Recrafting Government As an Open Platform

itjoblog writes "How effective are the world's governments at using technology to become more responsive? Technology has revolutionised the way that we do business, but the public sector has traditionally moved more cautiously than the private one. Now, a report from the Centre for Technology Policy Research in the UK has made some recommendations for the use of technology as an enabling mechanism for government." I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a wiki with full history.

Comments

Technology is not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Governments are less responsive because there is no penalty for being unresponsive. When nobody can get fired for incompetence and there is no competitive choice, you get less responsive outcomes.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[bunratty]

Elected officials regularly get "fired" and have to be rehired, often every two, four, or six years.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a permanent demotion that causes your maximum level of office to be restricted? Lose a senate seat, you're in the house (if elected). Lose the house, you're in the state congress, lose that and it's city council, etc. Forced permanent demotions would prevent bad politicians from remaining in government at a level they can continue to do harm. A further stipulation would be that you could no longer be in-line for the presidency should disaster strike.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[jimbolauski]

How about a permanent demotion that causes your maximum level of office to be restricted? Lose a senate seat, you're in the house (if elected). Lose the house, you're in the state congress, lose that and it's city council, etc. Forced permanent demotions would prevent bad politicians from remaining in government at a level they can continue to do harm. A further stipulation would be that you could no longer be in-line for the presidency should disaster strike.

Too Bad it would never work people are fickle by nature and what they want one one year "Hope and Change" the next year "Limited Government" has more of a bearing on who is reelected. Now lets apply that to the real world and see how well it works there were many kids that were fired from low wage jobs should they have to spend the rest of their lives working at even lower jobs, what is lower then working at a fast food restaurant?

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Demonantis]

And the unelected ones continue being unresponsive.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Elected officials regularly get "fired" and have to be rehired, often every two, four, or six years.

Too little, too late.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[rolfwind]

Losing an election does not mean you deserve punishment or are a bad person. Winning an election does not mean you are a good person.

I would like an appeal of the 17th amendment. Senate was supposed to be the voice of the states. People are already represented by the House.

I would like ballots to contain only a Name, DOB, and Residency and not political party. I hate parties, can't outlaw them, but at least we can stifle their effectiveness. If you don't know who you are voting for besides party, you don't deserve to vote. If you would like a single checkmark to vote down the line, you should be severely disappointed that you are made to think.

I would like the apt-tax to replace all national taxes. I would like in times of peace (no declared war, and no war on terror doesn't count) there be a balanced budget amendment.

I would like the electoral college either strengthen so that the electorate actually can vote something different as representatives... or cast out entirely and have a democratic vote. I would like the president to have lots of powers yanked away in either case.

The congress too should stop abusing the general welfare and interstate commerce clauses to turn a limited government into an unlimited one.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[sznupi]

I would like ballots to contain only a Name, DOB, and Residency and not political party. I hate parties, can't outlaw them, but at least we can stifle their effectiveness. If you don't know who you are voting for besides party, you don't deserve to vote. If you would like a single checkmark to vote down the line, you should be severely disappointed that you are made to think.

I don't think that would give much; those people would stil be basically told how to vote, and would go with it.
But making party affiliation clear (at least if there are actually lots of choices...) is quite convenient. Yes, optimally one should research candidates before going to the polling place, but even when there the grouping makes clear in which part of the ballot you'll find your choices, greatly speeding the process (and didn't stop me from voting sometimes, during the same elections (two houses of the parliament), for candidates whose parties are quite at odds, if I came to conclusion that each of them makes the most sense)

Re:Technology is not the problem

[jackspenn]

Elected officials regularly get "fired" and have to be rehired, often every two, four, or six years.

Not bureaucrats. Not government union employees.

Why does the post office totally suck compared to either FedEx, UPS, or others when it comes to deliver times, quality of package handling, number of lost, open or damaged items, ability for customers to track packages, customer services, cleanliness of facilities, etc? Because the workers there don't care, they feel entitled and see working for customers as inconvenience. On every level the USPS is last, except one, pension payments and benefits paid to retirees.

Government sucks, so why people want more of a crappy monopoly I don't understand. Government creates nothing, for anything it "provides to one group, it must have taken or borrowed it form another group".

Government is a parasite on the people. We should always be working to having the minimum government required and majority of the power should reside as close the the people so that it will be better managed by feedback. States should be stronger in our Republic and the Federal government should be confined back to only the 17 powers it was authorized to do in the Constitution, that would provide a better quality of service to the people.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Lil'wombat]

The problem I have with Parties is not the designation on the ballot, but the fact that the two parties have written all of the election laws effectively preventing other parties from being on the ballot.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[JeepFanatic]

I wish I had mod points today to mod this comment up.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Lil'wombat]

The USPS sucks for many reasons not the least of which is a strong union that blocks any changes to improve efficiency.

Other more compelling reason include:

Universal Service - The post office must deliver everywhere, 6 days a week.
Postal Regulations - Any changes to postal regulations must go through a convoluted approval process with testimony, federal register publishing, Postal Rate Commission and Board of Governors approval required.
Congress - 535 people with a vested interest in making sure none of the jobs/pensions/benefits/etc are lost in their district.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Lil'wombat]

Repeal the 17th? Really?

I'm from Illinois where Roland Burris was appointed to fill Obama's vacant senate seat by a then under investigation governor/ since then impeached with his trial slated to start next month. So leaving the senate process at the state legislature level would just be a disaster in some states.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[sznupi]

People enable that; essentially want that.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[kevinNCSU]

I would like in times of peace (no declared war, and no war on terror doesn't count) there be a balanced budget amendment.

I like a couple of your ideas but I think people have gone too far in deciding that a balanced budget is always the best way to go. I'm not defending our current spending by any means, but just like a balanced budget isn't always in the best interest of an individual's finances, neither is it for a country. When you borrow money for college, or to pay for a house, you are spending your future earnings, investing in yourself. This is wholly acceptable for an individual if done wisely and the same can be done for a country.

The key is making sure when we don't run a balanced budget it's because we're investing in our country and we expect that investment to pay off just like a college degree or property purchase would, not be a sinkhole.

Again, I'm not even framing this in the context of our current spending, simply pointing out that the absolutist 'never have any deficit spending except in a time of war' might not always be the best way to go.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Unordained]

USPS is also cheaper. As long as people keep using them, their issues don't need to be resolved, because they're clearly meeting the demand. Advertisers, for example, don't want to pay for 100% package delivery quality, and UPS & FEDEX don't offer a "less than perfect" option. USPS also delivers everywhere (in some form or other) -- UPS & FEDEX are free to refuse to deliver to places that aren't economically justifiable to them. The government has a basic need to communicate with people -- mail is the chosen medium. It therefore needs a method of delivery that isn't dependent on the marketplace, which may or may not provide the needed service, may go out of business at just the wrong time, and may charge and arm and a leg for it when it feels it can (right around tax time, census time, etc.) An in-house system takes care of that. I'm not saying USPS is perfect, mind you. But it doesn't exist without reason.

Governments may suck, but how many anarchies do we have on this planet? Somalia? They don't just happen by themselves. People create governments because they see good reasons to. People can be wrong. But the root of the problem is always people, not governments.

By your standard, corporations create nothing. For everything they provide to one group, it must be taken or borrowed from another. (Often the same group, but not always.) It's just a basic rule, government or not. No free lunch.

The microbes in your gut are parasites too -- but mostly helpful ones. Government's more of a symbiosis. When it gets out of balance, that's a problem. But it's not a size thing. There are more foreign cells in your body than your own, yet you're (probably) in balance.

I don't get the states' rights thing. I don't understand why small-government types usually believe:
a) the state is "good enough" (not county, town, or neighborhood -- even though these would seem likelier candidates for local control)
b) the constitution was originally perfect (what?!?! the founders actually fully expected later revolutions! some wanted laws to auto-expire, because they mistrusted the legislative process so much! why would they have thought their own works perfect, and why should you?)

Re:Technology is not the problem

[sznupi]

If you think your government "sucks" or is a "parasite"...then you must realise that ultimatelly governments are a reflection of the society.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Actually, I do RTFA]

And, to build on your point, it also applies to giving people money. Keeping a few recent grads fed while they work on some new tech can more than pay dividends in increased tax revenue when they hit it big. I'd like to see some level of welfare as public venture capital.

Again, your disclaimer of "I'm not defending the current system."

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Actually, I do RTFA]

The congress too should stop abusing the general welfare and interstate commerce clauses to turn a limited government into an unlimited one.

Congress isn't increasing the size of the government, it's moving governmental functions from the state/local level to the federal level. The total amount of government is remaining the same.

As for why they do it, well, you can blame progress for that. As I write this over the internet, I am interacting with people in many states, and even some countries. Sorry, states cannot regulate this at all and the federal government has to step in. Progress intertwines us all.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[jackspenn]

I absolutely believe our government is a reflection in large part of our society.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[profplump]

I find that argument odd -- if the state legislature is corrupt there's already a problem in the state and forcing direct elections can't possibly fix it because the same people you're expecting to choose federal senators already picked the corrupt state legislature. What makes you think they'd do a better job with the federal government than they do in their own state?

I think you're also confusing "governor" with "state legislature", but that's rather beside the point; the same basic logic applies.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[WNight]

I hadn't heard of the APT-tax, thanks. It seems like the best of the simplified tax codes I've seen.

I agree that the interstate commerce clause and a few other things are being abused to turn the federal government into exactly what it isn't supposed to be. It might not seem like much, but having laws come from the "right" level of government would make the system much less constrictive - people could have all the different laws they wanted, let's say for some stupid no-alcohol on Sunday rule, in their state, without having to screw with everyone else's laws.

Is it really hard to stop political parties? Or, rather, them forcing each other to vote the party line? It seems like a simple conflict of interest. Doesn't their oath include something about representing their constituents over all other interests?

Then we just require all elected officials to wear a collar-cam 24/7. Police (in some areas) do while at work. Post the footage directly on WikiLeaks...

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The march toward global government is not progress.

And who says the internet needs government regulation at any level?

Re:Technology is not the problem

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Global interconnectivity is progress. Therefore more actions take place across city/county/state/national lines. In order to efficiently police actions of any type at the same level that they were policed before, a higher authority needs to disambiguate when each locales laws become paramount (international law) or abrogate onto itself the authority formerly given to the more local authority.

Re:Technology is not the problem

[sznupi]

Why only "large"? Where's the dividing line "them" / "us" and why can it even apply?

Likely the best websites from the US Government...

[Pojut]

...are the Library of Congress site and the Supreme Court site. Both of them are extremely informative, and have a massive wealth of information that is readily available.

We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[jra]

an open platform, for the same reason we don't want daytraders on Wall Street, or intra-day trading at all, really. It's really nasty positive feedback, and has the bad effects positive feedback always has.

Whatever you think of Congress, it's a pretty handy damping loop to keep the Peepul from trashing the Constitution, and hence, the country.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[Dishevel]

Too late congress and the supreme court have already trashed the constitution. You know there is bullshit going on when the right to make 90% of the laws they pass is power they say is given to them by the commerce clause of the constitution.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[NervousWreck]

That's only when they get challenged and need an excuse. Usually they simply don't care. Side issue: Does it strike anyone else as odd that Congress rarely tries to justify their actions based on the "necessary and proper" clause? Seems to me that means even they admit most of the laws they pass aren't "necessary and proper."

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[BrentH]

And this is what a lot of people seem to forget: we have all this bureaucracy, all these checks and balances not solely as a job program, but most also because we shouldn't want a government that moves fast. People crying for strong leadership and action forget that we had light governments that could do that in the past, and they were called monarchies and dictatorships. The number of benevolent kings and dictators are extremely small. A society has to have negative feedback loops to prevent any government from moving to fast and to meddle too much. We have a legislative branch to prevent crimes, an army to prevent invasions, and that is about the fastest I want a government to move. I don't want fast action and strong leadership, because the same happens what happened in the bad old days: leaders that go to war, are only interested in their own agendas, start idoitic programs to suppress minorities, are susceptible to corruption and lobbyists etc etc. I advocate good government, and good government should know what to do and what not to do, and moving fast is not one of those things.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[Thanshin]

Positive feedback, seems to be a minor drawback compared to the problem of uninformed decision.

To make an open platform work you'd first need an informed population, and once you have an informed population (plus democracy), you don't need the open platform anymore.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[somersault]

I don't want fast action and strong leadership, because the same happens what happened in the bad old days: leaders that go to war, are only interested in their own agendas, start idoitic programs to suppress minorities, are susceptible to corruption and lobbyists etc etc

"Old" days? This sounds pretty much like America since 9/11 (and in some cases, before 9/11).

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[JustinOpinion]

Can you be more specific? I certainly see the negative effects of feedback in high-speed trading (volatile reactions, etc.), though there are some benefits to having all those day-traders and millisecond traders (liquidity, closing price gaps, etc.).

