Harmattan wrote:parties are not needed to have a majority of votes
We agree that parties are not needed to reach plurality or even majority decisions. Game theory demonstrates this.
You can prove through game's theory that the overall voting outcomes are more satisfying for individual party members than if they were not allied in a party
Game theory does not prove this at all. Game theory merely states that people are motivated by their own self-interests and builds upon this axiom with voting and auction mechanisms. Plus, what you said is contradictory. If a person's position is rejected by a plurality or majority of their group, and the group creates a position for which that member hates, and the group managed to pass that position into law, then the group scores a victory but is the individual really more satisfied than he would have been if the group had adopted his or her position? Obviously not. Game theory merely explains that the reason a person would remain with the group despite the rejection of that person's position is because that person continues to benefit from the group through the group's support services. The person perceives they are better off with the group than without. People are 'happier' to be included than to not be. It's as simple as that.
small concessions to ensure constant victories and less big concessions.
This is not limited to parties since it is true for all situations including in a congress. Parties are not needed to create small concessions.
but parties will be formed to systematically conquer majority of votes. Parties allow narrower consensuses to dominate politics ... rather than having to submit to the national consensus
So what you are and were saying is that
even if it isn't desirable that a
narrower consensus be able to dominate politics that it will occur anyway. Okay, I concur.
[Parties] provide services that no one sells today. They have specific political experiences, skills, knowledges and networks to run successful campaigns.
Yes. I agree with you that this is why people join parties. It's for the support services. It's also how the party maintains control over its members. A person is more willing to give up or compromise on their position on an issue if the consequence of not doing so is to be denied appointments to paid or prestigious positions within the party or government.
And many of those people do this benevolently!
I think you are specifically referring to free volunteer work. The voter registration system in my design directly addresses this. It rewards "benevolent" support. In fact, the foundation of my philosophy is that for a democracy of the People to be legitimate, it must be started by volunteers. Again, you are right that there are
individualist benevolent volunteers in the world who are both willing and able to do work for free just to see an event
they are interested in succeed or to support
their political candidate or party. So to those people, a reward for their contributions would be unnecessary, not that it wouldn't be welcomed as sweet savory gravy if they were rewarded anyway. It goes without saying that they would already feel great if the event they were organizing was successful or if their candidate or party won an election, yet, if they could also benefit from their contributions even when they lose or don't get their way, then it's that much better for them and thus their motivation can be more easily sustained. If there's one thing I learned from my own life experiences with voluntarism it's that the sustainability of a volunteer's contribution is unreliable, thus, any organization that relies on volunteers needs an unending stream of them. My design provides an extra incentive to volunteers to make voluntarism a bit more reliable and make it easier for the government (or party) to sustain itself without the need for large private donors or foreign loans. It also gives non-voting members (you can think of them as non-citizens) a fair and obtainable path to the right to vote (think of it like a path to citizenship).
Sure, some marketing agencies could theoretically specialize on politics and take over this role, but how will you ensure that parties disappear and are replaced by marketing agencies, especially as parties currently have a monopoly over this and will always be cheaper thanks to benevolent work? I suggest you put yourself in a candidate's shoes: so you are provided with this huge sum of money, so now what? How are you going to compete with this other candidate that is supported by a party with a professional staff that has campaign experience and a social network of benevolent supporters? It's like thinking that you can fire all of a corporation's employees and outsource everything.
I never intended to eliminate parties when I created this design. I just thought they wouldn't develop because the direct election mechanism in my design made them irrelevant. However, since you pointed out to me the services that parties provide would still be needed, such as branding and support services, I admitted the oversight on my part. My design does not eliminate parties, but I never set out to eliminate them anyway.
