Regulatory capture has made that near impossible now. At least crypto throws another challenger in the ring and can give people and businesses an, albeit inferior, alternative.
I'm not sure trading three owners for one public one is the right direction to go, particularly since there are few limits to the number of providers that could be operating in this space.
The article points this out, too, that it's incredibly expensive and difficult to start a new network from the ground up. This sounds like the thing you actually want to fix.
I think cheap and ubiquitous internet access has changed the game here significantly and it seems far easier to bring new products and technologies into the merchant space than it ever has been before.
> Visa/MC can straight up ban you from processing payments without rhyme or reason while they hide behind KYC/AML law
Yes, but if you had a dozen other providers to turn to, this may not be an issue, and may force the established players to have a more transparent policy.
> The government can't hide behind these laws.
I would consider the "No Fly List" as a terrifying example of where this naivete inevitably ends.
governments will give utilities a monopoly but with requirements such as they must service everyone regardless of profitability or they get fined all to shit.
If the government is corrupt or corruptible (and which aren't?) then "service everyone" isn't as objective as it seems.
Meanwhile you can just force all the collective carriers to post their prices and their profits publicly or threaten them with complete loss of license to operate. This has been effective in the past and allows for a more open system with many competitors rather than a state selected contractor.
I love how you throw in bidding as if we're not talking about the government giving a monopoly in exchange for guarantees (it's considered a public good). This exchange of guarantees has made energy one of the most stable long term investments in a way that other investments just aren't. Gee, why would anyone take that deal?
Go educate yourself.
And go read up on Chesterton's Fence.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_transport#Statist...
I woke up this morning with an odd thought. User interfaces are hard, they are not many but we have people who are really good at designing those, we also know how to user test them. Election programs are non binding, you can say one thing then do the exact opposite after winning. (Referenda are also complicated.) It doesn't seem to make sense in the modern age to be able to change your vote every x years. It's a great formula for [say] the 17th century.
What if we designed a really neat configuration page for the government and allow people to change whatever settings exposed to them. You check a candidate you like and with each option their choice is the default. If you don't agree with something you simply change it.
Then, one by one we take the topics away from the politicians so that they can focus on the rest of the work.
For choosing the party you get 3 up and 3 down votes that you may spend however you like.
A separate election is held to chose the team to populate and work on the interface so that gradually more and more topics get exposed. Their job would also be to research and estimate how familiar the population is with a topic along with a budget to educate the voter.
It would be enlightening for the candidates as well.
Eventually we can shut down the legacy system and have one or more nudgeable robot overlords.
Don't worry, I'm sure the dream will fade in a few hours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy#:~:text=The%2....
It basically lets each citizen choose between direct or representative democracy, per issue, and does away with arbitrary things like election dates and even candidates (you can "elect" any other citizen to vote on your behalf, as can they). The only reason we don't have it is because it's basically impossible without software. Even very complex ranked choice voting can be tallied manually.
If you are dealing with such monstrosity of an application all battles are lost at the interface level. It has to work for everyone, there is no room for excuses about dumb users, they are the target audience.
While in the US the number seems infinite, in the Netherlands we have roughly 140 000 laws that each could have a series of check boxes and sliders. Say we all do 4 per day, that would be only 1460 annually. It would take 100 years which seems to long. At 40 per day it would require to much effort.
If the interface is to work as desired a large amount of law needs to go.
We should burn the books most worthy first. Experts can compete finding the most nonsensical laws. Short videos can be made to explain why the law exists.
We assign a good number of test subjects to pick the least likeable ones until we have a good list of candidates unlikely to survive.
There must be a good feedback report of the terrible implications after a law is deleted.
I can see it already, naked people around camp fires, drinking booze in public, selling food after sundown, making music without a license, singing songs insulting the monarch.
For federal taxes only... and with silly limitations that exist... because lobbying? And oh by the way, the IRS isn't actually offering anything, they'll refer you to third parties that will then make money off of you if you have anything beyond the most basic filing, and also if you want to file state taxes.
So no, they don't actually do that.
Why would the IRS provide a filing service for state income taxes? Go ask your state government to provide this if you want it. The IRS isn't the one collecting those taxes
They can't. Too much of the tax code is subjective and based upon claimed circumstance. If they did know this, they wouldn't need auditors.
