It is an interesting idea, but unfortunately, it is a major fundamental shift from the current two-party political system that has been entrenched since George Washington left office, and has devolved to the point where we usually get two terrible choices.
It would help if we eliminated political parties altogether and every candidate was independent, running on their abilities and plans, not political party dogma. But that won't happen either. Even Donald Trump realized he had to choose a party to get elected. So he chose the party most likely to vote for a narcissistic bully who promised to bring back the good old days.
A helpful baby step might be to cap the candidate age at 70. We already have a minimum of 35-years-old to run. Why not a maximum? Then they would be out of office by 78 at the oldest. And hopefully, before dimensia, sets it. And it would eliminate the old "it's my turn now" candidates.
Spitballing here: maybe we strengthen the requirement that candidate or slates submit plans as part of filing to run, and in lieu if the idiotic debates we currently have, we televise them presenting their plans and taking questions for experts and citizens, almost like defending a thesis.
I agree we need more rigor out if candidates and less choosing off pure vibes, but given that there will still need to be people making decisions under unforeseen circumstances, I want to have a look at the character and mental capacities of whoever would be making that decision.
I also have a gut issue with: the council culling down the plans (seems super top down, I feel like the best proposals tend to rise from bottom up local experiments), and with the assumption that running government like a c-suite or a startup is better than our current democratic structures (the overwhelming majority if corporations and start ups I’ve encountered are dysfunctional, reckless, toxic—not to mention dictatorial in structure—and I thank god every day that they are only responsible for selling me beer or whatever vs making more consequential decisions). It’s easy and fun to bash the way our governments run, but this idealization of business doesn’t see the thousands of businesses that fly under the radar with much more dysfunction and way less scrutiny.
What if you could come up with your own plan, and there was some kind of community platform that bubbled up the top ones? I'm imagining kind of like Fanfiction sites where the most popular stories people gather around raise to the top? Maybe it's not a council that vets the plan, but the public?
I’m into that. I believe in crowdsourcing judgment to an extent. I still imagine we’d need to have maybe a separate where people nominate themselves or others to execute said plans, and there’s a vote of some kind based on their qualifications.
I also believe we need 80 year plans but politicians are looking only as far as the next election. Development of infrastructure for say, public transport or energy (wind, solar etc) need long term planning and not an election cycle.
I do think there is some of that right now. We can plan longer term when it comes to energy policy, etc. But yes, the election cycle does make things a bit whip-lashy sometimes.
I totally agree with the critical remarks about the current selection of politicians as result of money and showmanship. Unfortunately your proposals for an alternative way are rather flawed: who choses and instals the 7 leading persons? The board of experts? The 7c- head of governmenet? And with 5,6,8-ys plans for governing a nation we have made very bad experiences in Communism. Different to businesses the whole enrvironement (economy, culture, clima, foreign politics., technology...) is much too complex and much too fast-moving to give theopportunity for a plan for longer times.
One way I was thinking about it is the way that startup teams form. They kind of gather around and idea, work together to create a plan, and then when they get funding, they are greenlighted to move forward with the plan. Technically any of us could gather in a team of seven and put together a plan, but they would go through vetting phases to see if they are viable etc.
Consider just the opposite -- sort of. I can't stomach when politicians run on plans. We know we're in la la land. They can have Ideals. And platforms even. What they think and what they want to have happen. But what does happen isn't following plans but negotiations, adn I'll vote for people who see like I see.
It was a little scary reading about plans. So the opposite of being in harmony with life in an expanding universe, and more like the world of contraction and control that less evolved people, like those running things today, give rise to.
I guess the way I see it is that companies have comprehensive business plans that detail how every cent will come in and go out, and it is much more effective than just having a leader with ideals and platforms but no plan!
I am disagreeing with you. You can't predict what will happen in the world effectively enough to make tight future planning viable. And if that is how you run your ship, it would be a regressive and not an enlightened way. A leader with integrity meets the moment with the best things to do.
I agree with that. You need to be able to pivot and adjust as circumstances change, and that requires people who can do that effectively. But I think a team would do that better than a person! (It already is a team that does it, the politician is just the votable person on the face of it).
Yes. There's a major shift from top down management to horizonal sorts of things. It's part of moving our way to the sense of ourselves as being connected up as one humanity without power figures that we supplicate to.
