[ExI] Consensus (was Capitalism, etc.)

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Wed Nov 16 05:14:40 UTC 2011


On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 5:22 PM, Tara Maya <tara at taramayastales.com> wrote:
> On Nov 12, 2011, at 2:22 PM, Giovanni Santostasi wrote:
>
> This governing method is called "consensus decision making" or sometimes, more vaguely, "direct democracy" or "leaderless government."
> Sadly, this is not at all unusual for so-called "consensus decision."

Fascinating description of an alternative system and how it might work...

> I did have an idea for a system which possibly could take good aspects of classic democracy and good aspects of CDM. Political leaders would not be career-politicians, but would be chosen randomly from the citizens... the way juries are today. Individuals could be called up to governing duty exactly the way we are today called up for jury duty, and perhaps there would also be a provision for eliminating some individuals from governing duty if they were deemed unfit. (I am a bit unsure on this point, since it begs the question, who would do the weeding out? The previous governing team? Lawyers and judges? Appointed staff?) These teams would debate and pass laws, exactly like Congress does today, and would also be divided into executive and legislative branches of the government.
>
> Now, would this be an improvement over our present system? I have no idea. There would still the temptation for interest groups to bribe and bully the governing teams. It might be worse than democracy. But even if it were better, it certainly would not usher in a utopia, since humans would be involved.
>

I've heard this idea before... and at first blush it would seem that
randomly selected individuals would do a better job than the bunch in
Washington today. The problem in practice would seem to be that it
would build up a bureaucracy around the random individuals, and you
would end up with the lifer bureaucrats running things because the
poor randomly chosen individuals would have nobody else to turn to for
good advise.

In reality, much of Washington is today run by the career
bureaucrats... and they don't change from administration to
administration because nobody could get up to speed on the tremendous
amount of red tape that has been created that locks these folks in.
Republican or Democrat, after the top level few thousand people are
appointed in a given administration, it's the same tired folks from
there down decade after decade... and that's a big problem when you
talk about trying to change Washington.

-Kelly




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list