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Comment by mintaka5 | Hacker News Reader

make it like jury duty. randomly select taxpayers to represent people for short terms. i'd prefer a random concerned citizen making decisions for a month over 2/4 years of a corruptible do-nothing elitist. keep the representation constantly rotating. more people is more ideas, more consensus, and closer to reality for most of us <---

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Have you ever served on a jury? My three times were eye opening. Very few of my fellow jurors had the slightest ability to perform critical thinking. Most paid no attention to the jury instructions and simply voted their biases. I can't imagine how bad they would be as civil leaders.

I don't think anyone is saying these people would be competent. Just on average more competent than a career politician. If you're baffled by the average jury, you should see what the politicians are like!

There are a number of problems with juries:

1. They're too small.

2. They're not totally random. The attorneys are allowed to eliminate members of the pool.

3. The jury doesn't actually run the trial. Nor do they run the police department, for that matter. The trial is run by the judge and the attorneys. The jury is mostly passive listeners. They're spoon-fed info at the trial and not even allowed to know all the facts.

4. Jury terms are too short. Contrary to what the previous commenter suggested, it's not ideal to have short terms. Citizen legislators should probably serve 1 or 2 year times. They need time to learn how to do the job. They probably need preparation before they take the job.

The point of a jury isn't competence, but independence. A judge may be afraid to convict a powerful defendant or acquit an unpopular one, because he has his career to think about. A jury has no such issue.

If you simply align jury pay scales with pay scales for skilled labor in the work force, you'd expect to find basically only people who can't even hold a job. The 'pay' for jury duty in most areas is actually below minimum wage.

This is what they did at times in ancient Athens. One positive was that the average citizen was much more aware of the concerns of the city than would occur if only a select few were running things.

But not every one in Athens was a citizen. There were many slaves etc.

This is election as per 18th century Britain elections by the propertied classes.

Recurring stints of civil service as a form of taxation would be a good equaliser of opportunities as well.

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