voting

TRX
April 8, 2012
25:
Geoffrey @5:
We haven't (recently) tried universal direct democracy: let every individual vote on every single issue

Joan D. Vinge described something like this in "Outcasts of the Heaven Belt." So did L. Neil Smith in "The Probability Broach." The electorate could vote directly, or assign proxies to representatives, either in toto or per bill or subject.

Both depended on real-time interaction between the electorate and representatives; now easy via the internet, which didn't exist when either book was written. But the key was selective representation.

I don't *want* to have to involve myself in the details of acquiring new cages for the local animal control department, or negotiating the details of trash pickup with a new contractor, or any of a vast number of trivial and boring details that go into "government." There are a handful of subjects I'm vehement about, that I'd prefer to vote on personally, a larger group of things I'd be willing to assign to a representative, and an even larger block of things that "they" could take care of without my oversight, unless they stop on my toes, anyway.

This is a much finer-grained representation than what I have now, where various people are elected to terms of two to six years, then do as they please until the next election.

TRX
April 9, 2012
161:
@141:
'The federal budget shall be balanced in each fiscal year, save in time of declared war'.

Haven't we always been at war with Oceania?

TRX
April 9, 2012
163:
@147:
"How about a pyramid structure based on roughly the dunbar number (100 for neatness)"

[deletia for brevity]

That's not too different from the system described in the Soviet constitution. Soviets (councils) were to be formed from handy-sized blocks of similar people - workers in the same factory, or trade, or residents of apartment blocks, or any other handy method. These small-soviets would then elect representatives to administrative soviets of the same type of block, all the way up to the Supreme Soviet.

In practice the Party nomenklatura reduced the soviets to a "look how democratic we are!" sock puppet, but hey, that's practical politics for you...

TRX
April 9, 2012
164:
@159:
"Brain scanning for psychopaths and making them ineligible to hold political office?"

Even if you had your magic scanner, why would identifying someone as a psychopath be justification for denying them the civil rights enjoyed by other citizens?

If, say, my county clerk (an elected office) is a psychopath, or sociopath, or engages in squicky sexual practices doesn't necessarily have any bearing on how well they do their job.

Now, if you could come up with a magic scanner to detect "clueless screw-up", I might be interested...

TRX
April 10, 2012
206:
The default governmental system throughout recorded history seems to be variants of monarchy.

There are always people who want to be the boss, and others who will willingly follow them.

Any democratic system has to have some way to deal with that, or it will eventually wind up as a monarchy / dictatorship / tyranny / etc.

TRX
April 11, 2012
235:
@234:
That seems to describe the British Civil Service fairly well. MPs and parties come and go, but the bureaucracy endures, running as a distributed operating system underneath the elected officials. Then the good old boy systems running as daemons... the lines of authority and responsibility diffused and indirect.

Oops. Time for my pills again.

TRX
April 12, 2012
291:
@287
Mack Reynolds has been dead for some years now. By most definitions he'd be classed as a hack writer - most of his books were variations on a single theme, but they were acceptably entertaining, had a visible plot, and a beginning, middle, and end, things not always a given in modern fiction...

Most of Reynolds' stories were based in post-industrial leisure societies and how they dealt with the problems it caused. He ran basically the same stories through different versions - oligarchy, meritocracy, trial by combat, technocracy, and so forth. Many of his stories are still quite good if all you want is to kick back and relax for a while without getting dragged into the latest 1500-page angst- ridden bloviosity.

TRX
April 17, 2012
325:
@316:
> So does that mean we need a vast,
> corrupt and totally unaccountable
> world government before we can get
> rid of all border controls?

A world government of some sort has long been a staple of science fiction. It was one of those background things I never paid much attention to, until someone said, "what if you didn't like the government? There would be no other place to go."

Nowadays when I see the phrase "world government" I think of something like the old USSR, except with no hope of defecting to somewhere else... somehow, I just don't see a consolidation of all major political power as coming out in any happy scenario. And even if it did, it'd get taken over from the inside by the kind of people who would view it as their ultimate power toy.