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People don't realize that all of our problems lately are stemming from lack of truly representative government. Until we find a way to ensure political candida

People don't realize that all of our problems lately are stemming from lack of truly representative government. Until we find a way to ensure political candidates aren't corrupt and bought off, there will always be corruption, double standards, and lack of accountability from them.

johnnyanmac 7mo ago
That's a lot of work to do. It ultimately works off the issue that most voters are disengaged, while the most interested parties are very engaged. Corruption is happening out in the open and there's still so many people shrugging in response. One good push back from everyone all at once would fix a lot of things quickly. But that implies the people are united and not instead driven into manufactured conflict by said interested parties. It's basically enough that we're in a post truth era as of now. I don't know how we come back from that Anyways, repealing Citizens United would be a good first step.
- 0_____0 7mo ago
  [warning/apology - this comment regards USpol specifically] Our media landscape has people focusing on basically everything except what we need to be. I am not sure that liberal democracy will survive the information age. So much effort goes into the process of argument, we aren't as a whole really thinking about how to solve our very real problems. China's technocratic rule, after some, shall we say, growing pains (hunger pains? Is it fair to say that when millions of people starved to death?), seems a lot better at creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and international soft power. One of my great fears is that democracy was the right model in the past decades and centuries, but that it won't keep up with the laser focused technocratic rule that a competent bureaucracy can potentially muster.
  - thwarted 7mo ago
    > China's technocratic rule…seems a lot better at creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and international soft power. This requires that those in/with the power actually have altruistic, or at least not solely selfish, concerns. How rampant is government/bureaucratic corruption in China? I elided the population starving part in order to not distract from the possibility of truly selfless governance strategy. It may very well be the case that millions starving is considered "acceptable losses" ("the needs of the billions outweigh the needs of the millions") in executing on that strategy. Which, make no mistake, would be truly tragic and should be undesirable. But that not everyone sees it that way is really what we're fighting against. "I have a machine that feeds everyone, no one shall go hungry." "But mah profits!" "You only need profits so you yourself can eat, but that's now a solved problem" "But mah profits. How will we know who's winning?"
    - 0_____0 7mo ago
      Corruption definitely happens in China but even as a US person I can think of at least one major case where there were very real consequences for that. How many US govt officials have been executed for corruption? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zaiyong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zaiyong Millions starving during the Great Leap forward was very much NOT part of the plan, it was the result of some very misguided agricultural practices. My point is that in the same period, China has gone from "oops we accidentally caused the 2nd largest mass starvation event in history" to "we have the largest high speed rail network and manufacturing base in the world and nobody is even close." While the US went from "what's a postwar superpower to do? How bout some megaprojects?" To "I'm drowning in entitlements and houses now cost the same as the average lifetime GDP per capita".
      - Saline9515 7mo ago
        China is so technocratic and efficient that it has been faking growth and population statistics for the last decade, hides youth unemployment numbers, and raids due diligences companies who may provide external investors more realistic data about the economy or local companies. Also, China has its own real estate bubble, so it is not immune to those issues. At least in the US people have some recourse at the individual level.
  - vharuck 7mo ago
    Authoritarian governments are always more efficient than democracies. Their flaw is that citizens have no say in what goal will be efficiently pursued. When a technocratic authoritarian is in power, things improve overall (but there are still many "inefficient" people left behind or crushed). But when a cruel or incompetent authoritarian takes control, things hit lows that sound democracies wouldn't allow. Lows that take generations to recover from.
    - 0_____0 7mo ago
      While I like your message here, I don't think authoritarianism is actually more efficient (efficient at what?) usually. Because often it goes hand in hand with economic and social extraction, which is inherently inefficient. But I take and am a bit heartened by your main point - while the best case authoritarian regime can plan and execute more quickly and with greater efficiency than representative government, the worst case authoritarian govt is much much worse than the worst case possible with a functional democracy.
    - watwut 7mo ago
      They are not more effective. They basically always end up as highly currupt ineffective mess.
- michaelt 7mo ago
  > It ultimately works off the issue that most voters are disengaged, while the most interested parties are very engaged. That, and the fact winning a senate seat costs on average $26.53 million [1] You can't self-fund, that's 152 years of your $174,000 salary. Where do you suppose the money comes from, and what do you suppose motivates the donors? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...
psychoslave 7mo ago
