discoursedrome:
jadagul
There’s
been a huge move over the past…twenty years or so? to cut down on that
sort of behavior. Things like eliminating earmarked spending in
legislation so you can’t buy legislator approval of a bill by committing
to buying a bunch of shit in their district, that sort of thing.
Increasing transparency in government, more committee meetings in front
of cameras, that sort of thing.
And this sounds good from a “transparency of government, the people
know what their representatives are doing” perspective. The argument
that Balioc and Rauch are advancing, and I’m endorsing, is that this is a bad thing.
It makes politicians. respond to stupid symbolic political pressures
and basically incapable of engaging in compromise. Everything becomes
an ideological matter, everything becomes polarized, you can’t buy
support for a bill that needs to pass (see e.g. the debt ceiling
fights), and it makes it harder for politicians to just ignore their
constituents when their constituents are fundamentally misinformed.
This recalls my original objection then, I guess, that having representative government but making the representatives unaccountable and opaque is inherently absurd. If you’re intentionally removing the public’s ability to penalize politicians they think are doing a bad job, or even to tell how good a job politicians are doing, you should probably just be instituting an actual non-democratic system of government, rather than attempting to warp representative democracy into a pale imitation of it. If you really want to hack democracy so that government is mostly about pork, just ban political parties.
The bigger issue here though is that I don’t think this system would actually restore any of that. Under secret ballot you can’t tell how many votes you have for a contentious bill in the first place (since people have an incentive to lie), and you can’t tell who voted for it afterwards if the vote doesn’t go as planned, so leverage has to be applied either over the entire voting body collectively, or at least over a large enough majority of it to accommodate “noise”.
To be sure: none of my most-favored political systems, in the abstract, are democratic at all. I am 100% in agreement that, from a process perspective, the democracy isn’t contributing anything useful here. But whatever else you want to say about it, democracy does have the very real advantage that large numbers of people consider it super-legitimate. So maybe having pointless elections for unaccountable legislative agents is worth it if it convinces everyone that the government speaks with the will of the people. I dunno, man.
I think logrolling does work under this stupid system, though. In the voting chamber, there’s no incentive to do anything other than vote your actual preferences, since you’re unaccountable to anyone for your choices. If the $50K Pork-a-tarium matters to you, why wouldn’t you vote to support it, once it’s been included in the bill at your behest?
I suppose you might get a stupid dynamic where legislators lie about what it would take to buy them off, in hopes of torpedoing bills they oppose by screwing up the opposition’s vote count. I have trouble imagining this tactic surviving for very long, but maybe I’m not cynical enough.
balioc:
discoursedrome:
balioc:
epistemic status: just about the minimum level of confidence needed to think that something is worth talking about on tumblr
So, here’s the plan: both houses of Congress are run on a completely anonymous basis.
I mean, we still vote for specific named individuals, who campaign in the normal way. But all votes are secret ballots, such that even the legislators themselves don’t know what anyone else voted for. Only the final tallies are revealed.
Even more importantly, there is a legal ban on revealing the source of any given piece of legislation. Bills are brought to the floor by professional reciters who just read whatever’s handed to them. There’s no way to tell, or at least no way to confirm, whether a particular bill comes from a Republican or from a Democrat or from the President, or what.
*****
Obviously this plan is 100% anti-democratic. Its main function is to make legislators less accountable for what they do, to make it harder for voters and politicos alike to connect actions and consequences.
Right now, given the political problems that we’re facing in this country, I’m pretty sure that I’d take obfuscation over accountability. Corruption is a real danger, but…it sure looks like there’s more of a danger in being totally unable to compromise, or to ideologically-downshift for the Greater Good, because you can never stop mugging for the camera. And there’s yet further danger in knowing that it’s always better for you to trample and defeat the Enemy’s agenda, no matter what it is, because letting the Enemy get credit for anything good will cement Enemy control.
Thoughts?
This is basically government by lobbyists, isn’t it? They’d draft the bills themselves and buy the votes themselves, much moreso than today. It seems like if you want to go that route, you might as well just formalize it rather than having a fig leaf of representative government.
Yeah, there is a good chance that you end up with government-by-lobbyists. No question.
The question is: are you more afraid of lobbyists getting whatever additional influence they’d get from secrecy (over what they have already), or more afraid of politicians being straitjacketed by partisan politics and the need to pander to the base?
That’s not me being glib. That is a real question. I don’t know my own answer. But, the more I pay attention to US politics, the closer I edge to the latter.
(Also, worth noting: there is at least an argument that it’s harder to institute a vote-buying system when it’s impossible to verify that anyone’s vote was in fact successfully bought.)
discoursedrome:
balioc:
epistemic status: just about the minimum level of confidence needed to think that something is worth talking about on tumblr
So, here’s the plan: both houses of Congress are run on a completely anonymous basis.
I mean, we still vote for specific named individuals, who campaign in the normal way. But all votes are secret ballots, such that even the legislators themselves don’t know what anyone else voted for. Only the final tallies are revealed.
Even more importantly, there is a legal ban on revealing the source of any given piece of legislation. Bills are brought to the floor by professional reciters who just read whatever’s handed to them. There’s no way to tell, or at least no way to confirm, whether a particular bill comes from a Republican or from a Democrat or from the President, or what.
*****
Obviously this plan is 100% anti-democratic. Its main function is to make legislators less accountable for what they do, to make it harder for voters and politicos alike to connect actions and consequences.
