The Test: Civilization at a Crossroads

For example, decentralization can be useful in some cases. But differing laws in different can be a trade barrier, as companies have to lawyer up for each and every jurisdiction. There can also be arbitrage problems, eg: getting your free education in a generous-public-welfare state, then going to work afterwards in a low-tax state.

Another example is term limits. It has been suggested that in the presence of term limits, lobbyists end up with more political experience than elected representatives, which allows them to capture the political process. There's also the issue that without concern for re-election, an incumbent might feel no restraint in dishing out favors.

So my addition to the list of rules would be: "For each rule, consider how it could go wrong." It might make it harder to rile up the base even when that's appropriate, and it might make discussion take longer than it should, but I think it's worth it.

Well said. This is probably the most challenging analogy for people (and courts) to grasp.

Nobody has ever proposed pure altruism. We've often proposed a system based on mutual/collective self-interest pursued cooperatively instead of individual/corporate self-interest pursued competitively.

Example: the NHS or Canadian health system versus the American health system. I chose this answer because the answer is really bloody obvious. You would never think that many small risk-pools competing against each other will somehow yield a better ability to spread out risk than a handful of pools, or even a single large pool containing everyone. The interest of the individual taking out insurance is clearly to place themselves in as large a risk-pool as they can in order to defray their own costs.

So what leaves us with insurance companies and HMOs in the States? Capitalist dogma that pronounces that Many Competing For-Profit Entities Beat a Single Central Non-Profit Entity Every Time. But what functions are we envisioning these entities performing? Those for a capitalist health system are, in fact, envisioning HMOs and insurance companies as businesses first and actual risk-pools second, whereas those for a single-payer system are envisioning insurance as fundamentally being about risk-pools and discarding the goal of profit-seeking entirely in favor of mere cost-recovery where possible.

Not surprisingly, each system results in exactly the thing it optimized for! The American system puts out gigantic profits for insurers/HMOs at the expense of both the collective public (through Medicare/Medicaid) and the individual public (through premiums, deductibles, high prices for medical procedures). The Canadian and British systems successfully spread out the risk of requiring treatment for sickness over the entire population.

Like freaking magic. And you can design other things this way.

Words are cheap. Making real political change is damn hard, and takes a lot more commitment than a blog post here or there.

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Half this list is just a poorly worded rehash of the existing basis for U.S. government (poorly worded as compared to e.g. the clear, expressive, rhetorically masterful Federalist Papers), and the other half is hopelessly naïve and broken. None of his claims are backed by any kind of supporting evidence or analysis, or even clarification of exactly what he means.

For instance:

> Representative democracy, where (in the States) you elect somebody to go make decisions for you, should involve somebody who physically lives near you, who only works part time making decisions, who is not representing too many people (100K seems about right), and who doesn't have a job for life.

This is a terrible principle. It sounds good in theory, but practical attempts to be led by it – such as short term limits – lead to terrible outcomes, as we’re seeing in the California legislature, where now no legislators have enough time to learn what they’re doing and won’t stick around long enough that cooperation is worthwhile, and so both parties have become intransigent and the whole institution is broken.

> The president's term should be extended and he should be allowed only one term. That way he won't spend all of his time running for re-election.

This is also bad. The president’s power falls quite dramatically in his second “lame duck” term. Making him a lame duck on the first day in office won’t help anyone.

The proper fix is to get rid of the 2-term limit, which was only created in misguided posthumous revenge against FDR, by opponents who lost policy fights while he was alive and bore a grudge about it.

> Politicians should not be able to make decisions today that require my kids to pay money for them 30 years from now. If my kids aren't represented, they shouldn't be able to be taxed

This is ludicrous. All decisions have consequences, and all big decisions today will still effect people 30 years from now. How could you possibly isolate government from any decision which would have impact 30 years in the future, and whyever would you want to? Who would make those decisions instead?

We are best represented by those in our own communities and those who we know on a first name basis. The article suggests 1 representative per 100,000 people - I'd much rather see that number down around 1k. If you want to get power back in the local, make people ONLY elect a local representative per 1k people (+/- 100) and then you can have tiers of representation above that - the local could be a collective 10,000 people with a council of 10 voting, where 1 of them goes to the region / state level - composed of 100 localities - representing 1,000,000 people. Then the national level is just the collective states in the system - preferably, somewhere around 100. It does make national borders harder to cope with, but you can just add layers on top to make super-nations and eventually a global council on top (haha, I made a funny :P)

You get the benefits of having national and state representatives that don't need to be hell bent on campaigns and buzz words and an even more important trait is passed on to the public - it makes political influence easy.

You have ONE person who you, and everyone in your community, knows. You pick that person collectively. If you don't like your regions pick, you can move. If you don't like the local region, you can move to a different local. You should have laws start small and get large through consensus across multiple constituencies.

That kind of system would get people SO MUCH MORE INVOLVED in the political system. And with technology, we can easily usurp the overhead of linkage between different levels of government. You get a small national government that has explicit powers, and tiers of representation below that, down to the local, where law needs to pass up through the tiers by consensus of senate like bodies past the local.

I don't buy it. There have always been revolutions, there have always been ways to offload a lot of work (millennia before machines and computers humanity had slaves).

The most important part of any society hasn't changed -- people haven't changed. We're still pretty much the same animal that roamed the Africa and, unless we start radically modifying our own genome or come up with implants that can actually change our very personalities, the same motives and patterns that permeated our history will remain recognizable in the future. High tech love (or greed, or kindness, or lust...) is not that dissimilar to low tech love. Which is why we can look at Rome or Greece and see our own republics.

BTW we can really look at Rome now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrIEwjgfbYs

I'd want people to understand that politicians are not leaders - they are servants of the public. They are elected to represent the citizens of the country and make decisions that the citizens want, not which they believe would work or worse, which fit their own needs.

They're not leaders in a league of their own who have followers, those times have past. That's why they must be held in check, not left to do whatever they want - that's how you end up with having to take your shoes off and being patted by some stranger at an airport, while they fly first class or charter with their envoy without even going through a metal detector (just an example).

I would add that the states should be able to override any federal law if 51% of the states voted to do so. It would be as if the law never passed.