You can't find that because any concentration of power means the corruption forces have only very limited surface to pressure, and all the more that surface is actually easy to swap with one molded for even more corruption convenience. People ever rule through direct decisions or are enslaved into alien agendas on which they have no agency.
- gertarrsr 7mo ago
  [dead]
- nicoburns 7mo ago
  In countries like the US and UK with FPTP voting systems, proportional representation would help a lot. As it would make it a lot more viable for candidates outside of the main two parties to stand (and actually have a chance of winning). (although in a UK context, it's looking highly likely that we'll have a "changing of the guard" in the next election with both Reform and Green party making significant inroads at the expense of the more established Conservative and Labour parties)
  - kypro 7mo ago
    FPTP will just guarantee that nothing meaningful can be done. Too much compromise in decision making is bad. Personally I think ideal set up is a system which grants quite a of power to a small handful of people, but makes it very easy for those people to be removed. This is typically the model that works best in business and other cooperative pursuits anyway. Throwing more people in the room with different opinions will ensure significant decisions can almost never made. Any policy too far to the right or too far to left will be watered down. The result is that you'll be led by centrists who can't really change anything and anything they do change will be disliked by everyone.
    - sally_glance 7mo ago
      Great idea, except that I don't think it's easy to make sure we don't grant too much power. Basically this idea is the core of representative democracy. Problem is, the people who have been granted a lot of power are very good at finding loopholes to avoid or remove the safeguards we put in place...
WillAdams 7mo ago
My solution for this is to rate-limit political contributions --- they may only be made in an amount equal to what a minimum-wage worker might reasonably be expected to donate from a week's wages (say 10% of hourly min. wage * 40), as a physically written out check or money order physically signed by hand (at least an "X" mark) and mailed in a first-class envelope with at least a similarly signed cover letter explaining the reason for the donation. If this causes the extinction of the political lobbyist, I'm fine with that.
- CGMthrowaway 7mo ago
  Bundling would get around that to some extent
  - WillAdams 7mo ago
    1 check would require 2 x marks and 1 envelope and 1 stamp (or other indicia) --- just paying minimum-wage folks for stuffing envelopes and making "X"s would probably result in this being equivalent to a job creation program, and it would probably save the USPS.
- ashleyn 7mo ago
  This is the central problem with Citizens United. The supreme court tends to be unusually deferential with 1A cases and ruled that infinite money can go into formally unaffiliated PACs. Undoing this would require activist judges or a constitutional amendment.
  - uncletscollie 7mo ago
    Activist judges? The supreme court is majority activist judges. Why cant new judges undo the old activist judges wrongly decided law? Why are the other new judges suddenly activists?
    - parineum 7mo ago
      In the case of Citizens United, it's actually a pretty straightforward case. Without a constitutional amendment, it would take a very unorthodox reading of the first amendment. The "problem" with Citizens United is that it's a very clear case.
PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago
I think this is entirely the wrong way to think about this. While better elected representatives and officials would always be a nice thing, what we need is to ensure that we design systems around them that mitigate their corruption and double standards. We were even (collectively, across humanity) doing better and better at that until not that long ago.
- bsenftner 7mo ago
  We need regulations on the politicians because, clearly, their "public good use" far exceeds their contribution back.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago
    I didn't really mean "regulations" but more a political (and civic) system in which a given individual's corruption etc. gets caught quickly and/or there are too many disincentives for them to to do much based on it.
netbioserror 7mo ago
Colossally awful take. Corruption is an intractable problem in human history. Power is a magnet for the worst people, and every system we invent can be exploited in innumerable ways. The only variable is how long the people of any individual society can remain free and prosperous before their decline. Temporary recoveries have only happened by lopping off massive chunks of empire, implementing extreme monetary reforms, and/or a switch to full autocracy. Every other outcome is terminal decline.
colechristensen 7mo ago
You can't have truly representative government if the people voting don't understand or care that they're not being represented particularly well. It is apparently not much of a risk to your seat if you don't represent the interests of your people because the people have become tribal and it is only their tribe they vote for with very little effective criticism of the leaders in their tribe. (it's not that complaints are nonexistent, they just don't result in anything)
dbspin 7mo ago
Sortation.
- RealityVoid 7mo ago
  Sortition?
jimbokun 7mo ago
Post Citizens United, that’s going to require a Constitutional amendment. And the corrupt, bought politicians are the ones who would need to ratify it.
- asdff 7mo ago
  Let's not act like they weren't corrupt and bought before Citizens United
  - parasubvert 7mo ago
    This is unhelpful fatalism and actively dissuades reform. Not all politicians are "corrupt and bought". And further, there is an enormous difference before and after this Supreme Court decision. It costs money to run for office. Before Citizens United, it was hard, limited, traceable donations, from individuals. No corporations, no soft money, no legal dark money. Now money has flooded in, with far less accountability.
