Review of Select Ideas
What pre-existing radical ideas are worth learning from?
This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.
This is the beginning of Chapter 2 - A Review of Select Ideas. I have a few more core foundational pieces that will go into Chapter 1, which I’ll post when I get them cleaned up enough, but I’m feeling like skipping around a bit.
So - there's plenty of reason to be disappointed with the structure of modern liberal democracies. I know, as a writer I'm supposed to surprise you, not just repeat what we all know. But writing out some of the underlying reasons will help guide us in our search for novel and interesting alternatives.
Many of the current oft-proposed ideas out there don't get us that far. Adopting RCV doesn't fix the problem of bundled governance, nor does it improve on justifiable governance. Removing the Electoral College doesn't help us with the dilution of representation. Ten year terms for Supreme Court justices, though a good idea, doesn't help with the core problem: creating effective legislation. And ending the filibuster sounds good until you imagine your opponents being in charge.
If you put an engineer in front of the wrong problem, don't be surprised when you're not happy with the solution.
In the next sections I'm going to review some proposals I've seen and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. Some of them I've modified and repurposed as components of my own proposal, and I want to give credit. Others are just interesting.
The main areas I'll be talking about are:
Going Private and Going Public
Prediction Markets & Futarchy
The reality of self-governance in a big country is that there will always be some times when the people in charge have different political opinions than you. It's easy to imagine that the best system is the one that puts people you agree with in charge, but I posit that the best system is the one that doesn't harm you too much when the people you disagree with are in charge. The challenge then is how to allow change and progress at all, given there's always someone who disagrees. We'll review proposals specifically with that in mind.