Well yes, but the Government's objective is to maximize the CONTROL they have over people so there isn't a chance in Hell that they'd do that. Furthermore the objective of creating an ELECTED Human Rights organization is that it be EXTERNAL to the Government, and responsible to the Electors, and tit would be a check on their abuse of power.
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MIGHT MAKES RIGHT ... Woke activist Judges and LAWFARE are a huge problem in Canada.
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In effect it would be a different means of enforcing the protections that US Citizens have in their Constitution, but perhaps even more effective. An elected member of such a group would in many cases become more influential and effective than a typical DO NOTHING MP that just votes with the party line.
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If such an organization proved its effectiveness, then it is possible that they MIGHT agree to give up some of their Control and re-write the Canadian Constitution decades from now, but they will never do that unless they are forced too.
There can be no doubt my work is speculative in nature. I'm not trying to understand what is possible, I'm trying to understand what's better. If we can come up with better ideas, then we can create them. Almost every idea we've come up with (ranked choice voting, basic income trials, social security, even a world without slavery) started as impossibilities. But when ideas catch steam they become possibilities!
Fair enough, but America's "great experiment" is still very young. Your dream is a total rejection of the baby in the bathwater. A few bad years is not long enough to envision the wholesale failure of our form of representative democracy. Nothing wrong with dreaming, though, but they'd be better if they were more practical, perhaps a baby step along the way to a total transformation. I dream of lessening the representational distortions in the Electoral College by expanding the size of the House of Representatives.
Well, I'm still imagining a representative democracy, I just want that representative democracy to come up with an actual plan for the country and be greenlighted to do it!
My first question would be whether voting for a parliamentary "slate" is a step in the right direction, or if you think that's just a different way of voting for people.
My initial response is some feeling of, "democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others." You correctly identify serious problems with electing politicians. But, the current system is not set up to maximize the best policies (unfortunately), it's set up to maximize the process for a clear transfer of power.
I worry that voting for plans would end up with everything being resolved in court, rather than in the election -- for many of the same reasons that citizen initiatives often end up challenged in court.
Well, if I'm voting for a slate, then I'm just choosing a group of people right. Do we know what that group of people is going to aim to accomplish together? And do they have the authority to accomplish that once it office? Those would be my follow up questions.
If the people come with a plan and the authority to enact it, that would be a step in the right direction I think. But if not, it might be just another way of voting for people?
Yes, it's still voting for people, and it may not be that different from the current system. I was realizing, after I posted my previous comments that initiatives and referenda are both ways of voting for plans rather than people, and I think they're both good and, it's also true, that both of them have accomplished less than their supporters would have expected and so they can be good places to start thinking about both, "what works" and "what doesn't"
Here's the bit about multi-member vs single-member elections:
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It is well-known that MSPs perceive their roles differently depending on whether they are a regional or constituency MSPs from self-reported surveys on committee and constituency work. And we also know that regional MSPs attempt to build a personal vote and pay more attention to particular constituencies within their regions by the careful location of their home offices, with an eye toward contesting a constituency seat in future elections. But do the perceptions of MSPs match the actual choices made by them in their parliamentary duties – beyond where they locate their offices? That question remained unanswered.
The amount of time MSPs have during each parliamentary session is limited, so they have to make careful choices as to how they allocate their time and representational resources. We expect that constituency member MSPs concentrate more on casework activities given their need to cultivate a personal connection to voters back home, but regional members prefer attending to policy-related duties and advancing the party’s collective interest in the chamber. These choices are the end product of institutional arrangements. Regional members behave so because their position on the party-list ballot is ultimately left to party selectorates, not constituents writ large. Constituency MPSs, by contrast, are directly accountable to constituents, so casework is a more appealing foundation upon which to build a personal vote.
Initiatives are definitely a step in the right direction. But I also think they are too piecemeal. It's like voting for a part of a plan without knowing how it affects the rest of it?
This is what FDR did. He presented a detailed plan for solving the nation's problems and then followed the plan, adjusting constantly when a method wasn't working or Congress or court balked. Most of his agencies were designed to EARN A PROFIT for the government by selling services, so the New Deal depended less on general fungible taxation. Two of the agencies, TVA and BPA, are still earning a profit 80 years later!
