ON ONE POSSIBLE USE FOR VOTING (cross posted for archiving) The only argument th

ON ONE POSSIBLE USE FOR VOTING

(cross posted for archiving)

The only argument that I can prove that includes voting is:

(a) It is necessary for groups to have people who make decisions on behalf of the group (iron law of oligarchy). However oligarchies form whenever leaders are chosen. Therefore the Athenian tactic of Lottocracy appears to be the only solution that we know of that produces leaders who rotate as do juries, and who cannot easily be coerced (special interests) nor can they obtain power. I cannot be certain this wouldn’t exacerbate the problem of renters versus owners, but the evidence from juries is that no, it actually does the opposite.

(b) If these lottocratic leaders choose a set of policies, we can each vote our tax dollars for or not-for those initiatives. This has a lot of value in that it requires us to pay taxes in order to vote and influence decisions. This keeps taxes relatively flat, otherwise it puts too much control in the hands of the very wealthy. Now, it’s also possible to start discounting ones contributions at some point but I’m still not sure that’s very good. In other words, say a lot of you pay 100$ and someone else pays 1B$. Now, you should be pretty happy that your initiative gets funded and tat you can use your money on LESSER INITIATIVES.

I won’t go into all the different games that can be played under this scenario, but they’re reasonably easy to defend against if you can’t legislate involuntary transfers ,or taxes, you can only have a group of people get together to spend money for this one year.

If a group deals with a single year, and cannot make multi-year commitments, and if their contracts only last a year, then it is very hard for ‘fashionable but bad ideas” to become institutionalized as they do under law and bureaucracy.

Anyway. If you want voting of any kind, the combination of (a) public intellectuals conducting a debate, rather than politicians (b) lottocratic juries selecting proposed initiatives, (c) and economic democracy for voting.

I think you’re pretty likely to get to the land of OZ better than any other solution that we have. I mean, parties and politicians have a pretty bad record. And bureaucracies are even worse.