Still, there is a problem when there are only 2 parties, so let's address that. As we've already agreed, eliminating parties by force is against both our ideological principles. Then, without the option of banning parties, I don't think they can be eliminated. The best thing in this case, imo, is to create conditions which make it easier to compete against parties. Consequently, any condition which makes it easier for an individual to compete against a party will also make it easier for more parties to form. Having more parties on the playing field will result in more competition so that it is more difficult for large parties to sustain their size and power. On the other hand, game theory also demonstrates that smaller parties may align themselves with other parties, eventually resulting in a mass consolidation if conditions allowed. And, as demonstrated by the American Civil War, once consolidated it can be virtually impossible to break back apart except through military force. This brings us right back to the problem of lost opportunity. The only way to attack the problem of dictatorship then is to either have no parties or to have lots of competing parties. Since you pointed out that my system does not eliminate parties, then the other solution is to create conditions which make consolidation difficult to sustain and also results in the development of lots of smaller parties. As it turns out, with the addition of public funding of private campaigns, I believe my design accomplishes this. It allows lots of parties to compete for government control of
this society and gives incentive to break away from larger parties to compete more directly for public funding of their private campaign. In addition to public funding of private campaigns, my design employs an instant runoff voting system rather than first past the post. Those two conditions alone (public funding and IRV representation) create conditions that encourage the development of more parties. The idea is not new since other people have proposed this and some countries even run their democracies this way, but it does not go far enough to satisfy the criteria for developing a
rational democracy since we're still left with an irrational republic. This is where the thematic districts of my design come into play. By creating a hierarchy of thematic districts, much like all organizations do, whether they be organized clubs or churches or corporations, issues can be sorted into divisions by logical function. These two conditions create a competitive atmosphere within each logical division.
Parties are not just a matter of money
I know you framed this statement in the context of voluntarism, but since I've already pointed out that even when one feels strongly about certain issues (especially when directly affected by them), that an organization (political party included) requires a forever lasting string of volunteers. Even if every volunteer kept up their energy indefinitely and never had a single disagreement with the leadership, a person still has to eat. It takes less effort to be benevolent when we're paid to be. That's the whole focus of my design. It uses game theory which, as you know, is based on the fact that every individual is motivated by their own self-interests and that we can use voting and auction mechanisms to organize individuals into groups for the purpose of distributing political and economic power. I believe my design will 'work' as in if put in motion that it gives profit incentive to
'outsiders' to organize and operate within the framework of my design, if they only knew about it and understood it. The question is whether it's a
more desirable design than the world's
current government frameworks. I think it could be. Sure, there are a few issues to iron out, such as knowing how people will react initially upon first hearing the idea, which is why I sought out this discussion. Through this discussion, I've already seen how my design can be improved, plus I know how to go about rewriting it and exactly what questions to address. Still, I don't expect perfection. The goal is to just build something better, not to solve all the world's problems.
It's not that I do not "like" e-voting, it's that e-voting cannot be secured. E-voting is letting the NSA vote for you. Everyone with a real knowledge of those problems will tell you something similar.
How is e-voting allowing the NSA to vote for us? By knowing who votes which way and terrifying us to vote the way CNN tells us to? Or by forging votes? They couldn't get away with forging votes because votes can be verified by 3rd parties even while keeping the names secret by using a verification method that I will briefly outline in response to the following.
The ONLY way to secure a vote AND to make it transparent and verifiable (which is equally important: you cannot trust your government to secure the voting process, it must be verifiable by third parties) is to make votes public, to discard the secrecy. There is not other way. E-voting can only work if votes are public because this is the only way to empower citizens with the ability to control the e-vote. ... And, no, you cannot check your vote by logging in. You can check what the machine tells you your vote was, which is very different. [Because] even if it was your vote, the matter of knowing whether it is taken into account is still different.
I disagree with you that e-voting cannot be made transparent and verifiable without discarding secrecy in order to allow a third party to verify the votes. Here is my approach to it, but I'll post a link too with a concept others have been working on. As a programmer, I'm sure you know of the key value pair concept.
Code: Select allvoters = {"Bob":"ab8320dks88q41", "Sandra":"hs6518dil54p24"} Two lists can be made for the voting results. On one list, all the people who voted are listed. It doesn't tell us who they voted for. It only tells us they voted. This way, we can know how many people voted. On a second list, the vote counts are given and tells us which way each person voted but it does not tell us that person's name. Instead it uses each person's voter ID number. The public doesn't know who each ID is associated with, but each member knows his or her own voter ID number and each member can only have 1 voter ID. For added security, voters can be given new voter IDs every year. So to verify the votes a person only needs to verify their own votes and check that the number of votes corresponds with the number of voters.