In the case of governance, I can't really see what kind of problematic feedback loops would be generated. Obviously some government data needs to not be open (e.g. military secrets), but having the lawmaking process open and transparent (clear, easy to access information on who supported/didn't-support a given law (perhaps even on a section-by-section basis), revision histories, public debates, etc.) seems like a good thing. Obviously there will always be some amount of "off the record" conversations between politicians (which can be bad, e.g. backroom deals; or good, e.g. frank discussions). With respect to feedback, the main danger I see is that "voter fickleness" could get amplified, where elections (and thus important lawmaking) end up turning on trivialities. (E.g. with more and more transparency and record-keeping, it's almost certain you'll eventual find a sound-bite of your opponent saying something that seems stupid or wrong or evil.)

But I would argue we're already deep into the territory where such fickleness is having an effect. Commentators and voters who have already made up their minds already have enough specious data for their confirmation biases. As such, increased information to voters is a good thing because those voters who want to actually be informed and make reasonable choices will have the ability to do so (and won't have to take the word of a commentator).

Damping effects are still necessary, of course. But the inherently long-term voting cycle serves that purpose nicely, preventing voters from changing their representative on a daily basis or on a whim. This averages out many of the spurious and pointless "scandals" while allowing data (if available!) on important issues and voting records to build. I do indeed agree that other damping effects should be considered in a transparency roll-out, but to me that is just a matter of "doing transparency right"--the case for transparency itself is quite solid.

(Incidentally, one change that I've often thought about, which would serve both transparency and damping, is that any proposed law should have to sit, unchanged, for a set period of time (weeks) before being voted on. (New changes reset the clock.) This would give the public/voters/media/commentators time to examine it in detail, identify problems, and make their voices heard to their representatives. Having representatives act as a smoothing effect for the (sometimes irrational) public can be very good... but the way in which proposed laws currently mutate so rapidly and are modified at the last minute, so that the public isn't even sure what is finally put into law, is corrosive to democratic and transparent society.)

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[TheRaven64]

I prefer Frank Herbert's idea of a Bureau of Sabotage, a part of the government expressly created to ensure that the government doesn't become too efficient. It seems like it would work better than just hoping that doing everything badly will even out in the end. Especially when phrases like 'think of the children' manage to get small bits of the system to run very efficiently, at the cost of the whole.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[maxume]

You really think a slower market would be less susceptible to speculative pressures?

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[russotto]

"We" don't want intraday trading? You want all transactions handled in 24-hour batches, then? That was too slow for the horse-and-buggy days, let alone now.

Usually you handle positive feedback by turning the gain down, not slowing the loop to a crawl. I admit I have no idea how to do the former, but I don't think the latter is an option. Also, there are positive feedback mechanisms in the market which have nothing to do with daytraders. Short-covering is one, stop-loss orders are another; both can be significant.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Indeed. To me, the "lame duck" administration/congress is the best kind. When you get a clear majority, you start to lose barriers to making hasty decisions and changes. Historically, this doesn't seem to provide much long-term benefit.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[eln]

The necessary and proper clause just says they get to make laws deemed necessary to carry out their various duties as outlined in the Constitution. Every Congressional bill is implicitly backed by the necessary and proper clause because it's the only thing that gives them the ability to pass laws at all. However, in order to be Constitutional the law they pass has to be necessary and proper to carry out one of their enumerated Constitutional powers. Regulating interstate commerce is one of their enumerated powers, and happens to be one that's vague enough that you could claim all sorts of things are necessary and proper for carrying it out.

So, a law being backed by the interstate commerce clause means that the Congress has deemed that law "necessary and proper" for carrying out their duty to "regulate interstate commerce".

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[GrumblyStuff]

I don't want fast action and strong leadership, because the same happens what happened in the bad old days: leaders that go to war, are only interested in their own agendas, start idoitic programs to suppress minorities, are susceptible to corruption and lobbyists etc etc.

Uh... that all sounds pretty recent, some more than others.

What would be nice is a gov that doesn't 1) Let companies do stuff that, in the case of shit+fans, has the potential to ruin lives and livelihoods without backup plan after backup plan with resources and/or the ability to quickly get resources in to handle the problem, and 2) Holds their ass to the fire when they fuck up and have either ignored or been ignorant of safety plans and mechanisms that should have been in place.

This interests me greatly though I won't hold my breath in anticipation: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/5/25/869677/-Civil-fine-for-oil-spilled-so-far-could-total-$13-billion

Rig exploded April 20th so that's about five weeks and let's go with that 5k barrels a day. 5000*35*4300= $752,500,000

That's a good start.

How about fining them for continuing to use that disperant EPA has told them to stop using?

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

(Incidentally, one change that I've often thought about, which would serve both transparency and damping, is that any proposed law should have to sit, unchanged, for a set period of time (weeks) before being voted on. (New changes reset the clock.) This would give the public/voters/media/commentators time to examine it in detail, identify problems, and make their voices heard to their representatives. Having representatives act as a smoothing effect for the (sometimes irrational) public can be very good... but the way in which proposed laws currently mutate so rapidly and are modified at the last minute, so that the public isn't even sure what is finally put into law, is corrosive to democratic and transparent society.)

That seems to be one thing the Confederacy would have gotten right during the US Civil War. From the Confederate Constitution (S 7.20):

(20) Every law, or resolution having the force of law, shall relate to but one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title.

Of course, then they kind of blow it with this one...

No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed

Still... talk about babies and bathwater ;)

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[Jurily]

The number of benevolent kings and dictators are extremely small.

"Benevolent" is a truly misleading factor, and should probably ignored when choosing someone to run a country.

For example: Mathias I

High taxes, mostly falling on peasants, to sustain Matthias' lavish lifestyle and the Black Army (cumulated with the fact that the latter went on marauding across the Kingdom after being disbanded upon Matthias's death) could imply that he was not very popular with his contemporaries. But the fact that he was elected king in a small anti-Habsburg popular revolution, that he kept the barons in check, persistent rumours about him sounding public opinion by mingling among commoners incognito, and harsh period known witnessed by Hungary later ensured that Matthias' reign is considered one of the most glorious chapters of Hungarian history. Songs and tales refer to him as Matthias the Just (Mátyás, az igazságos in Hungarian), a ruler of justice and great wisdom, and he is arguably the most popular hero of Hungarian folklore.

Compare to his successor, Vladislas II:

He was a cheerful man, nicknamed "Vladislaus Bene" because to almost any request he answered, "Bene" (Latin for "(It's) well"). During his reign (1490-1516), the Hungarian royal power declined in favour of the Hungarian magnates, who used their power to curtail the peasants' freedom.[2] His reign in Hungary was largely stable, although Hungary was under consistent border pressure from the Ottoman Empire and went through the revolt of György Dózsa.

Mathias was not a nice guy. He wasn't elected (being the son of a warlord rising in power), increased taxes, ran the country on his own, suppressed the nobility and called his troops "the Black Army". Incidentally, he also knew how to run a country, and how to protect it.

On the other hand, Vladislas was elected, was a truly benevolent king, you couldn't have asked for a more likable guy, really. He also caused the fall of the Hungarian Kingdom by giving his power away, then not having the power to assemble a real army when needed. The result of his actions? After he died in the Battle of Mohács, Hungary ceased to exist as an independent entity for 400 years.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[Luke has no name]

At least humans could monitor and have some control over trading. This, opposed to letting fully automated programs trade several times a second based on some other programs' sub-second trading, instead of basing trades (somewhat) on qualitative bases.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[Luke has no name]

It doesn't seem the article advocates "faster" government, only more transparent government. If we're actually going to have a republic, it would be nice for people to be able to see what their representatives are doing with the money they take from us, and to see if our president is actually defending the Constitution. (ha)

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[sznupi]

Pork barrel politics would become much stronger. Generally it would become an impossibility to push unpopular, but neccessary decisions - sure, govs are not great at making them already, but...

Plus the problem is that too many people don't strive to be "informed and make reasonable choices".

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[BrentH]

That's pretty much the point: seems like nobody notices that America is moving towards what Europe is moving away from.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[maxume]

The combined market capitalization of the stocks list on the NYSE is ~ $16 trillion:

http://www.nyse.com/about/listed/1170350259411.html

I really don't see how a few tens of billions of dollars hooked up to fast moving trading programs can be responsible for 'a lot' of that valuation. Especially when the programs are all using basically similar strategies (so they are competing with each other for each little bit of advantage vs the rest of the market).

That isn't to say I think they are doing a whole lot of good, I just don't think they are particularly capable of doing much damage. If they are hugely harmful to other traders, some market maker will decide to make a market where they can't play, to attract the other traders.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[Anonymous Coward]

With friends like Congress who needs enemies like the 'Peepul'.... Congress is doing just fine trashing the Constitution and the country.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[quanticle]

Well, a government can't be too ineffective either. A lot of people forget that the Constitution wasn't the first government of the United States of America. The founders tried an even weaker form of government with the Articles of Confederation. That government was so weak that the newly independent colonies were almost separate countries. The chaos caused by that state of affairs is what prompted them to create the Constitution and lay out a form of government that could move boldly and decisively in times of crisis, but still have the checks and balances of a more deliberative system.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[FiloEleven]

Whatever you think of Congress, it's a pretty handy damping loop to keep the Peepul from trashing the Constitution, and hence, the country.

Funny, I always found it to be the other way around--the People being the damping tool to keep Congress from trashing the Constitution--only we haven't been very good at it for some decades.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[lawpoop]

Yeah. If the situation is happening so fast that you start to react emotionally instead of rationally, it's a system that's not designed with human cognitive needs in mind. It will create panics, flailings, and anxiety-driven behavior.

People will still speculate, but events will play out more slowly and orderly, allowing people time to carefully consider their actions, instead of going into a panic because OMG THE DOW IS DROPPING HOW WILL MY KIDS GO THROUGH COLLEGE SELL SELL SELL!!!!!

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[Fareq]

The main benefit of these programs is that at any time, in any asset, there is a buyer that will take an unlimited quantity (at some price), a seller that will provide an unlimited quantity (at some price), and that these two prices have a very small spread.

Except when they seize up.

Incidentally, almost all of the damage that these entities cause could be eliminated if everybody (or even just almost everybody) agreed to stop entering market orders and stop-loss orders, using only instead limit orders and stop-loss-limit orders with reasonable limits.

Re:We don't entirely *want* government to be ...

[maxume]

I think it is rather obvious that they would just borrow the money.

More seriously, for someone that is not an active day trader but is managing their own money, if their portfolio is that tied to their emotions (or versa vice), they are already doing it wrong.

Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[TaoPhoenix]

We know well enough "CongressCritter X voted for Bill Y".

What seems to be tough to fix is the lobbying lockdown. "If you don't support us in the War Against Z, we'll sink any other bill you ever submit for a vote."

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[drinkypoo]

What seems to be tough to fix is the lobbying lockdown. "If you don't support us in the War Against Z, we'll sink any other bill you ever submit for a vote."

If Americans wanted representatives who would vote their principles, they would vote for representatives with principles. They don't; they want pork.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[dugjohnson]

mmmmmm....Pork!

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

We want both

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Attila Dimedici]

Personally, I suspect that people should start voting against legislators who vote for bills that are longer than 100 pages (I would be willing to consider different numbers of pages, 100 might be too long and there is a remote chance that 100 isn't quite long enough). Any bill longer than this should be more than one bill. The only reason to make a bill as long as most of the ones that Congress has been voting on lately is to hide stuff (either from some of the legislators or from the people or both).

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Tom]

You assume that any representatives with principles are available to be voted for.

From all I gather, that is hardly the case in most districts, and even where it appears to be, you can't be certain. I know over here in Germany it took the founding of a new party (the pirate party) before I considered voting to be a possibility to express my preferences properly at all. All the others are either bought scumbags (major parties) or lunatics (minor parties) or both or somewhere in between.

I know the solution is to go and do it yourself. Thank you, I've held an elected office for several years (and stepped down on my own), I've had enough of politics for life. Anyone who enters that arena with good intentions and manages to keep them has my respect, and if I can, my vote.
But you can't play in the mudpit without getting dirty, and that's one reason why no matter how they start out, by the time they have progressed far enough in party politics to be on a ballot, pretty much everyone has become either a corrupted dipshit or a disillusioned cynic. My personal choice was to step down just before I became the later, but it was damn close (and as you may have noticed, I did take a good share of disillusion with me).

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you don't support us in the War Against Z, we'll sink any other bill you ever submit for a vote."

I don't even see how this is possible. There's no limit on the number (or redundancy) of bills that a congressman can submit, and there is no shortage of issues that could get a representative some brownie points. It's hard enough to get one meeting with one congressman. You really think a lobbying firm or single corporate GR department has the resources to get meetings with a congressional majority every time Congressman X submits a new bill? God forbid they suddenly have two representatives they need to torpedo.

No, it is infinitely more cost effective to just resign yourself to not getting support in your war against Z from that particular member and to move onto the other 400+.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[drinkypoo]

But you can't play in the mudpit without getting dirty, and that's one reason why no matter how they start out, by the time they have progressed far enough in party politics to be on a ballot, pretty much everyone has become either a corrupted dipshit or a disillusioned cynic.

