Sort It Out
...amongst yourselves
(NOTE: Tomorrow is an LA Georgist meetup in San Pedro. Come play The Landlord’s Game or something at 2 pm)
Four days after the 2004 election, I turned 18. Although I wasn’t able to, I believe that was the last election that I really wanted to vote in. It wasn’t that any particular candidate really excited me, but I wanted to be part of the community. I wanted to count among the adults.
Now, I haven’t voted in 10+ years. I pay hardly any attention to the California propositions. I didn’t watch the debate. (Incidentally, on the morning of my 18th birthday, I did wake up to a letter from the selective services that felt like a perverse rite of passage and an unexpected, eerie efficiency from government. We’ve agreed the draft is slavery, right?)
People hear about my voting history and cry out, “What if everyone did that!?”
My response is, “Well, then I’ll read about all the props and candidates, go vote, and then I get to pick all the winners. That would be fine with me.”
I’ve now learned that I practice “rational ignorance”. This is only one issue, of many, that I want to talk about today.
Today, I want to address the most common complaint I hear after I finish a sermon on the word of George. My friends all say, “Max, George sounds like a great guy, but it will never happen.” This is also what many people on the internet say. This is what a lot of Georgists fear. For a while now, I’ve known of a secret path. I do not promise it will bring about the glory of George. It may be that Georgism actually leads us to this path. As far as I know, it is not derived from first principles of justice. I regard it for its pragmatism and game theoretic efficiency. However, it’s weird. You probably already thought a single land value tax was wild, so I didn’t want to overload you with another radical proposition. Today, I believe you are ready to hear about sortition.
Sortition is the formation of legislative bodies by lottery.
Yes, it proposes picking members of something like Congress at random.
You could think of it like how we form juries. You pick some number of people randomly, as long as they pass a basic competency test, they’re in. Unlike how we treat jurors, the position would be optional and it would be well-compensated. These juror-legislators would serve for a fixed amount of time with no guarantee, or any increased likelihood, of being reselected. Due to the nature of random selection, there will be young, old, rich, poor, skinny, fat, red, white, blue, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, and brown people. It will not be made up of 99% landlords.
The two-party system would be undermined.
The campaign cycle, as a tribalistic, reality TV show, that consumes massive amounts of wealth and cultural power, would evaporate.
The legislators, unlike our present-day votership, would not have cause for rational ignorance. Remember what rational ignorance is? That’s me. If I were chosen to be one of the sortition body members, unlike my voting obligations now, I would take it very seriously. I would make every effort to share my ideas (read: GEORGISM) with the other members. The other members would be incentivized to listen and discuss. They would not be worrying about their home constituency. They would not be plotting their career trajectories. Would people offer these legislators bribes? Probably. Yet since a sortition body is dissolved in a fixed amount of time, the members are not careerists and can’t promise special interests any long-term support. It would be much, much less effective.
A chief executive officer would still be chosen, like a city manager. This would be the duty of the sortition body. It would not be an election.
I have not studied sortition as I have Georgism. I’ve only recently started trying to learn more. My motivation was mostly in seeking a way to implement the LVT. In other words, sortition is a new concept to me and I’m open to hearing arguments against it. I have only read 4 chapters (of 15) of the book-in-progress, Democracy Without Elections. I learned of sortition from Georgists and we regularly discuss it, but I’m no expert.
Prior to sortition, my only hopes for a fairer, less corrupt government had been voting reform. I liked ranked choice voting the most, although I was aware of Arrow’s impossibility theorem. It only seemed vaguely plausible that after many years of better voting methods, we could scratch away at the power of special interests and landlords. Maybe Georgist could hitch a ride on the YIMBY wagon, but their efforts are also limited by the current system. Was this the best shot we had at implementing the Land Value Tax? Well, it may still be. I may just be kicking the bucket down the road with proposing sortition. If sortition is great and could lead to the LVT, well, how do we get sortition? I don’t know that either.
My final comment about sortition is that, as Democracy Without Elections covers, the founders of this nation seemed to have been very worried about two-party systems taking over. We have ended up there. The promise of our system was to let the marketplace of ideas lead us to electing the best people for the job. The fall back option was that we could vote them out of office, if they sucked.
The book goes through this all very thoroughly, but I didn’t need to be convinced that our system has failed. It has failed at both electing good leaders and getting rid of bad leaders. The members of Congress and the presidents of the United States of America have not impressed little old me. What about you?
Yours truly,
Max
P.S. I feel good about how I ended my cute little blog post, but I still just want to say some more. If you had made me supreme chancellor of the galaxy a few years ago (we coudl talk about the idea of a benevolent dictatory being the greatest form of government some other time), I wouldn’t have known what to do (other than end the blockade of Naboo by the Trade Federation). It is only through my conviction of the justice of the Land Value Tax that I have taken an active interest in reform. So far, this seems pretty promising.
The longer one lives, the more corruption one realizes; and that 99% of leaders fall to whatever gets them re-elected. So remove that motivation!
I too have become interested in political decision making reform because of Georgism. What is it that prevents such good policies from being adopted? What leads to such a politically disenfranchised and disengaged populace? An ineffective voting system is a big contributor, and without fixing it I do think Georgism is significantly less tractable.
Sortition offers a compelling solution. The body members have as little entrenched interest as possible, and are as reflective of the population as possible. I think there's a lot of room for sortition in governance.
As a perhaps more incremental reform, I'd really like to just see a voting system that allowed a Georgist political party to participate on the same footing as any other party, where supporting it would not come at the cost of wasting your vote. The simplest fix would just let people to vote for all candidates they approve of, not just one, since choose-one voting is what gives rise to duopoly. The mandate of Georgism could be brought to greater attention, and get support from voters across the political space.
But as it currently stands, even if Henry George himself ran for the US presidency as a 3rd party candidate, we would not be able to vote for him because doing so would be a waste of our votes.