Raising recurring funds in the quantities required to pay for tasks like software development isn't really feasible using posts, in my opinion.
With new ideas, I think it's important to avoid quickly trying to label them. The worker proposal system is actually similar in many ways to shareholder voting (without the same contractual obligations that go along with a "real" company) so if we characterize the process as socializing the cost, then I think companies are also socializing their expenditures. Probably the biggest difference is there's no "representatives" (aka company officers) that make the final decision on how the funds are spent.
In general, I've tried to spec the system so that if the stakeholders don't want inflation, they can just burn it up. In the end, the aim of the design is to put the decision into the hands of stakeholders without requiring a hardfork if they change their mind about it.
Also, as I've said a few times at this point in other comments, the 1% is just an example amount, and I'm also personally fine with the funding coming from an existing inflation source. My description is pretty much a placeholder, because there's a number of options for that.
When I say “socialize the costs,” I mean that the burden of supporting/paying developers can be put on the entire community from the limited/shared pool, even if a super-majority of stakeholders don’t want the development that would be funded.
When grants of money can be given so easily to developers with little to no risk to any individual voter, chances are that accountability will be lacking for both the fund allocators and the developers. After all, it’s not their money that’s being spent. It’s the same problem we see with government and tax dollars. Are politicians rushing to give their own money to the state projects that they so proudly support with their rhetoric? Of course not. But they’ll certainly use that shared pool of cash that didn’t come out of their bank accounts...and they have no reason to make sure it’s well-spent either.
I know software development isn’t cheap. I know developers want to be paid for their work. But I also think that, if the proposed development from a trusted person/entity is truly valued by investors, then those investors will find a way to fund it and the developers should be able to solicit funding for it.
I know this is fairly new tech and some new concepts when it comes to organizing and developing, but people and businesses still need to put in the leg-work and not just hope for token giveaways.
But that conversation is practically irrelevant and probably a distraction, so I’ll just say this...
As long as there isn’t an increase in the inflation rate, I really don’t have much of a problem with a small percentage of the overall rewards pool going to development. I just hope that these funds are more carefully considered and allocated than post rewards and that the vetting of developers is better than that of our witnesses.
I would have serious concerns about large accounts (like the soon-to-be-anonymous Steemit accounts) directing funds to their own “projects” that are disguised as “community development.”
But ultimately, I would be more in favor of a development fund that operates on actual donations rather than inflation-funded reward pools. If there aren’t enough people willing to support useful development, then we have a real problem.
Just to briefly address your first point: if a majority of the stakeholders don't want a proposal to be funded, they can always vote the refund worker proposal in front of that proposal and the undesirable proposal won't be funded.
In fact, this ability to stop all funding actually upset a lot of people in BitShares in the distant past, because some large stakeholders decided they didn't want to fund any more work by the core team at that time and did exactly that.
Nothing about the "worker" system prevents it, if stakeholders want to organize things that way.
An "officer" can offer their service to the stakeholders as manager of a revenue stream and get voted in as a "worker". This, in practice, is how much of the Dash budget gets allocated (it goes to one item which funds a for-profit company with permanent management to carry on long-term development). However, importantly: a) the company can get defunded if it doesn't perform to the satisfaction of the stakeholders, and b) other smaller items such as sponsorships, app developers, etc. can get funded independently of the company.
In part this is why I am not a favor of the "worker" label as it tends to encourage a certain expectation around usage and structure vs. something a bit more conceptually neutral such as "budget item"
Yes, nothing about the system prevents it from being done. And in fact, one such company exists today in BitShares that pays a lot of the core programmers. I just meant that in it's "basic state" that stakeholders can vote for individual budget items, unlike in traditional corporations where that would be considered quite strange. I was trying to clarify where my analogy to standard shareholder voting tends to break down as part of my argument for why I think it's unreasonable to call it socializing the costs. Costs shared by an organizational members shouldn't be necessarily be considered socialized costs in the stigmatized sense.