We have a situation where big interests that can afford to treat supporting certain politicians as a business decision control our governance. That’s bad. You want to move to a situation where the unelected contingent within government will be able to control the political direction of the society that is governed by the state, which is also very bad. A noble attempt to solve a problem, but it causes other problems that are at least equally bad. And this is why noble attempts that treat the problem as very simple often lead to worse outcomes.
So what’s another solution. No campaigning at all? Just publish your platform online, let people vote. Good idea? Well, no, because people want to be excited, they like to be emotionally manipulated. You create a boring political process and hardly anyone will vote. You wind up in a situation where the only people voting are those business interests. Also, you push campaigning underground, it already partly is, but you wind up in a situation where “regular people” canvas and protest and “grass roots” and all that, which is usually covertly funded. Still, very bad.
The real problem here is the nature of power. There is no political solution to the Pareto distribution. Real power exists, it is undemocratic, and no amount of rules can fix those problems, all you can hope for is a system that leverages the natural incentives and propensities of power distribution such that it gives you a Nash equilibrium, a social optimum, the best we can do. That will necessarily still involve power imbalances, unforseen outcomes, some amount of corruption, because the actors in all these systems are people, and the beneficiaries are always people, even when the actors are not people.
I don’t know what the solution is. i don’t think very many people do.
This is a much harder problem than you realize.
We have a situation where big interests that can afford to treat supporting certain politicians as a business decision control our governance. That’s bad. You want to move to a situation where the unelected contingent within government will be able to control the political direction of the society that is governed by the state, which is also very bad. A noble attempt to solve a problem, but it causes other problems that are at least equally bad. And this is why noble attempts that treat the problem as very simple often lead to worse outcomes.
So what’s another solution. No campaigning at all? Just publish your platform online, let people vote. Good idea? Well, no, because people want to be excited, they like to be emotionally manipulated. You create a boring political process and hardly anyone will vote. You wind up in a situation where the only people voting are those business interests. Also, you push campaigning underground, it already partly is, but you wind up in a situation where “regular people” canvas and protest and “grass roots” and all that, which is usually covertly funded. Still, very bad.
The real problem here is the nature of power. There is no political solution to the Pareto distribution. Real power exists, it is undemocratic, and no amount of rules can fix those problems, all you can hope for is a system that leverages the natural incentives and propensities of power distribution such that it gives you a Nash equilibrium, a social optimum, the best we can do. That will necessarily still involve power imbalances, unforseen outcomes, some amount of corruption, because the actors in all these systems are people, and the beneficiaries are always people, even when the actors are not people.
I don’t know what the solution is. i don’t think very many people do.