- uncletscollie 7mo ago
  [dead]
asdff 7mo ago
>there will always be corruption, double standards, and lack of accountability from them The hard part is this has been true going all the way back to the stone age ever since we elevated the first person arbitrarily to chief. There has been no model of government developed since that is immune to this. I really don't know how to get around this and it depresses me that we will always be held back by the slimiest who abuse systems.
tankenmate 7mo ago
Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work. And before everyone gets upset, tax serves two purposes; 1) control inflation (it in effect burns money that was issued when the govt previously paid for things), 2) disincentivises selected behaviours. and one side effect, when the govt runs a tax deficit it increases inflation, and of course the contrapositive is also true.
- nine_k 7mo ago
  With wealth concentrated in so few hands, it's already not that easy to walk it back :-/
- fud3748 7mo ago
  Sure, it’s easy to tax “wealth”. Except most wealth today is of the type where Alice owns 10 million Y and Bob decided to pay $1000 for one Y. Alice cannot possibly sell her Y for near that price, but now she will be taxed on “wealth” of $10 billion.
  - antonyh 7mo ago
    Only in a system where the buyer sets the price.
  - __MatrixMan__ 7mo ago
    Maybe we need a debt jubilee then.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - vintermann 7mo ago
    There's a very simple solution to that problem. Tax Alice in Y rather than in $.
    - AlexandrB 7mo ago
      How would this work with real-estate? Probably the Y that should be taxed the most when we're talking about wealth.
wwweston 7mo ago
You either win big enough under the current system, with its system problems, or you never win to improve it. Imagining better systems before doing that is just a form of xkcd’s nerd sniping. And the biggest challenge to representative government might well be that most people are terrible at engaging it productively. Voting is the bare minimum and most people don’t vote (let alone organize and lobby effectively). Some significant portion of those that do vote can’t correctly draw a line between policies they’d like and candidates who intend to work on delivering, and that’s before we get to the portion of the population that may not correctly anticipate policy outcomes or even really understand policy as a concept. The system has actually been functioning surprisingly well considering, and as catastrophic as recent elections could be seen as, the outcome arguably represents a reasonable degree of fidelity to the input from the electorate. If we still hold free and fair elections, the task of those who want representative government is to change enough of the electorate first.
patrickmay 7mo ago
Power will always attract the corrupt and corruptible. The problem is the power. Reducing the size and scope of the federal government and devolving power to the states, communities, and individuals is the only way to minimize the negative effects of humans with too much authority.
- ranger_danger 7mo ago
  Reducing the size of the government just makes it where billionaires and corporations control everything instead, which we're already seeing now. You'd need a way to reign in their power/wealth as well.
  - eikenberry 7mo ago
    +1... Reducing government is part of power reduction, not the sum total. To reduce the size of government you need to reduce the size of things it manages. So, for instance, anti-trust would need a huge buf in enforcement to eliminate concentrations of power in business. I'd think strongly progressive inheritance tax would cover the rest.
- worik 7mo ago
  Abolishing private property is another way of defanging power
  - eikenberry 7mo ago
    Has this been tried successfully anywhere? Seems like mostly a dead end as long as we have resource scarcity.
  - 837263292029 7mo ago
    Let's start with your private property.
    - mackeye 7mo ago
      95% of the commenters on this post own no private property.
root_axis 7mo ago
The issue isn't representation, it's division. The party that won is being well represented with respect to the values of their constituents, whereas the opposition views it as a daily nightmare. These two visions of the world cannot be reconciled.
- conception 7mo ago
  I would say one side is being told that they should believe it a daily nightmare, e.g. people on the right really disliking obamacare but loving the aca.
- anon7000 7mo ago
  Representation needs to be less about black/white political ideology and more about the specific needs of various people. Farmers need representation, white color workers need representation, small business owners need representation, but their needs are all different, and don’t really boil down to left/right politics. The government isn’t treated as a forum to collaborate on solving problems, but as a playground for the powerful to create boogeymen that get people riled up.
  - overfeed 7mo ago
    > white color workers need representation [...] Don't worry - it's still there under the orange makeup. jk; I think you may have misspelled "collar"
  - root_axis 7mo ago
    That makes sense, but for most voters the left/right politics matters more than the economic identities you mentioned. Most people don't care that much about the economy, they make up their minds based on other issues, then find a way to rationalize the state of the economy with that choice after the fact.
    - lunarboy 7mo ago
      But the thing is your local gov & economic policies (tax codes, bonds, projects, trade) matter to your actual daily life and retirement far more than left v right. They just play that game to keep you enraged and baited. And people do actually care about gas, groceries, and inflation; they just don't vote in their own objective interest