But why is that? It's because voters are easily led sheep, who vote for shiny trinkets. It's never going to change unless people get interested in their government, instead of what they're told by Faux News &c.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Unfortunately, people with principles have a much harder time raising funds. The politicians without principles can easily make up for it by running five times as many ads claiming they have strong principles and their opponent is a fickle traitor. With the recent Supreme Court ruling that uncapped corporate political spending, the least principled have even more advantages. The average payday for the top 25 hedge fund managers last year was over a billion dollars, which is roughly the cost to run a modern presidential campaign. Congressional seats are much cheaper; you could buy and sell half of Congress with that kind of money.

PR is far more important than principles, and a lack of principles can buy a hell of a lot of PR.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Sheep,
I find it ironic that you blam Fox News, when it's CNN and NBC pushing for more shiny trinkets, and Fox shilling for the deficit reduction.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[jonwil]

The problem is, with a few rare exceptions, you have a choice between a Democrat candidate who supports pork over principles and a Republican candidate who supports pork over principles.

The only difference is which particular items of pork they support (and that is determined by whether they choose to accept the suitcase of unmarked bills from lobbyist A or the suitcase of unmarked bills from lobbyist B)

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[scamper_22]

Unfortunately, you are correct, but the answer is regulation of government.

You talk to people... and they recognize the need to regulate industry. Just look at the BP oil spill. Oil companies need to be regulated to make sure their oil rigs are safe.

The banking sector needs to be regulated to make sure transaction are fair and externalities do not spread to bring down the entire system.

Industries that use chemicals need to be regulated to make sure they don't cause undue harm to people.

Monopolies need to be regulated to make sure they don't abuse their power. Heck the EU goes nuts over Microsoft bundling a media player with their OS.

Yet, how about the most power monopoly in any country... the government... doesn't it need regulations in how it operates?
Bundling unrelated laws in bills to gain support... don't we need regulations to ban this?
Proving state benefits (pensions, healthcare...) to some citizens, but not others... don't we need regulations to ban this?

I could go on with other examples, but then I'd show my various political biases :P
So I'll leave it at this relatively straight uncontroversial example of regulations of government.
Of course this is what a constitution is for... but when you have a living constitution... that's like having living regulations created by industry itself. Yet, the constitutions are still useful. People still have the rights... especially the ones they exercise on a daily basis. Americans still own guns no matter what governments have done to curtail it. We still largely have freedom of speech. We still largely have freedom of religion... We still have separation of powers and a court system... We just need to fix all the loop holes...

Unfortunately, the ability to write government regulations in a sane manner is rare... normally just when a country is formed. So we don't often get this chance. And you can't really write it while the 'game of life' is in play. There are too many special interests that would fight it. If we were to say

"Proving state benefits (pensions, healthcare...) to some citizens, but not others... don't we need regulations to ban this?"

Public sector unions would go nuts, because they know they benefit immensely from the money of government.

And no... the courts don't offer us the regulation of government. They should... but they don't. The courts in any country are a political body with political views... often appointed by political parties.

Ultimately, it is up to good citizens and the public at large to insist government obey its regulations.
But yeah... I'm pessimistic about any real change until society collapses and we can rewrite the regulations on government.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[dkleinsc]

No, there's a much easier answer, that's more inherent in the job: you're dealing with (among other things) the allocation of a significant amount of cash. When you have a significant amount of cash to distribute, most people will try to get as big a share of that pile of cash as they can muster, and one way they'll do that is to butter up the people who are making the decision about how to distribute the cash.

And the next step, of course, is that too many people try to butter up the actual decisionmaker, so a new set of people comes up who's job it is to decide who can butter up the decisionmaker, and they now get buttered up by the people who want extra cash.

This is not limited to government - corporate purchasing departments and the like are also get caught up in this.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

You assume that any representatives with principles are available to be voted for.

I keep saying it--anyone who wants a job in politics should not by any means be allowed to take the job.

I think someone else said that before me, but I forget who.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[eriks]

That's not *entirely* fair... there are currently some reps who actually seem to *have* principles, and a handful of those who vote by them, from both "sides" of the aisle. I'd list a few, but I'm afraid the list would be embarrassingly short.

I can't really think of any senators that vote anything but the party line, though I'd hope there are at least a few.

Most elected officials, of course *profess* all kinds of principles, but these tend to always be "safe" ones, falling entirely along ideological lines, that are in reality, largely constructed positions, designed to produce perpetual incumbency by pandering to the lowest common denominator. This is the new republic. Same as the old republic.

In other words, the issue (in my mind) is the whole idea of "career" politicians, combined with the huge power and money interests, that are able to get whatever they want, probably without even resorting (most of the time) to outright bribes, but just a nudge here and a little support there.

Extricating ourselves from this predicament (into a more direct-democracy or some other system with a less-entrenched power base -- an "agile democracy" -- if you will) will be, to use the technical term a real lu-lu.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

But you can't play in the mudpit without getting dirty, and that's one reason why no matter how they start out, by the time they have progressed far enough in party politics to be on a ballot, pretty much everyone has become either a corrupted dipshit or a disillusioned cynic.

But why is that? It's because voters are easily led sheep, who vote for shiny trinkets. It's never going to change unless people get interested in their government, instead of what they're told by Faux News &c.

Bread and circuses - some things don't change even after 2000 years. People will vote for the politicians they think will give them what *they* personally want. What's good for the town/county/state/country doesn't enter into it.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Rogerborg]

How does any interest in government not end with the conclusion that there's a non-choice between Tweedledum or Tweedledee (or Joe Lieberman if you can't decide either way)? The only thing that really matters is candidate selection, and as you already noted, no honest candidate stands a chance against the Mob's candidate (take a bow, President Obama).

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Sheep,
I find it ironic that you blam Fox News, when it's CNN and NBC pushing for more shiny trinkets, and Fox shilling for the deficit reduction.

It's pretty amazing how they (both Fox News and Republicans in general) are only for deficit reduction when the Democrats are in power.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fox isn't shilling for deficit reduction. They are using this theme to approach politics with a 'personal' agenda. Again, they are not unique in this, but they are by no means shills for fiscal responsibility.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[st_adamin]

We had one, William Natcher. Missed like two votes in 41 years, one was while he was on his deathbed. He 'claimed' to have always voted conscience, and probably almost always did. He was so respected, that we temporarily lifted the "contiguous and compact" restrictions on districts so he could represent his hometown, as well as the district he served for so long.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oil companies need to be regulated to make sure their oil rigs are safe.

Not necessarily. If you penalise them appropriately for the environmental damage that a rig collapse causes, then they'll regulate themselves. And it's a lot simpler to do this than to oversee a lot of complex regulation.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[sznupi]

Ultimately, it is up to good citizens and the public at large to insist government obey its regulations.
But yeah... I'm pessimistic about any real change until society collapses and we can rewrite the regulations on government.

"Collapse and rewriting the regulations" is probably not a solution; that's essentially a revolution, and there's one thing inherent in them: chaos, you have no real idea what will emerge out of them (quite often it's worse; whatever was ruthless enough to thrive in the time of chaos)

Sure, ultimatelly the style of governance is the reflection of the society; but it takes time to change that. Generations.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[sznupi]

Uhm, or they'll just continue having disasters and trying hard to weasel out of them.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[sznupi]

If there would be a will from the society, surely that shouldn't be a showstopper and the society would be able to promote and choose some more virtuos candidates...

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[sznupi]

The type of society is what allows it, nothing else (isn't "get rich quick" generally admired and desired among most of that society?)

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[michael_cain]

Personally, I suspect that people should start voting against legislators who vote for bills that are longer than 100 pages. Any bill longer than this should be more than one bill. The only reason to make a bill as long as most of the ones that Congress has been voting on lately is to hide stuff.

Speaking from my experience as a permanent non-partisan staffer for a state legislature, which required that I spend a lot of time with both state and federal bills, statutes and legislative processes, some remarks:

• Some of the bulk is in the nature of bills. A bill may state that "Section 201, subsection 1, is amended to read," followed by the entire 20 pages of subsection 1 with the intended modifications indicated. The bulk of the actual changes may be small — a sentence removed here, three words added there — but clarity and accuracy require including the current statute as well as the changes.
• Some of the bulk is a consequence of the size and complexity of current statute. I'm a BIG fan of simplifying government, but what is, is. What starts out as a modest change in policy becomes enormous in terms of the bill bulk simply because it may touch many other parts of statute. That is, repeat the previous point 20 or 80 times.
• Many legislators are as unhappy as you are as they watch a bill grow to enormous size right before their eyes as staff adds the pieces necessary to keep the overall body of statute consistent.
• Philosophically, the US Constitution makes Congress the primary power within the federal government (the executive branch is charged with "executing" policies set by Congress). There are limits to how much of the policy setting Congress can delegate (probably the most far-reaching Supreme Court decisions ever made were the ones late in the 19th century when the Court ruled that Congress could delegate at least some policy details — rule writing — to executive agencies). Sometimes Congress is simply exercising its prerogative to write a detailed design document instead of a high-level functional spec.
• In many cases, the detailed design is appropriate. Consider the case where statute allows a factory polluting a river to be shut down. Under exactly which conditions can this be done? What pollutants count? Which don't? At what levels? What procedure must the agency follow to implement the shut down? Are there exceptions, say, in the interest of national security? Is there an appeals process? If so, what documentation must be submitted and on what schedule? Absent the detailed Congressional design, the agency and/or the courts are going to make it all up as they go along.
• Splitting a bill into multiple smaller parts is dangerous, in the sense that some parts may pass and others fail. The result can be statute that is incomplete or even worse, contradictory.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[clustro]

Mr. Sheep, I find it ironic that you blam Fox News, when it's CNN and NBC pushing for more shiny trinkets, and Fox shilling for the deficit reduction.

I agree. Glenn Beck might be nutty at times, and Bill O'Reilly a little annoying, but they are right on-target when it comes to how large and wasteful the government is, and how exacerbated the problem is by pork. Hell, its not like the Fox pundits are any more extreme. Hell, MSNBC has Olberman AND Maddow on their network O_o.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[clustro]

Completely agree. The state I live in has a law which requires that any state bill must focus on solely one topic, and no other. None of this "bridge to nowhere" stuff being snuck in with insurance reform or something like that.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Walkingshark]

Advocating for pointless wars != advocating deficit reduction. Try again.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Tom]

but they are right on-target when it comes to how large and wasteful the government is

I claim that is largely a myth.

Please show actual evidence of the government being large and wasteful. I mean evidence as in hard numbers, used in proper comparison. All such that I've seen so far were deeply flawed and clearly manipulated. For example, many state-run companies are labeled as "inefficient", and privatization at first seems to prove it. But in almost all cases, a few years down the road you suddenly realize that the state-run company offered secure, adequately paid jobs instead of minimum wage, it invested in sustainable infrastructure instead of short-term growth, and its prices were more long-term realistic than the private competitors who undercut them at first, only to raise them later.

I know one market here in Germany where privatization really worked largely to the benefit of everyone. In all other areas, there are many cases where it looks like it works, but only so long as you don't look too closely. For example, in the privatization concepts of the german train system, all calculations looked great - and completely ignored that the value to be given away had been built up over a hundred years with taxpayers money. As soon as you priced it at a realistic market value, it turned out that the concepts proposed could not possibly provide a sustainable train system. In fact, in the years leading up, the management had already made the company "ready" for going public, and the deterioration of quality, infrastructure and workers' rights was so bad that when bad markets delayed the initial plans, and all the crap slowly floated to the surface prior to instead of - as probably planned - after privatization, public outcry forced even the government party that had pushed for privatization the hardest to put a hold on the plans.

It was government entities that put men into space and on the moon, not private corporations. Sure, today, they can get someone into orbit for a tenth the cost of NASA. It's impressive, but while NASA did it at 10 times the cost, they did it more than 40 years ago. A lot of things in technology have dropped further in price than factor 10 in those 40 years.

So, in summary, please do provide actual hard evidence. To me, the claim that government is large and wasteful is largely (there are small areas of exception) a myth. And worse, a myth that is being spread with bad intentions.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[scamper_22]

"Collapse and rewriting the regulations" is probably not a solution; that's essentially a revolution, "

So revolution is not a solution? Open up a history book... and it is full of revolutions. There's perhaps a reason for that. It's often the only/best way to make change. Let's not take it lightly by any stretch. I'm not starting a revolution because I have to pay 5% more tax :P

I think we'll *hopefully* have relatively orderly collapses. What happened recently in Greece is a positive sign, not a negative in my view. The country was unsustainable, corrupt, and just collapsing. I consider what the EU/IMF are doing in terms of demanding austerity plans a kind of bureaucratic revolution. It's forcing change down the throat of such systems. Perhaps not the best/ideal change... but change none the less. Just as other kinds of revolutions can be for better or worse.

