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Comment by Entangled | Hacker News Reader

If your job is to create laws, then you must be an expert in that field. So the pool of candidates should be meritocratic in its nature, like a Law School degree and at least 10 years of experience plus 2 in public domains.

Then you can randomize.

Most countries in the world allow any bus driver to be a congressman and we know how great their understanding of laws and human rights are, none.

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Bias towards those whose profession benefits from a growing abundance of laws?

Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

If you are going to build a bridge are you going to hire an engineer or a cook? Now if you're going to create laws would you hire someone who has studied roman, germanic, sharia law since the times of Hammurabi, philosophy, sociology, politics and everything necessary to understand human interaction and association, or a bus driver?

We get the government we deserve, proportional to our level of ignorance.

There is a big difference between picking from a pool of politicians (crooks who climb the ladder by manipulation, backstabbing and deceit) and the best lawyers according to market forces and meritocracy then randomized.

The writing of laws can be left to staff, who may be lawyers, the impetus to have them written and passed need not be left solely to those who benefit from there being an abundance of them.

It doesn't take an Engineer to recognize that a bridge needs to be constructed.

If you ask the engineer whether to build the bridge, you might get a biased answer.

You need to balance it though. For example by adding economists and social scientists to the pool. You can't let one group have too much power.

Law-drafting isn't the entire job of representation. Also, current performance, such as using legislation written by consortia of corporations with lobbying interests, doesn't speak highly for such specialization.

You might as well require representatives be CPAs, or MBAs, since budget allocation and oversight of spending is at least as important as making laws.

Absolutely, the executive needs CPAs and MBAs, the legislative needs lawyers, the judiciary needs judges and to be honest that's the only one where meritocracy permeates, just add a little randomization instead of handpicking, that's all.

That's not what I wrote. Elected representatives get away with not being accountants by hiring accountants to staff the CBO. Similarly lawyers could be hired for drafting unambiguous legislation based on position papers.

Yeah, the last time I got on a bus the driver beat me and then killed me.

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