Long, long ago... the guys in Building 18 let me in on an open secret. I wrote this a very long time ago, and it was the first time I really nailed (with a LOT of help) the difficulties in our election system... without further ado: The Ice Cream Example
We elect people to investigate these matters and we provide them with the resources necessary to do so. The fact that they have proven inadequate to the task does not invalidate the system. Â It just shows that we have elected incompetent people.
But, WHY have we elected incompetent people? While there is no a priori reason to assume that representatives cannot serve the will of the people, there are thousands of years of citizens that have made the same case, over and over again. The system isn't broken, but it continually elects the wrong type of person.
We must ask the right type of person will be, if such a person exists. If you took an actual vote on gun control, through a direct polling of the nation's citizens, and 40% of the people wanted to outlaw silencers, then an ideally elected representative pool would vote in the same proportion. If the nation were against dancing pigs at a rate of 80%, then the representatives should express this preference.
The only exception, as you argue, is when representatives act through their enlightened wisdom to safeguard us from ideas that seem great, but carry long term consequences that are destructive.
Take social security, for example. There was little public support for this bill. Many wise people pointed out that it was an unmaintainable Ponzi scheme, and it would bite us in the rear many years down the road. It passed anyways. A trust was established where workers deposited their money to be repaid with huge returns in the future. The problem, of course, is that they raided the trust over and over to pay for new programs, for new votes, with money in a trust which was already promised to some of our most exposed citizens.
Most economists predict that seniors would have more money today for retirement if the social security program had not been established.
Representatives always and everywhere lack restraint. The power that their position confers will always attract those who seek to benefit from that power. Lord Acton said it best. Power corrupts.
If the idea is that we do not trust the judgment of the public on matters of state, then why would anyone champion a system where each citizen must not only decide their positions on individual issues, but must further become an accurate judge of the character of a politician.
If we cannot do the research required to intelligently vote on gun rights, then how can we accuratly judge a man's character, which is by far the harder task.
In all this, we are trying to implement a democracy. Though flawed, a democracy is ruled by the will of the people. Our representation system was designed to express this will, and not to subvert it.
If we intend to implement a durable Democracy, it must be direct... an expression of what the people want from their government, for better or worse, because that is exactly the country that our character dictates must exist.
If we intend that democracy to be restrained, and to protect the rights of minority opinion holders, then it must be far from a simple majority that legitimized the use of force. A direct, concensus democracy is the truest embodiment of the ideals expressed by our founding fathers, and the brave souls that gave their lives that this principal, Liberty, should be embraced by mankind.
Our government fails when it does not embrace popular sovereignty, freedom, liberty. The great bulk of human achievement has been provided by men and women, individuals apart from government, attempting to enrich their lives through voluntary exchange with others.
Governments, and the natural populism of a simple majority representative system, have combined to thwart liberty, to normalize the individual, and to take credit for every advance, and to place blame for every pitfall.
If Democracy does not serve both liberty and the necessary restriction of liberty which a consensus of society should be able to enforce, then Democracy must be changed.
No representative voting
All decisions between competing alternatives on the structure and order of government are made by the greatest consent of society. It is only the greatest consent of the public that can grant true legitimacy on a governing system.
All actions of that government require the consent of a overwhelming majority of society.
The notions of greatest consent and overwhelming majority require discussion. They are both practical and philosophical.
First, we have the decision making tool of greatest consent. In effect, it accepts that the most preferable course of action for a group should be that course of action which has the greatest support among group members. Current democratic process is clumsy and causes a system of block voting to influence the expression of the public will. The run-off system makes it almost inevitable that two voting blocks will develop... call them Parties. A system designed to choose between alternatives should present all alternatives and ask a participant which options he or she would support. It should be an honest question of, which of these options would you support? You may support none, all, or any combination of the proposals
National Ice Cream??
Vanilla
Rocky Road
Chocolate
Mocha
Lets say, for the sake of our example, that if forced to choose between all the alternatives, more people support chocolate than any other ice cream. A voter may like Mocha and Chocolate, and be fine with either, but if he knew that mocha probably wouldn't win, he'd vote for chocolate instead.