As I said, we won't see any real change until things collapse. Greece certainly wouldn't have fixed its problems until it collapsed. Ditto for most countries in the world.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[sznupi]

You really should look closer at what oftem happens after your average revolution...especially in places which aren't known for low crime rates or, generally, civic society (how much the US falls under that?)

Plus take note that the most "nice" places to live are for a long, long time quite stable; changes being gradual / mostly reflecting...the positive direction in which those societies manage to take themselves. Over generations.

In Greece you don't see a revolution, you see external "violence", essentially (and resistance to it...), in face of possible collapse. Sure, violence which is undeniably positive, but still. And collapse - nope, not really happening (the closest to it will be social disorder which is already happening in Greece for some time; but that's a show of sentiments which caused the problems)

Sorry if I have a bit of a grim outlook at revolutions, being from an ex-Soviet Block place that is in the EU now.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Shoe Puppet]

I know one market here in Germany where privatization really worked largely to the benefit of everyone.

Which one?

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Tom]

Telecommunication

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Attila Dimedici]

Some of the bulk is in the nature of bills. A bill may state that "Section 201, subsection 1, is amended to read," followed by the entire 20 pages of subsection 1 with the intended modifications indicated. The bulk of the actual changes may be small — a sentence removed here, three words added there — but clarity and accuracy require including the current statute as well as the changes.

Instead of amending a law as part of another law, replace the original law with a new law that includes the amendments (there are times when amending a law as part of a new law is acceptable, but most of the time it is a kludge that should result in the new bill being voted down).

Splitting a bill into multiple smaller parts is dangerous, in the sense that some parts may pass and others fail. The result can be statute that is incomplete or even worse, contradictory.

In which case it probably shouldn't have been passed in the first place.
I did not address your other points because they require a lengthier answer than this setting is suited to.
Overall, the main reason that bills have gotten too long is that the government does more than it ought.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[profplump]

In many cases, the detailed design is appropriate. Consider the case where statute allows a factory polluting a river to be shut down. Under exactly which conditions can this be done? What pollutants count? Which don't? At what levels? What procedure must the agency follow to implement the shut down? Are there exceptions, say, in the interest of national security? Is there an appeals process? If so, what documentation must be submitted and on what schedule? Absent the detailed Congressional design, the agency and/or the courts are going to make it all up as they go along.

Except in reality we create independent agencies -- like the EPA -- to set the specific regulations within the guidelines of their authorizing legislation. And they do make it up as the go along. But that's not necessarily a bad thing -- in many ways, the constitution is authorizing legislation for all three branches of the federal government, and it seems to work pretty well. Is there some reason the same sort of solution wouldn't work in other areas?

More to the point, things like "what count as pollutants" should absolutely not be enshrined in law. Laws take far too long to change and any sort of detailed, prescriptive solutions are bound to be outdated long before the law is repealed or updated. Which is a good part of the reason we've created independent agencies in the first place. It's important that the scope of their authorizing legislation is appropriately narrow, but there's no reason to codify specific requirements about chemicals or radio frequencies or any other such thing.

Finally, I'd suggest that anything too complicated to describe accurately and comprehensively in less than two pages is probably too complex a law to reasonably expect the average citizen to follow, and therefore worthless and perhaps even abusive. I'd be perfectly willing to give you extra space to spell out penalties, remedies, and other post-judgement details, or to provide tabular or other scientific data that might be required for specific compliance, but if the description of what behaviors are prohibited takes more than two pages you're making a law that reasonable people will likely be unable to follow simply due to it's complexity, which is always bad policy.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[jwhitener]

Finally, a post that actually makes sense.

I'm getting tired of all these libertarian'ish folks talking about the miracles of private enterprise.

Many things make sense in a 'for profit' model, but many things do not.

Healthcare insurance (not necessarily healthcare itself), communications/mail, infrastructure/roads, police, fire, military, etc.. are all examples of things that are leaps and bounds better because they are being run not for profit, but for the benefit of the people.

Added bonuses: We can actually vote to change those systems (can't vote for a CEO), private enterprise can provide competing services if there is a market for it (FedEx).

Even if a private company is more efficient (big IF in most cases), that increase in efficiency doesn't necessarily lead to cheaper prices or better service.

When the motive is profit, and the market will accept it, what motive do you have to lower prices, even if you innovate and find a way to make your products cheaper.

The natural response from the "government is always bad" people tends to be: "Well, if service A sucks, I vote with my wallet and get service B instead". Thats all fine and dandy if service B exists. You can't have 22 different telecoms all running wires, so by necessity certain businesses are going to be near monopolies, either by regulation or by practicality.

Next on the wacko thought train is:
"But lets de-regulate everything then!. Let the business fight it out, and customers vote with their wallets!"

Which, as history has proven, leads to monopolies orders of magnitudes beyond what anyone in our generation has every experienced. Less competition, worsening conditions, poorer products, etc..

Bah, well anyway. I just felt like ranting after reading about 20 posts yet again spewing the nonsense that government sucks and the glorious free market is always the answer.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[jwhitener]

The citizens united ruling is even worse than you describe. In addition to unlimited and anonymous political ads on tv, radio, print, etc.., corporations can now fund blatantly politically motivated third party organizations, who work around the clock promoting/demoting candidates, issues, and bills.

The candidates are even further from taking responsibility for the political vibe around a given issue/race now.

I am positive that the level of 'crazy talk' on radio, tv, etc.. is going to increase astronomically in an attempt to shift the political window to wherever the money is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[jwhitener]

Hey, this is slashdot. I thought government was horrible, regulation was crafted by the devil, and a totally free market is the solution to any problem. ;)

After all, we are all going to stop buying from BP (Vote with our Wallets!), and that will force them to be more safe in the future right? ;)

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Fareq]

It is not.

It is equally unamazing the extent to which CNN and NBC push for deficit reduction only when the Republicans are in power.

CNN, NBC, FNC, and, frankly, almost everybody on the planet suffers from My Guy syndrome to some extent. Especially when Your Guy provides you with the kind of pork you want, and The Other Guy only wastes money on pork that goes to People You Hate

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Fareq]

You can't have 22 different telecoms all running wires

Indeed. That's why once the government stopped enforcing the monopoly on telecommunication, private entrepreneurs invented wireless telecom.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Fareq]

Here would be my (still broken, but probably better) approach to this:

1) All bills must include the full text of any section that they amend -- however trivial the amendment. This is because many really bad bills hide their badness by reading like a diff of the entire code. You can't read them at all, so you don't know what they do.

2) The current length of the code in sections, sentences, lines, words, and characters is to be determined. For each of these metrics, the adoption of all new bills must either have a net-zero effect (except maybe sections, which can be allowed to be a net-zero, but never a net-increase). At no time should the number of sections, sentences, lines, words, or characters increase due to the passage of a bill. Every time a new bill that decreases one of these metrics passes, the new value becomes the ceiling. Over time, this will lead to shorter and shorter code.

Congress will eventually adapt and learn to write laws in tighter language with abbreviations and shorthand, but even then there will be a limit to what they can accomplish, since every new bill must remove at least one character from the length of the law.

3) Just to make things reasonable, take the length, in characters and words, of the longest novel that reached any position on the NY Times best-seller list in 2009, and declare that these lengths serve as a floor, and that new bills will never be required to reduce either metric below these thresholds. If you think that is too small, pick a nice multiplier (maybe 2 or 3?) and apply that to the length of said novel.

4) Now the easiest way to game the system is by cramming everything into one supermassive bill, crafting byzantine legislative proceedings that provide the equivalent of debate-and-binding-vote on making amendments to the supermassive bill, and then passing the then-open supermassive bill only once per session or when there is an emergency. So, to limit that, the sum of all words changed, added, removed, or moved by a bill must not exceed some reasonable number (say 30,000 -- about 100 pages in paperback-book format). If you like, have a similar restriction on character count.

5) Finally, to close one last obvious loophole, require that no character within a bill may be any character other than a capital letter, lowercase letter, digit, comma, period, colon, semicolon, parenthesis, or section-symbol (or, if you want, you could say, any standard printing character that is part of 7-bit ASCII -- though that provides more encoding space). Additionally requiring that all such characters be represented in the same font, color, and font size, and in fact that all instances of a character must look identical in all respects. (To decrease encoding space... you don't want a law that defines meanings for subtle differences in characters and then uses the rest of the codespace full of laws that are encoded in wonky character adjustments)

This system is still broken, because ultimately the problem is that we can't trust anybody to be the person with the authority to make the decisions, and every system is open to gamesmanship.

And, of course, this system is, ultimately, way too complicated and fairly silly. But if we could implement it, it would still be an improvement.

Though I just thought of a different system with a similar goal.

1) At the beginning of every session of Congress, the code shall be divided into 535 contiguous parts of equal size. These parts shall be distributed randomly to the members of Congress. Beginning with the first such part and continuing in sequence until all parts are completed, each member of Congress shall read aloud on the floor of their respective house, their section. Each other member of said house will be required to transcribe said reading without access to a visual copy of the medium, writing only with a ball-point pen upon plain lined college-ruled paper. The reader shall read with sufficient volume and clarity that each member is able to create an accurate transcr

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[ArsonSmith]

You want actually numbers?

How about the money taken in vs the money spent vs the revenue generated?

Ohh, you wanted vague references to how some government programs are worth it for the greater good and not hard numbers.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Attila Dimedici]

I actually have a much simpler solution. Instead of what most voters do, if all voters would default to voting against the incumbent except in those cases where the incumbent has done something exceptional during the last term or the challenger is at least David Duke (or Louis Farrakhan) crazy.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[ArsonSmith]

the original quote was something along the lines of "Those who crave power, deserve it least." or something like that.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[ArsonSmith]

You must browse at -1 or something. Actual libertarian ideals seem to get modded to there by this socialistdot.org website.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[ArsonSmith]

Anything more than 1 page, 250 words should have line item voting. meaning that a congressman has to sign in the yes/no/abstain on every line of a bill. If the bill has any part with more than 50% no then that part is thrown out and the bill is resubmitted.

No more I voted for that bill because of the good parts not the bad parts and pork. We'd know exactly what everyone voted for, against or didn't care about (abstain.)

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Attila Dimedici]

I like your idea, but I would suggest a slight modification, not line item but page by page. I would also allow 25 pages 250 words each. The second would just be my personal suggestion, the page by page part I think is important because it is more practical than line by line and any law that page by page is impractical for is too long.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

Actually, what I was looking for was:

it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

  -- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[mjwx]

From all I gather, that is hardly the case in most districts, and even where it appears to be, you can't be certain. I know over here in Germany it took the founding of a new party (the pirate party) before I considered voting to be a possibility to express my preferences properly at all. All the others are either bought scumbags (major parties) or lunatics (minor parties) or both or somewhere in between.

Things in Germany are very different from the electoral systems in the western world. In Australia, Canada and the UK who use the preferential voting systems minor parties find it very hard to get in, so most politicians align themselves with one of the two major parties. The biggest problem with this is that I vote on a local level for federal elections, If I vote for the Greens and the Greens do not win the seat in my electorate my vote automatically goes to whomever the Greens gave preference to, so I really have to choose which of the two major parties I want in. This works well for the House as that has to be done on a seat by seat basis but for the senate it does not. In the last UK elections, the Liberal Democrats received a bit under a third of the votes yet do not have a third of the seats in the UK senate (or what it's equivalent is called) because in many cases the vote passed to the parties preference.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[jwhitener]

It has been variable lately. I think if you view an article early, it seems to be modded to support libertarian views, but if you view the thread later, it is supporting more balanced views.

Probably a more accurate reflection of reality. "Reality has a well known liberal bias".

And look up the definition of socialism. It gets tossed around way to often as the opposite of liberal, or the opposite of progressive.

Every wonder why Libertarian and Liberal share the same root word?

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[jwhitener]

every=ever. I've never understood why you can't edit slashdot posts...

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Tom]

How about the money taken in vs the money spent vs the revenue generated?

Please post.
Also include the amount of salaries paid and add them to the revenue generated, because that is the economical footprint of a company, not the stock market value.

What you are looking for is efficiency. However, efficiency can be defined in several ways. The private way is how to generate the greatest amount of profit with the least amount of investment. But that is not the only way. A government may want to apply a larger picture. On a national level, the 1000 jobs that you "optimized" away have not vanished, they've gone on unemployment money. If you figure that in, it may well be more efficient to keep them employed in a low-efficiency job than to have them in zero-efficiency unemployment.

An economy is most efficient when it uses its available ressources optimally. The resources of a national economy are limited in the strict sense, i.e. you can not vary them at will, neither up nor down. A company has a different view, it can hire and fire. As such, eliminating jobs can be efficent from a company perspective, because for the company these people disappear. On a national level, we don't generally make people disappear if we don't have jobs for them.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[Tom]

The natural response from the "government is always bad" people tends to be: "Well, if service A sucks, I vote with my wallet and get service B instead". Thats all fine and dandy if service B exists. You can't have 22 different telecoms all running wires, so by necessity certain businesses are going to be near monopolies, either by regulation or by practicality.

