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Twenty years ago I was a libertarian. I thought the system could be reformed. One does not imply the other. The system is not fixable because it is not broken

Twenty years ago I was a libertarian. I thought the system could be reformed. One does not imply the other. The system is not fixable because it is not broken. It is working I think this is the thing that most people miss. It's not that the system is malfunctioning in terms of being self-inconsistent. It's working perfectly fine. So when people defend the various governmental abuses in the U.S. by saying "but we've decided that this is legal" they're right: we have decided that. And those things shouldn't be legal. So the system is being perfectly self-consistent. It just doesn't address the needs of the governed effectively anymore. Governments, like every other manmade system involving people from development teams to civic groups, need to be refactored on a regular basis. There has to be some self-correction mechanism built-in, because the participants will actively game the system in hopes of gaining a slight advantage. All we're really seeing is hundreds of years of this at work. Various participants have gamed the system to the degree that it's obviously way out of whack from where it started, even though many of the participants refuse to see it. No need to burn it down. Politely supporting reforms in the primary process and 2-party-lock would probably do wonders in the U.S. There are lots of options open aside from the flame thrower. The important thing to remember is that the parts needing fixing are the auto-correcting parts, not all the other stuff like the high-court, low-court stuff. Focusing on that stuff is only a distraction -- and only serves to keep true reform from happening because it diverts needed reform energy elsewhere. Having said that, the things that this author lists (and others) sure fret the hell out of me most days.

ballard 13y ago
First thing to start with is getting public financing of campaigns because that's the source of influence aka corruption... the money. It's the biggest problem, by far.
- ericd 13y ago
  I think this is the biggest thing too - no personal money allowed either. I don't know why any congress would pass this, though, because their existing fundraising infrastructure gives them an advantage over any new challengers who would have to build that up from scratch.
- ams6110 13y ago
  Anywhere there is money there is corruption. The source doesn't matter.
ericd 13y ago
Yeah, I think a change in how the voting process works, including something like point based voting would do wonders to shake things up. The problem I've seen is that most people have no idea how to begin to contribute to making a change like that happen without getting into politics themselves, and doing that successfully seems to require getting completely entangled in the existing way things are done. Anyone have any suggestions besides donating to various advocacy groups?
bostik 13y ago
A friend has been tossing around the idea of "null vote" for quite some time. Basically, to encourage a bigger proportion of constituency to vote, add a new bracket: "none of the above". And then start to visibly track that figure. (Note: this is in Finland, not US) The problem with general elections is that there is no meaningful choice. You can vote for the shade of your representative, but you can't vote against putting an invertebrate lizard in position of power. Adding a valid "none of the above" choice to the ballot would be a way to track just how big a fraction of population disagree with ALL of the available representative options. Currently we lump "invalid" votes together with disqualified votes, so protest votes do not count. They are treated as empty ballots. Personally I would be very much interested in seeing the results after a few years of "N/A" votes. Once the fraction of the votes to go against all of the available choices starts to gain and approach any of the potentially winning entries in the ballot, you might just see a reaction against the uselessness of current political system. At least that's what I hope.

ballard 13y ago

First thing to start with is getting public financing of campaigns because that's the source of influence aka corruption... the money. It's the biggest problem, by far.

ericd 13y ago
I think this is the biggest thing too - no personal money allowed either. I don't know why any congress would pass this, though, because their existing fundraising infrastructure gives them an advantage over any new challengers who would have to build that up from scratch.
ams6110 13y ago
Anywhere there is money there is corruption. The source doesn't matter.

ericd 13y ago

Yeah, I think a change in how the voting process works, including something like point based voting would do wonders to shake things up. The problem I've seen is that most people have no idea how to begin to contribute to making a change like that happen without getting into politics themselves, and doing that successfully seems to require getting completely entangled in the existing way things are done. Anyone have any suggestions besides donating to various advocacy groups?

bostik 13y ago

A friend has been tossing around the idea of "null vote" for quite some time. Basically, to encourage a bigger proportion of constituency to vote, add a new bracket: "none of the above". And then start to visibly track that figure. (Note: this is in Finland, not US) The problem with general elections is that there is no meaningful choice. You can vote for the shade of your representative, but you can't vote against putting an invertebrate lizard in position of power. Adding a valid "none of the above" choice to the ballot would be a way to track just how big a fraction of population disagree with ALL of the available representative options. Currently we lump "invalid" votes together with disqualified votes, so protest votes do not count. They are treated as empty ballots. Personally I would be very much interested in seeing the results after a few years of "N/A" votes. Once the fraction of the votes to go against all of the available choices starts to gain and approach any of the potentially winning entries in the ballot, you might just see a reaction against the uselessness of current political system. At least that's what I hope.