By the way, I don't' see myself as left or right wing. I look at an issue, and sometimes the left has a good solution, sometimes the right does. What we need is not a new party - we need a new way of governance which is issue based, not 'time' based. Maybe one day technology will be advanced and easy enough to allow safe referendums from your mobile device. Continuous referendums...
What we need is a way to link policy with its desired effects. Call it evidence-based lawmaking if you like. If you make a new policy, that policy should have a falsifiable goal embedded into itself. If that policy doesn't achieve its own goal, it is overturned - no courts, no appeals, etc., it simply winks out of existence.
Doing this would require creating new institutions with size and scope equal to current justice systems, albeit with different, if related, goals. It may be worth the work, though.
We would also like that the "consent of the governed" be unanimous. Or at least very high.
Just because %60 of the population, for instance, wants to ban gay marriage, they should't be able to. IT should take %95 or something like that.
We no longer have the multi-week latency between our hometown and washington. Votes can be instantaneous-- and in the 1990s MIT made software that would allow anyone to audit an election and prove it was legitimate, and prove that their vote was counted, electronically. Everyone could do a recount in a few minutes. Things like the blockchain might even be a better way to do the same thing.
So we no longer need "representatives" that don't even represent us-- because they are picked by the two party heads in a system that keeps any other party out, structurally with "election rules"-- not even getting into the shenanigans that keep them out of debates, and off the ballots in many cases.
Frankly, I think our election system is deeply compromised (whoever controls the software controls the outcome) and representational government is no longer necessary.
I don't think you can say that. Libertarians are not a single group with a single dogma or something.
I've seen some libertarians making a good case for a Monarch-like figure as well. Instead of having elected representatives who basically have no responsibility since they change every 5-10 years, having someone for life embodying the State may be something more reliable for the Country in the longer term, and who would have to listen to the people since they would not be going anywhere a few years later.
I can't say I really agree with the idea, but I can't really condone democracy as it is right now, where people who have no education, who can't reason with logic, and don't care about anything except their own situation have as much voting power as people who are trying to make reasonable, structured decisions based on principles or a good understanding of the country's situation. "Democracy" as we call it is not perfect indeed, and it actually sounds like the worst compromise of all options we have out there. That's the lowest denominator, and we can see how it keeps failing us over and over again no matter how we hope it can work.
Your democracy can only be as good as your people, and that says a lot about the quality of what we have right now.
> Just because %60 of the population, for instance, wants to ban gay marriage, they should't be able to. IT should take %95 or something like that.
If you want no decisions to be made, then setting thresholds like that is the best way for statu-quo. Or you know, you can actually have a constitution for things to be prevented to change in the first place.
The German Pirate Party had a system called "liquid democracy" which allowed you to vote yourself, or revocably delegate your vote to others. Interesting idea. IIRC it didn't work.
IMHO, continuous referendums are a mindblowing idea... mindblowingly bad. Politics, like any other skilled job, requires commitment and expertise. The "wisdom of crowds" is not a substitute: while it may aggregate information successfully, it cannot create information. For example, figuring out Putin's intentions, or doing a cost-benefit analysis of TTIP, is difficult and time-consuming. If nobody has the incentives and responsibility to do that, it will not get done: political expertise will be a public good, and will be undersupplied for the standard reasons. Representative democracy leads to candidates and parties who have reasonably strong incentives to demonstrate their competence. Direct democracy does not.
Noone knows if it would have worked, because they never implemented it (except for some local levels).
There was much party-internal warfare about it.
One faction saw Liquid Democracy as the solution to all problems.
The other faction insisted on "Datenschutz" (privacy extreme), which to them evidently meant that having your real identity tied to any election is unacceptable. They would rather have people vote twice or three hundred times on the same ballot than introduce any kind of identifier.
It's a great demonstration of why the German Pirate Party doesn't even get enough votes anymore to have the listed by name in TV when election results come in.
It's actually got it's own problems though. Everyone will vote yes to lower taxes, but also vote yes to spending more on schools, welfare, etc. Referendums are best if fiscally neutral, but that makes them hard to use for lots of issues.
I doubt the equilibrium would be perfect.
Even if the balance tips only 2 or 3 percent towards less tax / more spending, it would still represent the citizens opinion better than the decision making models of modern day democracies do.
I think that can happen only if we had an absolute single identity identifier. One issues to every citizen and is not mutable or shareable. One you cannot falsify or duplicate, lend to your friend or use after you die. There were many attempts to create such identities but I'm not sure any had that goal and neither worked anyway. There is a privacy concern with 'true identity' token like that, but that is something we'll have to live with. Until that happens, continuous referendums are not attainable, I don't think. Maybe a future generation of the blockchain?
Having said that, should I copyright the term? just in case ;)