It goes beyond that.

Even if you don't have a monopoly, the market will provide a lot less differentiation than the market theorists try to make you believe. That is because we have a meta-monopoly: The stock market. Every major corporation these days is subject to the same analysts and traders. As such, the variations are limited, because the expectations are. In very few markets, for example, can you go an intentionally try to not compete on price and market share, but provide quality products for a subset of potential customers. You simply can't do that in many markets, because analysts will quickly point out that your market growth is limited, you have reached all the customers you can possibly reach, and thus no future growth is to be expected. Which will be followed by demands to expand into other markets.

So even if there are 22 companies, most of the times the actual difference between their offers is tiny.

As you said: A government-run company can apply other standards. For example, NASA has this credo of "loss of human life is inacceptable". A private company could never do that. Well, maybe in public, but behind closed doors, the CEO would be grilled for spending $x million just to reduce the chance of a fatal accident by 1%. Other public companies can put customer satisfaction at the top of their agenda, not as a means to get more market share, but simply because.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[ArsonSmith]

so you're saying that efficiency is when you generate the most good (profit) with the least resources (investment)

People keep using profit as a dirty word and it saddens me. Government is also used as a dirty word from the other side of which I don't agree with either. Big government and profit generated off of it are both bad though.

Re:Not who wrote, but who paid for.

[ArsonSmith]

Actually I've known why for quite some time. It was the progressives hiding in the early 1900s and hijacking the liberal (liberty) movement and adding in their progressive (big government socialist) ideals in that word. There is no more individual liberty from anyone that claims to be a liberal.

Government Transparency

[solevita]

See also government transparency: http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/government-transparency/

Including Open Source Software and Open Document Standards.

Re:Government Transparency

[Wiarumas]

Also, see also America's Freedom of Information Act: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_(United_States)

The U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a law ensuring public access to U.S. government records.

Re:Government Transparency

[wwwrench]

We need more than just the ones on the list. All minutes of all government meetings (including cabinet meetings) should be published except parts which have security implications. Just like opensource code allows for scrutiny, opening up government will make representatives think twice before screwing us over...

Re:Government Transparency

[Dr_Barnowl]

Minutes? They should, at a minimum, make audio recordings, with a "voice key" that identifies each speaker. The amount of data required wouldn't be too bad using decent voice codecs. Video would be nice as it restores the non-verbal communications channels that you miss out on.

Minutes rarely convey the actual content of a meeting, in my experience.

Re:Government Transparency

[Shark]

I think the very broad 'national security' excuse has taken care of cases where FOIA is inconvenient.

Re:Government Transparency

[sznupi]

All minutes of all government meetings (including cabinet meetings) should be published except parts which have security implications. Just like opensource code allows for scrutiny...

You mean national security through obscurity?

Re:Government Transparency

[Americano]

I think what you're looking for there is called journalism.

Unfortunately, most journalistic outlets (on both sides of the conservative / liberal spectrum) are too busy pushing their own editorial biases to produce fair & factual reporting, and most people are too busy reading about Lindsay Lohan's scandalous cleavage-baring shirt to give a fuck.

You could publish every minute of every government meeting ever, and they would be lucky to get a handful of views, until long after the time when it'd be considered timely, and you'll only hear about it then when somebody digs up some sort of bombshell and posts it to Digg.

You can make government as transparent as possible, and it still won't matter a bit until people start paying attention and taking an interest in the information being made available to them. Until then, it's just more background noise.

Easier question to answer:

[Captain Courteous]

"How effective are the world's governments at using technology to become more responsive repressive?" Great! Thanks for asking!

Re:Easier question to answer:

[Captain Courteous]

Imagine there was a strike-through on "responsive" :(

It's already all there.

[Anonymous Coward]

There problem with most laws isn't that the information isn't publicly available. If you're Google-Fu skill is high enough, you can generally find any non-classified information that you want. The information is already out in the open.

The problem with most laws is that the information is that it isn't easy to find the damn stuff. A good example was when Baltimore created an ordinance requiring non-abortion providing clinics to post signs saying that they didn't provide abortions. You could find a ton of references to the ordinance, but not the actual ordinance itself. It turned out that the ordinance was buried under a poorly (imho) made city website with a non-searchable PDF, but unless you already knew where to look, chances are you would never find it.

Re:It's already all there.

[Qzukk]

What people want isn't to see the laws, what they want is "cvs blame" so they know when those must pass bloated piles of crappy bills come up, they know who actually added each little bit of pork.

agreed

[atisss]

Also history and diff mechanism with comments (as in reviewboard).

So I can know that Senator A commented exactly that point with such note upon discussion. Actually they could use reviewboard as tool for creating laws.

Re:agreed

[elronxenu]

Probably not a wiki; we should be using git repositories for working on laws.

Anybody can commit their suggested changes, but getting them merged will be really difficult.

Re:agreed

[Magada]

Nah, you just build a citizen reputation system alongside it, like slashdot.

Re:agreed

[atisss]

That's already total democracy (or e-government), where everyone can participate in law-making, not just chosen ones.

And non-reputable citizen can also have some good comments or proposals

Re:agreed

[DragonWriter]

Probably not a wiki; we should be using git repositories for working on laws.

Anybody can commit their suggested changes, but getting them merged will be really difficult.

The key prerequisite (and probably more important) is getting a standardized, structured format for representing law codes, adopting it for use as the representation of record in which codes are maintained, and then making the official, current version widely and freely accessible on the internet.

After that, yeah, using something like a DVCS for managing changes makes sense.

Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[tdisalvo]

...we need this on all elected positions. It is stupid that congressman X has been there 40 years and has accumulated so many favors that any of his pet projects get through and no real change happens. Why because the incumbent gets re-elected 98% of the time.With Term limits they would have to go get real jobs after say 12 years total.

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[maxume]

Term limits probably eliminate at least as many good representatives as they do bad.

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[OutSourcingIsTreason]

I've always thought that term limits are a bad idea because the choice of whether or not to reward an elected official with another term should belong to the voters. Anything that restricts a voter's ability to choose is bad. The people know best. Trust them.

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[fustakrakich]

Won't work (the presidency is no less corrupt for it) as long as the incumbent party holds on to its power.

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[catalina]

I'm against term limits; I would however, support a bounty.......

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[Arthur Grumbine]

Term limits probably eliminate at least as many good representatives as they do bad.

My mind boggles at the implication in your post that the ratio of good representatives to bad representatives is 1:1.

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[tdisalvo]

I would admit that it would eliminate some good representatives, however it would also cause more people to have to take part in government spreading out the responsibility to more citizens. It would also limit the amount of time power can corrupt a "good" person.

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[maxume]

Voters do, on occasion, eliminate bad representatives.

They also tend to continue electing the good ones.

So the theory would be that term limits disproportionately impact the good ones.

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[sznupi]

So at the end of their term, they would not give a shit. Apart from setting up favors that need to be repaid to them.

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[tdisalvo]

I would counter to say that voters typically do not continue to elect the good ones. "Conservative" that does not mean republicans, people who are ok with the way things are will continue to vote for who ever is in power because they are ok with the way things are. Also once you are in power you have a whole slew of lobbiest that give you $$$ to pass there laws. This in turn finances your campaign and since many undecided voters vote off of name recognition this keeps them in power indefinitely. There challengers simply cannot afford to run against them.

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[CrimsonAvenger]

I'm against term limits; I would however, support a bounty.......

I'd prefer we adopted the relevant portions of the Constitution of New Texas.

Setting things up so that harming/killing a "practicing politician" is only a crime to the extent that his public acts didn't deserve such harsh criticism would probably work fairly well....

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[maxume]

"Good" is rather overloaded, but I was using it to mean, to a voter, someone that did a reasonable job of representing their interests.

I would say you are arguing that term limits will change the entire culture of the people voting, something that I find unlikely, I expect that rather than individuals carrying the power of office around, you would end up with a bunch of mini-Putins.

I'd prefer to see algorithmic districting (this might happen, it is easy to explain and it appeals to most people's sense of fairness), a repeal of the 17th amendment (this probably won't happen), and a reform of the way the House and Senate organize themselves, placing much less emphasis on seniority (this will never happen).

(The internals of redistricting algorithms are not necessarily easy to explain, but the results are easy to display visually, and pretty clear cut)

Re:Two Words...TERM LIMITS

[DragonWriter]

With Term limits they would have to go get real jobs after say 12 years total.

I can't see why in any job with significant responsibility, you'd want to cap the experience that someone can have in the job.

What term limits due is shift power from elected representatives to non-elected staff, interest group lobbyists, and others, who don't have term limits capping their experience.

The main problem term limits seek to address is the lack of meaningful choice in elections, which is a product of an electoral structure which assures that there will be at most two viable choices, one of which is usually the incumbent.

Fixing the underlying electoral system to not use plurality or majority/runoff elections in single member districts would do far more to promote real choice than term limits do, and would avoid the undesirable effects of term limits.

With, say, 5 member districts with legislators elected by STV, you'd have far more real choice than with the U.S.'s current electoral systems (even with term limits added), and probably more change in individual representatives year-to-year, though it would still be possible for candidates that really did a good job in the eyes of the voters to keep doing the job as long as they retained the support of the electorate.

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever you think of Congress, it's a pretty handy damping loop to keep the Peepul from trashing the Constitution, and hence, the country.

That would make sense if congress actually upheld the constitution they swore to uphold.

Re: Elected officials get "fired"

[Errol backfiring]

No they are not. The "tomato-catchers" are replaced. The ministers that stick their neck out and have to "take responsibility" when things go too wrong to be publicly acceptable. The layer directly below that remains, and they are the ones that make all the plans...

One requirement

[Hijacked Public]

I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a Wiki with full history.

I have another:

All laws must have a measureable objective, defined in advance of their passage, that they must meet or otherwise be repealed.

Re:One requirement

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and please write then in some human language.

Re:One requirement

[JustinOpinion]

I like the concept. As hard as it is to get a law onto the books, it's almost impossible to get a law off the books. This leads to bloated and overly complex legal systems, innumerable special rules and exceptions, and so on. I also think that most laws should have time limits on them in the first place. Basically something that requires them to re-vote on the issue after X years, perhaps with a sliding scale if the law is always well-supported. (Something like 4 years, then possible 8-year extension, then 20-year extension, etc.)

I also like the idea of discouraging adding unrelated things into a bill. You don't want your pet project to be canceled just because the larger bill it was included in didn't meet a target!

There are of course potential problems:
1. Some legal changes that involve massive changes in infrastructure. Having these kinds of things be erected/deconstructed (perhaps repeatedly, as political climates for some issues can oscillate) might be even less efficient that the current situation.
2. Corporations could temporarily break a new law (or collude, etc.) in order to force it to miss a target, thereby getting legislation repealed. (But then again, this is just another variant of the already-well-entrenched "powerful companies can cause problems" issue.)
3. Issues not considered in the original objective target could arise. (E.g. an anti-pollution bill that misses its target because of a sudden environmental disaster in some other country that spreads...) Obviously the "targets" listed in laws would have to be crafted very carefully.
4. Related to #3, it is tempting to have a target in a law that is tied to the action of the law itself... but society is far too complex for this to generally be true. Laws may try to address issues of the environment, economic stability, employment, or whatever; but all of these things can be drastically affected by other things going on in society, unrelated to the law. So a very successful and well-supported law could be automatically repealed just because of a recession or other event.

As I said, I like the idea. But a blanket "measurable objective or repealed" rule might not work. At a minimum, I see no reason why laws shouldn't have an explicit statement of what the law is trying to accomplish, so that voters can more specifically assess whether the law is doing what it aims to. And we really do need better mechanisms for repealing laws.

Re:One requirement

[HamburglerJones]

All laws must have a measureable objective, defined in advance of their passage, that they must meet or otherwise be repealed.

That probably isn't a new idea, but it's new to me. One of the most insightful things I've read in awhile. I think it would vastly help clarify the spirit of the law, and help red flag concessions to special interest groups.

Re:One requirement

[Qzukk]

So you're asking for evidence-based legislation?

Why don't we just demand death panels for legislators ;)

Re:One requirement

[Anonymous Coward]

But then how would they ever sneak in riders? [/sarcasm]

How about at least forcing bills to be read (in their entirety) in front of congress before they can be voted on?
It would hopefully cut down on 1000+ page bills and make sure the congress critters have actually heard what's in it before they can vote.

And get rid of signing statements too.

Re:One requirement

[TimSSG]

All laws must have a measureable objective, defined in advance of their passage ...

I support above even if it did not cause the law to be repealed.

The bill to improve health care never defined what improved meant
in a simple way. That I could find; never read all 2000+ pages.

Does it mean lowering costs?
Or, maybe increasing the average age at death?

Or, does it mean increasing the average age, at death, of the people
in the party in power?

Tim S.

Re:One requirement

[Anonymous Coward]

Good idea.

I demand death panels for legislators!

