4 ms·

This is why "term limits" sound great in theory but are worthless in practice. The people who are writing these laws by another name (guidance letters, recomme

This is why "term limits" sound great in theory but are worthless in practice. The people who are writing these laws by another name (guidance letters, recommendations, etc) are nameless, faceless people who no one will ever know. And unless it's an official "memorandum of understanding" or similar, we won't even know their names. The people we see and hear in the news are just the distraction so we miss the real show.

zanny 10y ago
This can only happen when you lack accountability and actual representation in a republic. I've concluded that the general chain of reasoning is this: Unrepresented -> Corruption -> Money -> Corporate Influence -> Gerrymandering / First Past the Post / Term Limits -> Whole election system is fucked The way the US, and most other governments, are organized is broken because of a lack of humanity. If you try having one person represent millions, those millions will always be numbers to anyone, and that person will just be a name on a ballot to the numbers. Real representation requires a personal relationship, and that means you need to build government on the foundation of your community first. I generally see every position added to the ballot as a failure of a republic, because what you really should be doing is electing, say, a regional council (using STV or other proportional voting systems) whom then both nominates higher offices and appoints everything you would normally have on the ballot. Because that is their job, and you would not be picking between the lesser of two evils on a ticket but one of a few hundred of your neighbors who is exemplary who would do the best job. Most people I know, at least in less dense neighborhoods (and community interaction in cities and dense living always has been problematic) can name someone who lives around them they would want to represent them in government. And you are much more likely to have reason to trust, and hold responsible, your neighbor than some guy who lives in the richest part of the city, state, or country and whom you will never meet in person, and they will never know you to give a damn about your liberty.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  You have synchronization problems when every hill has it's own fiefdom. You get political deadlock, effective NIMBYism, corruption too small to get sunlight repeated at every hill, and things like making a metro transit system impossible because 60 municipalities can't work together. Just think about the general issues of a HOA gone bad and how hard it can be to deal with it without great personal cost. That is the problem of micro government in a nutshell. Scalable government is a hard problem in general.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    We've been seeing this in practice as the spotlight has shone on the white-flight enclaves in and around St. Louis after the Michael Brown killing.
- rjbwork 10y ago
  Well, congress has kept their constituents per critter at almost criminally high levels for going on a century now. As we see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment#House_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap... It is constitutionally provided for to have ~30k citizens per critter. But congress is left to determine how many critters there should be. Providing more critters, and thus less people per critter would reduce the amount of power they wield individually, thus there are absolutely perverse incentives at work to keep our congressional representation as citizens to a minimum.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  I would like to see a system of government that is similarly granular to your suggestion, but on technical lines rather than geographical. I tend to agree with very, very few of my neighbors on some issues, so rather than having to form a geographically local coalition, maybe better representation can be achieved by allowing the like-minded to choose representation across geographic boundaries, or to choose different representatives for different categories. While we're at it, could we make this hypothetical government's legislature use a fractional (or maybe one-citizen-one-vote) tally, with representatives acting as proxies that individuals could override for specific votes?
  - clock_tower 10y ago
    One thing that the Ottoman Empire did well (although not as legislature): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_%28Ottoman_Empire%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_%28Ottoman_Empire%29
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- StillBored 10y ago
  This hits close to an idea that has been floating around for a while. Basically, the Apportionment Act of 1911 needs to be replaced, with something that sets the number of representatives equal to some population number (say one representative for every 10k people. One of the suggestions is to set that number equal to the population of the smallest district. The idea gains a lot of support when its presented that people who live in certain states have "more" access to congress because their representatives represent fewer people. I'm to lazy to dig up the actual numbers but IIRC there is something like a 40% difference between the most populous district and the least. I've also wondered if massively increasing the number of representatives (say a few thousand) would help to remove some of the special interests, as it would take a small army to wine/dine the entire congress. Except, that I guess some of these interests basically have infinite money and could actually afford that army.
  - lakmear 10y ago
    California is the worst in the United States when it comes to the population vs state legislator issue. 80 members of the assembly and 40 members of the senate for 38.4 million people. Compare that to Vermont with 150 members of the House and 30 senators for a population 600,000. California could be construed as taxation without representation. You are completely correct that more legislators means less big lobbyist influence.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      California citizens retain legislative power and exercise it fairly freely including on matters of taxation, where they have sharply constrained the elected legislature, and retain the power of referendum to undo any act of the legislature (whether on tax or other matters.) As such, whatever the ratio of citizens to members of the legislature, it's ludicrous to suggest that it is "taxation without representation."
      - lakmear 10y ago
        I didn't mean to imply I am complaining about taxes. It's just a phrase to hammer home the lack of representation.
no-s 10y ago
We don't need term limits for people. People come with built in term limits of one form or another. What we need are term limits for laws. Absolute Sunset should be built into the constitution and every law, regulation, charter, advisory, authorization, order, or any other kind of governmental rule should be subject to it. At regular intervals we should require our elected representatives to explicitly affirm, without debate, the existing laws. void all the ones that don't get reaffirmed at the end of the session. That way we'll always know whether the politicians can be trusted to make the right choices and also it will put a limit on how complex government can be.