In a run-off, a game develops. Rocky Road, Chocolate, and Mocha interests may combine their votes, because in a four way run-off, Vanilla may take the crown. Rocky Road and Mocha may split the chocolate vote, and then the real favorite of the people, Chocolate, is reduced to second rank status.
National Ice Cream(Results)
Vanilla 35%
Chocolate 30%
Rocky Road 20%
Mocha 15%
If the chocolate group ice cream lovers combine their interests in this system, you would get...
National Ice Cream(Results)
Vanilla 35%
Cocoa Alliance(Chocolate, Rocky Road, and Mocha Political Party) 65%
Of course, the Vanilla crowd can now try to court the rocky road group by adding Fudge Stripes and Pecans, with a few star shaped marshmallows mixed in. The Cocoa Alliance will at this point be bickering about whether coffee subsidies should be part of the platform, in a show of support to the mocha crowd, or if Marshmallows are really that important.
In the next election, the inevitable happens...
National Ice Cream(Results)
Vanilla Dream Party, Now With Marshmallows, Pecans, and delicious fudge stripes 55%
New Cocoa Alliance (A chocolate mocha swirl, with a few nuts left behind from the rocky road bunch) 45%
And yet, nobody really wants vanilla with marshmallows. And why are there so many nuts spread about???
A government must accurately measure and express the will of the people, the source of its legitimacy. A run off throws noise into the expression of that will. If an alterative exists that more correctly achieves the preferences of the public, it should be offered as an alternative, and the public should express their preference. If more of the public supports an altered system than the current system, then it is by definition more legitimate, because in a democracy, the public legitimates its government only through willing consent. With one vote per person, the system with the most votes is most legitimate. It is a more organic pairing of the goals of democracy with a system that correctly implements it.
Which would you support as a national ice cream, choose as many as you wish? (Results)
Chocolate 75%
Vanilla 51%
Rocky Road 41%
Mocha 38%
Some voting systems assign a ranking system, but this is inadequate to the task. If a voter assigns 5/3/1 to their three favorites, for example, it taints the expression by forcing the 5/3/1 preference ratio that does not necessarily reflect the voter's actual preference. While the voter may have a preference, it may be nowhere close to the enforced 5/3/1 ratio. Gaming will be introduced because we have artificially fixed an aspect of the voters expression. Any enforced ratio can be exploited through vote pooling and the injection of dummy candidates and proposals to manipulate the process. History has taught us that corruptible systems become corrupt.
Some systems attempt to sidestep this issue by assigning a number of votes to each candidate from a pool, for example, of 100 points. The voter may spend these votes on as many candidates as they want, or to support as many options as they wish. I'll spend 75 on chocolate and 25 on vanilla, for example. While this correctly reflects the preference, it still presents a fixed aspect into the system, the limit of 100 points, which would be corruptible through issue dilution. It would be corruptible through the introduction of dummy issues on your opponents side to dilute his vote among several acceptable alternatives. It gives voters that pool their points an incentive to coordinate their voting to artificially subvert the actual will of the people. If it can happen, it will happen... the egos of important people and trillions of dollars are on the line here.
The system of greatest consent does have drawbacks. First, it does not allow the expression of a strong or weak support for a particular candidate or bill. It is advantageous for some groups to favor weighted expression. You don't care about ferret protection legislation, but I REALLY care about it, very passionately. This system would disallow the passion of an individual to give their vote more than its equal share in the democracy.
In this, it prevents new laws, regulations, and candidates that have little support from being passed, enforced, or elected, even if the interested parties REALLY BELIEVE IN corn subsidies or vanilla ice cream.
Greatest consent finds the alternative among a set which will have the willing support of the greatest number of people. In this, we implicitly aim at passing a bill which will the public will willingly comply, and subject themselves to. We understand that regulations always fall back to the threat of force or compulsion, and we therefore wish to use the government to accomplish our goals in the most precise and agreeable manner possible, and to set as few as possible against it.