Re:One requirement

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternatively (or in addition), I would like to see automatic expiration dates for all new laws. No matter what law they manage to pass, it should automatically expire after X years (maybe 10, 15 max). During the final year of life (but not before), they should have an option to renew it for another 10/15 yrs with another vote.

If the law is important enough to enough people, it will get renewed every time it comes up and no harm done, but if it was a bogus law that shouldn't have been passed in the first place, it will quietly disappear. This has the added benefit of continually forcing us to consider our goals and ask "is this still worth it?". If a person should re-evaluate their life plan every few years, the government should have to do so as well.

Re:One requirement

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

And another (the phrasing needs work, but I think the idea is clear):

When brought up for a vote, a bill must (when measured by at least one standard readability formula) be no more complex than the average adult reading level (as measured periodically by the Department of Education or the Census Bureau.)

Storing the law in a Wiki or requiring the law to have a measurable objective doesn't do the people any good if they can't understand at least the basic gist of what it says.

Re:One requirement

[ArsonSmith]

I had the idea that all laws should have an exponentially growing sunset clause. 1yr, 2yr 4yr 8yr 16yr etc.

On each sunset clause the law has to be voted on again whether or not to continue it.

Re:One requirement

[alephnull42]

>>As hard as it is to get a law onto the books, it's almost impossible to get a law off the books

Robert Heinlein's suggestion from "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" kind of resonates here:

“I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent -- the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?”

( http://www.halexandria.org/dward272.htm )

Re:One requirement

[Geminii]

"Laws may only mandate desirable or undesirable outcomes, not processes for (non-government) entities to achieve the outcome."

Seriously, screw banning electric light bulbs - just set lightbulb efficiency minimums and let the light-making industry figure out how to get the most lumens per watt. Don't ban or cripple hydrocarbon-burning cars, just mandate MPG minimums and let the fuel/electricity/whatever tipping points set themselves. Don't shut down analogue TV, just sell spectrum in smaller bands at higher prices and let the digital channels gradually squeeze out the less efficient dinosaurs over time.

And before someone chips in with an obvious this-allows-horrible/illegal-methods-of-achieving-X comeback, the requirement to for outcome X does NOT automatically mean that the entire rest of the body of law can be ignored in pursuit of X. If the quickest legal way to get to X causes other problems, add a law saying that causing those problems is illegal. If the production of the most efficient lightbulbs causes massive waterway pollution, delegalize the pollution, not any one particular chemical (which might turn out to be useful for something nonpolluting later).

WIKI Laws

[martijnd]

>> I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a Wiki with full history.

Sounds a like a do-able community project. How many laws within a particular scope change every day? Don't think all laws at first, start smaller.

Most laws go by for years without change.

If your government is not willing to do this, and it is still not happening then its just the laziness of everyone at large ; so stop complaining if you would like to see this happen.

Re:WIKI Laws

[st_adamin]

The solution I was thinking of a few years back seems even better. Not a law history type of law wiki, but a bill wiki.

Picture It: Any number of proposed bills, weighted by community voting, then split directly in half for dissent. The dissent would take the form of comments... lolcats and flamers would be suspended, but not forever. Comments would also be weighted by community voting. We would need some impartial moderators to summarize. That would be very hard to get, but I think people would be willing, if it meant a more effective, efficient, transparent means of legislation.

So the important bills are discussed, split, combined, perhaps dumped all together, discussed again, *condensed* and finally approved (by some vote margin), all by the community. Then forwarded on to Washington (or your capital of choice) with the digital signature of all the participants. They can't necessarily ignore us (the people) forever, not if we have a forum that reaches a wide enough audience. I don't, obviously, suggest this as the sole method of legislation, but as a supplement to a laboriously slow and innefficient system that we have in place. Plus by the end, it would not be lawyer speak, but human speak. I'm a smart dude, but I cannot slog through most of it, heck neither can politicians. They pay advisers to summarize. We shouldn't have to, not if we are a government of the people.

This would also help us scream "absolutely not" loud enough for someone to hear. Not sure about other places, but Washington seems to laugh off absolutely nots (the system was designed to prevent this, but the people have short memories). Additionally, this could be done for all levels of government, from city through national (or international maybe?)

Several weaknesses that I see: People tend to polarize 50-50. I don't know why that is, maybe its worthy of a psych experiment, but it would be tough to get anything done.

An online legal discussion proposition forum would, by definition, exclude vast segments of the population. Perhaps newspaper posting in the final stages might help, but vote counting there would take a massive infrastructure. Additionally, it would be a certain demographic (tech/geeks) that had a disproportionate weight for this forum. What is rule by the 'smart?' Oligarchy? Or something... I don't recall, but I'm against it.

Websites that can rally vast numbers of people could offset disporportionatly on single issues (like the Colbert toilet). I can't see any way to get around it. Maybe we shouldn't even try, I guess.

Non Participation. Just like voting, people would biznitch about what was done, but not take the few minutes to participate on the bills they care about. Emailing Washington does not work, but no one writes letters. A five hundred page letter (mit abstract), with 60,000 signatures, though should garner some attention.

Any thought/suggestions/criticisms would be most welcome... that's what this whole comment was about.

Re:WIKI Laws

[st_adamin]

oh, and bots could ruin it...

Re:WIKI Laws

[Magada]

I know it's counter-intuitive, but... people only polarize 50-50 on issues they really, really don't care about. If the signal to noise ratio is good enough in your wiki, you'll see very clear biases in the public opinion as well.

Re:WIKI Laws

[necro81]

all laws must be written in a Wiki with full history

Sounds a like a do-able community project. How many laws within a particular scope change every day? Don't think all laws at first, start smaller.

Most laws go by for years without change.

If your government is not willing to do this, and it is still not happening then its just the laziness of everyone at large ; so stop complaining if you would like to see this happen.

You can get plenty of up-to-date books or online databases that contain, for instance, the complete US Legal Code. You can also get information here and there about the history and intent of a law, and what it may actually mean in plain English. For some of the really arcane and abstruse stuff (and some of it really defies simplification) hire a lawyer.

But what I think the comment in the summary was getting at was all the changes that go on while a bill is being written. Lawmakers, especially when they are going for a soundbite, carp on about last-minute changes that were made in the dead of night and buried in the text of a 1,000-page bill, giving us a billion dollar boondogle pork project in someone's district. They are right to do so - that kind of behavior is inexcusable. Lawmakers get away with it because it is so buried and unaccountable.

Wikifying the bill-writing process would allow you to know that the text of a bill has been changed, and when, and by whom. Permit only elected members and the Congressional support staff (ya know, the people actually writing things) editing powers. As far as I know, Congress has absolutely no way to track changes to a bill as it makes its dirty, sausage-making way from concept through committee, debate and amendation, to conference, and finally ratification. For all I know it's just a Word file that gets spit out into a pile of paper. This kind of change-management system is common practice in many businesses where versioning and history are important - software vaults, part databases, etc.

I can think of no place where this is more needed than Congress.

Re:WIKI Laws

[Vanderhoth]

I don't know about that. There are many issues people tend to polarize on. Abortion, spanking children, Health Care (Currently going on in the US), religious affairs, etc...

In an ideal world I love the idea of cutting government almost completely out of the picture and having Society create the laws to govern itself.

However, one thing you need to consider is that there are many groups out there, PETA comes to mind, that would take advantage of an open system to enact crazy stuff. If the issue is only people who care about a particular bill end up participating in it's creation then most bills will end up being created by special interest groups with dozens or hundreds of followers and there might not be enough support from the people that don't really care stop them... Actually never mind, that's not much different from what already goes on.

Regardless, I agree "Normal" people know what is right and wrong for them, but politicians make laws that go against all common sense. Current governments such as Canada, UK and the States are corrupt and broken and there has to be a better way, but the hell if I know what it is.

Re:WIKI Laws

[st_adamin]

...but politicians make laws that go against all common sense.

Exactly. As the Astronaut Farmer said, "...We've got laws that protects us from other laws. We've got more laws telling us what we can't do than what we can." Hopefully this open system might cut some of that crap down. Additionally, you are so right about SIGs that it makes me sick. To extend your example: I hate cruelty to animals more than the next guy, but should ASPCA 'officers' really be carrying guns around, and have broad, discretionary, executive powers?

are corrupt and broken and there has to be a better way

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said, "Govt. is necessary because men are not angels" (or close). As long as governments are run by people, it'll always be this way. But real democracy (rather than representative) might help to minimize, or at least curtail that. "Ask the Audience" on Millionaire is right, what, like 60-70% of them time?

Re:WIKI Laws

[HatofPig]

Wouldn't Google Wave fit the bill for collaboration on legislation pretty well? With the release, they've been heavily pushing a new "Add email address" feature to current Wave users which just sends invites, so it should start spreading pretty quickly if creative people in the beta can actually make it useful for something. That plus the gradual federation of servers and diversification of clients, just like email, could make XMPP the collaborative protocol of the next decade. Seems like the right direction to head in, anyway.

Re:WIKI Laws

[Magada]

They rarely polarize en masse - you get a big pole and a small pole on all issues of any import and not all issues are equally important to all people.

The PETA situation is a good example - they have a vocal minority of followers and somewhat bigger group of rather less vocal antagonists, while the general population simply doesn't care enough to have an opinion.

If you do a referendum or (even worse) a poll on the issues PETA is about, both supporters and antagonists get drowned in the statistical noise, because both groups are way small as compared to the general population that doesn't have a stake in the issue and will vote essentially randomly, resulting in a nice fat 50-50 split.

laws must be written in a Wiki with full history.

[smchris]

You want to give people a heart attack? I had to read the Federal Register and my state's Register as part of one job I had. Thank whatever deity, power or force of luck you hold dear that not everything that gets proposed makes it out of committee. Not just anyone should be exposed to that knowledge. The horror. The horror.

direct democracy

[cies]

i should incorporate methods of direct democracy.. please let me remind you all that the representative democracies (vote for representative who then vote in the parliament) we have today, are the result of the ancient greeks not having an internet.

early democratic societies allowed everyone to vote (everyone was defined as: all rich men). but as societies grew and the notion of everyone changed, representative democracies emerged. i say thas was merely because we did not have a read+write medium that could connect everyone in a whole nation: the internet.

so with the internet we (the people) could, should and will reclaim control over our nations. and not allow multi-million dollar lobbies to set the agenda of highly corruptible small group of people that claim to "represent" us.

http://truetopiaproject.org

Re:direct democracy

[ducomputergeek]

Direct Democracy has another name: Tyranny of the Majority. (All Apologies to Plato)

Re:direct democracy

[Magada]

I'll take this over the oligarchy I live in any day of the week thank you very much.

Re:direct democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with direct democracy is the sheer number of things that need to be voted on. Congress is in session for what 11 months? Do you want to have to actively research and vote on things for 11 months out of the year while still maintaining a paying job? Admittedly our current congressman don't actively research what they are voting on but if they were truly doing their job that is exactly what they should be doing.

While we are on this subject, I would like to point out that ignorance of the law is no defense. The law is supposed to be for everyone. Therefore, doesn't this mean that I as a citizen am required to read all laws so that I can be cognizant of my duties? So, I have to read these laws but my own congressman can't be bothered since their real job is supposed to be a) read the legislation, b) vote on the legislation, c) possibly write legislation? Aren't congressman citizens too?

Re:direct democracy

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Spoken like someone who is a part of the majority.

Given my druthers, I wouldn't trust the majority of my fellow citizens with drivers licenses, let alone the right to directly vote on every issue.

Use tech to make gov't transparent

[RandCraw]

The best potential of tech in government is to turn their spy technology on themselves. We the people can be Big Brother.

Put cameras and microphones in every pol's office and videorecord and mike their entire day. Then store the record in a publicly web accessible read-only vault. Forever. Mike them and their staff 24x7, at all their off-site social engagements too.

As a servant of the people, no pol could refuse to play by the New Transparency and still hope to be reelected. It would so reduce any opportunity for quid pro quo that we wouldn't need campaign finance reform. The losers would quickly reveal their dark side no matter how hard they tried to conceal it.

Rats will flee a glass ship of state.

Re:Use tech to make gov't transparent

[st_adamin]

I was saying this just the other day. It sort of makes me a hypocrite, since I'm such an advocate of privacy, but crap. It was recommended to me that it's a great idea, as long as it's only the "workday" that is bugged, and not their private lives. But then the backdoor deals would be taking place during someone's birthday party.

Re:Use tech to make gov't transparent

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

There are some conversations that politicians should have in private. Conversations with their legal representation and conversations with doctors about their care or the care of their families are two that come to mind. So I agree with part of your plan, but here's my take.

• Record video and audio of the politician 24/7.
• Allow the politician to request that certain segments be treated as private (see above for some examples.)
• Have an independent, anonymous, decentralized, sworn to secrecy group review the records and decide into which category they fall.
  1. Deals with the politician's private life. Either this information is deleted immediately or it is stored for posterity but is not made public.
  2. Deals with the politician's public duties but is classified, confidential, or otherwise sensitive. Should be stored for posterity but not made public until or unless it is no longer sensitive.
  3. Deals with the politician's public duties and is not classified, confidential, or otherwise sensitive. Should be stored and made public.

