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.
yes. i'm very pragmatic when it i think about government structural reform. i used to think of the constitution as somewhat sacred, but no longer.
i'm now through chapter 6 of the Democracy Without Elections digital book/blog series. the author specifically talks about voting reform here: https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/election-reforms. highly recommend it. he says the australians are at the forefront of advocating sortition, as they've been unhappy with their rcv + pr voting systems.
rereading this, i've revised my thinking on a competency test. i would only dismiss people for uncivil behavior from a sortition body. i've been persuaded that having, for example, someone with down syndrome could actually be good thing. they would likely not persuade anyone to make any bad decisions, they may force people to express their ideas very clearly and more patiently, and they would certainly serve as a reminder to the other members of who all is in the society and will be affected by their decision.
I really like the sorition idea. Do you think if sorition is not possible to implement in place of an election system that a large big tent political party could be created that does it's primaries/nominations via sortition instead of the elite ivy League networking factory that the Republican and Democratic parties run to get candidates?
i think we attack from all sides? i still think simply telling the young generation about georgism feels like the most important thing to me. really don't know what's viable.
i'll say this though. the few times i've explained sortition to more of the boomer generation, and by explain, literally only say, "so. sortition is the idea that we just pick our legislators at random, like we do a jury. they serve one term, they have no gaurantee at all of being reselected."
they usually raise their eyebrows and go, "huh. not a bad idea."
i certainly think this approach is possible. figuring out where to direct efforts is hard and confusing for me. right now, i'm just kinda like pushing on all doors and seeing what opens. going to a local housing event that my california state councilmember is attending this saturday.
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.
yes. i'm very pragmatic when it i think about government structural reform. i used to think of the constitution as somewhat sacred, but no longer.
i'm now through chapter 6 of the Democracy Without Elections digital book/blog series. the author specifically talks about voting reform here: https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/election-reforms. highly recommend it. he says the australians are at the forefront of advocating sortition, as they've been unhappy with their rcv + pr voting systems.
Hmm I'm skeptical of the benefits of RCV and PR. I don't think we should consider them the model. https://rcvchangedalaska.com/
wow! yes, i've read about its shortcomings some, but these really hammers it home.
rereading this, i've revised my thinking on a competency test. i would only dismiss people for uncivil behavior from a sortition body. i've been persuaded that having, for example, someone with down syndrome could actually be good thing. they would likely not persuade anyone to make any bad decisions, they may force people to express their ideas very clearly and more patiently, and they would certainly serve as a reminder to the other members of who all is in the society and will be affected by their decision.
Yeah but without politicians, who on Earth would be able to make the decision to invade a place or to go to war?
;-)
right. and then what would we base our war movies off of?
I really like the sorition idea. Do you think if sorition is not possible to implement in place of an election system that a large big tent political party could be created that does it's primaries/nominations via sortition instead of the elite ivy League networking factory that the Republican and Democratic parties run to get candidates?
i think we attack from all sides? i still think simply telling the young generation about georgism feels like the most important thing to me. really don't know what's viable.
i'll say this though. the few times i've explained sortition to more of the boomer generation, and by explain, literally only say, "so. sortition is the idea that we just pick our legislators at random, like we do a jury. they serve one term, they have no gaurantee at all of being reselected."
they usually raise their eyebrows and go, "huh. not a bad idea."
i certainly think this approach is possible. figuring out where to direct efforts is hard and confusing for me. right now, i'm just kinda like pushing on all doors and seeing what opens. going to a local housing event that my california state councilmember is attending this saturday.