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Comment by trabant00 | Hacker News Reader

The part about North Dakota having senators way above population share in the country: why is this bad?

Maybe they represent a different kind of life. Maybe the zones that encourage overpopulation shouldn't have monopoly on representation. Because on some issues they clearly did bad.

And I think we can stretch this logic to the entire article. The author is as guilty as "not in my back yard" as the rich people. Move you yard! Vote with you wallet. Go live, work and pay taxes where they respect your way of thinking.

Now you want to have your cake and eat it too. You talk against corporations and rich people but you consume their products and dream about making it big yourself. What other reason could you have for staying in mega cities?

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> The part about North Dakota having senators way above population share in the country: why is this bad?

Because it's anti-democratic?

> Maybe they represent a different kind of life

Maybe Hindus have a different way of life than Christians in the US. Should they get bonus representation too, since they're a much smaller population?

> And I think we can stretch this logic to the entire article. The author is as guilty as "not in my back yard" as the rich people. Move you yard! Vote with you wallet. Go live, work and pay taxes where they respect your way of thinking.

Absurd. Land is fixed, you can't just go generate more of it. And by not allowing more people to live where a booming economy is, they're hurting people, they're hurting economic opportunity, and they're hurting the environment. That is not okay.

The winners here are selfish people, largely landowners who benefit from the housing prices being so high. The losers are the rest of us.

> Because it's anti-democratic?

Good thing the US is a federal republic

It's also a representative democracy.

A federal republic is a type of representative democracy, so you're correct.

So what was the point of your comment, then? The US is still democratic.

If you're specifically objecting to the use of "democratic", I could also say that it's blatantly unfair and nonsensical. Why should North Dakotans have more voting power than Californians or Texans?

North Dakotans have the same amount of voting power as Californians and Texans. It's just that they have to share with more people.

If you have a gallon of pistachio ice cream and a gallon of vanilla ice cream, the pistachio eaters have the same amount of ice cream as the vanilla eaters even if more people like vanilla than pistachio.

They have more voting power/representation per capita. Which is ridiculous, and blatantly unfair. People vote, not land.

Can you explain how what you're advocating / arguing for does not distill down to tyranny of the majority? That's how I have always viewed this argument but I'm open to hearing how I am wrong.

Every citizens vote should be worth the same. The POTUS doesn't work for ND, the state government of ND works for ND. The POTUS works for the citizens of the US and shouldn't be biased to the interests of residents of any one place in particular, which is what happens with the electoral college system.

If you want to avoid tyranny of the majority, you don't do it by eliminating equal representation, you do it by dropping first past the post.

> tyranny of the majority

Man, I hate this phrase so damn much. What does it even mean, and why do people bring it up? The original use was basically, "the majority using democracy to be real assholes to the minority". It's the reason we have certain rights enshrined in the Constitution, to protect against that.

But the way people bring it in response to anti-democratic efforts makes ZERO sense. Letting 55% of people vote to be jerks is bad, but letting 45% of people vote to be jerks is...somehow good, or something? Obviously not, it's basically the same problem except with less popular support, so it's a flatly worse situation.

It's super disingenuous too. If tyranny of the majority -- aka democracy -- is such a problem, what even is the alternative? Go back to kings, or an aristocracy? Should we remove the vote from Christians -- they're the majority in the US, after all -- and let, I dunno, Hindus make all the decisions?

Plus, the people who mention it curiously only ever want minority-equalizing powers that would benefit their side in particular. You don't see conservatives advocating for giving extra votes for Muslims and Hindus, or Asians and black people, despite those groups being obvious demographic minorities.

And the pistachio eaters have more ice cream per capita. Obviously the quantity of pistachio should be made smaller so that vanilla eaters can have bigger shares of ice cream.

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