"When FDR was running for office in 1932, determined to quash the Great Depression, he promised a policy of 'bold, persistent experimentation'. He didn’t really know how to fight a depression — no one really did, because in previous times, fighting depressions and recessions hadn’t been something the government did. FDR just promised to keep trying things until he found what worked.
And that’s exactly what he did. Many of the New Deal policies were missteps, or even debacles — the attempt to create government-sanctioned monopolies in order to raise corporate profits, the attempt to create artificial scarcity in the agriculture industry to boost farm incomes, and so on. To his credit, FDR eventually abandoned most of the approaches that didn’t work. What ultimately remained of the New Deal economic approach after Roosevelt’s death contained only a few pieces of his initial approach; instead, it was mostly made up of more successful ideas that had been discovered along the way, like financial regulation, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and large-scale infrastructure projects."
We were definitely still voting for a person. Though (and this is wild conjecture) I've often wondered whether it used to feel more like you were voting for a plan before there was television and the internet. For example, many people say that Abraham Lincoln or FDR wouldn't have been elected today because Lincoln talked slow and looked like a country bumpkin and FDR was in a wheelchair. They weren't very "votable" by today's standards, but they didn't need to be when your only exposure to them was through the newspaper. In that case, people were making their voting decisions based on what they read about a person and their plan. Which maybe is more like "voting for a plan" than it is today?
It is an interesting idea, but unfortunately, it is a major fundamental shift from the current two-party political system that has been entrenched since George Washington left office, and has devolved to the point where we usually get two terrible choices.
It would help if we eliminated political parties altogether and every candidate was independent, running on their abilities and plans, not political party dogma. But that won't happen either. Even Donald Trump realized he had to choose a party to get elected. So he chose the party most likely to vote for a narcissistic bully who promised to bring back the good old days.
A helpful baby step might be to cap the candidate age at 70. We already have a minimum of 35-years-old to run. Why not a maximum? Then they would be out of office by 78 at the oldest. And hopefully, before dimensia, sets it. And it would eliminate the old "it's my turn now" candidates.
Oh man, if the best we can do is make an age cap, that's disheartening haha.
No doubt. I am all for anything that breaks the cycle of madness that is currently US politics.
Spitballing here: maybe we strengthen the requirement that candidate or slates submit plans as part of filing to run, and in lieu if the idiotic debates we currently have, we televise them presenting their plans and taking questions for experts and citizens, almost like defending a thesis.
I agree we need more rigor out if candidates and less choosing off pure vibes, but given that there will still need to be people making decisions under unforeseen circumstances, I want to have a look at the character and mental capacities of whoever would be making that decision.
I also have a gut issue with: the council culling down the plans (seems super top down, I feel like the best proposals tend to rise from bottom up local experiments), and with the assumption that running government like a c-suite or a startup is better than our current democratic structures (the overwhelming majority if corporations and start ups I’ve encountered are dysfunctional, reckless, toxic—not to mention dictatorial in structure—and I thank god every day that they are only responsible for selling me beer or whatever vs making more consequential decisions). It’s easy and fun to bash the way our governments run, but this idealization of business doesn’t see the thousands of businesses that fly under the radar with much more dysfunction and way less scrutiny.
What if you could come up with your own plan, and there was some kind of community platform that bubbled up the top ones? I'm imagining kind of like Fanfiction sites where the most popular stories people gather around raise to the top? Maybe it's not a council that vets the plan, but the public?
I’m into that. I believe in crowdsourcing judgment to an extent. I still imagine we’d need to have maybe a separate where people nominate themselves or others to execute said plans, and there’s a vote of some kind based on their qualifications.
I also believe we need 80 year plans but politicians are looking only as far as the next election. Development of infrastructure for say, public transport or energy (wind, solar etc) need long term planning and not an election cycle.
I do think there is some of that right now. We can plan longer term when it comes to energy policy, etc. But yes, the election cycle does make things a bit whip-lashy sometimes.
I totally agree with the critical remarks about the current selection of politicians as result of money and showmanship. Unfortunately your proposals for an alternative way are rather flawed: who choses and instals the 7 leading persons? The board of experts? The 7c- head of governmenet? And with 5,6,8-ys plans for governing a nation we have made very bad experiences in Communism. Different to businesses the whole enrvironement (economy, culture, clima, foreign politics., technology...) is much too complex and much too fast-moving to give theopportunity for a plan for longer times.
