Tim, I applaud inventive alternatives. That’s an interesting idea but I don’t think a workable one.
Most people have neither the time, the inclination, the knowledge or the expertise to vote on major issues leastwise smaller ones. How many Americans really understand trade policy, the Iran Treaty, etc.?
How many are unwilling to vote at all? And if they were, most people are not very intelligent. Do you really want your Uncle Bob deciding nuclear policy or trade issues?
One of the major reasons the gov’t runs the way it does is that most people don’t want to be involved.
If everyone voted on everything there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day to just vote, leastwise study the pros and cons of what you’re voting on.
You would have gov’t by competing special interest groups. You’d have to require a minimum level of participation for any vote to count and then the special interest groups would be pounding everyone 24/7 to vote one way or another on the thousands of laws that would help or hurt them. Massive overload.
This is a difficult problem.
One SF novel solved it by giving the President dictatorial powers and implanting an explosive in his head. If a certain percentage of the population voted “NO” within a certain period of time it went off. This gave him a strong incentive not to piss people off.
Another SF story had the president implanted with pain sensors mapped to various provinces. The more the people in State X voted “NO” the more his arm or leg hurt.
I suggested a different tactic in this column:
Libertarianism And Socialism Are Both Failed Systems
We Need Another, Better Way
A Troika Of Dictators
In all of this we are up against human nature. Many if not most human decisions are based on emotion, personality, and subjective opinions on right, wrong, fair and unfair. If we all operated like Data or Mr. Spock governmental systems would be much easier to design and operate. But we don’t.
We have met the enemy and he is us.
