise abortion and euthanasia
3. Legalise genetic engineering of babies by IVF
4. Legalise some transhumanist technology
5. Consider a person who registered to donate their organs, who has died. Their family doesn't want their organs donated. We would make the person's wishes count, rather than the family's.
6. It would become legal to sell sperm and non-vital organs.

Society
1. Legalise marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms
2. Legalise prostitution

Science
1. Research which animals can suffer.
2. Research what causes animals happiness or pain.
3. Research the quality of life of wild animals in various environments (swamp, desert, forest, etc)
4. Research in vitro meat
5. Research which charities are most effective as per Givewell and Giving what we Can.

Industrial Relations
1. Performance based pay is introduced in education, medicine and various other fields

That's just the start. Really, it's breathtaking how un-utilitarian our current governments are.

1. Ban meat

Que riots.

I'm not sure about foreign aid. Unless it was done much better than it is at the moment, I wouldn't want it.

Pretty much agreed with other interventions. And I agree that governments get some easy win stuff so wrong.

Additionally: Legalize universal access to reliable and painless suicide drugs, on the condition of a delay period to overcome short-lived crises. Abolish coercive suicide intervention unless the chosen suicide method would endanger others. Alternatively, provide an opt-out mode for coercive suicide intervention that can be chosen by individual citizens, again with a delay period. Allow active euthanasia as a legal procedure to be added to living wills, to be executed on pre-defined conditions (e.g. permanent inability to think clearly, move and communicate). These rights should apply to minors as well, on the condition that they understand the associated concepts.

De-criminalize all non-coercive sexual relations unless third parties are harmed or consent cannot be established, e.g. legalize consensual incest but not sex with small children or non-human animals.

Allow access to currently illegal recreational drugs for citizens who can prove they know the risks and take them freely without harming others (they would have to pay for the costs of this process as well).

Build a global infrastructure of mobile communication that allows all people to communicate their current location and state of well-being to the global public. Make universally illegal all interventions that would prevent a person from this specific type of communication, or censor or distort the content of this communication, or prevent the general public from accessing and analyzing the messages (measurement of global well-being, global transparent emergency communication channel).

Legalize pre-implantation genetic diagnostics for genetic defects and, conditional on sufficient scientific evidence, alleles that correlate with differences of subjective well-being, unless side-effects or abuse potential are expected (for those countries in which it isn't already legal).

Hedonic Treader wrote:Allow access to currently illegal recreational drugs for citizens who can prove they know the risks and take them freely without harming others

I'm not saying this idea is bad on balance, but it has at least this problem: what about addicts? They will certainly harm themselves, they will lose productivity, they will harm their friends and family and they will make decisions that they will later regret. Perhaps we should protect their future abstinent selves from their addicted present selves?

Regarding foreign aid, Gedusa, what about donating to female education or population control, rather than food?

RyanCarey wrote:I'm not saying this idea is bad on balance, but it has at least this problem: what about addicts? They will certainly harm themselves, they will lose productivity, they will harm their friends and family and they will make decisions that they will later regret. Perhaps we should protect their future abstinent selves from their addicted present selves?

You're right, it's not completely simple. As a general tendency, I suspect that paternalistic intervention in people's private conduct and without their consent almost always does more harm than good, as long as that conduct doesn't harm third parties. Respect for individual autonomy is a pre-requisite for human well-being in any state that demands a monopoly of physical violence. This is true even for democracies, because people have shown that they are ready to vote away the autonomy of minorities, based on whims. The criminalization of consensual incest is an example. The utility quantities aren't massive in these cases (recreational drugs aren't the most important topic in the world), but they are indicators for a legal system's respect for individual autonomy, which has a huge impact on general welfare for at least 3 reasons:

1) It protects against arbitrary transgressions of those with power.
2) It can be an instrument of rational individuals to defend their utility againt well-meaning but irrational or underinformed interventionists.
3) It is perceived as valuable in its own right (we generally like doing things voluntarily more than we would like doing these things involuntarily).