octoberfranklin 7mo ago
Term limits for congress.
- tremon 7mo ago
  And age limits for congress.
- vunderba 7mo ago
  Same for the Supreme Court. 20 years. A lifetime appointment is no different than a king.
  - octoberfranklin 7mo ago
    That's not an elected office.
    - vunderba 7mo ago
      I never said it was.
Affric 7mo ago
What is interesting is that, as demonstrated by mass media and social media’s influences over our politics in the last century we can be motivated, but we have let power become too concentrated in the wrong hands. China’s qualifications for influencers thing is interesting by fundamentally doesn't address the power of social media publishers.
leptons 7mo ago
>Until we find a way to ensure political candidates aren't corrupt and bought off The US elected a convicted fellon, the corruption is a feature.
recroad 7mo ago
It's a representative government, it just represents Israel via AIPAC.
dyauspitr 7mo ago
No, our problems are much bigger in that we have a populace easily led by tribal sensibilities. Theses scumbags aren’t coming from nowhere, we’re electing them to these positions.
einpoklum 7mo ago
> lack of truly representative government. There is no such thing as (truly) representative government. To the limited extent that groups of people can at all be represented (which is a whole other questions) - governments are generally not about doing that. Yes, many world states have electoral systems where people can vote for one of several (lists of) candidates or parties, but the claim that in the normal and uncorrupted scenario, the elected properly represent the populace/citizenry - does not, I believe, stand scrutiny. Which is to say, don't try to "find a way in which candidates aren't corrupt and bought off"; that is in the core of democracies in money/capital-based economies. At best, the elected will act according to some balance of influences by different social forces, some being more popular and some being powerful and moneyed elites or individuals. If you want that to change, the change needs to be structural and quite deep, undermining state sovereignty and exchange-based economy.
titzer 7mo ago
The only thing that changes behavior is consequences. If there is no justice system enforcing the law and its requisite consequences, then there is no justice. I don't think those in power understand the anarchy that their intentional dismantling of the justice system has and will cause, and how the blowback from that anarchy will be visited upon them.
fennecbutt 7mo ago
>People don't realize that all of our problems lately are stemming from lack of truly representative government. Hard disagree. I fully believe that we are collectively responsible for all of our problems because we are a shitfuck tragically tribal species who, in a world of ever expanding tribe sizes, desperately cling onto tribe sizes that our tiny brains can handle, hence becoming tribal about a myriad of trivial and pointless things like sports, racism, which bathroom someone uses or which policy on immigrants one supports. Dunbar's number. And we're so tied up in these micro tribal problems that we completely ignore the macro tribal problems that affect every single one of us. We're shit out of luck we literally evolved to act like this and there's nothing we can do to stop the behaviour; it's innate. Global temperatures are still rising and will continue to do so. We can try to stop it but we won't be able to.
- deaux 7mo ago
  There is, it's eugenics. We can absolutely select against psychopath traits and select for altruistic, greater good, communal self-sacrificial traits. We have the science.
  - undeveloper 7mo ago
    how would you implement this without going into nazi-like levels of control on the individual? assuming "we have the science".
    - mcmcmc 7mo ago
      Lmao you can’t. Eugenics is evil and denies reproductive rights, bodily autonomy at the most basic animal level. It is literally the idea of creating a master race and culling off anyone who doesn’t conform. If you find yourself in a situation where you want to do something Nazis did — just not that way — you are halfway there.
      - undeveloper 7mo ago
        yea, it's very suspect. regardless, every idiot who claims to have "found the science" has failed to produce anything beyond studies of n=10 (10 is PUSHING IT).
yieldcrv 7mo ago
The US should have direct referendums at the national level, just like most of us have at the state level Most - maybe all - hot button issues have much more moderate takes than any party national committee positions, in the bluest of blue states and reddest of red states the actual individuals have much more consensus on every issue Whatever the founder’s initial reasoning or lack of inspiration for national referendums for federal law passage doesn’t seem to be relevant today
jfengel 7mo ago
If that were true, people would be unhappy with their representatives. For the most part they seem pleased with them. They think everyone else's representatives are corrupt, but in fact they are also doing what their constituents have told them to do. The corrupt ones are us, the voters. We hate each other and send our Congresspeople to do as much damage as they can to the others.
beloch 7mo ago
Implement campaign spending limits, regulate or ban PAC's, and commit to an ongoing effort to stomp whatever new methods big-money comes up with to influence politics. We do most of this in Canada and our leaders seem to be less influenced by big money. (Nevermind that we recently elected a billionaire PM...) The vast expense of running a U.S. style election campaign virtually guarantees that U.S. politicians are all bought and paid for.
- willhslade 7mo ago
  Carney isn't a billionaire, right? He's been a bureaucrat, not a plutocrat.
mcmcmc 7mo ago
Sometimes I wish we’d bring back tarring and feathering. “People should not be afraid of their governments …” and all that
chr15m 7mo ago
Bring back sortition, within elected parties.