One way I was thinking about it is the way that startup teams form. They kind of gather around and idea, work together to create a plan, and then when they get funding, they are greenlighted to move forward with the plan. Technically any of us could gather in a team of seven and put together a plan, but they would go through vetting phases to see if they are viable etc.
A more obvious way would be to just copy how Switzerland elects their Federal Council. But I think there's even room for improvement there?
Consider just the opposite -- sort of. I can't stomach when politicians run on plans. We know we're in la la land. They can have Ideals. And platforms even. What they think and what they want to have happen. But what does happen isn't following plans but negotiations, adn I'll vote for people who see like I see.
It was a little scary reading about plans. So the opposite of being in harmony with life in an expanding universe, and more like the world of contraction and control that less evolved people, like those running things today, give rise to.
I guess the way I see it is that companies have comprehensive business plans that detail how every cent will come in and go out, and it is much more effective than just having a leader with ideals and platforms but no plan!
I am disagreeing with you. You can't predict what will happen in the world effectively enough to make tight future planning viable. And if that is how you run your ship, it would be a regressive and not an enlightened way. A leader with integrity meets the moment with the best things to do.
I agree with that. You need to be able to pivot and adjust as circumstances change, and that requires people who can do that effectively. But I think a team would do that better than a person! (It already is a team that does it, the politician is just the votable person on the face of it).
Yes. There's a major shift from top down management to horizonal sorts of things. It's part of moving our way to the sense of ourselves as being connected up as one humanity without power figures that we supplicate to.
Here is an 'Interesting' suggestion ...
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CANADA and other Western nations do not have the Human Right safeguards as exist in the US Constitution.
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There is nothing that would prohibit the EVOLUTION of the Canadian Constitution though.
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AN ELECTED body, a new branch of Government devoted to the protection of Human Rights would be extremely powerful..
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Many of its ELECTED MEMBERS, by virtue of the high number of people who voted for them, would have more power than MPs elected in the same riding.
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N.B. There is nothing in Canadian Law that would prohibit the election of members to a HUMAN RIGHTS branch of Government.
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No this would not be a Panacea, but it would be a huge step in the direction of fixing our current Uni-Party system.
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Do you need a whole new elected body in order to protect more human rights? Or could you just amend your constitution?
Well yes, but the Government's objective is to maximize the CONTROL they have over people so there isn't a chance in Hell that they'd do that. Furthermore the objective of creating an ELECTED Human Rights organization is that it be EXTERNAL to the Government, and responsible to the Electors, and tit would be a check on their abuse of power.
.
MIGHT MAKES RIGHT ... Woke activist Judges and LAWFARE are a huge problem in Canada.
.
In effect it would be a different means of enforcing the protections that US Citizens have in their Constitution, but perhaps even more effective. An elected member of such a group would in many cases become more influential and effective than a typical DO NOTHING MP that just votes with the party line.
.
If such an organization proved its effectiveness, then it is possible that they MIGHT agree to give up some of their Control and re-write the Canadian Constitution decades from now, but they will never do that unless they are forced too.
.
I don't understand how you can even get off the ground with your idealistic proposal. The U.S. Constitution stands in the way.
There can be no doubt my work is speculative in nature. I'm not trying to understand what is possible, I'm trying to understand what's better. If we can come up with better ideas, then we can create them. Almost every idea we've come up with (ranked choice voting, basic income trials, social security, even a world without slavery) started as impossibilities. But when ideas catch steam they become possibilities!
Fair enough, but America's "great experiment" is still very young. Your dream is a total rejection of the baby in the bathwater. A few bad years is not long enough to envision the wholesale failure of our form of representative democracy. Nothing wrong with dreaming, though, but they'd be better if they were more practical, perhaps a baby step along the way to a total transformation. I dream of lessening the representational distortions in the Electoral College by expanding the size of the House of Representatives.
Well, I'm still imagining a representative democracy, I just want that representative democracy to come up with an actual plan for the country and be greenlighted to do it!
My first question would be whether voting for a parliamentary "slate" is a step in the right direction, or if you think that's just a different way of voting for people.
