From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Aug 07 2002 - 15:29:49 MDT
--- Rafal Smigrodzki <rms2g@virginia.edu> wrote:
> Technotranscendence wrote:
>
> The sortition experiment would be a good one to try, though I fear it
> will only be of limited help in taming the worst aspects of
> democracy,
> since ultimately it does nothing to reduce government power or to set
> up
> an alternative self-reinforcing, self-limiting system. After all,
> there's little to stop a sortitionist or even a demarchist government
> from issuing emergency powers -- the "Crisis and Leviathan" scenario
> we
> see all too often in the growth of government -- and thereby quickly
> obviating its limitations -- as we see, e.g., with Congress giving
> war
> powers to the President, thereby obviating a check on executive
> warmaking powers.
>
> ### Yes, you are quite right here. If the MP's chosen by sortition,
> and by
> extension, the population at large, do not care about their own
> freedom,
> there is absolutely nothing (not even the perfect anarchy) that would
> prevent them from losing it. I think this is a fundamental problem,
> which
> cannot be solved by any political means.
It sure can. Simply have the sortition at the party level, so that
candidates for various parties can only be randomly selected from those
registered to vote as members of that party. The party has a primary to
select one of several random candidates, and then the parties go head
to head in the election with candidates who are entirely without
connections, debts to contributors, etc. i.e. insiders will always be
outside in such a system.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better
http://health.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:57 MST