A Vision for State Governance
Posted by dlw in Uncategorized at 1:57 pm | 
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I’d like to make the state gov’t unicameral and with a cross between a representative and a majority rule system. We really don’t need two chambers at the state level. In MN, we could divide up the state into 5 or 6 regions and have representational elections in each region. So for each region, a party would get the number of representatives that is quasi-proportional* to the percentage of the vote they won. This would keep elections local, but make them not winner-takes-all contests and give third parties a better chance of getting some representation. When elections are not winner-takes-all contests major party candidates are more likely to discuss the issues, instead of smearing each other and when third parties have a decent chance of getting a toe-hold onto power then the main party candidates will need to take on more of their issues.
I’d also like to see a state-wide flat tax where all adult citizens would also receive a 500-1,000 dollar transfer so long as they vote in state and nat’l elections. If this were coupled with having biannual state legislative elections, it would go even further to keep legislators more responsive to the people.
Anyways, I think such state-based institutional reforms are an important precursor for decentralizing more of the power in the nat’l gov’t to the state or local levels.
dlw
*There’d need to be a rule for what percentage of the vote a party would need to get to get a representative. I think this percentage would need to be tied to how many representatives there were for a region which would be based on the region’s population size.
The 25th of April, 2006 at 12:06 am
[…] This could be coupled with other changes in the rules, like what I described in the last post, to make it easier to envision a better future for the United States. […]
The 28th of June, 2006 at 8:21 pm
[…] Well, you know the Lord giveth and taketh. I’ve found that my hopes of joining the Christian Democratic Union(CDU) will not happen on account of their uncompromisingly prolife position. I did write an alternative for them. I believe it is a superior strategy for dealing with the politics of abortion and could enable a third party to gain a serious foot hold on power by capturing the center on this most persistently contentious issue. An Idea to Prevent Abortions and Acrimony. For the CDU to succeed in getting significant National attention and a toe hold on power, it needs to gamble. That includes gambling by taking a controversial and more centrist position on the politics of abortion. The goal of this gamble is to reduce effectively the number of abortions and to get free nat’l media attention by distinguishing ourselves from both main parties and capturing the center on this issue. Idea: We call ourselves Pragmatic ProLifers. We commit ourselves to working long-term to making all elective abortions approx. 48 days after conception illegal. We justify this goal by stressing that it is not an arbitrary compromise cutoff point but rather is a clear cut dividing line for when we should first treat the human unborn as legally-protected-persons. It is clear cut on account of the critical importance of relationality for whether someone is a human being. What makes us human beings is not our dna or our level of brain activity or how much autonomy we have as individuals. What makes us human beings is not any specific set of attributes that we possess, but rather how other human beings are able to recognize themselves in us. This is the critical importance of relationality for whether someone is a human being and the first means by which we recognize someone as such is through their human form that emerges at 48 days after conception, as illustrated here. Now, we don’t have to all agree on this notion of when we should first treat the human unborn as human beings, but we can say that “Not all of us here [in the CDU] believe this and many of us hold to more conservative or liberal positions personally, but we agreed that politically it would be wise to make this our end-goal for the extension of legal-personhood to the unborn.” We could then use pictures from before, at and after this point in embryonic development to illustrate our goal. The next step is to emphasize the need to be pragmatic or strategic in acheiving this goal. There are two key pragmatic principles here: (1) we need to stress that it is much more important to change hearts than laws about the personhood of the human unborn and (2) we must also seek legal and social changes that will value all mothers. In the first point, we need to stress the importance of changing hearts first, since otherwise there is no guarantee that the extension of legal protections to the unborn against arbitrary loss of life will prove durable. There are examples, like in Portugal, where abortions were made illegal and then, after some bad press over the enforcement of the law, were made legal again. The legal changes did not last because most people did not believe that those involved in the abortion deserved to be punished. The solution here is that we need to tie ourselves to the mast and commit ourselves longterm to changing hearts before changing laws. The way to do this is with a strategically chosen constitutional amendment. We need to press for a constitutional amendment that would make dederal legal changes as to when we first treat the human unborn as a legally-protected person only possible through national referendums. The second part above of being pragmatic is to reduce the feminist opposition by making sure that we are both prolife and pro women’s rights. Our faith-based approach would stress the need to follow Jesus in the way he did not condemn the sinner in John 8:3-11, but rather stood up for her right