4 ms·
You've reframed the problem to wealth influencing politics, which still isn't something that needs to be fixed by taking money away from people. Redistribution
by natrius 11y ago
You've reframed the problem to wealth influencing politics, which still isn't something that needs to be fixed by taking money away from people. Redistribution is a decent solution to resource problems, but this isn't that kind of problem.
Ending money in politics is hard to do using the levers of democracy since those levers have already been purchased, so I understand the desire to end extreme wealth instead. There is another solution, though. We can end the influence of wealth on our politics without needing the government to do it for us.
Instead of trying to get the government to stop excess political spending, we should eliminate the incentive to accept excess political spending. People accept money to influence our democracy because they can use that money to get whatever they want from almost anyone, including you. You can't opt out because economic power is invisible. But we can make it visible, and give every individual the freedom to reject economic power that they feel is misused.
This is merit capitalism. http://meritcapitalism.com/ http://meritcapitalism.com/
- edc117 11y agoThis is a very interesting mixture of two ideas I hadn't really considered before. Has this been discussed or brought up here previously? Is the only real obstacle to this adoption? It seems like an extreme transparency, but the lack of a central authority while maintaining reliability is very compelling.
- natrius 11y agoI bring it up in comments here any time it's relevant, but it hasn't had its own discussion. Adoption is the only obstacle, but tools and infrastructure are obstacles to adoption. There's lots of software to write before it's easy for people to install a mobile wallet app that banishes oligarchical influences from their personal economy. A bug/feature that needs to be addressed is that this mechanism can be used to enforce any rule enough people decide to pursue. We've discovered a lot of the ways our form of governance can go wrong over the past few hundred years, and we've even fixed some of them. We have to do the same thing for merit capitalism and limit its use until we know how to use it without causing catastrophes. Luckily, we can use merit capitalism to limit the use of merit capitalism: if someone breaks the "constitution" of acceptable uses, they can be sanctioned. We can slowly evolve the constitution as we learn more.