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Ralph Nader Back On The Florida Ballot
Makoto916 writes "It's official. The Florida State Supreme court has ruled in favor of 3rd party candidate Ralph Nader. He is now back on the ballot, and just in time since absentee ballots were to be mailed out tomorrow (Saturday). This is certainly a victory for those of us who believe that the country is better off when alternative political voices aren't suppressed."
The link in the above post should be
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting
John McCain, Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean support instant-runoff voting (a kind of preferential voting). Of course, they're principled so they're always going to lose to the shill-driven jokers we're so used to in this country (not to say that some shill-driven jokers aren't strikingly worse than others).
The theorem you are thinking of is Arrow's theorem.
While it is true that no voting system is perfect, that certainly does not mean that all voting systems are equally imperfect. It's hard to see what advantages our current system has over a runoff system.
The people who were voting for Nader were never voting for Kerry, they'd write something stupid in, or what have you.
That's the most uninformed comment that I've read on Slashdot in quite a while -- and that's saying something. Every political pundit, analyst, and reporter accepts for fact that Nader takes votes from Kerry -- based on scientific polls. Bush supporters have launched massive campaigns to get Nader on the ballot in many states for just that reason.
...and that's why we need approval voting, or some similar system. (Yeah, I know I'm being redundant)
-jim
Lemme guess, you're Republican and want Bush to win Florida?
Nader has made it onto the ballot here in Wisconsin also (where the polls indicate a very close race), but he is running as an independent here. Unfortunetly, many people seem to have missed that detail and will likely vote for him with the idea that they are voting for a third party candidate, trying to push the numbers up to the that all-important 5 percent needed to reach *real* party status. I've already personally talked to two people who were planning to vote Nader under that misconception.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for third party and independent candidates... I've often voted that way in the past. I just think it is important people really know what they are voting for.
The Bolachek Journals
http://www.vote-smart.org/
This is an extraordinary website. I admittedly worked for them at one point. But this site has absolutely NO SPIN!!
Check it out and see for yourselves voters.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
I'm intentionally leaving the term "socialist" vague here, and admittedly it's probably not the best term. By it, I just mean a tendency towards government control (both in terms of regulation and in terms of how many services the government insists on running directly itself) centrally, at a nationwide level. Suggestions for a better "neutral" (e.g. not "fascist" or other emotionally-charged terms, since the word I'm looking for would not inherently imply injustice or oppression) are welcome, since by my working definition here, imposition of a state-mandated religion would be "socialist", and to my knowlege no modern nations who are generally tagged with the word "Socialist" (as opposed to being thought of as an outright "theocracy" or "dictatorship") really do that. At least not for the last couple-hundred years - the Church of England would once have qualified, but not in modern times.
One has to distinguish between two issues here: one is how much the state centralizes power in its hands (we call such states which do it on a large scale 'centralized') and another, how much the state takes care of its citizens' needs, instead of letting them do it on their own (we call such states 'welfare states'. These are two different issues. For example, France is very centralized and also has quite a lot of welfare (but you have to pay each time you see a doctor in France, though), and Germany is a welfare state, too, but is not centralized. W/r to religion, Sweden has a state church, priests are paid by the government and bishops have to be members of political parties in order to be ordained. And it would be called by you a 'Socialist' country!
I would say, that the better word would be 'socialdemocratic': welfare state, but with private enterpreneurship and democracy.
In order to be more "socialist" (by my almost-certainly-non-canonical definition here) Government needs to have more power over its citizens in order to maintain its control, both through "overt" and obvious means (e.g. police and "internal" military) and less obvious (controlling access to and distribution of information and goods. The larger the population of the governed, the more force the government needs to keep everyone in line.
You're ignoring the possibility that the government builds the welfare state because the people want it (and vote accordingly). If people in Europe were forced to accept welfare, would they oppose any cuts so strongly as they do?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)