to life and dignity(despite her shortcomings) and asked her to leave her sinful lifestlye. So what these pragmatic principles would result in is a three part strategy. (1) We would encourage local reforms meant to prevent abortions and care for mothers, like those advocated by feminist prolifer Serrin Foster. (2) we would lead the charge for a hopefully multipartisan-supported Constitutional Amendment. The amendment described above would omit the economically liberal aspects of the CDU’s current Human Dignity amendment, so as to hopefully get the support of prolife economic conservatives. The amendment would repeal only part of RoeVWade. We could leave the protection of all first trimester elective abortions until a later amendment, after it’s become clear how well the referendums work in adjudicating our differences on this controversial subject. (3)It would then be up to us to foster widespread conversations on the facts of the fetal development process and what it means for us to be human beings who deserve legal protections against arbitrary loss of life, and to press for a series of referendums until we reached our goal. Personal Testimony I believe this would work long run and, in the short-run, it would be just what the CDU(or any third party) needs to distinguish itself from the main parties on this persistently important political issue. It would allow the party to capitalize on the institutional rigidities of the main parties on this issue and to capture the center. As someone who used to believe that we were humans at conception and then later switched to that we were humans at the point of viability and then who went through a process of gradually working out what I believed through much debate and study, I can promise you that I believe 100% that we will be able to convince 75% of the US population to make the beginning of legal personhood at 48 days after conception. I don’t believe that about conception. In fact, I see the belief that we are ensoulled human beings at conception as basically a religious tradition, justified neither by Science nor Scripture, that is held by some Christians and not others. As such, I am very much opposed, on the basis of the separation of Church and State, for it to be made law over and against the views of the majority of US citizens. Strategic Problems with the existing CDU approach. I would describe the CDU’s Human Dignity Amendment as a strategy similar to that used by the Pope in the Evangelium Vitae. This approach couples a strong orthodox position on the value and inviolability of life in opposition to legal abortions with an economic advocacy for the working class and poor. The problem is that this coupling of the two issues is too easily decoupled. I think realistically, it is hard to commit to politically. It skips over the uncomfortable question of how the party would work out its priorities when the two agendas inevitably come into conflict. A party has only so much political capital and when they come into power, they will be under pressure behind the scenes by moneyed interests. In these situations, it would be easy to deprioritize economic issues by over prioritizing social issues and then spinning the outcome to the party as “biblically balanced” or “compromise”. The key to circumventing this problem is to pick one’s battles wisely at the outset on social issues so as to ensure a better balance between them and economic issues and to provide more room for making key structural reforms to the political system. Structural reforms like First Pass the Post Plus or making state legislative bodies a unicameral hybrid between representational and majoritarian systems where elections are annual and there is near 100% voter participation. The Importance of Admitting our Fallibilism. But in all of this, we need to distinguish between God’s ideals and human laws that inevitably accomodate human sinfulness. And, inasmuch as we are fallible in discerning what sorts of legal changes we may make in the here and now, it is not helpful to claim that our goals reflect a transcendent ”natural law”. We can believe in moral realism and oppose moral relativism but also admit that our systems of cultural values/beliefs fall short of “The Ideal” and can and should be open to change. So, that didn’t work with the CDU, but I still believe that it could work and help a third party grow in political influence. dlw […]
The 3rd of July, 2006 at 2:47 pm
[…] I think that this idea and the Basic Income Guarantee plan for income tax and welfare reform, coupled with a Land Value Tax to keep marginal income tax rates down and oil taxes to force us to conserve and reduce our foreign oil dependency problem, and my vision for making state legislatures unicameral with a hybrid between a majoritarian and representational election system and annual elections where near 100% voter participation is encourage along with healthcare and educational reforms would work well if coupled with the image improvement in matters of national security and a reframing of the cultural wars issues thru aspects of “my pragmatic prolife manifesto” and a redirection of LGBT activism from seeking more legal gay marriages to more concrete and less symbolic rights issues and winning more public goodwill by championing family values issues that are being neglected by the religious right. […]
The 10th of November, 2006 at 4:20 pm
[…] I would like to see an alliance formed of all reasonable third party movements to press for changes at the state level that will give more support for third parties. This means economic liberals and social conservatives like me (well, social moderate in the US) would work with economic conservatives and social liberals (like Jesse Ventura) to pass reforms(like this and this) that would give us better options for supporting (different) third parties in later elections. […]