That's just my approach, but, as I mentioned earlier, there are people more knowledgeable than I am who have been working specifically in this area. They call their approach
'zero-knowledge proof'. Do you know much about it?
If you think that open source or secured machine could do the trick, they cannot. For the start it is a lot more complicated than you think (you would need to scan every machine transistor by transistor by electronic microscope and every line of source code from the OS to the firmwares - and scanning the hardware probably means destroying it) and would require so much money and work that very few entities could do it (so much for the verifiability). And even if you were doing all of that, the probability would be high that someone could still manage to have hidden a vulnerability that could be exploited to fraud complete votes for decades: if checking source code was enough, modern OSes would not look like cheese..
That's absurd and ridiculously unnecessary since only the results need to be verified. Whether a machine is infected with malware is entirely irrelevant if the outcome is intact and verifiable. And if it's found that the votes had been tampered with, then the machines can be replaced and the votes erased. I demonstrated above that it is possible for a 3rd party to verify e-votes without having to scan every machine transistor by transistor to see if the votes had been tampered with. However, you did bring to the surface of my mind another problem of e-voting which will probably kill the e-voting aspect of my design. That is if a machine is hacked, even if it does not change the votes (which
can be verified), simply knowing who voted which way could have devastating consequences as it would forcefully remove the secrecy layer. Secrecy cannot be discarded in the foundation layer of a democracy. There will be too much pressure on individuals by their peers who would bully them into voting their way, maybe even by the NSA.
But maybe we're both being a bit too paranoid over secrecy? Even in paper voting, the
county clerk or designated recorder records all the votes after they have been counted. This is how they discover if someone has voted twice or not. This means even with paper votes that the government already knows who voted and how they voted. Nobody seems to be bothered by this.
On the other hand, yes, you can count the ballots yourself: I already did after being asked to come back at the end. We were two or three dozens of people at the end and we were randomly selected to count the ballots. And the others were able to watch us. The paper process can be controlled by citizens from the start to the end. And some people do control it. The e-voting is not verifiable by the crowd unless you discard secrecy.
Here in America, each state has its own ballot procedures but they all seem to use an electoral commission. My design uses a Ministry of Elections which really isn't any different.
Direct democracy is not like anarchy. The coordination would still be there: I said the base would be your typical democracy, so there would still be a govt, parties and such. It's just that the number of representatives would not be bounded, that representatives would have as much votes as their "electors", that you could bypass your representative anytime. Once we get e-voting (at the cost of discarding secrecy, again), there will be no reason to keep legislative elections as they are now. The legislative chambers as we know them mostly exist because no more than N people could enter a parliament building, because asking people to vote is bothersome and expensive, etc. On the other hand representatives would still be needed because most people do not have the time or knowledge to understand or follow the debates and would rather trust someone else: their representatives.
We use direct democracy in some states in America, such as my home state of Colorado. The way it works is that someone circulates a petition (often by standing outside a store or attending parties and ask registered voters to sign it) and if enough signatures are collected then it is sent off to be verified. If the petition was signed by enough valid registered voters then the measure is added to the next public ballot. If 60% of the citizens vote in favor of the measure then it is signed directly into law, bypassing the legislation. I oppose direct democracy because it removes the necessary filtering process of forcing bills to be debated in legislation. What happens then is the farm animals take over the farm, removing rationality.
Here is an article that goes into greater detail of the problem. To me, direct democracy is not far from anarchy. It may not technically fit the description of anarchy itself, but it isn't far from it either.
I am not aware of any previous use of the word "thematic" or any "thematic democracy". And given the poor results I found on the web, I think it is not connoted with anything, although I would not be surprised to hear that some direct democracies have used this adjective to describe their way to slice and distribute responsibilities.