johnnyanmac 7mo ago

That's a lot of work to do. It ultimately works off the issue that most voters are disengaged, while the most interested parties are very engaged. Corruption is happening out in the open and there's still so many people shrugging in response. One good push back from everyone all at once would fix a lot of things quickly. But that implies the people are united and not instead driven into manufactured conflict by said interested parties. It's basically enough that we're in a post truth era as of now. I don't know how we come back from that Anyways, repealing Citizens United would be a good first step.

0_____0 7mo ago
[warning/apology - this comment regards USpol specifically] Our media landscape has people focusing on basically everything except what we need to be. I am not sure that liberal democracy will survive the information age. So much effort goes into the process of argument, we aren't as a whole really thinking about how to solve our very real problems. China's technocratic rule, after some, shall we say, growing pains (hunger pains? Is it fair to say that when millions of people starved to death?), seems a lot better at creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and international soft power. One of my great fears is that democracy was the right model in the past decades and centuries, but that it won't keep up with the laser focused technocratic rule that a competent bureaucracy can potentially muster.
- thwarted 7mo ago
  > China's technocratic rule…seems a lot better at creating a coherent strategy for economic growth and international soft power. This requires that those in/with the power actually have altruistic, or at least not solely selfish, concerns. How rampant is government/bureaucratic corruption in China? I elided the population starving part in order to not distract from the possibility of truly selfless governance strategy. It may very well be the case that millions starving is considered "acceptable losses" ("the needs of the billions outweigh the needs of the millions") in executing on that strategy. Which, make no mistake, would be truly tragic and should be undesirable. But that not everyone sees it that way is really what we're fighting against. "I have a machine that feeds everyone, no one shall go hungry." "But mah profits!" "You only need profits so you yourself can eat, but that's now a solved problem" "But mah profits. How will we know who's winning?"
  - 0_____0 7mo ago
    Corruption definitely happens in China but even as a US person I can think of at least one major case where there were very real consequences for that. How many US govt officials have been executed for corruption? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zaiyong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zaiyong Millions starving during the Great Leap forward was very much NOT part of the plan, it was the result of some very misguided agricultural practices. My point is that in the same period, China has gone from "oops we accidentally caused the 2nd largest mass starvation event in history" to "we have the largest high speed rail network and manufacturing base in the world and nobody is even close." While the US went from "what's a postwar superpower to do? How bout some megaprojects?" To "I'm drowning in entitlements and houses now cost the same as the average lifetime GDP per capita".
    - Saline9515 7mo ago
      China is so technocratic and efficient that it has been faking growth and population statistics for the last decade, hides youth unemployment numbers, and raids due diligences companies who may provide external investors more realistic data about the economy or local companies. Also, China has its own real estate bubble, so it is not immune to those issues. At least in the US people have some recourse at the individual level.
- vharuck 7mo ago
  Authoritarian governments are always more efficient than democracies. Their flaw is that citizens have no say in what goal will be efficiently pursued. When a technocratic authoritarian is in power, things improve overall (but there are still many "inefficient" people left behind or crushed). But when a cruel or incompetent authoritarian takes control, things hit lows that sound democracies wouldn't allow. Lows that take generations to recover from.
  - 0_____0 7mo ago
    While I like your message here, I don't think authoritarianism is actually more efficient (efficient at what?) usually. Because often it goes hand in hand with economic and social extraction, which is inherently inefficient. But I take and am a bit heartened by your main point - while the best case authoritarian regime can plan and execute more quickly and with greater efficiency than representative government, the worst case authoritarian govt is much much worse than the worst case possible with a functional democracy.
  - watwut 7mo ago
    They are not more effective. They basically always end up as highly currupt ineffective mess.
michaelt 7mo ago
> It ultimately works off the issue that most voters are disengaged, while the most interested parties are very engaged. That, and the fact winning a senate seat costs on average $26.53 million [1] You can't self-fund, that's 152 years of your $174,000 salary. Where do you suppose the money comes from, and what do you suppose motivates the donors? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United...

psychoslave 7mo ago

You can't find that because any concentration of power means the corruption forces have only very limited surface to pressure, and all the more that surface is actually easy to swap with one molded for even more corruption convenience. People ever rule through direct decisions or are enslaved into alien agendas on which they have no agency.

