Germany's Pirate Party Looks to Win More Seats

Similarly, the German public understands hyperinflation as leading to the rise of Hitler and the Second World War. There was a genuine and severe hyperinflation crisis in the years after World War I, but the main economic reason for the Nazi ascendance to power in the early 1930s was actually a period of _deflation_ and mass unemployment. The Nazi rise to power coincided with an inflationary policy (Germany exited the gold standard in 1931), in part supported by the Nazis, that decreased unemployment and increased economic growth.

This is why it’s kind of funny when the current inflation aversion of German policymakers is attributed to a national trauma about hyperinflation. It’s true that the hyperinflationary period 1919-1923 was deeply painful for Germans and you can understand that they don’t want to repeat that, but surely the consequences of the deflationary period leading to the rise of National Socialism were worse.

(That doesn’t mean that Keynes was wrong, but a story that sees hyperinflation leading to WWII is probably too simplistic. It’s more like hyperinflation → gold standard → Great Depression → deflation → Nazis gain more seats → leave gold standard → Nazis gain absolute power.)

See http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2010/06/30/197736/austerit...

Problem there is that there is no such thing as a person who holds every single one of your views. By voting for the guy who, say, believes the internet should be hands off, you could also be voting for a guy who believes something like abortion is eeeeeevil, or that fiat money is bad, or that minorities should be marginalized, what have you.

Hence the voting for people, since you have to choose which of the pluses and minuses are more important to you.

More parties can mean more extremes in parliament, and more coalitions that depends on making concessions to extremists.

It may be more democratic in theory, but in practice it does not push politics toward the center, but instead enables the extremist fringe.

People behave very differently when comparing communities to even just the town or city they live in. They behave to their neighbor much differently than someone a 15 minute drive from, and absolutely differently from someone they never see.

Given that (in the US at least) approximately 1.5~ in 10 people are public sector workers (I forgot where I got that statistic, but anything > 1 in 50 would suffice), you can easily go full republic and have small communities of 1,000 people (psychological analysis studies seem to lean towards something in the 700 - 1300 range being the maximum number of people any one individual can actively relate to at a human level) who elect a singular representative amongst themselves every year (with no re-elections, and at such a small scale, the politics of campaign finance break down completely - everyone should know each other.)

You simply select, emotionally, the person amongst yourselves you feel best represents you individually, and those that want to take the local seat can debate one another in forum with whoever is interested. The rest can be expected to take sides, but the beauty of this idea is that as long as people remain mobile, you can expect common political interests to attract one another, and as long as you can preserve individual mobility (which is much easier in the modern world) you can expect people to move where the politics suit them.

The idea is that you start legislation bottom up rather than top down. The most fundemental flaw in western politics, such as the controvesry surrounding the Euro, is that hundreds of millions of people can be legislated upon with no suffering or injustice.

In terms of scale, have a "locality" be 1,000 people, have a "district" be 13,000 people (13 representatives), have a "region" be 273,000 people (21 representatives), have a "state" be 9,009,000 people (33 representatives), and have a national body be the sum of all member states in a nation. Those numbers are completely arbitrary - the idea is that each level up represents an approximate order of magnitude more people and has more representatives in chorus to represent more diverse viewpoints and require more debate and process.

CPGrey has an excellent video series on the means to partition a nation into equally sized parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A

If you do the traditional every 10 year national census and split line partition, you MUST be able to get every district in a margin of 950 - 1050 people, and you can shift the per district number to make sure every region and state has the proper number of component members to match.

The real "shift" here is you are actively breaking the boundries of artifical borders. Regions are liquid and determined by how large an area it takes to contain some number of people - naturally, cities will have highly concentrated people in little area and most of the US midwest would be massive regions.

It gets rid of the great flaw of the American representational system that gives biased voting power to small states - an arbitrary hold over from when states were independent nations.

One important facet is that each member body would elect amongst themselves someone to represent them at higher levels of governance. That means the national level has representatives beholden to four levels of government equally (civil service is real service, but realistically being a politician should only start being a full time job in these circumstances at the region level).

Then, you have a constitutional requisite that for legisilation to be considered by a higher tier of representation (IE, for state law to be considered) a law must be drafted that has been passed in a majority of districts, and that law would require a a majority vote with less than 1/4 disapproval (ie, if 1/4 vote against higher legislation, it does not pass state-wide, or region-wide, or nationwide - it remains applied at the lower tiers).

If localities attract mobile people who are like minded, the most successful jurisdictions would attract people, who grow the power base of the region and get entire swathes of the nation under like minded ideologies. As these areas naturally grow over time, and over decades of change, we can see diverse and disparate political ideologies put their ideas into practice in "test labs" of local governments, and then if policy is successful, you will see either other jurisdictions adopt it, or people will migrate to where good governance is practised.

The result is that naturally good policy attracts adoption and migration to it, and ideas that fail to benefit a localities citizenry gets rejected - and in the case of majority opinions that harm minorities, a minority can concentrate regionally and prevent adoption of hostile legislation).

Given a no tarrif system, and a tax code that requires that national tax be at most as large as the smallest state tax, the smallest state tax be as large as the smallest regional tax, and regional tax being as large as the smallest local tax, then you can keep tax from rapidly inflating out of control (local districts can heavily tax if need be, but national tax policy is forced to the minimum, preventing the current policy in the US of focusing all spending at the national level and making 50% of paid taxes be national tax).

The weaknesses in this system are that because disparate ideologies converge, it creates tension between them. Historically, that leads to war, but we seem to have entered a period where hopefully first world countries won't be declaring war on one another over ideological differences. We hope. It is definitely a weakness of this design.

Another one is that it requires mobility fundamentally - if you don't agree with your regional politics, you are at the mercy of your peers to implement legislation that can only be overturned with super-majority indifference in majority approved legislation to overturn it. Hopefully, that would mean that legislation without victims never passes through the system, but I feel it is vulnerable to holes.

One important tenant would be that we maintain the ability for higher courts to declare legislation unconstitutional. A simple bill of global rights, that people are equal, you can not differentiate between people in government based on physical characteristics, fundamental rights to private propery and the resulting privacy, right to freedom of expression, press, religion, etc, right to bear arms - those would all be similarly constitutionally bound concepts and amending that document would require super majority (75%) support of all levels of government (and it would have to be proposed nationally to prevent localities from throwing amendment clutter at everyone in the country).

So if you maintain mobility and human rights, have a forced free trade no war inter-state region, and let politics be local and thus emotionally bonded between small groups of people electing single representatives amongst themselves, with no re-elections, and thus no campaigns, and having each layer of government choose a singular representative to maintain their beliefs at each tier above that (who would most likely be moderate) you get "perfect republic". I feel like having digital remote communication allows politicians at each tier to be "in multiple places at once" much more effectively, enabling a tiered system like this.

... And I just wrote an essay on alternative republics. Go me?