[deleted]
We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government
51–60 of 88 posts
Re: We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't we trying that already? Citizens United dramatically loosened the rules on campaign finance.
Citizens United had nothing to do with campaign finance. It was about election-related speech by an independent third-party non-profit organization.
The term "campaign finance" appears on this page 45 times:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Maybe you could say "technically, the case invalidated restrictions on campaign related advertising by third parties, so-called soft money. Though this may be commonly referred to as campaign finance, strictly speaking, that's not correct." I think very few non-lawyers would say the case "had nothing to do with" campaign finance.
Re: We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government
#53If we had a more granular democratic say that was counted above and beyond a token X in a limited choice of option every 4-5 years with those options promises being no guarantee that what was on the tin is what you will get. Then maybe we would have more harmony and progress. Imagine if you will that every voter had the ability to submit their idea's for other voters to support/debate and the top ones go onto being v…
The lottery system has several variants to take that in consideration. In one of them, everybody votes for x (e.g: 3) people around them. Then you remove the top 10% to avoid people campaigning, and the bottom 10% to avoid psychopathic candidates. The ones that remain can then register to the lottery. In some variants, you have limits to the wealth you have, jobs you hold, geographic min and max, number of times you…
Tactical voting would have a field day with that.
Re: We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a common argument against term limits: by shifting the burden of institutional memory even farther away from the elected officials, you're further empowering the bureaucrats.
Isn't already the case though? If yes, it should not prevent us from tying out term limit, only push us to also add some mechanism to deal with bureaucrats.
It also further empowers the lobbyists, which adds to the risks. A government full of ignorant people will tend to fall back on those who seem to know what they're talking about.
Re: We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government
#55What a terrible idea. Being a representative isn't just about beliefs, it requires expertise in statecraft. There are so many better ways to solve the stated problem.
> Being a representative isn't just about beliefs, it requires expertise in statecraft. I suspect you don't live in the United States - or have never watched these representatives in action in their various sessions and places of work, because ... elections are a beauty contest that are simply a reflection of a candidate's ability to campaign, and have nothing to do with the actual ability of the representative to ca…
Sadly, this happens on nearly all modern democracies.
Re: We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government
#56If we had a more granular democratic say that was counted above and beyond a token X in a limited choice of option every 4-5 years with those options promises being no guarantee that what was on the tin is what you will get. Then maybe we would have more harmony and progress. Imagine if you will that every voter had the ability to submit their idea's for other voters to support/debate and the top ones go onto being v…
This already exists, it's called initiative and I believe that some of the U.S. states even implement it. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiatives_and_referendums_in... Representation, referendum, initiative and lottery are all just different tools in the toolkit of democracy. They all have advantages and disadvantages, and ideally, they should be used as such. So for example lottery is great if you want people…
Interesting and was not aware of this (Being UK peon), glad that voting ballots have at least shown some form of expression beyond an X and embraced it. In the UK, anything than a single X in a box will void the ballot paper/vote.
EDIT [Autotype correction - embarrassed into embraced - opps]
Re: We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government
#57Maybe. I am bothered that there's an unofficial pre-election in the US that is called campaign financing. It skews candidates towards the wealthy, corporate backed, or populist. If elections were publicly financed somehow, then perhaps we'd see a more representative selection. At least they wouldn't be beholden to donors as often.
The counterintuitive solution is to get rid of campaign finance restrictions. If money is easier to get, candidates will need to "pay" less for it in favors. To understand the dynamics here, the key fact is that additional money only helps a campaign up until it has enough to get its message to the voters. More money after that doesn't impact the result.
Political parties and their representatives stopped trying to only get their message to voters a long time ago. Today they want to target - and preferably close to drown - each person with the sequence of messages, video clips, social media reactions, and sound bites that are most likely to get you to vote for them, based on as much data as possible, and oftentimes both using and abusing every cognitive weakness we humans tend to have.
This is almost indistinguishable from what used to be called propaganda, and generally seen as somewhat problematic even before it was inundated with individual targeting and the ungodly amount of realpolitik we see today.
This is not a game where there is ever enough money, and it can work terrifyingly good, almost no matter what agenda you push, as long as the agenda is all that you care about.
Sure it might come tumbling down one day, if the lies becomes to obvious. The damage will still have been done at that point.
If history has taught us anything, it seem to be more of the opposite of what you claim.
Re: We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government
#58From 1268 the oligarcial Venetian republic used a multi-round system of elections and selections by lot to choose the Doge. Apparently that system actually had a lot going for it https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf , and the fact that it and the Venetian republic endured for over 500 years after 1268 seems to support that idea. So this is probably the sort of model the US should be seriously considering to reform its somewhat broken electoral/political system, and specifically how it appoints its chief executive. It's discouraging that instead the only systems which seem to have any support or awareness are fully direct election and the system of (weighted-but-otherwise-)effectively-direct election which is already in place.
Re: We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citizens United had nothing to do with campaign finance. It was about election-related speech by an independent third-party non-profit organization.
The term "campaign finance" appears on this page 45 times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC Maybe you could say "technically, the case invalidated restrictions on campaign related advertising by third parties, so-called soft money. Though this may be commonly referred to as campaign finance, strictly speaking, that's not correct." I think very few non-lawyers would say the case "had nothing to do…
The specific provision at issue in Citizens United was part of the campaign finance laws for the same reason the Patriot Act is called what it is. But it had nothing to do with financing of campaigns. It involved speech prohibitions on corporations and labor unions unrelated to campaigns.
Re: We Should Let a Lottery Decide Our Government
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about we instead consider distancing the human political actors from direct contact with temptation? Corruption is an integral part of all political systems and ultimately festers until inevitable failure and restart. Can’t we start to consider open source, programmatic execution of popularly derived decisions?
I have quite the oppossite approach- if corruption is so unavoidable, why not instituionalize it? The economic sector gets 25 % of the votes in parliament. Companys can boost the percentage of there representive in this fixed part, by paying taxes (in secret). If there are 25 company representives, and every company pays 1 billion - they get each get 1% of the economic-sector-power to distribute. Corruption outside o…
If we know that corruption varies a lot between states (as in countries) and, worldwide, has reduced over time, why would we think it's inevitable?
I see a lot of estimating-as-inevitable in many problem areas - for example: the environment, race and sex relations, security / "privacy". I'm not sure whether it has increased, or I'm just more aware of it these days.
When we think that a problem is inevitable, we may conclude that various reponses that otherwise have little to recommend them might be a good thing: populisms, zero-sum thinking, authoritarianism, radical transparency. This idea of inevitability is in conflict with optimism in David Deutsch's sense: optimism as the principle that all problems are caused by lack of knowledge (and therefore that all problems are either solvable, or truly inevitable because of some law of physics - no examples of the latter being known).