gertarrsr 7mo ago
[dead]
nicoburns 7mo ago
In countries like the US and UK with FPTP voting systems, proportional representation would help a lot. As it would make it a lot more viable for candidates outside of the main two parties to stand (and actually have a chance of winning). (although in a UK context, it's looking highly likely that we'll have a "changing of the guard" in the next election with both Reform and Green party making significant inroads at the expense of the more established Conservative and Labour parties)
- kypro 7mo ago
  FPTP will just guarantee that nothing meaningful can be done. Too much compromise in decision making is bad. Personally I think ideal set up is a system which grants quite a of power to a small handful of people, but makes it very easy for those people to be removed. This is typically the model that works best in business and other cooperative pursuits anyway. Throwing more people in the room with different opinions will ensure significant decisions can almost never made. Any policy too far to the right or too far to left will be watered down. The result is that you'll be led by centrists who can't really change anything and anything they do change will be disliked by everyone.
  - sally_glance 7mo ago
    Great idea, except that I don't think it's easy to make sure we don't grant too much power. Basically this idea is the core of representative democracy. Problem is, the people who have been granted a lot of power are very good at finding loopholes to avoid or remove the safeguards we put in place...

WillAdams 7mo ago

My solution for this is to rate-limit political contributions --- they may only be made in an amount equal to what a minimum-wage worker might reasonably be expected to donate from a week's wages (say 10% of hourly min. wage * 40), as a physically written out check or money order physically signed by hand (at least an "X" mark) and mailed in a first-class envelope with at least a similarly signed cover letter explaining the reason for the donation. If this causes the extinction of the political lobbyist, I'm fine with that.

CGMthrowaway 7mo ago
Bundling would get around that to some extent
- WillAdams 7mo ago
  1 check would require 2 x marks and 1 envelope and 1 stamp (or other indicia) --- just paying minimum-wage folks for stuffing envelopes and making "X"s would probably result in this being equivalent to a job creation program, and it would probably save the USPS.
ashleyn 7mo ago
This is the central problem with Citizens United. The supreme court tends to be unusually deferential with 1A cases and ruled that infinite money can go into formally unaffiliated PACs. Undoing this would require activist judges or a constitutional amendment.
- uncletscollie 7mo ago
  Activist judges? The supreme court is majority activist judges. Why cant new judges undo the old activist judges wrongly decided law? Why are the other new judges suddenly activists?
  - parineum 7mo ago
    In the case of Citizens United, it's actually a pretty straightforward case. Without a constitutional amendment, it would take a very unorthodox reading of the first amendment. The "problem" with Citizens United is that it's a very clear case.

PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago

I think this is entirely the wrong way to think about this. While better elected representatives and officials would always be a nice thing, what we need is to ensure that we design systems around them that mitigate their corruption and double standards. We were even (collectively, across humanity) doing better and better at that until not that long ago.

bsenftner 7mo ago
We need regulations on the politicians because, clearly, their "public good use" far exceeds their contribution back.
- PaulDavisThe1st 7mo ago
  I didn't really mean "regulations" but more a political (and civic) system in which a given individual's corruption etc. gets caught quickly and/or there are too many disincentives for them to to do much based on it.

netbioserror 7mo ago

Colossally awful take. Corruption is an intractable problem in human history. Power is a magnet for the worst people, and every system we invent can be exploited in innumerable ways. The only variable is how long the people of any individual society can remain free and prosperous before their decline. Temporary recoveries have only happened by lopping off massive chunks of empire, implementing extreme monetary reforms, and/or a switch to full autocracy. Every other outcome is terminal decline.

colechristensen 7mo ago

You can't have truly representative government if the people voting don't understand or care that they're not being represented particularly well. It is apparently not much of a risk to your seat if you don't represent the interests of your people because the people have become tribal and it is only their tribe they vote for with very little effective criticism of the leaders in their tribe. (it's not that complaints are nonexistent, they just don't result in anything)

dbspin 7mo ago

Sortation.

RealityVoid 7mo ago
Sortition?

jimbokun 7mo ago

Post Citizens United, that’s going to require a Constitutional amendment. And the corrupt, bought politicians are the ones who would need to ratify it.

asdff 7mo ago
Let's not act like they weren't corrupt and bought before Citizens United
- parasubvert 7mo ago
  This is unhelpful fatalism and actively dissuades reform. Not all politicians are "corrupt and bought". And further, there is an enormous difference before and after this Supreme Court decision. It costs money to run for office. Before Citizens United, it was hard, limited, traceable donations, from individuals. No corporations, no soft money, no legal dark money. Now money has flooded in, with far less accountability.
uncletscollie 7mo ago
[dead]

asdff 7mo ago

>there will always be corruption, double standards, and lack of accountability from them The hard part is this has been true going all the way back to the stone age ever since we elevated the first person arbitrarily to chief. There has been no model of government developed since that is immune to this. I really don't know how to get around this and it depresses me that we will always be held back by the slimiest who abuse systems.

