the townspeople announce their intention
If the townspeople generally all had the same intention, elections wouldn't mean more than which identical mental cog would have the power and responsibility to execute everyone's identical intention.
If you don't start from the presumption of different intentions, you're not talking politics in any meaningful way.
I've been listening to criticism and have reworded it quite a bit to avoid such easily misunderstood statements.
At any rate you reason from "If the townspeople generally all had the same intention"
(a phrase that could very well mean only that they generally all believe democracy is the best way to go, all things considered, and they see some hope of the experiment demonstrating something useful)
to "which identical mental cog would have the power and responsibility to execute everyone's identical intention."
Take a small town, say about 4000 pop., where people generally know each other, and can nearly all agree that the way we run elections is very dysfunctional compared to a normal hiring process.
How many different 4000 people town election processes did you actually look at before you concluded that those elections are generally very dysfuncitonal?
Worthwhile question -- short answer is this hasn't been an extensive research problem so far.
For what it's worth, I live in a town of population 17,000 and it seems dysfunctional enough. I'd consider staking a bet that they could half the property tax and still do as well (no prize to either side if it's indeterminate, which it probably would be -- notice the notoriously slippery word "could") -- so yes, I'm pretty far from really putting my money where my mouth is.
Signs and commercials are not allowed.
Oh, if only that pesky Constitution didn't stand in the way...
A broader point is that you are assuming nice, homogenous, reasonable, sane population to start with. That's not a realistic assumption. If we had that, politics wouldn't be a problem they are.
I've been listening to criticism and have reworded it quite a bit.
RE "you are assuming nice, homogenous, reasonable, sane population to start with. That's not a realistic assumption."
I'm assuming only that somewhere in America there might be such a town, and if the project succeeded, there might be more.
An even broader point :-) is that democracy doesn't scale well.
There are lot of things which might work well in some 4,000-people towns and don't have a snowball's chance in hell in a political unit with many millions of people in it.
There is a well-known anti-statist blog, popehat.com, and one of the guys writing for it, Clark, is not shy at all about expressing his dislike for the government. And yet...
A few weeks ago I was visiting a much less urban area of the country and ended up reading a transcript of a town meeting. Officer Fred from the police department wanted $90 for ammo to practice with. Bill from the Department of Public Works wanted $1,200 for a new liner for the skating pond, and noted that they already had $940 in the savings account. All five women on the historical committee agreed that they should open the local museum on a Saturday.
Reading the transcript I had a really weird feeling, and it took me a while to figure out what it was.
I eventually did.
You know how progressives love to say things like "'government' is just a word for things we all do together"? And you know how I mock that with additions and ammendations such as "…like use drones to kill Afghani children!" ?
I realized what was so odd about this small town's town government.
It really was just a bunch of people.
I don't know if it's sheerly because of the limited budget, or because the number of people involved is close to the Dunbar number, or because there's greater transparency, or there's some step function where any government under a certain size operates categorically differently from bigger governments.
…but I had the very weird experience of seeing a government and not having my extreme hair-trigger anarcho-capitalist / voluntaryist hackles raised. I thought to myself "yeah, the skating pond probably does need a new liner".
I swear to God, I even thought "$90 isn't much – the cops really should get some more ammo to practice with".
With out exaggerating, this is the first time in my life that I saw a government that seemed reasonable to me, and I'm still slightly in shock at the idea and reverberating at bit in response to it.
"An even broader point :-) is that democracy doesn't scale well.
There are lot of things which might work well in some 4,000-people towns and don't have a snowball's chance in hell in a political unit with many millions of people in it."
I'm cognizant of that, and am proposing we learn something from what engineers do when trying to create an entirely new thing: Start with a tabletop model, and see how and to what extent it can be scaled. In finding how it can be scaled, the concept is likely to evolve considerably.
Start with a tabletop model, and see how and to what extent it can be scaled.
The problem is that running the test - adjust - test - adjust... cycles requires not just speculation about what the result might be, but actually throwing the model into reality and looking at how it does.
That's... difficult when we are talking about adjustments to political processes :-/
I wouldn't take it so literally, and I'm not trying to put the world on my work table -- just casting a meme upon the waves.
