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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit of a hobby horse of mine, but the reason is the number of elected representatives has not kept pace with the population growth. When the USA was founded there were about 20,000 electors per representatives and now in some seats there are over a million.

If you want representation you need to be able to meet and talk to your rep - more importantly they need to be able to acquire your vote without the need for advertising. Remove the need for advertising and you remove the need for money and the corruption that flows.

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I agree fully! Apparently they stopped adding representatives when they filled up the space in the capital building. I've been intending for ages to pull up the ratio mandated by the constitution to see how many "missing" representatives we have today.

It looks like Article 1 Section 2 has what you're looking for, specifically "The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative" [1]

Wikipedia also seems to provide a good summary of the issue. [2]

[1] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...

How about starting from the other side? Decreasing the number of electors to be more the way it was when USA was founded? So people with no income earning property ('passive income' as it is called here), do not vote? Before 1820s, they didn't.

If you're interested in fixing the problem the article discusses, this is pretty much exactly the wrong approach. You would actually be hard-pressed to find a solution more diametrically opposed to fixing the problem.

That would be the fastest way to regress back into feudalism, you know if that is what you are in to.

My belief is that post-scarcity society with very high technological unemployment and universal democracy are fundamentally incompatible. People who are net recipients from the government, should not vote, or they will vote the society into collapse. Can they ever vote for anything but more free stuff?

Other problems are fixable with more attention/funding to law enforcement, and yes using all the AI toys: crime prediction, drones, etc.

If it's truly a "post-scarcity" society, people can have all the free stuff they want. If they can't, then it's still a scarcity society.

More law enforcement is rarely the solution to any long-term problem: that's how you end up with the East German situation where 1/4 of the population was Stasi informers.

The stasi informal informers where there to monitor attitudes of people, not prevent crimes and either way the system wasn't particularly effective. Overall in East-Germany, people were not very afraid of police ('friend and helper'). Police didn't randomly shoot people.

I'd say the US is a better example of a police state than the GDR.

> Police didn't randomly shoot people

Well, unless they went over the wall while trying to leave.

The GDR has been synonymous with "police state" for my entire life, although it's not the place that coined the phrase. The US has colonial policing and people who believe that slavery should not have been abolished.

Well plenty of people got shot crossing the wall, but that's not really a "random shooting". Certainly much less random than "walking while black" or something.

Apparently there were 139 wall-victims in 29 years, so less than 5 per year, or about 0.03 deaths per 100k people per year. Apparently, twice as many people died of natural causes while crossing the border.

The US seems to have about 1000 shootings by police per year [2], which would be about 0.3 deaths per 100k people per year.

So the US has 10x more police-shootings than the GDR had wall-deaths per person.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todesopfer_an_der_Berliner_Mau... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...

America largely disproves this already. The highest proportion of net recipients of federal government benefits are from poor rural deeply conservative states that form a substantial part of the base of the Republican party, which has made rolling back those benefits a primary goal.

Never mind that most people who have to use welfare for cash assistance actually hate it, and they would rather earn their own living wages via work. Welfare queens are very few and far in between.

If the remaining voters then don't vote in the interests of those net recipients, where will that lead? A medicated underclass?

I think it's safe to wait until we can envision a truly post-scarcity society to envision how we might go about destroying it.

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