One week from elections 2012, yadda yadda. So a lot of people are yelling about jobs and crap that the federal government of a republic has no duty dealing with. After watching the 3rd party debates, it seems obvious (well, duh?) that any major presidential candidate or party acting today on the federal stage doesn't recognize the fundamental flaws in the way the American system is implemented. And it isn't something shallow like first past the post, it is deeper than that, and it requires some introspection on history.
Way back when this country was founded, it was populated by a few million people, and the way the original proceedings of the time were that white men got to vote every year or two in local, state, and federal elections, and most of those votes were for local people taking on local governmental duties like the sherrif, a judge, the mayor of the town, the town council, etc. The state they lived in had their own way of electing regional governances, the state congress and the governor, and the only federal thing any average citizen had to worry about was a vote for their local house representative. The house was interesting in that originally it had a variable number of members and the only rule in the Constitution was that you could have at most one member per 30,000 people.
The modern house seats a representative per ~710,000 people (not necessarily voters, just census residents). Back when the constitution was written, the house had 65 members. The 1790 population census at Wikipedia cites approximately 4 million people in the country at the time. That would have been one representative per ~62k people. It now is fixed at 435, and one representative "represents" over 10 times as many people. The problem here should be obvious - as individual representatives represent more and more people, they lose connection to their constitutenacy and see them more as statistics and numbers rather than individuals. Your vote and voice matters less in the house because you are encompassed in a larger group. So back in the dawning years of the nation, you could easily expect to have a larger voice in the house since you had more representation per person at the time, just because there were fewer people in general.
That isn't really the big problem here. Back then, you only voted for a house representative. Your state would appoint senators and memebers of the electoral college to elect the president. You didn't need to worry about those - and today I would say that would be so much better than what we have. In the worst case scenario, California, you have 2 senators representing almost 38 million people. The electoral college system and the tremendous stupidity of the average voter means that only around 8 states matter in the presidency, and the recent staged parody of a debate season only shows how dumb voters are for swinging between two politicians with established political careers as senator + president, and governor, respectively, and taking their words as meaning anything when we have years of their actions to refer to.
It doesn't help that the original purpose of the electoral college, and the allocation of senate seats, was to appease states that at the time were small, and were acting as independent nations. It was a concession not for liberty or good government but like the 3/5ths compromise was done just to get a functional federal government in the first place. Today, they harm us greatly, and the direct election of these people makes it so that you can't expect them to have any concept of who they represent. No wonder they only hear the voices of extremely wealthy special interests and campaign donors that line their coffers, they can't possibly even begin to comprehend how many people they "represent" when it numbers in the millions. And no wonder nobody can compete with the two party system, because the amount of money it takes to reach that many people and voice positions is astronomical.
The problem is simply one of scale and size. Because in the end, politics is dealing with human beings. Your average citizen does not have the time (hell, I'm unemployed and it took me around ~30 hours to research the major ticket placements I get to vote on in PA this year, and compare the candidates for each, who really like obscuring their positions on whatever it is they are being elected for, I wonder why) to pick individuals for dozens of positions every election cycle. They don't have the time to wade through the bullshit rhetoric they get heaped upon all the time. No wonder we have parties and spin dominating discourse rather than intellect, reason, and sound policy. You have individuals voting for way too many things, so of course they eventually break down and vote party lines. You have first past the post elections, so of course two party systems that are easily corrupted and exploited by wealthy interests can just funnel money into one of two places and expect wide reaching political benefit because the parties act as hive minds (especially the republican party, as it goes more and more right and gets more and more extremist, the core is all that remains and they speak in one voice now it seems, but the democrats are just as spineless and bought out from their own special interests).
You have politicians representing way too many people directly, who do horrendous things to secure reelections, who are funded by massive corporate dollars funneled through their parties to maintain control, and who can never fathom conceptualizing all the people they represent as individuals rather than statistics. You have outdated mechanisms of election designed around appeasing disparate foreign powers into consolidating into one nation rather than being around individual liberty and voice.
So unlike everyone else bitching about this problem, here is my solution. I imagine it is gravely flawed and shows off my ignorance in droves, but it is better than nothing to be loud and ignorant than to be ignorant and in denial of it.
