Yesterday, in the context of how copyright laws have come to be so absurd and hurt the public and defeat the reason they exist, I made a strong attack on the distortions money and press access have on the legislative procedure, to the effect that I have abandoned hope in democracy.
This is largely true, except as Churchill once noted, it is hard to come up with a viable alternative that doesn't risk dictatorship (not that democracies don't generally evolved into dictatorships too, or at least societies where people have little freedom).
Several things. First, the legal profession has to be prevented from controlling things. Lawyers are generally disliked everywhere for good reason, although there are good lawyers, there are an awful lot who do much more harm than good, but that is for another blog.
The issue here is that they tend to, as a profession, dominate legislative processes, and their solution to everything is to complicate the law. Society ends up with more and more regulation and regulators and bureaucrats and litigation and in the end vast amounts of corruption needed to function at all.
They also of course routinely act in their personal interest, so we have laws about things like "practicing law without a license" and an utter inability of legislatures to get litigation under any reasonable control.
So the first thing I think needs doing is to ban any member of the legal profession from politics, or anyone who has been in the past.
Another thing is pork. One approach might be to let the executive make the budget and the legislature either approve or disapprove, up or down, with no amendments. A lot of pork can be dealt with by having at-large representation in the legislature, with staggered terms.
That still doesn't eliminate it as the executive will have to make compromises in order to get the budget passed, and the executive itself will probably have its own bits of corruption. (Yes pork is corruption -- we need to recognize it for what it is.) This also seems putting a lot of power in the executive's hands, so institutional checks here need to be thought up.
Of course largely the root of the problem is the voter. They vote for all sorts of silly reasons, although more often in their selfish interest or based on the position of the candidate on a limited range of issues. So candidates lie or take bad positions just to get elected. Or, even worse, ideologues get elected, and some really stupid people who don't understand the real world and function from within an ideology or even a religion.
The thing is the voter has little choice. He or she only can assess the candidate by the campaign and what and how they say things, and this is so easily manipulated. Negative campaign adds, for example, have been shown to be effective over and over, when in fact it should drive voters into the camp of the person being attacked.
A much more limited voter roll seems needed -- one where stability and education and reasonableness and so on are considered when one applies for the franchise. Of course such things inevitably get used to keep groups, such as racial minorities, from having a say, so it would have to be much more complicated than just a board reviewing applications and more automated.
Then the voters are a small number who can get to know the candidate personally and who know what is going on.
I suspect my views are just too radical for most people, and smack of Platonic ideas and of course of Leninism, although there are differences. One thing is I would have the whole thing non-partisan and eliminate political parties (which have the effect of turning elections into sporting events).
Of course no system is perfect, and all can be criticized, but it seems to me we are so badly governed nowadays in most countries that something pretty radical needs to be done.
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