tankenmate 7mo ago

Isn't it just so much easier to make sure that wealth isn't concentrated in so few hands? Tax wealth, not work. And before everyone gets upset, tax serves two purposes; 1) control inflation (it in effect burns money that was issued when the govt previously paid for things), 2) disincentivises selected behaviours. and one side effect, when the govt runs a tax deficit it increases inflation, and of course the contrapositive is also true.

nine_k 7mo ago
With wealth concentrated in so few hands, it's already not that easy to walk it back :-/
fud3748 7mo ago
Sure, it’s easy to tax “wealth”. Except most wealth today is of the type where Alice owns 10 million Y and Bob decided to pay $1000 for one Y. Alice cannot possibly sell her Y for near that price, but now she will be taxed on “wealth” of $10 billion.
- antonyh 7mo ago
  Only in a system where the buyer sets the price.
- __MatrixMan__ 7mo ago
  Maybe we need a debt jubilee then.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- vintermann 7mo ago
  There's a very simple solution to that problem. Tax Alice in Y rather than in $.
  - AlexandrB 7mo ago
    How would this work with real-estate? Probably the Y that should be taxed the most when we're talking about wealth.

wwweston 7mo ago

You either win big enough under the current system, with its system problems, or you never win to improve it. Imagining better systems before doing that is just a form of xkcd’s nerd sniping. And the biggest challenge to representative government might well be that most people are terrible at engaging it productively. Voting is the bare minimum and most people don’t vote (let alone organize and lobby effectively). Some significant portion of those that do vote can’t correctly draw a line between policies they’d like and candidates who intend to work on delivering, and that’s before we get to the portion of the population that may not correctly anticipate policy outcomes or even really understand policy as a concept. The system has actually been functioning surprisingly well considering, and as catastrophic as recent elections could be seen as, the outcome arguably represents a reasonable degree of fidelity to the input from the electorate. If we still hold free and fair elections, the task of those who want representative government is to change enough of the electorate first.

patrickmay 7mo ago

Power will always attract the corrupt and corruptible. The problem is the power. Reducing the size and scope of the federal government and devolving power to the states, communities, and individuals is the only way to minimize the negative effects of humans with too much authority.

ranger_danger 7mo ago
Reducing the size of the government just makes it where billionaires and corporations control everything instead, which we're already seeing now. You'd need a way to reign in their power/wealth as well.
- eikenberry 7mo ago
  +1... Reducing government is part of power reduction, not the sum total. To reduce the size of government you need to reduce the size of things it manages. So, for instance, anti-trust would need a huge buf in enforcement to eliminate concentrations of power in business. I'd think strongly progressive inheritance tax would cover the rest.
worik 7mo ago
Abolishing private property is another way of defanging power
- eikenberry 7mo ago
  Has this been tried successfully anywhere? Seems like mostly a dead end as long as we have resource scarcity.
- 837263292029 7mo ago
  Let's start with your private property.
  - mackeye 7mo ago
    95% of the commenters on this post own no private property.

root_axis 7mo ago

The issue isn't representation, it's division. The party that won is being well represented with respect to the values of their constituents, whereas the opposition views it as a daily nightmare. These two visions of the world cannot be reconciled.

conception 7mo ago
I would say one side is being told that they should believe it a daily nightmare, e.g. people on the right really disliking obamacare but loving the aca.
anon7000 7mo ago
Representation needs to be less about black/white political ideology and more about the specific needs of various people. Farmers need representation, white color workers need representation, small business owners need representation, but their needs are all different, and don’t really boil down to left/right politics. The government isn’t treated as a forum to collaborate on solving problems, but as a playground for the powerful to create boogeymen that get people riled up.
- overfeed 7mo ago
  > white color workers need representation [...] Don't worry - it's still there under the orange makeup. jk; I think you may have misspelled "collar"
- root_axis 7mo ago
  That makes sense, but for most voters the left/right politics matters more than the economic identities you mentioned. Most people don't care that much about the economy, they make up their minds based on other issues, then find a way to rationalize the state of the economy with that choice after the fact.
  - lunarboy 7mo ago
    But the thing is your local gov & economic policies (tax codes, bonds, projects, trade) matter to your actual daily life and retirement far more than left v right. They just play that game to keep you enraged and baited. And people do actually care about gas, groceries, and inflation; they just don't vote in their own objective interest

octoberfranklin 7mo ago

Term limits for congress.

tremon 7mo ago
And age limits for congress.
vunderba 7mo ago
Same for the Supreme Court. 20 years. A lifetime appointment is no different than a king.
- octoberfranklin 7mo ago
  That's not an elected office.
  - vunderba 7mo ago
    I never said it was.