zanny 10y ago

This can only happen when you lack accountability and actual representation in a republic. I've concluded that the general chain of reasoning is this: Unrepresented -> Corruption -> Money -> Corporate Influence -> Gerrymandering / First Past the Post / Term Limits -> Whole election system is fucked The way the US, and most other governments, are organized is broken because of a lack of humanity. If you try having one person represent millions, those millions will always be numbers to anyone, and that person will just be a name on a ballot to the numbers. Real representation requires a personal relationship, and that means you need to build government on the foundation of your community first. I generally see every position added to the ballot as a failure of a republic, because what you really should be doing is electing, say, a regional council (using STV or other proportional voting systems) whom then both nominates higher offices and appoints everything you would normally have on the ballot. Because that is their job, and you would not be picking between the lesser of two evils on a ticket but one of a few hundred of your neighbors who is exemplary who would do the best job. Most people I know, at least in less dense neighborhoods (and community interaction in cities and dense living always has been problematic) can name someone who lives around them they would want to represent them in government. And you are much more likely to have reason to trust, and hold responsible, your neighbor than some guy who lives in the richest part of the city, state, or country and whom you will never meet in person, and they will never know you to give a damn about your liberty.

mahyarm 10y ago
You have synchronization problems when every hill has it's own fiefdom. You get political deadlock, effective NIMBYism, corruption too small to get sunlight repeated at every hill, and things like making a metro transit system impossible because 60 municipalities can't work together. Just think about the general issues of a HOA gone bad and how hard it can be to deal with it without great personal cost. That is the problem of micro government in a nutshell. Scalable government is a hard problem in general.
- rhizome 10y ago
  We've been seeing this in practice as the spotlight has shone on the white-flight enclaves in and around St. Louis after the Michael Brown killing.
rjbwork 10y ago
Well, congress has kept their constituents per critter at almost criminally high levels for going on a century now. As we see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment#House_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap... It is constitutionally provided for to have ~30k citizens per critter. But congress is left to determine how many critters there should be. Providing more critters, and thus less people per critter would reduce the amount of power they wield individually, thus there are absolutely perverse incentives at work to keep our congressional representation as citizens to a minimum.
nitrogen 10y ago
I would like to see a system of government that is similarly granular to your suggestion, but on technical lines rather than geographical. I tend to agree with very, very few of my neighbors on some issues, so rather than having to form a geographically local coalition, maybe better representation can be achieved by allowing the like-minded to choose representation across geographic boundaries, or to choose different representatives for different categories. While we're at it, could we make this hypothetical government's legislature use a fractional (or maybe one-citizen-one-vote) tally, with representatives acting as proxies that individuals could override for specific votes?
- clock_tower 10y ago
  One thing that the Ottoman Empire did well (although not as legislature): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_%28Ottoman_Empire%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_%28Ottoman_Empire%29
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
StillBored 10y ago
This hits close to an idea that has been floating around for a while. Basically, the Apportionment Act of 1911 needs to be replaced, with something that sets the number of representatives equal to some population number (say one representative for every 10k people. One of the suggestions is to set that number equal to the population of the smallest district. The idea gains a lot of support when its presented that people who live in certain states have "more" access to congress because their representatives represent fewer people. I'm to lazy to dig up the actual numbers but IIRC there is something like a 40% difference between the most populous district and the least. I've also wondered if massively increasing the number of representatives (say a few thousand) would help to remove some of the special interests, as it would take a small army to wine/dine the entire congress. Except, that I guess some of these interests basically have infinite money and could actually afford that army.
- lakmear 10y ago
  California is the worst in the United States when it comes to the population vs state legislator issue. 80 members of the assembly and 40 members of the senate for 38.4 million people. Compare that to Vermont with 150 members of the House and 30 senators for a population 600,000. California could be construed as taxation without representation. You are completely correct that more legislators means less big lobbyist influence.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    California citizens retain legislative power and exercise it fairly freely including on matters of taxation, where they have sharply constrained the elected legislature, and retain the power of referendum to undo any act of the legislature (whether on tax or other matters.) As such, whatever the ratio of citizens to members of the legislature, it's ludicrous to suggest that it is "taxation without representation."
    - lakmear 10y ago
      I didn't mean to imply I am complaining about taxes. It's just a phrase to hammer home the lack of representation.

no-s 10y ago

We don't need term limits for people. People come with built in term limits of one form or another. What we need are term limits for laws. Absolute Sunset should be built into the constitution and every law, regulation, charter, advisory, authorization, order, or any other kind of governmental rule should be subject to it. At regular intervals we should require our elected representatives to explicitly affirm, without debate, the existing laws. void all the ones that don't get reaffirmed at the end of the session. That way we'll always know whether the politicians can be trusted to make the right choices and also it will put a limit on how complex government can be.