To adjust the rate at which proposals are made, we could choose a fee that people must pay to make a proposal official. (This fee might be refunded, perhaps even at a reward multiple, if the proposal were accepted.) As described above, legal recursion could set this fee by having a high fee at the base level, and inviting the creation of regimes at other levels with lower fees. If the basic rule required a $10 million fee for making a proposal official, then within this regime speculators might estimate that the additional changes that would result from lowering this fee to $10 thousand would on average raise national welfare. In this case, speculators would approve as a policy a new regime which authorized proposals using this lower fee. You Might Not Catch Buggy Decisions Quickly Enough If a bad decision were made due to bad information, then market decision advice should be reversed the moment speculators became aware of this fact, giving legal authority to reverse the bad decision. But what if a bad decision were instead due to a bug in the welfare function, i.e., an unintended consequence of oversimplifying some aspect of our values? To fix this kind of problem, the democratic part of this form of government would have to vote to change the welfare function. But this process might be too slow to avoid harm from bad decisions that are expensive to undo. So far we have suggested that a proposal would be approved today if a market clearly estimated good consequences for welfare as it is defined today. To deal with this welfare bug problem, we could also allow such proposals to be vetoed if another market clearly estimated bad consequences for welfare as it will be defined in the future, say in one year. If someone then spotted a bug, they could bet that elected representatives would agree that it is a bug and fix it within one year. If speculators agreed, the proposal would not be implemented. This system might give more power to representatives who have private information about likely welfare definition changes. But this may be a reasonable price to pay to avoid bad decisions due to welfare definition bugs. This Is Too Big A Change All At Once Speculators should take into account the negative costs of too quickly disrupting established processes when they estimate the consequences of each proposed policy change. This form of government sets up a rule for changing the status quo, but allows for any status quo and any rate of change. Thus a nation might keep its current political system and modify its constitution only to allow policy to change via speculative markets. Once a bill were passed declaring the first definition of welfare and the agencies responsible for measuring it, policy would change only as fast as speculators deemed appropriate for achieving welfare as so defined. Basic Rights and Freedoms Are Not Guaranteed Rights and freedoms could be preserved by putting them directly into the welfare function. That is, the government might collect statistics regarding the number and types of violations of basic rights and freedoms, and the definition of national welfare might give a large negative weight to such outcomes. In addition, the constitution might empower courts to reject policies that violate certain stated rights. 22