Now finding people willing to be in that "independent, anonymous, decentralized, and sworn to secrecy group" might be tough ... but not impossible.

fix ?

[Tom]

Any attempt to fix current government systems fails to explain why its #1 pre-assumption should be taken as correct: That the government system is fixable.

We all know that there are things that you can repair, and then there are things that are broken far beyond repair. Before going about to fix the government system, one should prove that it is actually fixable, and not simply kaputt.

The mistake that most attempts at fixing the system make is the same one that the security industry has been making for the past 20 years - coming up with solutions for todays actual problems. But the evil guys are already working on tomorrows exploits.

You can not win if all you do is playing catch-up.

Re:fix ?

[russotto]

The mistake that most attempts at fixing the system make is the same one that the security industry has been making for the past 20 years - coming up with solutions for todays actual problems. But the evil guys are already working on tomorrows exploits.

You can not win if all you do is playing catch-up.

Probably true, but the alternative is dissolving the system and starting over. That wasn't even done during the US Revolutionary War (the state governments remained basically intact, as did the system of common law). And even if you tried, the evil guys would probably co-opt the process and you'd find yourself taking the short path to totalitarian oligarchy, instead of the long path we're on now.

One more requirement

[Anonymous Coward]

All laws - ALL of them, even the obvious ones - must expire. 10 years max, say. That way, congress must spent time re-instituting laws we know we want, and won't have time to keep piling on more and more and more obscure, conflicted, special-interest legislation. The law should evolve, but the competitive nature of evolutionary processes requires the less fit to expire.

The constitution and bill of rights should not expire. Or at least the term should be much longer.

Re:One more requirement

[Anonymous Coward]

...the length of the term should be in proportion to the votes cast in favor.

Re:One more requirement

[cdrguru]

Do you really think it would be a good idea to have to renew Social Security every 10 years? I know a lot of people that would seriously be in favor of changing the way it works with current workers paying for a growing number of retirees and looking forward to the day when current workers are paying for newly minted citizens from immigration reform.

How about civil rights laws being renewed? Do you believe they would stay the same? I would say we would end up with every single possible alternative to "Christian White Male" being a protected class by law. Do you believe it would make sense for it to be illegal to dismiss workers because they were abused as children or because they were unable to complete college? These things and more would likely be worked in to Civil Rights v2.0.

You get the idea. Some laws, maybe. The bulk of them, not such a good idea.

Earmark your tax dollars

[rwa2]

I'd love to be able to control where my tax dollars go... so I'd be able to say, "30% to education, 10% to research, 20% to paying off national debt, 0% to the DoD". Congress can still fight over what's left.

Hell, they could even phase it in slowly... maybe let people earmark even just the first $100 or $1000 of their taxes, so everyone gets a nearly equal say, and it would serve as a great data collection tool as to the political priorities of most people... better than anything else I can think of.

Re:Earmark your tax dollars

[Rallias Ubernerd]

I veto the national debt option. National debt is good.

Re:Earmark your tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with your proposal is that it leads to a system where your vote is proportional to your wealth. Such systems have, in the past, been shown to suck majorly, which is why we now have the one (wo)man, one vote principle.

Re:Earmark your tax dollars

[Anonymous Coward]

50% of americans do not pay fed income tax. Of course we all pay SS and Medicare, if you make 1 cent or more a year. It would have to be the first 1% of your tax dollars since not everyone pays $1000 a year. I like your idea though.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-apf-1105567323.html?x=0

Re:Earmark your tax dollars

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Why would the private earmarking have to come only out of taxes you pay? And why should the rich get to earmark more? The entire point was to keep the private earmarking on the 1 person/$100 of earmarks level

Re:Earmark your tax dollars

[Chowderbags]

Judging by the quality of US education, I suspect that many people would add the percentages up wrong.

Re:Earmark your tax dollars

[mjwx]

I'd love to be able to control where my tax dollars go... so I'd be able to say, "30% to education, 10% to research, 20% to paying off national debt, 0% to the DoD". Congress can still fight over what's left.

The problem we have here is that everyone will assign money to their pet projects. It would be worse then pork for the pollies, it would be pork for the masses. I think political advertising in the US is bad enough as it is (you'll never get away with it in Australia) but this would make it even worse. False prophets on the TV every 10 minutes telling you to take money out of issue Y and put it into issue X, trying to guilt or goad you into moving funds towards their interests. After that you'll have recommendations from political parties, workplaces and religious groups to place your funds where it does the party, company or god the most good. After this you'll have the die hard militarists who will put 100% into the military and attack anyone who doesnt. Meanwhile things you dont ever think about like sanitation, gas/water utilities and so forth get little in actual funding.

Re:Earmark your tax dollars

[rwa2]

Well, you can already sort of assign money to your (nonprofit/charitable) pet projects... You can steer some money away from the feds by making charitable contributions -- but only if you can itemize deductions (which isn't terribly easy unless you have a mortgage or some other means of getting you above the standard deduction). The money you contribute isn't taxed, which means if you donate $100 you might keep $20 out of the hands of the feds to spend on things you have no control over (other than by ticking a box on a ballot every couple years)

And really, the whole thing is largely symbolic. Congress will still set individual budgets for things and just add more or less depending on how much receives publicly-allocated funding. The point is to actually collect data from people on what they think is actually important.

But I understand how collecting actual data from people diminishes Congress's ability to spin and weave and politick and wield control.

I think technology ought to enable a more direct digital democracy, rather than the representative democracy we now have. And we could start with relatively small steps that wouldn't be terribly disruptive or even revolutionary.

Re:Earmark your tax dollars

[mjwx]

I think technology ought to enable a more direct digital democracy, rather than the representative democracy we now have.

I agree, more involvement with reps and the governmental system is a good thing but this needs to be given in equal measure to all people (regardless of whether they use it). Giving people direct control over where their tax money is spent is not this however, it will only result in too many uninformed and manipulated choices being made and no way to stop it.

Simple Requirement

[rlp]

I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a Wiki with full history

I have a simpler one - legislators must read the laws before voting on them.

Re:Simple Requirement

[Dr_Barnowl]

LawCAPTCHA!

Re:Simple Requirement

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Something that could help usher that in is a word count or document length limit to new laws. I mean, I know we live in a complex society, but having a 2000+ page law for anything is simply absurd. The reason the Constitution is such a powerful symbol for folk in America is because it is simple and accessible by the public. A layman can pick up the Constitution, read it in an hour, and have a pretty good idea of the goals that the document were supposed to be accomplished. If it were illegal to pass a law that had pages upon pages of jargon, legal-speak, and utter unrelated bullshit then voters wouldn't need media outlets and politicians to 'translate' what a proposed bill says.

When it comes down to it, any bill that is more than a couple dozen pages is trying to micromanage whatever issue it is addressing and will, thus, cause more confusion, inconsistencies, loopholes, and, ultimately, harm than good.

ALREADY HERE! Called COMMUNISM

[Anonymous Coward]

And the reds are practicing it as I speak. If it's good enough for the COMMIES it's good enough for YOU!

git for law. LawML.

[Dr_Barnowl]

Perhaps make the law accessible via a wiki. But most wiki revision control systems aren't very sophisticated.

Keep the law in git branches. If people wish to amend the law, let them branch the law, make their amendment, and propose it for merging to the master branch. What the proposed changes are become very easy to track, as does the person responsible for each and every line.

Even better, produce an unambiguous machine-readable language for law, one that can be used to make legal inferences (e.g. - is this particular act legal?). Of course, this would cause a huge mess when people realise how self-contradictory and downright logically impossible some of the law is...

Re:git for law. LawML.

[JustinOpinion]

Even better, produce an unambiguous machine-readable language for law, one that can be used to make legal inferences (e.g. - is this particular act legal?). Of course, this would cause a huge mess when people realise how self-contradictory and downright logically impossible some of the law is...

The current situation, where a citizen has no hope of really ascertaining if a prospective action will be legal or not, is a huge problem. But trying to make law even more rigid and codified is not necessarily the answer. It does appeal to many in the Slashdot crowd, since we like and understand computer languages, but has numerous problems when applied to real laws.

1. The average person will have great difficulty parsing a truly unambiguous and machine-readable language. Elsewhere in this discussion some have called for just the opposite: human-readable laws, that don't require a lawyer to make sense of. Highly structured laws might make the situation even worse, where only a small group of people are able to really understand the law, which effectively makes every citizen a criminal.
2. Ultimately the real world is itself ambiguous and complex, such that you will never produce an unambiguous representation of problems/solutions therein. The laws need some wiggle-room to avoid becoming absurd in their application.
3. The problem with complex rule-based systems is that they can, and will, be gamed. In particular, it is the rich and powerful who will be most able to subvert the system, because they have the resources (the money necessary to pay people to spend time figuring it out, for instance) to find all the special deals, exceptions, and loopholes. Note that I'm not even talking about the rich and powerful rewriting the rules (though that is a problem, too). I'm talking about the fact that for a given ruleset, the rich and powerful will have the best chance to exploit that ruleset to their advantage. Thus simpler rulesets can be more fair.

I'm sympathetic to the notion of a less ambiguous legal system. But I don't think that's realistic. Instead what I think we really want is a less murky legal system. The laws should be written clearly. They should be accessible and well organized. Part of the job of the court system should be to digest legal codes and legal rulings into things that the average person can understand. For instance, they should produce a FAQ for sub-sections of the legal code, helping to guide the average citizen into understanding what things are legal or not (and why, and what sections of the legal code are implicated, etc.). The goal is for people to know where they stand vis-a-vis the law.

P.S.: The git-branches for legal changes is brilliant. It allows an auditable trail and forces the actual legal code to be a single document, rather than a piecemeal of amendments and addendums. This makes laws shorter and easier to read.

Re:git for law. LawML.

[canajin56]

We need pretty advanced AI before computers can start interpreting law, and even more before they can start enumerating all possible actions a person, group of people, or corporation, could possibly commit.

Re:git for law. LawML.

[Dr_Barnowl]

You've caught me out.... I oppose electronic voting systems for exactly the same reason - that they are incomprehensible by the average citizen and thus impossible for them to audit. I even note that geeks love to noodle with the ideas for implementing a successful e-voting system because they love a complex problem.

Thanks for clarifying an extra benefit though - not being a lawyer I wouldn't have thought about laws being composed of what is effectively a stream of patches, that the user has to read verbatim and apply mentally instead of just applying to the original "source".

Re:git for law. LawML.

[atisss]

I think that was exactly the idea behind wik, so that laws are explained correctly, perhaps even in some advanced markup language that can automatically search for referenced items and display them in simple readable form. For example each term in law can have mouse-over definition including definition of terms used in first definition.

In country where I live all current laws are acessible on public website, however browsing them takes some time, because you often have to search another referenced paragraph or term.

Re:git for law. LawML.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better, produce an unambiguous machine-readable language for law, one that can be used to make legal inferences (e.g. - is this particular act legal?). Of course, this would cause a huge mess when people realise how self-contradictory and downright logically impossible some of the law is...

Then someone will actually get to write the mythical person class!

Its WIKILAW time!

[Rallias Ubernerd]

Time to take control of government once and for all.

Fun Fact

[iluvcapra]

The now-trashed Constitution was written in secret and all of the members of the Convention observed an oath of secrecy while it was written and for many years after. If they hadn't, the individual members wouldn't have been able to make any of the compromises they did and the process would have quickly stymied. On the other hand, minutes were kept and the members wrote a lot of commentary before and after the fact.

Tyranny

[Archangel Michael]

The problem with Democracy and most other forms of governance is tyranny.

We try to keep tyranny of the majority from affecting the rights of the minorities, and then we end up with tyranny of the minority, which infringes upon the rights of the majority.

LIBERTY, is the ONLY governance that works. It says each is responsible for his own actions, to the end that he doesn't infringe upon the liberty of others.

The problem with Liberty, is that all the do-gooders who want to tell others how to live, because they think they know better, and those that want to rescue everyone from themselves.

That is why we have things like "war on drugs" and "war on poverty" (porn, terror, big oil, pharma etc) and all the "do it for the children" and whatnot being the driving forces of laws that infringe upon everyone's rights and liberties.

So, the fight is always against tyranny, which is the natural course for man.

Re:Tyranny

[st_adamin]

Then it's Tyranny or Anarchy? The above seems to assume the operative

responsible

applies to everybody. It doesn't. If it did, Marx would have been right, and the state would have "withered away." Is a "liberty" guy, responsible for his own actions, going to charge himself with murder? Where also is the forum for honest, legal disputes? Pistols at dawn (provided both consenting parties agreed to it)?

I'm extraordinarily against the govt taking what it wants, but crap, do we not need highways and interstate travel? Cell towers, utilities, and all of the infrastructure that government installs and maintains (til it sells out to monopolistic PI at least)?

I'm also there with you on the 'less number of stupid restrictive laws,' but we just haven't reached Roddenberry-an Utopia-ism just yet.

