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Even if all the voters hate the surveillance state and want it gone, what do you do when the anti-NSA candidate in your district disagrees with you on war or ab
by evunveot 13y ago
Even if all the voters hate the surveillance state and want it gone, what do you do when the anti-NSA candidate in your district disagrees with you on war or abortion or monetary policy or...? Every informed voter has to weigh all of a candidate's (professed) views, and chances are any vote they ultimately cast is a compromise of some sort, so you end up with representatives that are collectively a jumble of contradictory opinions. Thus it's hard to put the onus on the voters for any particular policy outcome (especially when it's an outcome that's been deliberately kept secret).
The government of the US is an okay system for managing the varying interests of its geographic groups (the States), but it's not really set up to reflect the will of the US people on any particular issue.
Which makes me think maybe the government should be broken up functionally as well as geographically. Imagine you could vote for separate Presidents and legislators in each of the departments of the Treasury, Defense, Education, et al and make them negotiate equally amongst themselves when their purviews intersect. Then you could get the anti-NSA candidate elected to President of Defense or President of National Intelligence without worrying about his opinions on abortion or drug policy or whatever. And then you could legitimately say "The American people betrayed/saved the internet."
- nitrogen 13y agoImagine you could vote for separate Presidents and legislators in each of the departments of the Treasury, Defense, Education, et al and make them negotiate equally amongst themselves when their purviews intersect. This is something I would also like to see. There are many conceivable ways of partitioning responsibility; geographical partitioning has historical momentum, but there's no reason it has to be the only way.