Democracy is somewhat like a rough approximation of a market in the sense that people are "buying with votes" what they expect to be the best product/service. But a key difference is that it's a huge collective buy of a monopoly or near-monopoly. Are or were there "attempts" to make public administration more market-like in the sense of having political parties acting more like companies from which one can request public services through vouchers? Imagine that there were "Republican" and "Democrat"-run public schools in the same cities and states at the same time, rather each parting running them all in N-year long terms, and one could then put their children in the public school of their choice through vouchers. Thus being able to sort of "switch" the public administration in a way that wouldn't be fundamentally different from switching between private schools. Without being "locked" in the term length, and perhaps, because of that, making the administrative parties put more effort into providing the best public service, without the usual state/city/country-level near-monopoly. Perhaps schools aren't the best "example" as perhaps it would be better dealt with a more conventional voucher system, less/no need of parties being involved hands on on the school administration, I guess. But perhaps the same basic concept could be expanded in a way that political parties compete concurrently within the same political territory in a more market-like system, but yet with a redistributive voucher system, rather than votes, or plain anarcho-capitalism.
Imagine having an entire duplicate government on top of the one you have now. Let's you go first: you do that in your town, and I'll get a chance to see how it works.
Because moving to another city, state, or country is usually more inconvenient than switching the provider of a service. "Why not switching from the public service to a private one"? Maybe no money for that, but regardless, I was just wondering if there weren't alternatives in the form of non-monopolistic governments. The question is more intriguing regarding everything other than public services, anyway. I imagined primarily division, not (or not necessarily) duplication/multiplication. There are N public schools, and 2 or 3 main proposals of how they should be administered, none of those being preferred by the overwhelming majority of the population. Then instead of being "the >50% winner takes it all" (or however it really works in the US), with a large almost-half of the population being forced to accept an alternative they didn't vote for, you'd have N public schools running under different policies/principles, divided in a closer approximation to what the population really wants. With public schools it's pretty close to vouchers, really I guess. Multiplication would only occur more or less in direct correspondence of public approval of the parties' policies, as they would gather more revenue and propose the creation of new schools under their policies. Or something like it, I don't have laid out plans of exactly how it could be, and I don't have the resources to take over and impose such system (...not yet). I was just roughing it out questioning whether something similar would already exist or have existed somewhere. Someone would point it out, and perhaps there could be an interesting discussion about it.
