Family Coalition Party Leader Giuseppe Gori has published an online work titled Economic Optimalism which presents his political philosphy on how to run a government. He terms his particular view optimalism.
The idea behind optimalism is to base government spending and operations on scientific reality and real-world experience, not ideology.
Of course, most people do not want their government to be ruled by ideology, but by common sense. So what is the difference with optimalism?
To better illustrate this ideology, I will explain the means of adopting fiscal policy, i.e. budgeting. Because that's what a lot of the book deals with.
A country has a fixed amount of GNP, i.e. of resources, and you can use from either 0 to 100% of that country's resources to run the government. The optimalist attempts to find the optimal percentage of the country's GNP that needs to be spent on government operations and programs in order to maximize the economic effect of fiscal policy.
How? The government would tender bids to econometric firms-- firms that create economic models. These models would be public. One would be chosen as the model for the government's budget.
The percentage GNP would constitute the government's budget for that fiscal year.
And government departments would be allocated a percentage of that budget, not a fixed amount.
This has the advantage of never producing a deficit, and of expanding and contracting according to the current economic situation.
To finance this fiscal policy, optimalism proposes one type of tax: the Value-Added Tax (VAT). This one kind of tax would replace the numerous types of taxes already in place (income, property, corporate, fees), and eliminate bureaucracy and make the tax system more efficient.
This system of taxation is less "progressive" upfront, but is more favourable to the less fortunate because it creates more wealth, and that ultimately benefits them.
This system seeks to avoid the problems of politicians spending too much money to gain votes.
The idea is to create a government that is as efficient as possible, according to the available means.
That's an aspect of the system that I find very attractive. I neither advocate for small or big government, but I want "right-sized" government.
In that vein, optimalism advocates for the free market, competition in all industries and field of activities, but it can allow for things such as a fiscal stimulus in order to attain the optimal economic productivity.
There's a lot more in the book, and it's only 47 pages. Please take a look and comment.