Affric 7mo ago

What is interesting is that, as demonstrated by mass media and social media’s influences over our politics in the last century we can be motivated, but we have let power become too concentrated in the wrong hands. China’s qualifications for influencers thing is interesting by fundamentally doesn't address the power of social media publishers.

leptons 7mo ago

>Until we find a way to ensure political candidates aren't corrupt and bought off The US elected a convicted fellon, the corruption is a feature.

recroad 7mo ago

It's a representative government, it just represents Israel via AIPAC.

dyauspitr 7mo ago

No, our problems are much bigger in that we have a populace easily led by tribal sensibilities. Theses scumbags aren’t coming from nowhere, we’re electing them to these positions.

einpoklum 7mo ago

> lack of truly representative government. There is no such thing as (truly) representative government. To the limited extent that groups of people can at all be represented (which is a whole other questions) - governments are generally not about doing that. Yes, many world states have electoral systems where people can vote for one of several (lists of) candidates or parties, but the claim that in the normal and uncorrupted scenario, the elected properly represent the populace/citizenry - does not, I believe, stand scrutiny. Which is to say, don't try to "find a way in which candidates aren't corrupt and bought off"; that is in the core of democracies in money/capital-based economies. At best, the elected will act according to some balance of influences by different social forces, some being more popular and some being powerful and moneyed elites or individuals. If you want that to change, the change needs to be structural and quite deep, undermining state sovereignty and exchange-based economy.

titzer 7mo ago

The only thing that changes behavior is consequences. If there is no justice system enforcing the law and its requisite consequences, then there is no justice. I don't think those in power understand the anarchy that their intentional dismantling of the justice system has and will cause, and how the blowback from that anarchy will be visited upon them.

fennecbutt 7mo ago

>People don't realize that all of our problems lately are stemming from lack of truly representative government. Hard disagree. I fully believe that we are collectively responsible for all of our problems because we are a shitfuck tragically tribal species who, in a world of ever expanding tribe sizes, desperately cling onto tribe sizes that our tiny brains can handle, hence becoming tribal about a myriad of trivial and pointless things like sports, racism, which bathroom someone uses or which policy on immigrants one supports. Dunbar's number. And we're so tied up in these micro tribal problems that we completely ignore the macro tribal problems that affect every single one of us. We're shit out of luck we literally evolved to act like this and there's nothing we can do to stop the behaviour; it's innate. Global temperatures are still rising and will continue to do so. We can try to stop it but we won't be able to.

deaux 7mo ago
There is, it's eugenics. We can absolutely select against psychopath traits and select for altruistic, greater good, communal self-sacrificial traits. We have the science.
- undeveloper 7mo ago
  how would you implement this without going into nazi-like levels of control on the individual? assuming "we have the science".
  - mcmcmc 7mo ago
    Lmao you can’t. Eugenics is evil and denies reproductive rights, bodily autonomy at the most basic animal level. It is literally the idea of creating a master race and culling off anyone who doesn’t conform. If you find yourself in a situation where you want to do something Nazis did — just not that way — you are halfway there.
    - undeveloper 7mo ago
      yea, it's very suspect. regardless, every idiot who claims to have "found the science" has failed to produce anything beyond studies of n=10 (10 is PUSHING IT).

yieldcrv 7mo ago

The US should have direct referendums at the national level, just like most of us have at the state level Most - maybe all - hot button issues have much more moderate takes than any party national committee positions, in the bluest of blue states and reddest of red states the actual individuals have much more consensus on every issue Whatever the founder’s initial reasoning or lack of inspiration for national referendums for federal law passage doesn’t seem to be relevant today

jfengel 7mo ago

If that were true, people would be unhappy with their representatives. For the most part they seem pleased with them. They think everyone else's representatives are corrupt, but in fact they are also doing what their constituents have told them to do. The corrupt ones are us, the voters. We hate each other and send our Congresspeople to do as much damage as they can to the others.

beloch 7mo ago

Implement campaign spending limits, regulate or ban PAC's, and commit to an ongoing effort to stomp whatever new methods big-money comes up with to influence politics. We do most of this in Canada and our leaders seem to be less influenced by big money. (Nevermind that we recently elected a billionaire PM...) The vast expense of running a U.S. style election campaign virtually guarantees that U.S. politicians are all bought and paid for.

willhslade 7mo ago
Carney isn't a billionaire, right? He's been a bureaucrat, not a plutocrat.

mcmcmc 7mo ago

Sometimes I wish we’d bring back tarring and feathering. “People should not be afraid of their governments …” and all that

chr15m 7mo ago

Bring back sortition, within elected parties.