This is also why I think these arguments are non-starters:

they will lose productivity, they will harm their friends and family

Both imply that other people are entitled to an individual's productivity and/or relationships, which is problematic from the perspective of autonomy. If this counts, we must also favor laws that forbid people from quitting sub-par jobs and ending bad private relationships. The only exceptions I can see are voluntarily accepted responsibilities, such as the obligation to financially support children that the individual has created either deliberately or as a consequence of knowingly engaging in unsafe sex (and even here, the obligation is more related to the child's entitlement to compensation for the non-consensual act of bringing it into existence in a state of need than an axiomatic moral obligation to maintain a relationship etc.)

In the least convenient world possible, I would favor severe autonomy violations for the greater good. In practical reality, it's very often a mistake to use coercion against people in order to protect them from themselves, or because their non-harmful conduct appears immoral or aesthetically unpleasing to others (such as in incest prohibition etc.)

Many of us have said increase foreign aid, and that's likely the right course. But if it were in your power, at what proportion of GDP would you set foreign aid, if you were the government of a single (small, rich) country? Would you raise taxes sky high and close all non-essential programs (arts funding, museums, etc) to channel most of it to subsaharan africa where it would do more good?

Regarding foreign aid, Gedusa, what about donating to female education or population control, rather than food?

Hmm. Yes, I suppose. Maybe I'm being too pessimistic about the prospects for rationally implemented foreign aid. I don't think those particular causes would be the most efficient but can imagine ofter efficient foreign aid targets. I think that for some reason my attitude to government aid is different to charitable aid, something about the scale of one versus the other and the bureaucracy involved in the former makes my intuitions start warning sirens. I'm way into medical aid in the form of vaccines and developing vaccines for diseases that affect mainly the developing world though, weirdly there's no intuitive squick at that.

Many of us have said increase foreign aid, and that's likely the right course. But if it were in your power, at what proportion of GDP would you set foreign aid, if you were the government of a single (small, rich) country? Would you raise taxes sky high and close all non-essential programs (arts funding, museums, etc) to channel most of it to subsaharan africa where it would do more good?

If I weren't worried about re-election... then quite possibly I'd withdraw some services (the arts) entirely and cut some severely (defense) and then use the money saved on reducing x-risks, medical research, population control etc. The proportion of GDP I'd want allocated to these projects would be something like 10-20%, with increased taxes to make up this figure. I'd probably want to keep the rest in the economy to keep it running.

Is there evidece that increased foreign aid is really the most rational option to alleviate poverty in the long run? What about a reduction in export subsidies and import barriers for agricultural products? Is it a misunderstanding on my part, or are there state-driven distortions of the international markets that actually make it harder for developing countries to compete fairly?

Regarding development aid: Do research on which kinds of development aid are most effective (and have minimal adverse effects) and focus on those. A fancy name like "development upgrade" would help differentiate those optimal methods from less effective ones.

Education:

• Make learning about ethics mandatory.
• Do a complete reform of the education system so that teaching is decoupled from testing and certification. This allows learners who take a non-standard educational route like un-schooling to get equivalent degrees/certificates. It would also improve the possibility to compare the effectiveness of different kinds of teaching and learning methods.

Economy:

• Phase out all(!) subventions (except financing useful research). Distorting the markets is not a good idea in general.
• Reform the patent system. For example, let the government pay for inventions directly instead of granting patent protection. But yeah, this is a really complicated topic in itself and may require more research.
• Consider a basic income guarantee once it's economically feasible. There would be better incentives for accepting jobs with low payment under such a system.
• Simplify the tax system. Like, for real. Usually demanding a more simple tax system leads to an even more complicated tax system in reality.

Hedonic Treader wrote:De-criminalize all non-coercive sexual relations unless third parties are harmed or consent cannot be established, e.g. legalize consensual incest but not sex with small children or non-human animals.