It's possible that your search results differ from mine, given the nature of Google. But the real problem is more likely my hyperbolic use of the term anarchy. From my hasty viewing of admittedly only a few web sites, it appeared to me that the word thematic was being used by people who favor direct democracy. I don't think people who favor direct democracy are interested in rational government since it allows the majority to vote laws directly into existence rather than relying upon representatives who are more educated and more aware of the issues to make the laws. We must have leaders make the laws, not common people. Common people don't even know who their
vice president is let alone whether or not we should ban
dihydrogen monoxide. How can you expect people to know what the issues are let alone know how their decisions affect their environment on both a micro and macro level without sufficient awareness?
Here is a fake news report that does a superb job of demonstrating how 'media language' herds people's opinions.
Here is another one. I see this kind of trash in the real world every time I watch the news or read a newspaper. It doesn't matter if it's CNN, Fox, ABC, MSNBC, The Alex Jones Channel or The Young Turks. They all do it. I only chose to post those videos instead of actual ones only so I could show non-controversial examples and avoid creating any side debates or discussions about any specific incident which would distract from our primary discussion.
This is why my system elects leaders instead of laws. Leaders act as the filter. Unless it is one's job to be aware of all things or one is grossly financially independent, nobody has the time and resources necessary to "open a book" and "educate themselves" on every subject and every issue. Heck, even if one were grossly financially independent, no single person can know all things. There are simply too many things to know and our environment always changes. That's why we specialise. Besides, even if someone were to have all the resources necessary
and knew everything, what incentive would they have to expend still more resources (including their limited time) to inform the rest of us? And why would we believe them even if they did? Because they would call us stupid, uneducated and too lazy to open a book if we didn't? Oh, please...... I know that they are the real idiots. They're completely oblivious to reality. It all boils down to "believe me because I said so." And that is a problem with both libertarianism and monarchism. But, when we
elect leaders, we collectively decide only whether a person has the qualifications to serve the position, whether that person's values resemble our own, and whether that person's management strategy will result in an outcome we can trust. So if the Ministry of Science tells
us that evolution is the theory most accepted by scientists and that creationism is pure crackpottery, then we confidently know whether or not we can believe the ministry since we know the procedure the Ministry of Science uses to derive that conclusion and that the Minister of Science was transparently selected based on his or her merits. The scientists can duke it out amongst themselves through peer-review while we, the commoners (or specialists in other fields), can rest assured of what we're taught in school are more in line with the facts or are at least the closest at that time to whatever the "truth" happens to be.
I still strongly dislike your civil service idea. What's the point of forcing me to spend a hundred of euros or work 1h a month while I already pay much more in taxes every year?
Think, from the perspective of you wanting to join a club you are not yet a member of. You would be unequal to the club members if you had to first get the permission of the current club members before you could join. What if they said no? So not only would you be unequal, but it would be unfair to you too. In fact, being excluded might make you envious, especially if you were starving and membership to the club meant you could eat. On the other hand, it would be unfair to the current club members to let you join without paying any kind of equitable due, especially since they were the ones who created the club and made their resources available to its members in the first place. To be fair and equal to both sides, there must be an equitable contribution by everyone. But the equitable due itself poses a problem. If the fee is too high then there will be people who can't afford to pay. If the fee is too low then it is unfair to already existing members. Obviously, I do not want to spend a bunch of my own money and put in a lot of my own time to create something just to lose control of my creation (and thus its benefits to me for which I deserve since I created it) to a bunch of freeloaders who contributed nothing. I thought about this problem for a long time which is how I eventually arrived at voter registration as the solution. Since the society is for the benefit of a group, and not any single individual, it stands to reason that building the society must be a group effort. And that is why we must have dues. But there is no basis from which we can use to set an amount for dues because as of yet there is no society, nor even a small club. So what to do? There must be a minimum contribution that all people pay or else we could only have a dictatorship. Plus, we can't ignore the people who have zero worth. Perhaps they are victims of progress, which is what we call technological unemployment, but if they are willing to learn then they should be allowed to join so that they can learn to be useful, but they should not vote if they have contributed nothing. So we allow them to join but don't allow them to vote since they contributed nothing. But if we do not educate them then they would effectively be denied equal opportunity and that would go against the founding philosophy of the society. Therefore, to keep membership open
and to keep from giving away the farm, we limit voting to those who contribute the minimum amount. This way voting is restricted to equity members. This means voter registration is the bare minimum required tax. The tax on economic activity does not count toward the bare minimum. The tax on economic activity is only in place to enforce that a portion of wealth withdrawn from the society is redeposited as tribute for creating the conditions which enabled the economic activity in the first place (public services such as police, fire department, roads, bridges, parks, education, business loans, grants, etc.) In other words, voter registration forms the sustainable base of the government while the transaction tax sustains and grows the government's operations and public services.
