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Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

But the status quo is considered anomalous by most of the world, so I would not use it as a benchmark.

I'm all in for some continuous improvement experiments for democracy:

- modest proposal: yes, have X random people in government, but have a Y-month paid training period before they serve for Z years; ALSO ensure their families want for nothing (read, a decent non-luxurious lifestyle), but prohibit receiving money from lobbyists, PACs, gifts, etc... AND, ensure they get reintegrated into society in a nonpolitical field (with some exceptions) by also offering Y-month long paid training in different fields.

The corruption costs reduction would significantly outweigh any increase in payroll and training.

"Simple" remedies for American democracy:

  * Campaign Finance Reform
  * End Citizens United
  * Ranked choice voting (or a variant of same).

Technically totally feasible, just impossible due to the current owners.

Also

* Expand the Supreme Court

I'd add:

* Expand the House (and make provisions that keep it updated with each census).

* Statehood for US territories.

The systemic problems with our democracy seem pretty clear, really.

> Expand the House (and make provisions that keep it updated with each census).

Interesting. Looking in from a country with a smaller lower house, I think members in the US are already so numerous they seem to fade to the background and their survival becomes mostly about party politics not making a good impression on their district. It's not like most of them could make a good speech while most members are present and listening. Only senators seem individually important enough to make a name for themselves (with the exception of the speaker etc).

But I've never lived and voted in the US so maybe I'm missing something important here.

I absolutely agree. You are just moving the lack of representation to the next level if you increase the size of the house. House members need to know each others and works with each others to be effective. And this is where math says things turn ugly, the size of the graph connecting all house members grows exponentially, until at a certain size (which I believe we have already reached) it is simply unmanageable. the solution might be to add yet another layer in the system. Naively, it seems that democracy is hard to scale (this does not mean that we should no try though). But last time I tried to bring up that concern on HN it did not go well...

Members of the House of Representatives’ first obligation to my view is knowing their constituents. Knowing each other may not help as much as you may think unless you’re on a committee. As the population increases, members of the House were meant to increase. This increasing size has been arrested.

They do get to vote on any bill regardless of committee membership though. Maybe we should just abolish the general vote, allow for the number of reps to keep up with the population increase and only have (larger) committees that have final decisions on the bills that fall under their purview.

I do wonder if we could have some sort of deterministic/coordinated ⌈n⌉-level rotating hierarchy (think a rotating program cycle with period ⌈n⌉) such that n^n ≈ population. The aim would be to have ⌈n⌉-generation stewardship [0], without immediate-issue-deprioritization [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_generation_sustainabilit...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longtermism#Deprioritization_o...

That is a hack which would be last in line. First and foremost, there should be no "legal bribery" of any justice -- up the salaries and fluff up the goodies (housing, etc), but otherwise zero outside income, with a blind trust for all assets.

One very thorny issue is the fact that our system of government is built on respect for the law and the institutions, but the current regime has learned they can just do whatever they want with virtual impunity. They brought tanks, drones and nukes to a knife fight, and the other side is completely unarmed and trying to talk them out of the fight.

We are so fucked.

We could also increase the membership of the house beyond 435 members. This number was capped in 1911 when the population was much smaller.

> End Citizens United

So no more union political contributions?

Well, it's our benchmark, because it's our status quo. That is, you measure any proposed change for here against the way it currently works here, not the way it works in country X.

It is anomalous in the historical context of the same country.

Otoh, the degradation of democracy into oligarchy and then tyranny was called by Socrates...

Anomalies cause extinction events.

Actually, "right wing government gets elected and gets a huge omnibus bill passed that the parliament didn't even read" has been a worldwide trend for some years now. Closest example that comes to mind is probably Argentina, which managed to pass its own controversial right-wing omnibus bill in June last year [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Bases_and_Starting_Poin...

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