The people must be sovereign over their government, but still willing to accept regulation when there is real need to do so. Do people get to murder? 99% of us would say 'no'. Steal. Definitely not... and then you get to an issue that fewer people support. Should the government have the right to take away our guns? 40%. Should we require children to go to public education? 60%. So we get to keep our guns, and we can't steal or murder. Those are clear enough. But public education?
If we do not see the danger in this, it is because it is too close to home. Most of us went to public school, and we generally believe in education. Most people think we should have public education, so what is the problem?
First, it is unclear whether Americans, if asked squarely, would consent to a system where their government can require their children to learn anything! This is a huge concession for Americans to make, and it directly impinges on the parent-child relationship. We will take your money. We will use it to hire teachers who will train them to become good Americans. Our employees will teach your children the history of America from textbooks that they approve of. If you want to go the home school route, you must still pay for schooling for others and you have to teach your children specific things, and they must pass tests that we approve of.
If we were not squarely inside of it, would be not judge this system as daft? And yet we are a bit daft sometimes.
You can pick any standard for the quality of legislation that gets passed. You may say it must get the approval of 30% of the people before it becomes law. You may say 50%, because for every issue that can garner a 30% vote, a bill with the same goals that obtained a 50% vote should be superior.
Currently, this is where we stop for most issues. This is a conquerors democracy. In the formation of a government, decisions must be made as to the rules to govern by. Since these issues are settled by powerful people whose method at arriving at their current post often involved violent conflict, this seems natural to them. If I have 51 tanks and you have 49 tanks, I win... I get to make the rules.
This is a behind the scenes, subconscious reason, though. These men also had very conscious reasons for adopting this strategy. It gave the governments power. Any time support could be raised for the ambitions of the political class, it is far easier for the government to do great things if the bar for consent is low. A fifty percent vote from representatives of the people is a low bar indeed, to take a citizens property, liberty or life.
If we want to improve education or anything else, we cannot accept this system. It is the cause of low quality solutions to real problems. These flawed solutions are as a rule more wasteful and more corruptible than solutions provided through voluntary cooperation. We must not accept 50% as the bar for quality. What is the correct number. That must be determined by the will of society, in full knowledge of what we can reasonably expect from different levels of consent.
A level of 99% would neuter the government. It would be feeble and the citizenry may have to fend for themselves on most issues. If the Anarchists are right, and they make a fair case, we would be forced to cooperate for even such issues as policing. There would be very few that dissented to any individual rule in government, but perhaps many that would wish the government to have more control... to keep people from having sex on the Whitehouse lawn and chicken fights on the city streets.
It's a free country, right? To some, perhaps too free.
At 60%, we would not protect the minority opinion, but those in power will fight hard to keep the system in place, because it still allows a great deal of social control. Through this spectrum of required consent, the group of things that would become legal or illegal will change. The higher the number, the fewer powers the government could enlist, and the greater the freedom of the individual.
At 85%, we say that the will of the people must be obeyed, just like every other system, but we acknowledge that the public must have some control over minority members, such as those that like to kill people for fun. We say that 85%, for reasons as arbitrary as our values and tastes, is the correct number.
At 85%, everyone would have the right to do with themselves whatever they wish, so long as it is not opposed to by 17 out of 20 people. If we were only to institute a system of education if 85% of us supported it, then we would have either no education system through the government or we would have a system that was well designed enough to convince 85% of the population of its merits.
From the opposite perspective, if 85% of the public wanted a law to be enforced and the government was not set up to answer their cry, the citizens may take matters into their own hands. Certainly at 99%, this would be so. So the answer of where the consent level should be laid must be determined by the public itself, and is only in that way legitimated as a grounds to stir government to action.
Based on what I know about governments and people, I would support 75% to 85%. What would you support? The number you choose says a lot about what you believe the role of government should be. 66%? 90%? How much do you trust your fellow man? Is the bulk of enmity is society a result of a system that puts our interests at odds?
If you choose 50%, that says much about you, as well. In order to give the public more control over minority positions, you are willing to enlist all the harm and mediocrity that this level of legitimacy must confer upon an unsuspecting public.
Together, a system of representation and a conquerors level of required legitimacy create the political climate we see today. Trace these tendencies, from country to country, from decade to decade. Representation and 50% are anathema to a free society.
