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Min wage in most states is so sad (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/workreform@lemmy.world
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[–] 57 points 1 day ago (5 children)

I think the government should switch to a random lottery. Every term a random person is selected from all available and eligible citizens. It would be our civic duty, put your regular job on hold for a few years and do your part.

Most would hate it, but that’s kinda the point. If we all had to eat our own dogfood, we’d eventually start making it taste better.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    I've said this for years. Live in dorms. Cafeteria food. Minimum wage. All assets put into trust and in a vanilla total market fund for 5-10 years after service. It should be like jury duty. I've not met a single person who disagrees with this system.

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  • [–] 1 point 22 hours ago

    Dorms, cafeteria food, and minimum wage are not things that most Americans would want. It would really only be a benefit to those already making minimum wage (or unemployed) and without families. For the rest those would be motives for corruption, rather than the opposite.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    I’ve not met a single person who disagrees with this system.

    Well consider me the first.

    Then first the plan won't work, those dorms will be run by the very government politicians they are supposed to make miserable. so they won't.

    And why must that be a goal in the first place? Instead of improving democracy so that politicians aren't in the pockets of PACs and actually represent the people, you want to just make them both miserable and now unelected.

    If you want that random people are in charge instead of politicians a direct democracy system will work far better then this.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Who said anything about making them miserable? That isn’t, and shouldn’t be, the goal. The goal is to remove incentives to be corrupt.

    A nice dorm and high quality food provided to them removes some of that.

    Locking assets into total market funds removes incentive to inside trade, because you can’t.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    Think this assumes those selected have no friends or family. You can't uproot a whole family, and it would be unreasonable to break up a family for the extended period of time you imagine.

    In practice, it does become making them miserable, because it's literally forced relocation and isolation from their friends, family, and financial resources.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    Most importantly, 24/7 surveillance. No secrets. No back room deals.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    Have you met a random person?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    Think the rough analogy is Jury duty. After going through that, I was frankly surprised how generally decent the folks were that were being vetted. Sure a couple were a bit off, but on the whole the folks seemed pretty reasonable. I didn't agree with some of them, but at least they seemed to be roughly rational and open to thinking about things.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Couldn't we all just vote on shit regularly from home and do away with representatives altogether?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Maybe not everything, but we could certainly vote on a lot more directly. There's no reason we couldn't. Representative government was a necessity when we only used horses to get everywhere. Now much less reason for it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    The other point of representative government is that the people making the decisions can spend the time to research what they're voting on.

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  • [–] 1 point 12 hours ago (1 child)

    No I don't think that tracks, I'd say it's kind of a modern interpretation really. Historically it's a a darker seedier reasoning really. Traditionally representative government has been favored because the wealthy delete didn't think the people could be trusted. Unwashed uneducated masses couldn't be allowed to make decisions. The liberal bourgeoisie in no way wanted the people making any decisions. There's a reason most liberal revolutions did not result in widespread suffrage, much less universal suffrage.

    After all it's not like Representatives had extra time to do research. When they weren't traveling by horse or mule they were conducting their own affairs, not researching well into the night. No it's much more about class than actual dedication.

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  • [–] 1 point 12 hours ago (1 child)

    It doesn't really matter whether it's modern or intended or accidental. The point is that it's best that the people making the decisions are educated and informed, and that takes time. That takes the kind of time that makes it a full time job, not one you can do on the side.

    And yes, I understand that current representatives spend most of their time trudging up donations for campaigns, but that's less than ideal. I might even argue that makes the idea not modern at all.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 hours ago

    How do you determine if they're educated? How do you determine if they're informed? Who decides? How would you even go about enforcing the fact that they spend their time researching? Instead of campaigning or getting donations or just fucking around?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    It could be from macro to much more micro, e.g.: what portion of the budget should be allocated to education? And then how is the budget allocated, etc. everyone must vote in the first few votes and then as the issues get more nitty gritty and local the only people voting are those in the localities and/or those who care. You could vote on everything but realistically you'll just set the main direction and the rest just happens.

    The more you think about this the more complicated it seems, even if the concept isn't that complicated. I've thought about this a lot for a long time and I honestly think we'd get so much more done.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    I honestly think we need representational government. One of our big problems in this country is regular people thinking they understand all the nuance of an issue. Not that random assholes completely solve this issue, but the law of averages is enough that some would take this seriously and actually learn, listen and think before acting.