I am still convinced that public agents will have the most votes and will form a de facto leading caste. I do not see anyone buying 1k€ (the cost of 60h of cheap work) or even more than 100€, and I do not see anyone volunteering for 60h of work while it would seem pretty natural for a civil agent to just shift some of his working hours every month as part of the civil service. To formulate it differently: the psychological price of the vote will be far lower for civil agents so they will dominate the vote.
Yes, it will start out that way and I designed it like that in order to safeguard the society's constitution during its early stages. After all, what if a group of Muslims joined and changed the constitution? I don't want Muslims to dictate to me, in a society I designed, what projects will and won't be funded. Nor do I want public money being used to fund mosques nor grants given to clerics. But, I still want to
allow anyone to contribute to the society's economic development so that the society can support its leaders. So to accomplish both, I use game theory to my advantage. Because I know that people only care about their own interests, I can rest assured the Muslims will keep themselves out. Muslims won't be interested in an anti-religion constitution and there won't be enough economic incentive in the society's early stages for them to want to join. When the society grows large enough that its economic incentive begins to attract people who would like to change the society's constitution, it will be incredibly difficult for them to do so because that economic incentive which attracted them in the first place will also have attracted Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists. Upon learning first hand that they don't stand a chance of being elected by the opposing force, not to mention the large group of atheists who made up the founding membership, they will lose interest because the economic incentive still will not be great enough to keep trying. So the atheists stay in power and more atheists join, attracted by the economic incentive and the established fact that it is easier for a non-religious person to be elected than a religious person. So if some people choose to not obtain voter registration because they believe their 60 hours of work or their payment of hundreds of dollars will do nothing to influence a vote then fine. We just have to remember it's their decision not ours. We give them the opportunity and they turn it down. That was their choice. At least we give them a choice.
So, the society grows in terms of land holdings and economic activity and more people shall become attracted to it as a result. But, even though membership is open to everyone, not everyone will want to become a member. But eventually, they will become a member anyway even if they cannot affect the vote. After all, living in the mountains is an option for citizens of many countries, but few choose to do so because they lose the benefit of living in cities. Even though everyone is pretty much forced to live in a society somewhere, I don't think anybody is forced to live in cities any more than they are forced to enjoy Internet connectivity and hospitals. But, civilization comes at a cost and all its inhabitants must share the expense because all its inhabitants benefit from their society. Still, people must be given a choice of societies to live in. Because people were not given a choice to be born, the location of their residence and environmental circumstances are not their fault. Therefore, people must be allowed the freedom to travel and settle without immigration restrictions, and people must have the right to form new governments. Our current governments do not allow limitless immigration, so my design shows a solution.
Maybe I have not been clear: private schools are identical to public schools. They do nothing better, nothing worse, everything is homoegneous.
Private schools compete on teacher to pupil ratio. The smaller the class size, the better education students receive. So in my system, even though school tuition gets reduced as more public funding is accepted, there will still be a market for private schools because students can receive a better education with smaller class sizes. This does not mean public school students receive the worst education either because public schools will be privately owned. The teacher to student ratio will be entirely up to the school's owner, plus they must keep in mind that parents and students can still choose their schools. This very well could result in a very homogeneous outcome, but it is not at all uncompetitive nor of low quality. In fact, competition between the schools will result in stable, high quality, low cost education.