I think it would be better not to have any specific laws against sexual offences at all. Instead, it would make more sense only to punish general abuse. Treating sexual abuse separately from non-sexual abuse can be used to distract from the severity of non-sexual abuse.
The issue with consensual sexual intercourse with non-human animals is a rather delicate issue. Often, due to speciesism, it is claimed axiomatically that non-human animals can't consent to sexual intercourse with human animals, with no real basis in reality. I think it's in the interest of utilitarians not to restrict the spectrum of pleasant activities for animals arbitrarily. For more information on this topic there's the detailed post Zoosexuality: should it be considered acceptable?

Gedusa wrote:

1. Ban meat

Que riots.

Yes. Planning a personal philosophy with utilitarianism is different from planning a political philosophy. Identifying that killing cows causes harm is one thing, but a utilitarian approach to government should include consideration of the many repercussions of enacting prohibitive laws.

The posts on this page represent the views of people in this forum, but keep in mind that the views here represent a combination of two things: 1) utilitarian system of ethics, and 2) a system of values that extends moral consideration to nonhuman beings. It might be possible to declare a utilitarian form of government that excludes consideration of animals (consider the interests of possible society after a prolonged global depression). Granted that the typical ingredients of utilitarianism include impartiality and a pursuit of objectively defensible philosophical stances and that those things would seem to lead to moral consideration of animals, but not everyone shares that view.

I'd tax animal cruelty. Factory-farmed meat would be prohibitively expensive, and meat in general would be pretty expensive, but you could still get it.

Is there evidece that increased foreign aid is really the most rational option to alleviate poverty in the long run?

As opposed to what? Open trade is nice, but it only goes so far. Is there anything else we can do that isn't foreign aid? Or are you asking about the current methods of foreign aid? In that case, it's clearly not the best way. We'd not only increase the budget, but allocate it better.

I'd try to increase investment, either by subsidizing it or by just investing government money, possibly to the extent that the interest on it replaces taxes.

I'd do more experimentation. For example, I don't think it would be a good idea to have the government own and produce most forms of intellectual property, but I'm not sure enough to not consider it worth testing.

I'd try to increase investment, either by subsidizing it or by just investing government money, possibly to the extent that the interest on it replaces taxes.

This seems likely to work and very good if it did. Why isn't this done? There must be some reason.

I agree with most of the stuff mentioned, if only as large scale experiments to see what works best.

Encouraging people to invest? Yeah, it's called superannuation. In Australia, about 5-10% of income is set aside in a superannuation account which can only be withdrawn at retirement. Additional voluntary contributions are matched by the government, which is basically a subsidy for investment.

If you mean the government just getting its money from investment, they'd have to eliminate the deficit, eliminate the debt, and finally create a savings of around thirty times the annual budget. That would likely take over a century.

One problem is that whoever controls what the government invests in will be horrendously powerful.

Among many other things (most already posted) I think one of the first actions of a utilitarian government would be:

DECRIMINALIZE DRUGS - that is at least decriminalize the use of all psychoactive drugs. Nonviolent users should not be subjected to state (or other) inflicted punishments. It is also very likely that decriminalization of production should immediately follow.

RyanCarey wrote:

Hedonic Treader wrote:Allow access to currently illegal recreational drugs for citizens who can prove they know the risks and take them freely without harming others

I'm not saying this idea is bad on balance, but it has at least this problem: what about addicts? They will certainly harm themselves, they will lose productivity, they will harm their friends and family and they will make decisions that they will later regret. Perhaps we should protect their future abstinent selves from their addicted present selves?

Regarding foreign aid, Gedusa, what about donating to female education or population control, rather than food?

Portugal has done a decent job of decriminalizing drugs - they funnel their money not into prosecution, but instead rehabilitation centers that can help the people that need it most.

As for productivity - watching TV and being lazy makes one lose productivity

What lowers productivity the most? Internet

Gedusa wrote:util research projects (what suffers etc.)