    It’s mostly a joke though, obviously a random lottery will never happen, but I absolutely would choose it over what we have today.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    Who decides what a random person is and what a knowledgeable person is in your scenario though? Where are these knowledgeable people? Our current Speaker of the House every time he gets in front of a TV Camera claims he knows nothing at all whatsoever. He's never heard anything he's never read anything he's never seen anything and he just doesn't know about anything. So knowledgeable people aren't in charge now.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    There are also several proposals of random voting that have a lot of good things about them. In one system, you pick a random ballot out of all ballots, and whoever that person voted for wins for all positions.

    Or, you can do it per elected position. Take all of the votes for each elected position and pick a random vote.

    One advantage of random ballots is that no elected official is safe. A candidate who gets 60% of the vote can lose to a candidate who got 20% of the vote.

    Why is this good?

    Well, for one thing, it would be much harder to gerrymander. Gerrymandering generally means you have one party win most districts by a tiny amount, and the other party wins very few districts by a large amount. This strategy simply doesn't work with random ballots.

    Another benefit is that politicians would be incentivized to get as many votes as possible, far beyond 50%. Even a politician who gets 90% of the vote would lose 1 in 10 elections. So, politicians would work for everybody's vote, not just for the slim majority's vote.

    It has other advantages beyond that. Mostly in the realm of the fairness of votes. You vote feels completely fair. It's just as likely that your vote will decide the winner as anybody else's vote.

    One big disadvantage is that there might be an extremely popular politician, who has 99% of the vote, and who still loses. This can be mitigated a bit by keeping terms short. The politician could come back in a couple of years.

    Another disadvantage is that it is very difficult to recount the ballots. You basically just pick another random ballot and all of the winners might change. And related, it's more difficult to detect cheating after the fact. Like, what if the ballot wasn't completely random?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Seems like that would cause massive voter dissatisfaction and less people to vote. Not many vote now because they feel like their vote doesn't count

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  • [–] -2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Literally exactly the opposite of what you said. I addressed those exact two points in the comment you replied to as being strengths of random ballot.

    The most obvious specific benefits of random ballot to the voter are less voter dissatisfaction and feeling more like your vote counts.

    Less dissatisfaction because politicians will try to appeal to every voter. They don't want to leave it up to chance.

    More like your vote counts because your vote has an equal chance of choosing the winner as anybody else's vote. It doesn't matter how anybody else votes.

    If you want to say that the opposite will happen, then you not only need to give specific reasons, but you should also know that there is already a lot of research on these types of elections. That's why my comment seemed so informed, while yours didn't.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Your comment makes you sound like an ass.

    There are many thing wrong with it off the top of my head

    1. logistics
    • electronic vs paper, many different ballots, how is it chosen, etc
    1. different ballots in every single city for local issues
    2. pushes further for vote disenfranchisement
    3. massively increases minority power

    Having someone with 90% support lose to some racist nazi seems like a shit system

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  • [–] -1 points 23 hours ago (1 child)

    You sound like much more of an ass. You obviously first responded without actually reading my comment. Wasting everyone's time instead of simply reading the comment you were responding to that had that info in it.

    And now you can't even defend your previous points. You have to move the goalposts and bring up new points, half of which, again, I already addressed in that first comment you didn't read. I'll address your points and then I am done with you.

    1. Trivial. Number all ballots the same then pick one of those numbers randomly. The votes already have to be counted together. If what you're saying is hard, then normal voting would also be hard.
    2. That already happens with our current ballots. Sounds like you don't even vote if you don't know that.
    3. No. Rephrasing something isn't an argument and it doesn't make it true.
    4. The minority power point is by far your worst one. Random ballot actually gives better proportional representation on average, and makes gerrymandering more difficult, again, as I said in the first comment you didn't read. Unless you really believe democracy is supposed to strive to be "the tyranny of the majority," in which case, you're beyond help.

    I'm done with you but if you try to argue things in the future, how about doing the absolute minimum and at least read what you're arguing against? Other ideas: Read a tiny bit of a related Wikipedia article. Double check your arguments before submitting them.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 hours ago

    Maybe you should yourself?

    The author of it even says its not fair or practical

    The rule is rarely, if ever, proposed as a genuine electoral system, as such a method (in Gibbard's words) "leaves too much to chance".[5] However, the rule is often used as a tiebreaker to encourage voters to cast honest ballots, and is sometimes discussed as a thought experiment.

    Please again tell me how someone with 90% of the vote losing to some racist psycho due to a random ballet doesn't disenfranchise the 90% and doesn't give the minority extreme advantages?

    60/40 is even worse. What should be a definite win becomes a toss up.

    And I was asking how they handle determining which ballot to use when there are many different ones as each town or even districts in towns have their own ballets and would need to pull their own random ballot as well.

    Minority already has far too much power, this just makes it worse not better. Some kind of ranked voting is needed, not more minority power.

    And I called you an ass because of your last paragraph on your initial reply.

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