essentially the government acts as a baseline market maker
Government should participate in private markets
So far one of the core ideas that the crypto industry inspired in me was that money and state should be separated just like religion and state should be separated in modern societies. Therefore it feels backwards to me that the government should act as market makers or participate in private markets after all. We do know that the government is not the better capital allocator. Depending on how the government is created, its members have so far not always been selected based on their individual merits or competences. For instance, in modern democratic governments that would effectively result in humans that are popular for some reason end up in positions that they are not necessarily well qualified for. Continuing to allow those kinds of elected officials to have anything to do with sophisticated private market mechanics appears unreasonable to me. If we have a white sheet of paper in front of us, we should maybe rather try to do away with all of the old ways. Or at least we should try to get closer to some kind of automated and meritocratic system. For instance, Ethereum's block builders are not operated by elected officials. They might be defined by the high priests who are our EF researchers, but the execution is entirely left to the most able, because there, out in the open, there exist truly free markets.
Government provides baseline free infrastructure for managing payroll, benefits, and other things (e.g. via smart contract) which removes the need to file taxes
Thinking about restructuring government, the notion of providing infrastructure in the sense of public goods should maybe be one of the very few mandates that any government ought to have in the first place. Most concerns in life should either be left to the individual, be automated, or taken care of by an elected institution, in that order of preference.
Any industry where extractive behaviour would violate human needs should lean towards being publicly funded
Ever since Flashbots invented the study of MEV, we do know that MEV is literally everywhere if you just squint hard enough. Only because extractive behaviour does exist, should not automatically imply that any public body should be involved in the day to day of the matter. I think such notion is a driver for big government and other idiosyncrytic outcomes. What we may rather need to do is to define better systems with clearly automatically enforcable rules based on blockchain networks in order to guarantee, and for everyone to see that nobody is cheating. And counter to today's best practices in the western world, those systems and rules are not very likely to be built and defined by merely popular elected officials.
Basic healthcare must be publicly funded
Basic education must be publicly funded
I agree that healthcare and education should be available to every citizen without exception. Just only to publicly fund those industry using a publicly collected fund is not good enough. The emphasis here should maybe rather be on general availability, and not so much how it is payed for. The former is a desirable objective, the latter is an implementation detail. More to rant about now. I live in Germany. I have "publicly funded healthcare" and I had "publicly funded education". Neither is really good based on how much we pay for it, and that is especially true for education. That is a complete disaster to be honest. I think I understand what those desires express. I am just not fully convinced that those statements alone and what they stand for are entirely sufficient enough. The issues here concern every industry that is highly regulated. When we look at affordability of goods and services over the past couply of decades we can clearly see how certain goods have become cheaper and how certain services have become more expensive. The goods that have become cheaper and better at the same time are those technical devices, like computers, that are produced by competitors who leverage mostly unregulated supply chains. Here we have free markets working. The services that have become more expensive without improving proportionaly to their affordability are those services, like education, that are monopoliced by frankly little competent governments. Two big problems we have in every public sector is the tragedy of the commons and the principle-agent problem. The very long chain of commities involved in decision making today has not lead to any fundamental change in the way we teach, and has not lead to any fundamental improvement in the baseline competence of the average citizen. And then, the problem with public funding is once again MEV, wich is often referred to as regulatory capture or lobbying. The result of said MEV is that the government, read the uninvolved citizen, ends up paying literally any ludicrous price for goods and services that are frankly not really worth their money.
Basic housing should be publicly funded
I think that this is already true in western societies and while it services some well it might be a coinflip in terms of efficacy. Again, the underlying desire is probably something that we can all agree on. That desire would be something like "nobody has to sleep on the streets". But that again is different to how it is accounted for on a balance sheet. I strongly believe that just making up for the money does not automatically imply a good rule, nor good system nor good outcome. The funding is again rather an implementation detail for the underlying higher cause. And even if everything is paid for, we will always end up with fractions of drug abuse, domestic violence, dysfunctional families and straight up people who rather prefer to checkout from the system. All of those circumstances, among others, cause a lot of affected people to end up on the streets. The question from a system point of view is how to define an objective that leads to a set of rules which together guarantee a baseline in the sand of what is the culturally accepted fallout rate. I think the issues related to housing are fundamentally philosophically by nature. In German there is a saying that goes like "there are many kinds of deaths but you have to die one". To make the argument go full circle. I think the baseline should always be less rules and more free markets. Responsibility is what gives humans agency and in turn meaning in life. If everything is accounted for, I argue, the fallout rate is increasing without improving the system at least equally by some measure. Big government and over-regulated industries take away agency from its citizens. And while it appear to be fun for one election cycle or two, the degradation of societies takes inevitably place in cycles of secular trends and are hard, if not impossible to revert. As a final thought, if housing should be made available and affordable, the houses should simply be built. If there is more supply than demand then everyone who wants a home will be able to find one. And that to locally affordable prices.