1. People need to be electing as few people as possible, but have as much influence on those elected as possible. Your voice should be heard, respected, considered, and it should have implications on every level of politics regardless of viewpoint. You can kill two birds with one stone here - use CPGrey's (amazingly smart guy) binary partitioning of the population scheme until you are dividing the population into roughly equal segments of something between 1000 and 1500 people. I'd argue that is about the "average" limit a normal person can hope to actually relate to their constituancy on a human, personal level, without being too much overhead per person (if you were electing a representative per 10 people, supporting 10% of the population as politicians would be infeasible, you want to minimize the economic overhead of governance). So every 1000 - 1500 people can elect (now here is something equally radical) someone for a two year term, with no chance for reelection, as a sitting representative on a local council of 10. They control local law, and have a local monetary transaction / consumption (ie, the exchange of money between parties, you could probably have this nationally the burden of the receiver to pay a percentage of money granted as a local transaction tax, and make it a constitutional law that localities can only tax in this way, in one direction, but they can control the tax rate). Unlike our current broken state sales tax code, it would be for any money coming into the pockets of residents of a locality (note, these localities are approximately 10k to 15k people) and citizens are expected to pay as a percentage of money received.
That includes wages, it includes physical property sales, it includes capital gains, inheritance, and Christmas cards. No exceptions. When money one person has goes to someone else, a percentage is expected to be given as local tax. Of course you could never process all of these and make sure grandparents don't give their grandchildren $50 where the kids don't pay their reception tax on it. Money between private citizens, I'd imagine, would be untaxed, because you just can't feasibly tax that. Money between groups would be taxed. And groups are an important concept in my entire political ideology, because at the end of the day, most of the work of government is to protect individuals from groups.
So the transfer of wealth, through business (including funeral estates) would be taxed locally, in that a percentage of money you recieve from any source must be paid annually to your local council.
Here is the beauty. That accounts for a lot of money. And if you have sufficient social mobility, people will move to areas with lower tax rates on purpose, and some will pay higher taxes for government services they like. You could easily have a 1% tax of this kind pay all of a local governments dues. Of course, wealthy neighborhoods will probably have a very tiny tax rate of this kind. Good on them! It is their local tax, and if their local government makes good decisions that attract people to live there, those good ideas grow and spread. It is an organic trial and error of policy and taxation that lets people move to where they agree with the ideologies of the area. And since it is at such a small scale, the influence of individuals on their local councils is very high, so good ideas can be heard and attempted. And it doesn't cost millions to get a message across to a constituency.
This is a lot like city states. They were tight knit, closed off communities with their own policies. People would move between them and to the prosperous ones they agreed with. The only weakness in city states were disputes between them, in civil liberties within them (small groups are very prone to mob rule and witch hunting) and defense (because a small group of people has a hard time fighting off a big one).
You can solve most of those issues today though, just through progress, innovation, and technology. You still have a nation instead of independent localities, so you have a constitution and higher courts. You absolutely have codified national law on the topic of civil liberties, and the abused and discriminated against can appeal to higher courts than the local one for protection and justice. You still have a national military for protection of any locality, and you would expect the same public outrage about abuse of such a military (... heh, like that actually happens when the US military acts barbaric abroad). You have instantaneous communication - nobody is isolated anymore. And economics are global and globalized, so you don't have traditional issues like food shortages or price disputes, since everything is on an international market anyway.
Disputes between localities is a states issue. Plain and simple. This system I propose is build like a pyramid, in many ways like the original constitution envisioned, but today we have all politics operating on the top and having wide reaching implications for everyone, where local and state governments barely write laws but exude more influence over the actual lives of citizens just on how they fund road repairs and schools and tax property. You want tax law to be national and flat, and you want local policy experimentation to find out what works before you force it upon everyone, where they have no choice in the matter.
And choice is important. If you can be socially mobile, you can go where you like the policies of the state or local government, rather than be stuck with nonsense like NCLB, the patriot act, or NDAA. If you don't like Obamacare, under such a system, it would be a local law, not a national one, and healthcare could be based in regions (or states... getting to that).
So how does state and federal law work here? If you have localities of a council of 10, that council elects 1 member amongst themselves when they are first elected themselves (so that in the end state representatives are directly elected, but they are chosen by council members once they convene in a concesus, and since there are no reelections it would be really hard to rig a state elector body to be predominately of one political viewpoint unless it represents the viewpoints of the people at large, which is an emergent behavior of this system - as people organically move to like minded ideological areas, the higher levels of governance surrounding them would start adopting common law that they all agree on, and you can expect larger like minded communities to emerge beyond just the local level, over time, slowly, and with lots of room for objection and redirection if policies don't pan out).