They just evict the worse students and put this burden on the public schools.
I don't know about the policies in France, but in America, public schools have the power to evict students too. Besides, the worst students should be evicted. They disrupt classes and ruin the learning environment for other students. I could see how my policies could force the worst students into public schools who will accept
anybody because they are refused admittance by both private
and public schools. But, in that case, it's the students' own fault. They were given an equal opportunity (most likely several opportunities since schools are paid per pupil) and they chose to throw their opportunity away. If the environment of a public school is not a good fit for a student and that student cannot afford to attend a private school, there is no problem because under my system that student can choose to attend another public school (who will gladly take them as long as they don't have an expulsion record). After all, the school won't turn down government money (unless they believe that the new student will drive away the other students).
In the end, our education system is entirely decided at the ministry level.
The education system must be at least steered at the ministry level. It's the only way to ensure those topics which are essential for our society are taught. The methods used to teach those topics can be left up to the schools and the teachers, but
what will be taught in each topic or whether or not to even teach a topic at all cannot be entirely up to the school or the teachers. For example, the teaching of creationism should
never be taught in a public school and public money should never be awarded to any school or any teacher who teaches creationism. Even if the school teaches math, no funds for teaching math should be given to the school if that school also teaches creationism. It must be in the constitution.
I misunderstood what the congress is in your system.
I thought I made the congress system in my design quite obvious. But, if anything, you pointed out
how I should rewrite it. Once I rewrite it, it'll be much clearer. I'll write out exact situations and center everything around open source society development. I'm thinking about something like a democratic version of
Open Source Ecology. Their society project is a monarchy. I'm imagining doing the same thing but as a democracy.
But how can a congress be the head? 200 people cannot debate together to devise multi-years priorities, decide everything, etc. Everything takes too much time, concessions are made all the time, clientelism rules (congressman X will want measure Y so that he is re-elected), etc.
The congress can be the head because it selects the ministers who run the country based on the policies they create. Both corporations and non-profit organizations use this system of governance and their societies operate just fine. Of course, with corporations there are majority share holders that provide stability to the system, but this is not the case with non-profit organizations where each member holds only 1 vote.
In a corporation, stock holders elect the board of directors. Those board members elect the corporation's executives. The executives run the business but they are not independent of the board of directors. The board of directors vote for policies that the executives must abide by. So you see, even though the executives get the credit for running the business, it's the board of directors who are ultimately in charge. Several non-profits also run their organizations this way. |
AAAS |
ABET |
American Neurological Association |
The leading board must be narrower. If Mexico wants to invade the USA? they just have to do it on a Friday night: half of congressmen will not be contactable, the other ones will disagree on the proper answer, they will have to create a sub-commission to address specific issues, etc. By Sunday night the USA will be Mexican. Or, more likely, you army will have took over the reins and overthrown your government.
Not so because each minister has enough authority within the jurisdiction of their own ministry to act on behalf of the congress within the constraints of the policies created by the congress. If Mexico invaded, the Ministry of War would have automatic authorization to deploy military forces. But if there was no war and military forces were deployed then the congress's Sergeant at Arms would be ordered to arrest the Minister and seize his or her assets. But in the beginning, there isn't likely to be any Ministers of War because the society wouldn't be large enough to warrant any. (Maybe there could be a Minister of Cyber Warfare) But even without the power of arrest the budding society can still freeze a minister's assets (i.e. society owned land and currency) and initiate criminal proceedings with the local government who has arresting power for a physical jurisdiction in criminal cases like assault, theft and fraud.
By anonymous faces, I meant no-names, people who are not known from the public. The public needs to know who to blame when things turn bad. Since they will barely know most of their representatives, I doubt this information can be properly extracted and used on the next election.
People barely know their representatives today. The difference is that
under my current government I cannot vote against a candidate from representing his or her local district (and by being a member of congress me also!), but under my system I can. That's because the congressional divisions of my system are drawn thematically instead of geographically.
That term, thematic democracy is starting to grow on me.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller
- By FiveofSwords
- By MistyTiger
- By wat0n