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Comment by sidewndr46 | Hacker News Reader

One of the failings of most modern democracies is that if a measure doesn't pass, nothing prohibits it from being introduced again immediately. I've seen ballot initiatives simply get copy pasted onto each election by city council until they happen to pass.

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The deck is stacked. They only have to win once, and it's law. You have to win over and over every time it's introduced.

Heinlein in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress proposed a bicameral legislature, where one half needs a 66% majority to pass a law. The other half’s only job is to repeal laws, which they can do with a 50% majority.

This is a dumb and outrageously anti-democratic idea, and is a much worse cure than the disease it's attempting to fix. If 65% of the population supports a law it's favored by 30 points-- far higher than the margin of most elections-- and yet would not exist under this system.

There's nothing magical about 50%. The bar for "this policy should be inflicted on everyone" should be very high--I'd argue much higher than 50%. At the same time, the bar for "we should stop inflicting this policy on everyone" should be extremely low. I'd argue a 1/3 minority should be enough to repeal a law. If one out of three people feel they are harmed by something, maybe the government shouldn't be doing it.

This doesn't work in practice. Look at how Senate Republicans have weaponized the filibuster in the last 20 years. A 40% veto is conceptually similar to your repeal process and it results in gridlock and nothing getting done.

It is harder to build than to destroy. If laws can be trivially repealed no one will be willing to commit to long term things. We're seeing that right now with the destruction of US soft power, economic power, and global leadership.

There is a difference between long-term stability in foreign relations and long-term stability in citizens' freedom. The latter is supported by the absence of restrictions, i.e. the absence of laws and regulations.

The only people wanting stability in restrictive laws are those profiting from their legally guaranteed niche, typically of the rent-seeking monopolist kind.

The absence of laws and regulations enables exploitation, not freedom. We've seen that over and over. Libertarianism gives us the "freedom" to have monopolies price gouging, locking the fire exits to ensure we don't leave before our 16 hour shift for pennies is over.

It's an interesting thought, but as presented that sounds fairly dysfunctional. If it takes 2/3 to pass and 1/3 to repeal, you may as well just say it takes 2/3+1 to pass, as otherwise anything passed can be, and likely will be, just immediately repealed.

I don't think the assumption that "law = things the government is doing" is a good one.

I could imagine a law that specifically restricts the government's ability to do things. For example, maybe the federal government passes a law that makes it easier to sue its agents when those agents violate individual citizens constitutional rights.

Perhaps 65% of the population feels they are harmed if this law doesn't exist, and 35% of the population feels they are harmed if the law doesn't exist. Should that law be repealed?

> I could imagine a law that specifically restricts the government's ability to do things.

I fail to see how fairy tales are relevant to this discussion.

I mean, that's exactly what the first amendment of the United States Constitution is.

It's a codification of a specific restriction on government power. Should it be able to be overturned by a minority of the population?

At the end of that book, the protagonist explains that all the high minded Luna libertarian values broke down and were more or less abandoned in the years following their revolution, and they returned to more normal political processes.

Classic "missed 100% of the point" literature phenomenon

It's analogous to information security.-

PS. Maybe there's something there ...

Is this really true, though? Couldn't you pass a law specifically banning the thing you don't want to happen, so any future law that contradicts it needs a supermajority to pass or something?

Depends on the system, but usually no, a parliament cannot restrict future parliaments.

e.g. the law to make changing thing X require a supermajority could itself be repealed with a simple majority here, unless it was approved as an amendment to our constitution. Which _does_ happen more often than it does for the US here, but usually just for large nationally popular things.

Privacy is a fundamental right. Politicians have passed all kinds of surveillance laws which then got declared illegal by the courts. The problem is that courts are not fast enough and the bad laws linger around for a while until they are repealed.

There is a system like this in Switzerland. The voters can change the constitution by a public initiative+vote, which binds the parliament. Only another public vote can revert the constitution.

This is e.g. why there was an initiative to constitutionally forbidding some religious buildings: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_minaret_controversy

A well-funded institution will always outlast an individual or smaller organization in a war of attrition. I think a modern Constitution needs to consider 19-20th-century concepts such as game theory if it has any hope of preventing eventual corruption.

The same game theory that could make a modern constitution so robust could also be used by the bad guys to thoroughly corrupt the drafting of any modern constitution you could get enacted.

I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy — death by a thousand papercuts — will be lead to catastrophic tipping points.

As a ChemEng, I can't help but compare the current coordinated attack on the democratic rule of governments worldwide to having multiple batches of emulsions undergoing phase-inversion [0]: only so much fascism can be added before things collapse into a greasy turd.

That democracy is not robust does not mean it is not good nor something worth aspiring to. I would argue that the root cause of the sad state of democracies is the fact that we were coaxed into a snafu by virtue of accepting the false equivalence of capitalism and democracy: the first does not warrant the other; in fact they are most times at odds.

I am also reminded of the Behind the Bastards podcast and their episodes on Adolf Eichmann's careerist pursuit enabling the Holocaust... leading me to wonder how many people are burning the world down as part of a KPI... Or, in other words, are our economic systems and forms of government vulnerable to the paperclip problem?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_inversion_(chemistry)#In...

>I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy

I'm not a fan of democracy. You wouldn't be either, if you thought about it for very long... you just can't help yourself, it was championed as some sort of virtue ever since you were old enough to realize that governments existed. From kindergarten or pre-k.

The things you'd claim you like about democracy aren't even things that make it a democracy. The one (and only) criterion of democracy is "can you vote". And there are better ways to get all the other things than voting... voting/people do not scale. It is the undoing of democracy, people get what they deserve from it. Good and hard.

>That democracy is not robust does not mean it is not good nor something worth aspiring to.