Something like this "scaling up" occurred when in the late 1770s and early 1780s, former colonies tried many models of state constitution, and the results were, according to some historians, beneficial to the design of the U.S. constitution. Maybe some 1775-6 pamphleteer could be said to have been somewhat in my position when he wrote "here's something we might try..." (and maybe he was ignored and I will be too).
just casting a meme upon the waves.
Oh, no problems with that. But the ocean is vast... :-)
Well, if all I did was remind you of that story so you could tell it to us, this has been a worthwhile conversation (referring back to "A few weeks ago I was visiting...").
I still think the trouble with anarchy is that power vacuums always get filled with something, and the only viable plan is try to get democracy to work, not eliminate it, or reduce it to "merely" having the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
I've been listening to criticism and have reworded it quite a bit to clarify.
I'm talking about a consensual experiment by one small community, and asking "what if?"
"Utopianism" generally means, in my view, looking at the world through a Gods-eye view, leading to imagined solutions that make sense from a Gods-eye view, and ultimately in the worst case, slaughtering those who won't acknowledge you as God.
I'm talking about a consensual experiment by one small community, and asking "what if?"
Your first sketch suggest consensual use for violence in form of tearing down ads.
Your first sketch suggest consensual use for violence in form of tearing down ads.
Not tearing down signs is fine with me and I decided to take it out of the sketch, as you seem to be aware.
As a half-hearted partial defense, tearing down signs seems comparable in violence to plastering signs all over walls and telephone poles that one does not own, and if one were to tear down signs maybe one should stick to those.
Mostly unrelated, but this made me think that it might be neat if all hiring interviews were publicly broadcasted (or at least, filmed and publicly available), as a matter of law. Or at least for positions of responsibility.
Or alternatively, have yearly exam/interviews where people have to publicly display their skills/knowledge in certain domains. Some certified professions like doctors etc. may already do something like that, but I'm not aware of anything really public.
I'm looking at a project that could be tried by a small group of people, with no legislation required. What you suggest is kind of opposite in spirit.
I'd like to throw this out as a test project, in case there are any takers, or rather for now, mostly throw it out for comment and criticism to see if it can be taken any further.
Take a small town, say about 4000 pop., where people generally know each other, and can nearly all agree that the way we run elections is very dysfunctional compared to a normal hiring process. This would have to be a very unusual town for such a conversation to take place; maybe it would be a very small suburb of Redmond Washington. Liberals, libertarians, and conservatives would hold a town hall type conversation and almost all agree that the current prototype of an election is dysfunctional. They might then agree to tell the candidates "Save your money, no ads, signs, etc. We're providing a different forum for you to represent yourselves, and whoever ignores this will forfeit our respect for sabotaging the experiment we want to carry out."
Townspeople would spend a period of time, with face to face meetings and online debating forums figuring out what questions they'd want answered. Maybe a few of the sort of people who would normally become activists for one or the other party would supply the drive, looking into what was done by the town under the last mayor. Discoveries would be made like "Oh, here's one thing the mayor does that I never thought of, hiring concrete contractors; I wonder how he/she would decide which one to use."
Then candidates are interviewed one at a time in a town hall type setting with web and/or local cable broadcast. Each candidate will be called individually on one or more evenings partly to avoid time-wasting put-downs of the other candidates.
I think this would get national news attention and provoke discussion. There are plenty of stories of unusual situations in small town elections just because a man and his ex-wife are running against each other, or the (male) mayor goes trans-gender and has large breast implants (and to warm our hearts, the town chases off out of town demonstrators against such an "abomination" -- this one I actually heard about recently).
I realize the "normal hiring process" analogy has to be stretched and squeezed to fit the very different situation, but I think it's worth an experiment, at least, to see if we could capture some of the virtues of a process that has worked (and been thought out and rethought, and books written on it) that has worked well enough for private business.
What we currently do is as much like a normal hiring process as if the hirer couldn't even get the candidates into their office, but must watch them out the window performing circus-like theatrics; they don't get to ask questions, but the candidates shout out whatever they think is relevant over a bullhorn.