It is these flaws in our current implementation of Democracy that made the entire system unworkable in Iraq. In a country where 60% of the population are Shia Arabs, we entrusted a democracy that gave that group a sort of legitimacy and supreme control over the other 40%... half of which are Sunni Kurds... half of which are Sunni Arabs. Did we really expect this to go over well? The Shias have cause to celebrate... they have control. They probably won't amend the 50% thing any time soon.
Representation does not accurately express the public will, and it has not produced more wisdom and restraint. Representation must be destroyed, because the positive aspects it once had no longer apply to the same degree. Representation was an excellent tool for the voting population to maintain order, because they believed that the liberty of all mankind was dangerous. They voted themselves more power because they thought themselves wiser than the masses.
Perhaps most of the population were incapable of governing themselves in that day and age. I may have thought so at the time, in my vanity. I know now that my vanity would have been false. We expect to little of people because we suffer an unending demagogic skree about how everyone is screwing up the planet, how dumb we are as a species. This is all we hear because there is an incentive in our political system to caricature and belittle those with opposing opinions. No matter how you vote, someone will be calling you stupid for it tomorrow morning in the paper.
We mistrust those who are different, and it causes us to underestimate them. In liberty, we can live together. We must be restrained when we act, and we must not accept a system as manipulable as representation has proven itself to be.
In my argument, I make the assertion that the expression of the public will is the primary purpose of the representative. This is why 'represent' is in the name, and not 'decider'. The only valid exception I can surmise is when the representative acts to protect us from our own passions or short-sightedness, in which case I may accept their judgments.
Representation could only be said to be preferable if the benefits exceed the drawbacks.
Representation supposedly saves time by not requiring the individual to research each individual law. The underlying assumption, however, is that the government needs to be very active at changing the rules. Businesses in the Great Depression didn't think it was a good idea. Isn't it more about deciding on durable, practical and principled rules than trying to pack in as many as possible?
If we hadn't passed a single law since the inception of the United States, where would we be? Surely all the greatest actions of congress involved lifting restrictions. We lifted restrictions who could vote and who could hold office and who could own property. All the noble actions that we celebrate our country for were directed at human liberty. At equal treatment under the law.
All the restrictions, licensing, requirements, paperwork, DMV lines and parking tickets... those are a product of an active congress. Some good can be found in all these laws, but on balance... it's mostly bad, except in terms of winning votes, the true objective of most new legislation.
Representation does great harm because it divorces the government from the people. Through their inaction, the people can be harmed by their government. This must not be so. There must be no defensive battle between the people and a government apart from it. We must be one America. The people must be in control, because at all times, they must hold themselves wholly responsible for the great successes and great failures of our country. Being separated from our government through representation always leaves the public blaming bad decisions on the government... and representation gives the government the excuse that they are simply representing the interests of their constituents... which is... sort of... okay. If the government gave favors to no special interests whatsoever, it would be immoral to seek special consideration. At this stage, all citizens would effectively be equals, neutral to one another. Once the first special interest gains the favor of government, it becomes fair to ask for considerations for any group. Actually, from an ethical standpoint, a representative should lobby congress for favors until the distribution is neutral. If your constituents pay in ten billion, then try to get money until the ten billion dollar mark is reached.
So, whereas an honest government should sidestep this whole issue by not giving a single dollar to any special interest, the interests themselves will almost always benefit by trading votes for favors... and the politician that does this increases his chances to be elected... so...
Perhaps there are conflicts of interest among different groups in society. Once the government takes any side in any conflict of interest among its citizens, the greatest care must be taken to avoid but if any interest group can lobby representatives for favors, it is fair and just for representatives to act similarly in the interest of their particular constituents, even at the expense of others in society. and the government with the excuse that blame is diffused, and all acts they are now only sporadically and partially in control.
When issues must be decided that do not directly infringe on an individual participants liberty we accept the decision for which there is the greatest consent among participants. Any attempt at a run-off system involves the introduction of game mechanics. This is necessary when that which always provides leverage into the system when a decision must be made, then the course of action gaining the approval of the greatest number in society is the most legitimate course of action.