RyanCarey wrote:Science
1. Research which animals can suffer.
2. Research what causes animals happiness or pain.
3. Research the quality of life of wild animals in various environments (swamp, desert, forest, etc)

is anyone doing this research?:D!:D!

yboris wrote:Portugal has done a decent job of decriminalizing drugs - they funnel their money not into prosecution, but instead rehabilitation centers that can help the people that need it most.)

my friend was telling me the other day about these heroin clinics where there are paramedics and nurses to care for people and also give out clean needles (i think thats done everywhere already, it certainly is here anyway) , im not sure what country he was talking about, but the cost something like that would cost. i have absolutely no problem with it whatsoever if the people taking heroin want to fund it but it would not be efficient for the tax payer to fund this kinda thing considering the more utility-efficient routes it could go into. my dad works in the drug courts (a new thing set up here recently), he says that while lotsa people can keep a job on cocaine if they're taking heroin thats all they're really doing, if this is the case then they wouldnt be funding it. but anyway in principle yea i agree but if people are gonna be totally unproductive thats not utilitarian

someone said to legalise prostitution, at the moment (here anyway) there is a lot of human trafficking which is horrific but obviously yea if it was all consensual it would be grand

i agree with most of whats been said and making ethics compulsory to study would be AWESOME!

Here's a radical proposal:
In a utilitarian government, prisons would be emptied. A significant role of imprisonment in our current society is for retribution (punishment). Criminals are better punished by fining, rather than imprisoning. Then, in the process of punishing, money is gathered for the state to improve others welfare. .A dollar value is placed on a crime according to the suffering it causes. In this society, when you commit a crime, you must pay the state an an amount that will make up for the suffering that you have caused. Then, crime is not so bad anymore because it will not, on balance, be harmful. Criminals will not need to be imprisoned for reasons of endangering society because their criminal acts are not, on balance, hurting society at all! The only time that a criminal needs to be .locked up is if they have hurt society so badly (e.g. mass murder) that the fines imposed by their government will bankrupt them. So prison will be reserved for criminals who are bankrupt.

Thus the criminal system would be made more like the civil system, in which people sue one and other. What do you think of this proposal?

RyanCarey wrote:Thus the criminal system would be made more like the civil system, in which people sue one and other. What do you think of this proposal?

Some aspects:
1) People may then perceive justice being done by paying money alone, which will socially translate as, "If I am ready to pay money, I can commit this crime legitimately. No further social repercussions for such crimes are needed." At least if the fines aren't high enough, this may increase readiness to commit certain crimes.
2) Some crimes cause a great deal of damage, which would translate to great costs, and many people who commit them are relatively poor. We already have legal modes where fines can replace jail time, and we already have more have-nots than haves in prison. This baseline might not change as much as you think with your proposal.
3) If punishment fines don't scale with income/wealth of the perpetrators, wealthy people will be much less deterred by the legal systems than they are now. I'm not certain to what degree this effect would materialize, and what kind of additional damage it would cause to society, and if that kind of damage could be compensated for by higher fines.
4) The state would get an additional incentive to overly criminalize relatively non-harmful behavior since instead of costing tax money, punishment could now generate income, which then can be used selfishly by the state's implementors.
5) Some violent offenders obviously have to be physically prevented from causing further harm to society unless they have much more money and we're literally ready to trade off physical security against more money for the state, which will probably receive low social acceptance.

1) People may then perceive justice being done by paying money alone, which will socially translate as, "If I am ready to pay money, I can commit this crime legitimately. No further social repercussions for such crimes are needed." At least if the fines aren't high enough, this may increase readiness to commit certain crimes.

Is there anything wrong with that? If the fines are high enough, and the government spending is efficient enough, the "criminal" is doing net good. Is that really something that should be discouraged?

I have previously suggested fining animal cruelty, so as to allow people to do it anyway when it's worth while. For example, it's useful for medicinal research. Are other "crimes" fundamentally different?

4) The state would get an additional incentive to overly criminalize relatively non-harmful behavior since instead of costing tax money, punishment could now generate income, which then can be used selfishly by the state's implementors.

This incentive is no greater than the incentive to increase taxes.

...we're literally ready to trade off physical security against more money for the state,...