So you have a "state" of another council of 100, which represents 1 million to 1.5 million (mathematically, if localities have a normal distribution [which doesn't happen because you are bilaterally splitting the population anyway, but this is just a thought experiment now - you would actual have very closely sized localities everywhere under proper mathematical partitioning] of 1k to 1.5k people, as you compound additions of these distributions you get statistically much more likely to be at the median of 1.25k people with very low variance). These states have a few restrictions - they can only tax at up to 1.5x the lowest local tax rate, and they can't borrow money (localities can, because they might need to perform local damage control - that is fine, it is a small enough group to handle variability of finances, but states and federal governments can't borrow and perpetually spend deficit without significant bad economic ramifications from inflation, and I'll talk about currency and exchange in a later post). So the idea is that you would have a state war chest, or a finance campaign from citizens to fund things they want that aren't a part of the tax code, or when the state needs emergency funds, they could just run a donation drive. This is much more sound economics, and much more "free", since it means individuals and constituents would be funding their own state policies that are beyond the tax code.
Now I don't know if I would want state funding to be state resident only, or open it up to the fed, or allow random contributors. Because once you start adding arbitrary money flows into the mix, you add a lot of potential corruption, and can easily end up with state dependence on federal dollars. But if you only let states contribute to their own budgets, and run into a desperate need for money that the state can't produce even with citizen involvement... honestly, that is the better way to do things. States need to show the restraint not to overspend themselves, and if they do, they reap the consequences of their actions and the citizens can rebuke them appropriately.
Since state councils are fixed at a large size, you can imagine discourse is less fluid but more open for on the floor debate. It would be necessary given that state councils can't comprehend the people they represent, much like how current politicians can't, so any policy at the state level needs to be slow and laborious to get through. Since representatives are from localities, you aren't going to have arbitrary party lines drawn, and there would be much more contention over policy.
The other important state-wise requirement is that any law or policy change under consideration must first be approved or already in place under at least half of all localities it oversees and less than a third of localities can be in direct opposition to it through their own policies or legislation. Meaning you have between 51% or more support and 32% or less opposition. That means it is hard to get laws past at the state level, which is intentional.
After states, you have a federal level which isn't of fixed size, and is composed of 3 representatives per state (meaning states are actually councils of 997, insuring no tied votes, like the localities have 9 per council so they can't tie either). Federal law, like state law, requires at least 66% of states support and less than 25% oppose such legislation. This makes federal law extremely hard to pass, on purpose. If you took the current USA at 310 million people, you would have 744 federal council members. Which is bigger than the current congress, but not by much, and their influence is very restricted.
Each local, state, and federal tier picks citizens from whatever jurisdiction they control (that aren't themselves) to fill the roles of judicial, executive, and managerial duties. I would imagine the first month of each election cycle might be consumed just by generating a full government, and until positions are filled the predecessor maintains the position, but it can't be held off indefinitely, so it would need to be some constitutional mandate that councils must fill government vacancies within 30 days of the departure of the previous office holder, or some such. Offices, unlike elected officials, could probably be renewed, so in effect the councils are bosses of every other government job and every 2 years can replace those it finds ill suited for their work. You can also have councils able to "fire" people with a voting majority, and replace them immediately. Elections / choosing of new personnel to fill roles is only required once every 2 years, though.
So I'll stop there. It gives the general idea I have. People elect only a local councilman, but that councilman may be serving in the national council. They can't be reelected, so every 2 years every 1 - 1.5k people pick someone new to play councilman. With that few people, you aren't voting on party or rhetoric, but by the people you know in your community from experience. You wouldn't need campaign ads or any such nonsense, someone who wants to run for council could just go door to door, or the locality could just have a town house debate between people who want to run. It is the most organic election system I could imagine, and if you layer the higher levels of bueracracy on top of the local councils, you allow for maximum legislative experimentation with the most fairness for everyone, as long as they are mobile enough to move where the ideologies agree with them. You want somewhere for every political viewpoint to go and live the way they want, with the minimum of executive and state overhead and mandate that isn't already agreed upon and in law by the localities.
The federal still controls the military, and the states probably control the police, so you still have the problems of protection dealt with. State and federal can only tax at 1.5x the highest rate of its constituent bodies, so taxes are really tight, on purpose. Federal and states can't borrow on a deficit, and must finance any post-tax policies through fund raisers and donation drives. Since the fed controls the military, it would still have the ability to take "extreme immediate action" when needed, but that really is the only essential role of the federal government in a sound republic in my book.
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