> If you are the one who prepared them you absorb the liability when the IRS comes after you.
The liability is typically just the difference between what you paid and what you owe. It's hard to believe most people are so bad at taxes their efforts would be mistaken for willful criminal fraud.
The reason we don't have free tax preparation software (or a tax system that doesn't require that) and don't have free health care is because of competence issues. Taxes seems like a different dimension of problem, so let's leave it aside for the moment. Do we really believe that the people that work in the government here (in the US) are actually competent enough to administer a public health care system? I don't. I'd like to be convinced otherwise. Maybe you mean to say that we'd, I don't know, outlay lobbying and redirect that economic activity toward paying market salaries to people who are, in fact, competent enough to administer a public healthcare system.
Pointing to Russia on costs also points to the other side of the problem: Their healthcare system is severely under-funded. That's one way to make it cost less.
Sorry for the late reply.
Belief is unnecessary. The US government has been administering Medicare[0] since 1965 -- longer than I've been alive.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/regii-average-...
Or UPI in India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
So to answer your question: with law on your side. You limit price gouging, and mandate interoperability with a cheaper system.
It's not comparable to VisaNet.
The middle man doesn't really take all that much - most of interchange goes to the cost of loan origination, insurance and most importantly cash back and rewards programs. There's no annual fee 2% cash back cards. It's a little disingenuous to say the 1.5-3.5% interchange fee "mostly goes to middle men" when most of it goes right back into your pocket in one way or another.
There are two problems with this. The first is that not everybody is eligible for the no annual fee 2% cash back cards, and the people who aren't are the people in financial straits, so this is effectively a tax on the poor.
The second is that it's an anti-competition measure. Sure, maybe you get 2% out of the 3% the merchant is charged, but then you refuse to use a competing payments system because you want your 2%. And then we're stuck with the incumbents forever because anything new and different can't build a network effect when customers would have to pay a de facto 2% tax on everything they buy in order to use it.
Which is exactly what happens to your debit cards -- and then people are subject to the whims of Visa and their opaque capricious KYC implementation.
Not really. The merchant decides what kind of card to accept and how to route. It's just that customers will choose not to visit your establishment if you only accept debit, even if you have lower prices. Because they like the perks of a credit card.
The reality is the merchants pay a blended average of about 1.8% and they do so because people spend more on credit cards. It's relatively cheap, super fast, very easy and secure.
KYC is hardly capricious. Visa, issuers and acquirers have no interest in cutting off customers because, and this is true, cut off customers don't make them money. There is room for something like 'payment network neutrality' where legislation requires networks to process all legal transactions. Things can be better.
> And then we're stuck with the incumbents forever because anything new and different can't build a network effect when customers would have to pay a de facto 2% tax on everything they buy in order to use it.
I don't buy this either. The last few years saw the development of a whole new network in BNPLs. And guess what, it's not cheaper, at all. They charge 4% or more and they don't kick any of it back to customers.
The value in credit networks is in the loan origination, the insurance and to an extent the rewards. The credit networks do just fine in Europe where interchange is capped at 0.2% for debit and 0.3% for credit, and I haven't really seen a wellspring of competition. What I do see is a dearth of loyalty programs, which is a tradeoff you can choose to make.
Some customers. But then this leads to the problem: If you accept credit cards in order to satisfy those customers, other customers will use them in order to get the cash back.
> KYC is hardly capricious.
It is. They often cut off lawful businesses because they have disfavorable PR associations or political views, and sometimes apparently random people for undisclosed reasons. If it was easy to switch to any number of competitors without customers having to know any difference or sign up for different cards etc. that would be irrelevant, but it isn't.
> The last few years saw the development of a whole new network in BNPLs. And guess what, it's not cheaper, at all. They charge 4% or more and they don't kick any of it back to customers.
This is a loan. Naturally the customer is then paying interest. A credit card is nominally a form of credit too, but the fees are still charged to the merchant even when the buyer immediately pays off the card in full.
> What I do see is a dearth of loyalty programs, which is a tradeoff you can choose to make.
And this is the tradeoff we should make, because getting charged 2% more and then getting 2% back is useless, but has negative consequences like inducing complexity and customer ire to provide cash discounts or credit card surcharges, and causing customers to prefer the incumbent system in favor of competitors even more than they do otherwise.
