151–160 of 200 posts
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My criticism is of banning campaigning, it's a an engineers solution to a complex web of problems they don't understand.
Well that isn’t a very compelling argument unless you get a lot more specific.
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Proof by counterexample: I think it would have been a good decision to shoot Adolf Hitler for his opinions, don't you?
Simpler example: WWII happened, causing more than Hitler to be killed. Wars are political acts.
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Simpler example: WWII happened, causing more than Hitler to be killed. Wars are political acts.
Sure would have been good if someone had killed Hitler before he started the war.
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Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right. No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in. Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.
Land value tax would be a good addition to the Japanese model. Raise the tax high enough, land prices are zero, leaving behind only the value of the home. Homes, like cars, will naturally depreciate in value. No weird artificial depreciation of houses needed. You can still have investment in real estate, but it will be a competitive market. You can't sit on land and let it appreciate without putting in the work, beca…
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Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "exper…
Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.
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>There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. Only if by that you mean equal opportunities for everyone. But if you mean equal outcomes, then you're guaranteed to get USSR/Cuba/Venezuela poverty, famines and shortages, and even there that didn't fix the issue of the elites being super wealthy, it just made everyone else equally poor. People will never end up equal no matter…
Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes. Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities. All the countries you mention had a lot of power centralization, which I'm arguing is the reason all systems fail. If we avoid centralized power, we avoid the corruption and theft that inevitably comes with it.
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File this under Lies Engineers Believe About Political Science.
Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
e.g. that doesn't seem to be working that well in Hungary or Turkey and presumably quite a few other countries. Banning or severely limiting external funding or support makes it rather easy for politicians with authoritarian policies to keep their grip on power.
You win the election, you tweak the system to make it easier for you to win next time, you get more funding and your opponents less. Rinse and repeat and you can weaken the opposition to such an extent that you can stay in power more or less indefinitely. That's what Orban or Erdogan are doing.
Another option is you spend a lot of money, win, then change the rules to ban or limit external funding so that nobody else can do that to challenge you.
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Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
Yes, severely capping funding, or even banning all private funding and giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money, is probably one of the most important things you can do for the health of a democracy. It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol
How do you allocate that? Surely you can't give anyone who asks the same amount. So you favour parties which are already entrenched. Of course that has quite a few upsides but it doesn't seem like an inherently democratic system.
In worst (of course not unavoidable) you also might end up with indirect equivalent of what your re trying to ban, e.g. private media companies with a lot of resources that are biased towards certain candidates influencing public opinion (without crossing the legal boundaries) or those already in power using the state media to do the same.
e.g. in Hungary most funding comes from the government. How did that work out for them?
This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.
You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent
Many people have anti-social traits which manifest by seeking power and then using it to extract value from other people at their expense.
Meanwhile the people doing real work are almost always pro-social but are too busy to play these power games, unless the power imbalance gets too large.
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There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should n…
What if a true democracy is not a worthy goal? What if some people should have more or less say in something. Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing? Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair? If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinc…
Yes, I certainly agree.
The problem (which IMHO outweighs all the benefits by quite a bit) is that when you allow drawing these artificial lines the ones in charge of them will inevitably design the system in such a way that benefits them (maybe even without ill intentions).
It's similar to geographical gerrymandering just openly based on social/education/etc. class.
Also... balancing interests of diverse social and economic groups is not exactly straightforward, its certainly not basic math.