Whether or not we consider ourselves ready, the trade-off exists. We don't seem to consider spending all the tax money on safety a good idea, so we implicitly don't consider physical security infinitely valuable.

...which will probably receive low social acceptance.

If we're going to do what everyone says, and everyone isn't utilitarians, it's not a utilitarian government. It's one of the democracies that already exist.

DanielLC wrote:

1) People may then perceive justice being done by paying money alone, which will socially translate as, "If I am ready to pay money, I can commit this crime legitimately. No further social repercussions for such crimes are needed." At least if the fines aren't high enough, this may increase readiness to commit certain crimes.

Is there anything wrong with that? If the fines are high enough, and the government spending is efficient enough, the "criminal" is doing net good. Is that really something that should be discouraged?

I have previously suggested fining animal cruelty, so as to allow people to do it anyway when it's worth while. For example, it's useful for medicinal research. Are other "crimes" fundamentally different?

Criminal punishment for the worst crimes is typically accompanied by jail time, confinement with rehabilitation, or suspended sentence with the threat of jail time. Your description sounds close to imposing a fee as opposed to a fine. A fine is intended to discourage behavior and therefore fines often increase with repeat offenses. A fee is typically set and does not increase. If the only threat for the worst crime was a pre-determined fee, then Bill Gates could probably afford to spend weekends thrill-killing. The result would be heightened fear and related consequences that would adversely affect society.

As for the fee for cruelty to animals, there might be a way to use that as a compromise when the prevailing attitudes in a country do not support stronger animal rights. The fee could be effective in supporting respect for animals, and if fees are set properly, it might both encourage humane treatment in most cases and provide funding for a system to enforce the standards. It sounds cruel to allow some types of experimentation, but if the cost were very high, then the frequency of such offenses would be lower and would hopefully be reserved for the most valuable experiments.

If the only threat for the worst crime was a pre-determined fee, then Bill Gates could probably afford to spend weekends thrill-killing.

He can already do things that have a higher opportunity cost, such as buy a fleet of yachts. If I could choose between him saving ten people and killing nine versus him doing nothing, I'd go with the first. After all, I'm statistically 11% more likely to be one of the ten.

The result would be heightened fear and related consequences that would adversely affect society.

Include that in the fee.

it might both encourage humane treatment in most cases and provide funding for a system to enforce the standards.

It should be enough to enforce the standards, and do enough additional good to balance the bad done by making the animals suffer.

It sounds cruel to allow some types of experimentation

Why? I don't think it seems cruel to allow human testing, so long as the expected benefits outweigh the costs. Animal testing couldn't possibly be more cruel.

RyanCarey wrote:Here's a radical proposal:

...

Thus the criminal system would be made more like the civil system, in which people sue one and other. What do you think of this proposal?

I like the idea where it can apply, but I think it would be quite common for people not to be able to pay. You'd have to account for the fact that criminals are only N% likely to be caught, then multiply the damage their crime caused by slightly more than (100/N). But I would guess most repeat criminals don't carefully save the income of their crimes up, and the system you're proposing seems to disincentivise them from doing so, depending on the consequences if they can't pay. Also, a lot of crimes don't give any income, and most of them are negative sum - violence obviously, but also for eg if you steal a new TV it becomes a used TV, instantly losing a lot of its value. So you'd need a strong backup plan.

Here's an alternate/complementary idea I had during the recent riots over here: to avoid stuffing up the prisons, impose fines on everyone convicted of rioting as a group. What the poorer convicts can't afford to pay, the richer convicts have to pick up. This means you get more money back in, and heavily discourage rich opportunists. I was only thinking of it for the riots, but maybe similar reasoning would be effective elsewhere. A friend told me the Normans used to have a system like this, but they didn't keep enough records for it to be easy to tell how successful it is.

Here is a thought for utilitarian FUNDING of government operations. This is based on Bentham's idea that each person can decide what counts a pleasure. That idea contradicts the idea that a bureaucrat should determine what is best for everybody (so this is leaning partially toward a libertarian view). This system is NOT one that is run by a utilitarian scientist who determines what is best for other people to do, but it is run by the cumulative input of each individual who ranks what is most valuable to them.