Notice that the cost of "insurance" from the credit cards has to be passed on too. You like that you can issue a chargeback, but so can a scammer in order to rip off the merchant, and then merchants have to cover the cost of getting ripped off. Any disincentives to not implicitly buying that insurance when you trust the merchant and don't need it will tend to raise prices.
Which is fine, you can offer discounts based on payment method, like at a gas station. I still pay credit.
> It is. They often cut off lawful businesses because they have disfavorable PR associations or political views, and sometimes apparently random people for undisclosed reasons.
That's not AML/KYC/CTF. That's freedom of association. KYC is a legal compliance matter. That's why I suggested a 'payment network neutrality' bill that required these systemically important networks process all lawful payments - or the introduction of a state-run network.
> This is a loan. Naturally the customer is then paying interest. A credit card is nominally a form of credit too, but the fees are still charged to the merchant even when the buyer immediately pays off the card in full.
A credit card is an interest-free loan for 1 billing cycle followed by the regular APR. Part of the interchange pays for the first billing cycle where you are not charged your APR. They don't return any of that 4% BNPL fee if you pay it off early either do they?
> You like that you can issue a chargeback, but so can a scammer in order to rip off the merchant, and then merchants have to cover the cost of getting ripped off.
Still works out better for the merchant than not taking card. That's just the reality. If it weren't then they wouldn't accept cards.
And then you need more more complicated signs, which often confuse people who then get dissatisfied.
You also may not be allowed to charge as much as it actually costs -- they allow you to recover the processing cost as a fee but not the cost of chargeback fraud.
> That's not AML/KYC/CTF. That's freedom of association. KYC is a legal compliance matter. That's why I suggested a 'payment network neutrality' bill that required these systemically important networks process all lawful payments - or the introduction of a state-run network.
No, they're related, and that's why your proposal doesn't work, or is just equivalent to doing away with KYC.
The government isn't allowed to penalize people based on vague suspicions and no proof, but private companies are. And that's what KYC is coaxed into service to do -- the bank wouldn't otherwise care if you're a drug dealer, but now the government can lean on them to drop anyone the bank has any vague suspicion might be, even if neither of them have any real proof.
But that system has false positives, because its burden of proof is trash, which turns into a serious problem when the thing dropping you has a dominant market position instead of you just being able to go to the bank across the street whose algorithm isn't quite as broken.
If you passed a law requiring them to do business with you unless it would be illegal, you're taking away the slack that was put there on purpose and they could only drop you if they could prove you're committing a crime -- and maybe that's good -- but good luck getting it passed, because the government likes the status quo.
> A credit card is an interest-free loan for 1 billing cycle followed by the regular APR. Part of the interchange pays for the first billing cycle where you are not charged your APR. They don't return any of that 4% BNPL fee if you pay it off early either do they?
The issue is that they're tied together. You can't say "I want to avoid the interchange fee by having you debit my checking account the same day" even if you don't even want the billing cycle's worth of float -- and for a percent or two a lot of people would take that deal if it was available, because that's an awful high interest rate to pay over 30 days.
> Still works out better for the merchant than not taking card. That's just the reality. If it weren't then they wouldn't accept cards.
That's only true if some viable alternative is available. They're stuck accepting cards because some customers wouldn't buy without them -- often because they're actually buying on credit -- but then once they do, other customers use them in order to get rewards or because the merchant isn't allowed to pass on the cost of chargeback fraud to only the people paying with credit cards.
And even when the merchant is pressured into accepting credit cards through structural factors, you still have to pay the cost of chargeback fraud through higher prices when they do -- you just can't avoid those higher prices by not using a credit card, which is even worse.
The service the networks provide is a way for all participants (banks, people, businesses, etc) to trust one another, as well as a healthy rules-based system to address disputes. Getting this working is not trivial.
Banks pay fees today around this to the payment networks. The Fed could simply charge a tiny fee per transaction to the bank to cover this.
It would be much less expensive than Visa and Mastercard, since there is no service fee on top.
To clarify, I never said it be 100% free, but it would dramatically lower and standardize fees.
As far as trust goes, if you can't trust the central bank, we have bigger problems don't we?
To be honest Visa type services should be provided via the central bank (again, Visa itself isn’t a credit card issuer) so businesses don’t have to soak the payment percentages