Right now, given the political problems that we’re facing in this country, I’m pretty sure that I’d take obfuscation over accountability. Corruption is a real danger, but…it sure looks like there’s more of a danger in being totally unable to compromise, or to ideologically-downshift for the Greater Good, because you can never stop mugging for the camera. And there’s yet further danger in knowing that it’s always better for you to trample and defeat the Enemy’s agenda, no matter what it is, because letting the Enemy get credit for anything good will cement Enemy control.
Thoughts?
This is basically government by lobbyists, isn’t it? They’d draft the bills themselves and buy the votes themselves, much moreso than today. It seems like if you want to go that route, you might as well just formalize it rather than having a fig leaf of representative government.
Yeah, there is a good chance that you end up with government-by-lobbyists. No question.
The question is: are you more afraid of lobbyists getting whatever additional influence they’d get from secrecy (over what they have already), or more afraid of politicians being straitjacketed by partisan politics and the need to pander to the base?
That’s not me being glib. That is a real question. I don’t know my own answer. But, the more I pay attention to US politics, the closer I edge to the latter.
epistemic status: just about the minimum level of confidence needed to think that something is worth talking about on tumblr
So, here’s the plan: both houses of Congress are run on a completely anonymous basis.
I mean, we still vote for specific named individuals, who campaign in the normal way. But all votes are secret ballots, such that even the legislators themselves don’t know what anyone else voted for. Only the final tallies are revealed.
Even more importantly, there is a legal ban on revealing the source of any given piece of legislation. Bills are brought to the floor by professional reciters who just read whatever’s handed to them. There’s no way to tell, or at least no way to confirm, whether a particular bill comes from a Republican or from a Democrat or from the President, or what.
*****
Obviously this plan is 100% anti-democratic. Its main function is to make legislators less accountable for what they do, to make it harder for voters and politicos alike to connect actions and consequences.
Right now, given the political problems that we’re facing in this country, I’m pretty sure that I’d take obfuscation over accountability. Corruption is a real danger, but…it sure looks like there’s more of a danger in being totally unable to compromise, or to ideologically-downshift for the Greater Good, because you can never stop mugging for the camera. And there’s yet further danger in knowing that it’s always better for you to trample and defeat the Enemy’s agenda, no matter what it is, because letting the Enemy get credit for anything good will cement Enemy control.
Thoughts?
bambamramfan:
shieldfoss:
argumate:
Anon:
TIL, secondhand, that some people won’t accept the earned income tax credit (a US federal tax credit for people with low/moderate income, especially ones with kids. As income increases the credit amount increases, then flattens, then decreases) because they think it’s “welfare” or “political control of their lives”, or that it’s somehow wrong to accept help from anyone other than family or church. What can you even do. :|
Anyway, I guess the lesson here is it’s only okay to receive government assistance if it’s very heavily disguised as being something else, preferably through an unrelated third party (such as a corporation that’s being “incentivized” to build factories near you or whatever). Sort of like money laundering, in concept.
yes, one of the downsides of basic income that I think about a lot is that it’s going to piss some people off to think of themselves as dependent on others unless they can reframe how they spend their life as providing some vital function that everyone else benefits from.
Isn’t that rather easily solved by making it something you apply for, and automatically granting it to those who apply?
My feeling here, as all such similar questions that devolve to “would you tell this to a 55 year old Walmart stocker that (we wont give her free money to live on because her job gives life value)(her job has no value)?” is to ask the people involved. We should like, poll some working class people and ask them which system they’d prefer.
If it’s significantly split, well you’re fucked no matter which policy you go with. But you know, you asked, rather than played some thought experiment about What The Middle America In My Head Wants.”
(Not faulting anyone in this thread for this, just, the dynamic shows up in way too many discussions about UBI)
Unfortunately, I think your proposed (reasonable, common-sense) approach fails on basic predictable human-psychology grounds. In this case, anyway, and cases like it.
Like…I’m pretty sure we know what most people’s first-best choice here is. “I want a job that rewards me both with a substantial wage and a substantial status boost, in which I provide a needed good or service to the world, demonstrating that I am a worthy worthwhile person deserving of pride and also that I am better than all those lazy unskilled slobs who might have some use for welfare.” We could run a poll to see whether that’s actually the outcome that people would prefer, if you believe it valuable, but I’m really quite confident in it. It is the ideal promulgated by pretty much every facet of American culture, and if it’s not your first-best choice, it means that you’re some kind of weirdo who’s broken away from your cultural training.
But of course that doesn’t get you very far, because that option is Definitely Not Available for many many many people. The real choice is often between, say, Welfare or Subsidized Makework Job or Poverty. (Or something like that.) That’s the polling data you actually want.
Except that…
A. It is really hard to get people to believe that their first-best choice (to which they feel entitled) is unavailable and that they have to consider second-best options. If it is at all possible for them, they will find a way to delude themselves into believing that one of the proffered options will lead to the thing they actually want.
B. It is really really hard to get people to believe this when “your first-best choice is unavailable” continues into “…because you have no presently-desirable skills and the free market has no use for you as anything more than a warm body.”
C. It’s especially really really hard to get people to believe this when you have malicious actors actively lying to them about it. And make no mistake, that is a thing that is happening, and will continue to happen. Someone is going to be pushing the line that the Republicans are pushing right now: “as soon as we gut the welfare state and free the market, all those Real Jobs that gave you Real Dignity will come roaring back!”
I am strongly of the belief that there are many people for whom decent welfare would be much better than any job they could ever get (or at least “extremely desirable as a supplement to wages”), but who will never ever admit this even to themselves, because they are strongly invested in not being the sort of losers who would need to think that way.
In short: poll all you want, but good luck getting people to face up squarely to the question long enough to give you a genuine answer.