Over a 10-year initial break-in period, allow every taxpayer [EDIT: base it on each voter?] to allocate most of their taxes to about 20-30 categories of government spending. The numbers could be entered in percentages, and the government computer would deal with errors by adding the entered values and prorating them according. Legislators continue to set the total tax rate.

Possible categories would be military; perhaps several types of science funding (tech, disease research, NASA); debt reduction; transportation; department of agriculture rebates; department of agriculture inspections; department of agriculture general; an environment fund (perhaps spanning environmental cleanup, forestry department, national parks); international aid; emergency response funds; educational scholarships; *investment rebate*; a fraud-detection auditor or controller... I'm not sure about Social Security (maybe there would be a fixed part and an optional part of that fund--it might change over time).

A small percentage of money would be taken off the top and would go to core services like the court system and some other things. The form would show recent values for last-year's allocation and perhaps a recommendation from the President.

Some people would allocate everything to the military. Some would allocate it all to debt reduction; Some people would donate everything to science research. How corporations would allocate their tax revenue might be a subject of debate--does the CEO allocate it or do the corporate officers allocate it through private vote or do the employees get to allocate part of it. Corporations might allocate 100% to rebates for investment (note that the rebates would be awarded on investments in corporate machinery and the like). This might shift the effective tax base, so plenty of study would be needed. Perhaps it won't work or perhaps some limiters would be needed.

To temper the impacts of whimsical allocation of funds, allocation from each year would be prorated across 10 years. The actual tax money would be spent each year, but after the break-in period spending would be based on the weighted average of the past 10 years of allocations.

Politicians would plead with individuals to make good choices, but politicians would still decide the details on how to allocate money from each fund to specific projects. Watchdog agencies would

I'm not sure what details would be needed to make this system work. Some relatively simple pilot studies could be used to estimate how individuals would allocate funds, and some more detailed studies would be needed to see how corporations respond in long-term dynamic simulations.

[EDIT: yes, this might lead to what appears to be selfish behavior, but it might be interesting to explore it as an alternative to ideological gridlock in the U.S. I wonder if the liberals would allocate all money to social services and the conservatives allocate 100% to military or debt reduction, the net effect might be 'not too far' from the status quo. The idea of a benevolent, utilitarian dictator might sound good to some but is seen by libertarians as a personal assault on liberty and might not be politically feasible. The happiness of the 20% of the stingiest people in the country does count and might be offset by the 20% most generous. In the perfect world, individuals might think and act via utilitarianism and then the clash of ideologies would dissipate.]

Rehoot, the idea seems to be that people will allocate their funding intelligently and willingly, which is fine. But I would doubt that people will allocate their funding selflessly. If you give people enough freedom, they will just allocate the money back to themselves in the form of tax cuts, rebates, tariffs, and various other selfish things. Companies will lower the corporate tax every time. Mining execs will cut the carbon tax every time. And so on. There is a broader ideological issue here. This issue is how direct our democracy ought to be. If democracy is the "least worst" system of government we have found so far, will giving more power to the people make it better yet. This is not clear. It could merely force the population to be tyrannized by a government that more faithfully represents its stupid wishes!!! So although this is an interesting idea, it's not a simple utilitarian win, unlike most of the thread's suggestions.

Legalize polygamy.

And the previous comment is spam.

Not any more it isn't. (well, depending on what you make of Ryan's views )

If you give people enough freedom, they will just allocate the money back to themselves in the form of tax cuts, rebates, tariffs, and various other selfish things.

He didn't give that much freedom. You can't allocate money to "tax cuts". You might be able to do rebates, but at best it will go to people with the same general income as you. Very little of it would get back to you. If that's not good enough, you could make it so none of it goes back to you, and your rebates just go to other people with a specific income.

Legalize polygamy.

Stop legally recognizing any kind of marriage. If people want to get married, that's between them, and possibly their work and religious institution.