Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

...or because the positions are smaller (and even less salient), it becomes easier to buy off a bunch of smaller reps. If the rep for Chattanooga is corrupt, would you know? Do you even know who they are, right now?

I'm not aware of any academic research on this off the top of my head, but it must exist, that's probably a better reference than a belief that everything changes if we adjust some numbers. That's a very engineer-oriented approach, but it misses that the current crisis (can we call it that) is social. People have to decide they will not support and/or elect unethical morons who say what they want to hear. Until then, it doesn't matter, and you aren't going to be able to reform the system without getting reformers into it, anyway. If you can do that, why is a massive change needed?

Don't mean to be a complete dick about this, but any supporting evidence would be appreciated. You made a logical leap (more reps = less corruption) which is not at all obvious.

It's not academic, but perhaps the founding fathers were onto something. The original constitution set the number of House Representatives to 1 for every 30,000 citizens. It was not until 1911 that the House capped the number at its present 435. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_H...

Yeah, well those guys thought only land-holding males should vote, so maybe they didn't. Did the men designing a system of government for a nation limited to the eastern coast have special insight in what governing 300 million people would look like?

Okay yeah fuck the patriarchy too but they weren't idiots. What they did was no small task and it's.. disrespectful.. to ignore that because they weren't progressive enough for your taste. We could appreciate the fact that they created a system that lets us change the rules as it evolves because they themselves admitted it would be impossible to forsee all the future context needed to make a perfect government. IIRC we've abolished slavery and granted women the right to vote and redefined marriage--we've corrected the issues you mentioned and more. What really kills the whole thing is when we feel the need to circumvent the rules in order to push an agenda down other people's throats. The system was designed to balance a plurality of of factions by preventing abuse of localized powers while at the same time reaching concensus for majority rule.

You mistake criticism for disrespect. I've read Federalist 10, as well. Yes, it's a marvel.

That we've corrected issues over time is evidence that they didn't have all the answers, as wise as they were.

≥That's a very engineer-oriented approach, but it misses that the current crisis (can we call it that) is social.

I've been trying to harp on this point for a while. Any proposed changes to how our government functions and how representatives gets elected isnt going to work because it's addressing something that isn't causing the problems we're seeing. The problem IS the electorate and the choices the electorate is making under its own will.

We are here, because the electorate chose to be. And the portion of the electorate that seems perfectly willing to make uninformed or irrational choices isn't exactly small, and often only counts as a technical "minority" when compared to the over all population.

You might alleviate the problem at best, and most likely only temporarily with any proposed changes. Every change that's been proposed in these discussions always assumes that the presence and amount of rational actors is sufficient, if not the norm. That's not what we currently see.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com