collapsedsquid asked: I've seen you talking about sortition a few times, and I'm curious, how seriously do you take it? How worried are you about issues of legitimacy?
oligopsony-deactivated20160508:
Serious! I think forms of government can be arbitrarily weird and yet considered legitimate as long as there’s appropriate ritual around them and they people’s lives are about as good as they expect them to be, and I don’t think sortition is that weird - it’s fair, it’s representative, it’s been done before.
Those who see voting as expressing the “consent of the governed”, maintain that voting is able to confer legitimacy in the selection. According to this view, elected officials can act with greater authority than when randomly selected.[55] With no popular mandate to draw on, politicians lose a moral basis on which to base their authority. As such, politicians would be open to charges of illegitimacy, as they were selected purely by chance.
I don’t see the downside.
The issue is when lack of agreed-upon and enforceable methods for resolving disputes leads to terrible outcomes when disagreements do occur, such as mob violence or all-out war.
I think “avoiding mob violence or all-out war” or “let’s pay everyone the same reasonable amount of universal basic income for their basic needs, funded with a universal flat tax without loopholes or deductions or favoritism to special interests, and a land value tax based on the market value of the land in question” or “let’s ensure that people can’t pass the harms of their actions onto non-consenting third parties” requires way less legitimacy than “let’s ban e-cigs, unprescribed estrogen, transgenic food, sex workers, and black people” or “let’s arbitrarily intrude into the private lives of people so we can know how much exactly to rob them for the purpose of subsidizing cronies while simultaneously treating the poor with degrading paternalism” or “let’s decide (primarily based on whose special interests are the best in lobbying and arranging favors) the ~exact specifics~ of the future of energy, transportation, jobs, and other big parts of the economy and rob the public to pad the pockets of our buddies” and thus reducing the government’s legitimacy on the margin would primarily impact the latter before adversely impacting the former.
Welfare minarchism is a far more stable and less-legitimacy-requiring equilibrium than statist micromanagement, and people are far more likely to start asking questions about the latter while the former can defend itself with substance so it doesn’t need to resort to style by pleading to the vox populi.
The trust I need to let someone engage in a legal and low-value commercial transaction with me is far lower than the trust I need to let someone run my life for me, and attempting to run my life for me and failing at it reduces my trust for commercial transaction purposes as well, so at least I would consider a government that was only allowed to eg. set the tax rate, use 25% of the collected taxes to run a justice system, science, public-goods-kind-of research, and all the Institutes of Specific Study and Standardization that make basically a rounding error of the government budget and are actually useful or at worst just a harmless hobby for some nerds, and divide 75% equally to everyone, far more legitimate than a government that is allowed to define poker, vote on my body, require permits for fortune-tellers, socially engineer the entire nation into car dependency as an anti-communist conspiracy, socially engineer the entire nation into chemical moralism as an anti-hippie-and-black-people conspiracy, take some money from me to subsidize some asshole’s weapons manufacturing business to ~create jobs~ (something I could do perfectly well on my own thank you very much, by paying people who create value to me in proportion to the value they have created and thus incentivizing people to do positive-sum things to each other; who does the government think pays the wages of workers, the boss? okay actually please don’t answer that question oh god), kidnap poor people for trivial and victimless things (or socially engineer a situation which makes some poor people do more victimful things than they’d have otherwise done) so it can ~create jobs~ by paying other poor people (and their rich cronyist bosses and investors) to watch over and abuse the first set of poor people, etc.
1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #seriously tho if the government was simply banned from doing any #~job creation~ #it would already be a massive improvement #because it would have to give money to people if it wanted to be keynesian #and thus people could use the money on the things they actually need #not things assholes think other people need to have imposed upon them #and the same thing goes for food stamps etc. #if you want paternalism you can buy paternalism on the market #yes this is what a promethea actually believes #basic income would enable life management businesses #that take people's money and pay their bills for them #so they can't drink or gamble themselves into trouble even if they have low conscientiousness #and the users of the service would be the payers of the service so the business would be incentivized to serve them #instead of the moralism of the voters · 23 notes · .permalink