My initial response is some feeling of, "democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others." You correctly identify serious problems with electing politicians. But, the current system is not set up to maximize the best policies (unfortunately), it's set up to maximize the process for a clear transfer of power.
I worry that voting for plans would end up with everything being resolved in court, rather than in the election -- for many of the same reasons that citizen initiatives often end up challenged in court.
Well, if I'm voting for a slate, then I'm just choosing a group of people right. Do we know what that group of people is going to aim to accomplish together? And do they have the authority to accomplish that once it office? Those would be my follow up questions.
If the people come with a plan and the authority to enact it, that would be a step in the right direction I think. But if not, it might be just another way of voting for people?
Trying to find a good article on the topic I found this (excerpt below): https://www.democraticaudit.com/2018/04/17/on-the-ballot-how-electoral-procedures-shape-the-work-of-members-of-the-scottish-parliament/
Yes, it's still voting for people, and it may not be that different from the current system. I was realizing, after I posted my previous comments that initiatives and referenda are both ways of voting for plans rather than people, and I think they're both good and, it's also true, that both of them have accomplished less than their supporters would have expected and so they can be good places to start thinking about both, "what works" and "what doesn't"
Here's the bit about multi-member vs single-member elections:
----------------------------------
It is well-known that MSPs perceive their roles differently depending on whether they are a regional or constituency MSPs from self-reported surveys on committee and constituency work. And we also know that regional MSPs attempt to build a personal vote and pay more attention to particular constituencies within their regions by the careful location of their home offices, with an eye toward contesting a constituency seat in future elections. But do the perceptions of MSPs match the actual choices made by them in their parliamentary duties – beyond where they locate their offices? That question remained unanswered.
The amount of time MSPs have during each parliamentary session is limited, so they have to make careful choices as to how they allocate their time and representational resources. We expect that constituency member MSPs concentrate more on casework activities given their need to cultivate a personal connection to voters back home, but regional members prefer attending to policy-related duties and advancing the party’s collective interest in the chamber. These choices are the end product of institutional arrangements. Regional members behave so because their position on the party-list ballot is ultimately left to party selectorates, not constituents writ large. Constituency MPSs, by contrast, are directly accountable to constituents, so casework is a more appealing foundation upon which to build a personal vote.
Initiatives are definitely a step in the right direction. But I also think they are too piecemeal. It's like voting for a part of a plan without knowing how it affects the rest of it?
This is what FDR did. He presented a detailed plan for solving the nation's problems and then followed the plan, adjusting constantly when a method wasn't working or Congress or court balked. Most of his agencies were designed to EARN A PROFIT for the government by selling services, so the New Deal depended less on general fungible taxation. Two of the agencies, TVA and BPA, are still earning a profit 80 years later!
From a different perspective, you might argue that FDR is an example of the "vote for people not plans." Noah Smith just summarized: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/is-us-industrial-policy-learning
"When FDR was running for office in 1932, determined to quash the Great Depression, he promised a policy of 'bold, persistent experimentation'. He didn’t really know how to fight a depression — no one really did, because in previous times, fighting depressions and recessions hadn’t been something the government did. FDR just promised to keep trying things until he found what worked.
And that’s exactly what he did. Many of the New Deal policies were missteps, or even debacles — the attempt to create government-sanctioned monopolies in order to raise corporate profits, the attempt to create artificial scarcity in the agriculture industry to boost farm incomes, and so on. To his credit, FDR eventually abandoned most of the approaches that didn’t work. What ultimately remained of the New Deal economic approach after Roosevelt’s death contained only a few pieces of his initial approach; instead, it was mostly made up of more successful ideas that had been discovered along the way, like financial regulation, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and large-scale infrastructure projects."
We were definitely still voting for a person. Though (and this is wild conjecture) I've often wondered whether it used to feel more like you were voting for a plan before there was television and the internet. For example, many people say that Abraham Lincoln or FDR wouldn't have been elected today because Lincoln talked slow and looked like a country bumpkin and FDR was in a wheelchair. They weren't very "votable" by today's standards, but they didn't need to be when your only exposure to them was through the newspaper. In that case, people were making their voting decisions based on what they read about a person and their plan. Which maybe is more like "voting for a plan" than it is today?
FDR really got things done. Love him.