Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

> (If your governance is so bad that half the state tries to leave, you're doing something wrong.)" -- but if half the population of the state really wants change, then it should be able to do so with normal democratic functions, right?

I see we're still getting mileage out of the whole "population/land" duality, huh? The combined population of all the counties that have voted to leave so far is 205,000 (the red counties, not the grey and green, which have not voted so far), which, assuming the entire population voted to leave, comes out to just 5% of the population, not 50%. For the record, that's not even 50% the population of Multnomah County (the county that has Portland in it).

To be clear -- I have no particular opinion either way about whether counties should be able to switch states like free electrons in metal. In fact, I might lean towards it. I just don't see the need to repeatedly use the lamest, laziest, and cheapest rhetorical techniques in these arguments. For a group that loves to talk about virtue signaling, they sure like to "arguing-in-bad-faith" signal.

> but if half the population of the state really wants change, then it should be able to do so with normal democratic functions, right?

You're assuming uniform population density.

This is country folk rejecting the city slickers.

I think the issue with Oregon is the one that we see nationwide. Major cities are dictating policy for everyone else. It's almost like the fear of the founders is coming true: Major cities are deciding elections, and everyone else is kind of ignored.

Kind of like the gas stove issue...

Great! I am sympathetic to arguments around limiting state and/or Federal powers. But the reality is that that is actually less and less often the actual goal. Instead, the goal has become to have "the other side" dictate what goes on, often by trying to incorrectly portray it as an equally large "disenfranchised" side. We can tell this is the case because there is less and less discussion about "protecting minorities viewpoints," as we can see in this very article that can't help itself but to try to portray this issue as "half the population" throwing up its hands and wanting to leave.

This inevitably leads to the actual problem we have in this country: minoritarian rule (that should be obviously worse than majoritarian rule, but again, gets disguised as the "actual majority" or "equally populous opposition" getting a say). If you look at the composition of the supreme court and the senate, along with the contribution to the electoral college from states in presidential votes, it's pretty clear that what gets dictated is lopsided to smaller percentages of opinion, not larger. At the current rate, we are on track to have 66% of the senate representing just 30% of the population by 2040: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/28/b...

This is the problem that vexes me the most (though I'm utterly uneducated on political science). Yes, people generally don't vote with the things that affect others on their mind. So, we can attempt to divide people into groups of "affected by X" and artificially increase the worth of their votes, e.g. "affected by rural issues" vs "affected by urban issues", but that's just so incredibly hazy (there is complex bleed-over between all categories due to indirect or time-delayed effects). And there are too many categories to realistically consider. Do we artificially amplify the votes of black people because there are issues that disproportionately affect them and they are a minority population?

And then you run into problems where there is an issue that affects everybody, but one of these amplified groups has a strongly different opinion on it compared to the general population for some tangential reason, where there's no good argument to amplify any one voice on the topic (lots of examples in right vs left social politics, reflected in the rural vs urban groupings, that aren't intrinsically rural vs urban issues).

Edit: I think the second problem I'm describing is what people are calling "the tyranny of the minority."

> Major cities are dictating policy for everyone else.

Cities contain large quantities of people -- that's why they are called population centers. Large numbers of people generate lots of votes. As compared to locations with fewer amounts of people, cities will have an outsided influence on the outcome of elections.

How else do you want it to work? Normalize vote weight by acreage?

> Cities contain large quantities of people -- that's why they are called population centers. Large numbers of people generate lots of votes. As compared to locations with fewer amounts of people, cities will have an outsided influence on the outcome of elections.

> How else do you want it to work? Normalize vote weight by acreage?

You're implicitly assuming something like a single central authority. I think the idea would be to have more local control, so your local conditions aren't controlled by some distant group that has no concern for them. If the decisions are being made far enough away, there's not that much practical difference between a king and a "population center."

Focusing too much on population gets you a tyranny of the majority.

The U.S. Senate exists to protect the interests of landowners against the overwhelming interests of population centers. That is the bulwark against "tyranny of the majority."

If sentiment is so overwhelming that they can't even win the Senate, then I'm sorry, they lose.

The alternative is tyranny of the minority, which is what we are perilously close to having with egregious gerrymandering and the non-talking filibuster.

> The U.S. Senate exists to protect the interests of landowners against the overwhelming interests of population centers.

No? There's no special property qualification to vote in a senate election.

The Senate exists protect the interests of states as independent political units. That's why senators were originally appointed by state legislatures (i.e. the state governments).

That's funny, down here in Texas, home to 35 million people, cities are 55-60% Democratic but effectively have no representation in the Senate, much of the House, governor and other statewide positions, state legislature, state Supreme Court ...

Effectively we're being told to shut up and serve as economic engines to a bunch of rural backwoods yokels.

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