One Man One Vote
In a previous post I explored the chief problem with democratic systems – that producing the most popular choice does not equate to providing greatest overall human value. I was trying to show by analogy how a market system produces better value than central control, even when that central control is managed democratically. Show why the less a society resorts to central authority for any given decision, the more overall human value it will produce.
Since then I have been thinking about this issue occasionally, and recently asked myself the most basic question I could think of “How does purchasing what you desire differ from voting for it?”
I have come to believe that the main problem with voting is the issue of “One Man One vote”.
Now, the first thing that might leap to your mind here is that when people “vote” with their money, a rich man has more votes than a poor one. But that is not the issue I am thinking of. What I am currently pondering is the idea that when you “vote” with your money, that money is gone, and can not be used to vote for something else tomorrow.
Consider the case of a simple (non representative) democratic system where each citizen gets to vote on each proposed law. If there are 3 laws on the docket, each citizen gets to cast 3 votes – yea, nay, or abstain on each proposal. When another law is proposed, each citizen receives yet another vote to cast as they choose.
The problem with this is that, unlike a financial market, there is no price signaling. Which is to say, voters do not need to conserve any sort of resource so they can vote heavily for (or against) the things they really care about and thus lightly or not at all for the issues where they have little or no preference. In a system where each man gets an extra vote for each new law proposed, it is possible for a 51% majority of the voters to pass a law that has little meaning for them over a 49% minority for which the law might have dire consequences. Thus, a system that offers no way for participants to signal how much they care about a particular result, creates huge losses of overall human value.
So how might this be fixed?
I propose that we would see much better results with a voting system that actually embodied the concept of “One Man One Vote.”
Imagine a system where every year the entire slate of laws was up for change/renewal, and each voter could only spend their vote once, either for or against a single law. This would produce two likely results:
1. A better representation of actual value in the adopted laws.
2. A Simpler legal system with fewer laws on the books.
This system could also work quite well with a representative democracy. Each representative would have multiple votes to spend (equal to the number of people represented). The representative could spend all or none of them on any given proposed law, but could still only spend each vote once.
Some other possibilities would be to only give representatives votes equal to the people that actually voted in their elections (might increase voter turn out), or the votes of the people who actually voted for them, or only the number of votes by which they won their respective elections (votes for other candidates being like votes of no confidence for the winning candidate).
That’s it.
Simple concept.
One man one vote.
I wonder if you could have legislative race conditions. What if two laws were up for vote: 1) taxes will be reduced by 10% and 2) taxes will be reduced by 20%. They both pass, but the taxes were previously 25%, meaning now they are negative 5%, and the government goes bankrupt and sells off all its assets to cover the taxes.
The problem comes from multiple laws changing at the same time. In our existing (serially-processed) legislative system, later laws supersede earlier ones if they conflict with them.
This might just be a general part of the same problem as “How do you decide what the slate of laws that can be voted on includes” – which is both already an existing problem in the legislative process and something that I also have no immediate good answer for. But I will think about it some more.