It does not scale. You're aspiring to something that not only does not and cannot work, but you're trying to make it even bigger, true "the beatings will continue until morale improves" style. If I can figure out how to strike out on my own and be a million miles away from you when you rally for your most ambitious attempt yet, that's what I will do.

Defining something in the negative is always tricky. What are some better designs, or design principles?

Sortition. If no one can vote, then there can't be any of the chicanery that comes from that. Political parties couldn't exist, because a party can't help someone get elected. We no longer have the problem of the only people in office being those who wanted to be in office enough to go to the trouble. No need for term limits (people are unlikely to win office twice, let alone more often).

And yet it preserves everything you like about democracy.

I get the impression myself that no singular approach is perfect. They've all been tried and all have flaws. That and different functions of government might actually benefit from different methods.

This is why most practical real world systems tend to be a hybrid of several different designs.

Eg... the US constitution gives us Direct elections (congress) , indirect elections (president via electors, though that has been somewhat undermined), Sortition (juries), lifetime appointment (judges), appointment based on merit (civil service), and probably a few more that I've missed. One can even argue -if one would like to try- that separation of powers counts as anarchistic (certainly it is anti-archon).

> It does not scale. It scales pretty well; but we have let our guard down and naïvely thought the problems would sort themselves out by virtue of voting. We "live in a society", that means casting a vote on a paper ballot won't make the farmer understand the downstream effects of fertilizer runoff, nor the impact to communities of a CEO outsourcing away jobs. We can't go about living our lives without trying to meet each other halfway. And we won't survive without finding a way to make being nice to each other mandatory.

> You're aspiring to something that not only does not and cannot work, but you're trying to make it even bigger [...]

On the contrary, I'm trying to prevent it from getting smaller. And, even better, to improve on it (we're a community of hackers and tinkerers after all, right?)!

We are all much more vulnerable to autocratic regimes nowadays due to the erosion of privacy rights and deregulation (again, the threat of instrumental convergence — the paperclip problem — threatens the fabric of society: censorship in the name of advertising-friendly content, spying in the name of targeted advertisement, and the weaponization of targeted ads and "the algorithm" propping up foreign-state-funded populists/autocrats).

Look at SOPA/PIPA. They simultaneously pushed the same bill through both chambers to try and guarantee it would pass. Grassroots efforts led to it being overwhelmingly blocked in both cases. And then they just slowly slipped most of it's provisions through other legislation over the years.

Except for a few types of bills that customarily originate in the house, most bills are introduced roughly simultaneously in both houses so that the information for debating the bill doesn't have to be brought twice. This obviously doesn't guarantee a bill will pass because it is required to pass both houses.

Every bill has to go through both chambers, but they usually originate in one and then are passed to the other once the originating chamber affirms them.

It is not common to push two independent bills simultaneously, despite your assertion so.

> It is not common to push two independent bills simultaneously, despite your assertion so.

This is in fact extremely common. Both houses pass independent bills, and then they go to conference to work out the differences.

https://gai.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Tab-6-...

"Frequently, however, House and Senate committees each develop their own bills on the same subject. In these cases, one house often debates and amends the bill reported by its committee but then amends and passes the corresponding bill that the other chamber has already passed"

You’re picking and choosing, and being obscenely obtuse because you want to win a nothing internet argument.

They dual draft bills. A draft is not the same thing as a proposal. When it actually runs through the process, one of the two drafts runs its course (as a proposal) in the origination chamber. That same bill is then passed to the second chamber to get approved. If it happened “all the time”, you would link examples rather than barely related Georgetown University theory pieces.

Do I need to link you the “School House Rock” video? Or are you going to continue to link out of context/slightly tangential articles to try and prove your point in a typical armchair expert manner? If so, just move on and pretend you “won”; it’s more productive.

> If it happened “all the time”, you would link examples

Because I'm right, this is very easy to do. I thought that linking to why this happens would help you understand, but I can clear any bar you set. For example, variations of the DREAM act have been introduced in the House and Senate, often within a few months of each other, just like SOPA and PIPA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DREAM_Act#Legislative_history

But this is all beside the point. You claimed that this was a conspiracy to force the law through. Since it has to pass both chambers, this strategy doesn't work, and your conspiracy theory makes no sense, yet you refuse to concede this.

You can clear the goalposts you keep moving or redefining, certainly.

The goalposts are right where you left them with SOPA and PIPA.

Exactly, the two independent bills that both failed to pass.

Congrats, glad we agreed on that.

I have always agreed on that. Where we disagree is that these independent bills introduced months apart is a rare thing (it's not) coordinated as a way to force through the legislation (it can't).

I think we should be at least several decades past looking at the USA as a particularly functional democratic system...

The US constitution, despite its biblical status in their culture, manages to be more of a distracting throw-word ("LOOK at how this bill helping provide healthcare OBSTRUCTS your CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to NOT CARE ABOUT THE POOR!" (Ok, not a great example)) than a functional constitution that limits institutional overreach.

Your opinion is fine and all, but it's moot to this point.

The exact same things are happening in the EU, as evident by this very legislation this thread is concerning.

Meanwhile, they make the dismantling of legislation near impossible. You have to go through the same process, but in inverse; and hope that miraculously the representatives in gov't become altruistic with a desire for less power.

It'd be nice if bills were one item only and on failure or passage, there would be a timeout before it could be brought to vote again either to try to pass it again or to repeal it. Like at least a year. For some things maybe five years.

That's what constitutional amendments are for, right? (or in this case ECHR updates)

Not really. There have been multiple times that California passed ballot initiatives that violated their own constitution.

At the federal level in the US we have the annoying problem that effectively everything is interstate commerce.

This system would make a lot more sense if the number of people you had to get to agree to a bill with a bunch of riders was more than 50%.

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