Re:Tyranny

[2obvious4u]

Liberty does not equal Anarchy. That is a logical misconception used when people want to justify taking away someone else's rights. We can agree that people can not defraud people since that is harming others and that would not be tyranny or anarchy. The government has a responsibility to bring charges against the defrauder once there is a victim. The same goes for battery, we want the government to protect us from battery and if someone attacks us there should be consequences. There is still liberty and not tyranny and not anarchy. However the government forcing me to wear a seatbelt (even though I know I should) should not be threatened imprisonment (if you don't pay the fine a bench warrant will be issued and you will serve jail time). That is tyranny and for a victim less crime.

Re:Tyranny

[st_adamin]

In that case, I admit I completely misunderstood

each is responsible for his own actions...

I am fine with the idea of minimalist government. I guess 'minimalist' art a matter for further debate, though.

I fully agree with the seatbelt deal (and other more onerous examples). Since when has our justice been about justice or moral rectitude? I don't think every little dumb-arsed thing needs to be legislated to death. You want model rockets? You're probably not a terrorist. You want a chem lab? You're probably not going to make meth. You want to make meth for your own purposes? You're a jackass, but it isn't my business.

The problem, as I see it (my opinion), is that Libertarianism, while striving for minimalism, backs itself into the corner of nebulousity. Where is the line drawn for spending on national defense? It's your right to think 0%. It's my right to think 15% (or whatever). But neither of us should be able to decide, as it is a critical need, and our right to refuse would infringe on everyone's right to be protected (from actual threats, not the War on Whatever is Popular/Scary ATM). So too education, interstate commerce, public infrastructure.

Personally, I think the government needs to have its hands deep into education because so many of us don't (though I fully believe in a parents right to home-school, legislation against that p's me off to no end).

What about feeding the poor? You may think they need to get off the teat, but I think not letting people starve to death is worth a pittance of my taxes. I believe in the whole "Poor, tired, oppressed...huddled masses yearning to breath free..." That's my American, too.

Where are the lines drawn for prosecution? Capital offenses? Sure. Felonious criminal? Yeah, maybe... Misdemeanor criminal? Ummm... well, I should be able to jaywalk if I want, it is my risk (I agree with that).

Like I said, I misunderstood his argument in the beginning... but with so many justifiably liberty based viewpoints.... you know, it seems like only chaos would result. I also think 'everyone does what they want' would work either, because "men are not angels."

Disclaimers: I am not a fan of our current system. I promote downsizing the government by at least (insert some huge percentage)%. Additionally, I'm a huge fan of the flat sales only tax. Bet like 5% could do it fine we cut a great huge deal of fat.

Re:Tyranny

[Archangel Michael]

What about feeding the poor?

Define "poor" in such a way that society as a whole would agree, and now define it in such a way that government bureaucracy can verify that a person is 1) poor 2) hungry while maintaining things like "dignity" and "feelings".

Look, I don't mind helping people who are down and out. I just mind helping people too damn lazy to get up off their 400 lb asses because we've made it so easy for them to be "poor" and "hungry" that they become 400lb disabled by fat, professional TV watchers.

And when most of the world is "poor" and "hungry", people in western society have a lot of gall trying to suggest that people are even capable of starving to death here.

Color me jaded, but I think that is just a crock people trot out when trying to manipulate people into tyrannical social programs.

Re:Tyranny

[st_adamin]

I do color you jaded, sir. My points are not crocks trotted out, nor are they non sequitors as others have said, designed to take anything away from anyone. I want you to have and enjoy as much freedom as is reasonable/possible in a broken world. However, I also believe in basic human rights (for which I think we are all *gasp-shock* responsible), a summary of which would probably be close to the following:

Clean Water
Food
Clothing
Heated Shelter
Education
Basic and Emergency Health Care (absolutely not Obamacare, don't even think that, reason out for yourself what would be 'right' and 'just' and 'good')
Freedom of Opinion (speech, text, whatever)
Freedom of Religion


Heck, I'd even maybe go so far as to insert:
Electricity and you know what, heck maybe even
Computers and Internet (educationally anyway)

You seem to think I'm deceiving you, so that I can help institute some tyrannical ship of state that tells you what you can and can't do? Either that or you think I've so swallowed completely other peoples opinions that I am only parroting what I heard, so they can institute some tyrannical ship of state. I assure you, neither is true. I don't care what you do, provided that it does not impinge on my liberties (wink). My opinion is that, from an economic perspective, most of the above things are part of a system so freaking broken (unjust, and simply not right), and everything is so much about money, and peoples attitudes are so wrapped up in their money, that all above priorities are just way the hell out of whack.

You got no mercy for the poor? Then say just that. Accept it and live with it. Don't clothe it in other guise. And don't tell me that my love for the poor has anything to do with what I want to take from you. You got nothing I want. You don't feel you're part of society and should therefore meet society's due? Maybe someday I'll be in a position contribute your share. And I will, because it will be right.

/Conservative

Re:Tyranny

[Archangel Michael]

Clean water is a "Human right" ???

I'll just address that one thing. If you're in the desert, stranded and all alone, do you have a "right" to clean water? How do you go about getting "clean water" when there is none to be had?

Human rights are a fallacy, as you've described. A right exists on its own and doesn't require another to secure or provide it to you. It just "is".

Of the things you listed, only two are "Freedoms" (rights), and are based upon the idea that they exist on their own, and doesn't requires anyone else to secure or provide something for you. There is no lack of either of those if you're stranded in the desert.

The moment you realize that a right and liberty exists on its own, then you can begin to understand the rights and responsibility of each individual.

The moment you demand of me, something you yourself lack, is the moment you've stepped into tyranny.

Liberty is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner, and the sheep grabbing his gun to contest the vote.

As for me and poor people, that is between me and the poor people, and not between the poor and you to decide for me. My point, and the original question I asked was designed to point you to the idea that "poor" is a subjective quality, not quantitative as you suggest. What classified as "Poor" here in the US would be considered "Wealthy" in places like the Philippines, or even in the US 100 years ago.

Society has a responsibility to promote welfare, not provide it. The responsibility comes from the right to self determination, not the determination of tyrants, which demands provision without responsibility.

Replace 2nd Amendment

[EmperorOfCanada]

Replace guns in the 2nd amendment with information control. As the control of information is power. So a new amendment firmly placing information control into the hands of the people.

The 2nd Amendment was cooked up with the idea that people could resist a government out of control. This might have been vaguely reasonable when you could typically only fire one badly aimed shot per minute. But with the command & control structures and things like drones and tanks it would either be impossible or shockingly horrific for people in a modern democracy to mount an armed resistance to a bad government.

We now have a new and better weapon which is the easy distribution of masses of information. Thus I would suggest changing the 2nd amendment from the right to be a hillbilly with a gun to the right to any information the government has combined with with a restriction on the government's right to store information on us. Basically I would want all information that is not involved in an active and ongoing serious criminal investigation to be released and the government to not use any personal information not covered by the above.

This would take some tweeking so that criminal records are kept but not allow the police to store travel data or license plates that drive by.
The whole idea would be that the government would lose a huge amount of power over us and we would gain a huge amount of power over it.

Re: Elected officials get "fired"

[sznupi]

And the layer below that. And one more below. And another.

All originating from the society - with the system of governance reflecting...the society.

Less law-making

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that it might be a good idea to require a 75% parliamentary 1st chamber majority to create new regulation or increase the scope of existing regulation, legislation, taxation and government, but it should be enough with a 40% 1st chamber minority to remove or reduce the scope of regulation, legislation, taxation och government.

There should also be a small 2nd chamber which only decides if a proposal constitutes a increase of decrease of regulation.

With such a regime, we would end up with only a small government and a low number of laws with a strong public support.

Legislative Development with CVS, SVN, Hg, or Git?

[SgtChaireBourne]

Likely the best websites from the US Government...are the Library of Congress site and the Supreme Court site. Both of them are extremely informative, and have a massive wealth of information that is readily available.

Development of legislation is quite byzantine and revision (mis)management during the drafting can make for some very serious readability problems. Currently it is nearly impossible to have time, even for a full-time politician with staff, to have time for their team to individually work through all changes and revisions of a draft of a bill.

Using a version control system (CVS, Subversion, Mercurial, Git) makes it very easy to track individual changes and who made them. It also makes it trivially easy to integrate all the changes and show a snapshot of the current draft or one from any arbitrarily earlier version.

Code bases for large software projects are unwieldy, constantly changing and have many authors yet need full transparency and accountability to succeed. So are drafts of legislation. Using a versioning system in our legislative process is long overdue.

And here enters Technocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Though a little different from what's on wiki:

-Technical experts as elected officials
-Open government legislation/lobbying/funding, etc... (transparency above all else).
-Redistribution of wealth evenly.
-Not entirely classless, but the margins between them are minuscule.
-Corporations are not people, and only individual humans can donate, all at a low cap not exceeding 5% of the average national yearly income.
-Patents have 3-5 year max, as rapid technological progress overwhelms anything longer.

I could go on, but realistically, it would never work in our modern era. Too many have been disenfranchised to make an appropriate shift.

Better as an 11th amendment

[st_adamin]

but it's moot anyway, as anything that was inflammatory or weakened the regime of the wealthy would be deem state-secret, or ongoing investigation. Or some other danged loophole.

PS: Not everyone who agrees with the second amendment and owns a firearm is a hillbilly. I don't disagree that we'd lose. But it's been misread as 'right.' It is not 'right,' it is 'duty.'

Re:Better as an 11th amendment

[DragonWriter]

IF it was a new amendment, it couldn't be anything less than the 28th.

The Constitution didn't stop being amended with the "Bill of Rights" (well, in one sense it did, since Amendment XXVII, the most recently adopted of the 12 amendments proposed as the bill of rights -- 11 of which have been adopted -- is also the most recently passed amendment to the Constititon; in any case, it didn't stop with the 10th Amendment.)

Re:Better as an 11th amendment

[st_adamin]

While I have been aware that there are more than 10 amendments (since 2nd grade or so), I was not aware that 11 of them were now considered the Bill of Rights. In that case 12th or 13th. I was opposed to eliminating one freedom in favor of another basically unrelated freedom. Posters bias against said 'right' seemed worthy of challenge, as we are not all hillbillies. I'd venture a POTA guess that 80% of the exceptionally intelligent people I know are in favor of the second amendment.

But I do agree with nearly unrestricted access to information, though FOIA didn't seem to help too much with that.

Re:Better as an 11th amendment

[DragonWriter]

While I have been aware that there are more than 10 amendments (since 2nd grade or so), I was not aware that 11 of them were now considered the Bill of Rights.

There were 12 amendments proposed in 1789 as the Bill of Rights. 11 of them were eventually adopted; they were adopted as Amendments 1-10 in 1791, and Amendment 27 in 1992.

Re:Better as an 11th amendment

[st_adamin]

Pretty interesting. Just looked up the twelfth, regarding apportionment. Wiki says almost 5700 representatives by this amendment (as of 2000). I guess I can see the logic behind guaranteeing representation, but this seems to have been the only one of the twelve that include hard numbers, except the 7th... Which I guess I don't really understand... is it like a combination of 5th and 6th regarding civil cases (right to trial by jury + double jeopardy)? That or it seems to eliminate appeals...

Um, wrong questions, sort of...

[rickb928]

"for the use of technology as an enabling mechanism for government."

I'm not sure I want my government enabled any more than it is. Ineffective oversight of offshore oil drilling, failed immigration control, failed financial oversight, my government needs to do some things that are just not that hard, and don't need technology to do them. Only three of many examples shown. C'mon, Obama, fix your own house, eh?

"I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a Wiki with full history."

Of all the things that need improvement, our legislative record and US Codes is not one of them. Sure, a Wiki would be more convenient. But if you want to know more about a law, there are MANY sources. Another Wiki doesn't fix anything. It's all out there, and duplicating the data just de-normalizes things. Several universities have excellent sources of legislative action and history.

Now, publishing documents in open formats would be useful. Disclosing political campaign donations in REAL TIME would be very enlightening. Correlating lobbying and corporate behavior, legislative action, and campaign financing would also be enlightening. Opening up some datasets, as the Census Bureau has started to do, would be useful. Raw data is always great, and raw data on political contributors, etc. would shed light on a dark process. A good thing.

Re:Legislative Development with CVS, SVN, Hg, or G

[CrimsonAvenger]

Using a version control system (CVS [nongnu.org], Subversion [tigris.org], Mercurial [selenic.com], Git [git-scm.com]) makes it very easy to track individual changes and who made them.

Whatever makes you think that any government, anywhere, wants its citizens (or anyone else) to be able to track individual changes and who made them?

Citation?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a good imagination, but it isn't enough for a plot of a good book. No, it would be slightly interesting at best. Try again.

Re:Legislative Development with CVS, SVN, Hg, or G

[Unordained]

... and comments! Both in the code, and when you commit to the repository. We keep having battles over the intent of laws that are badly worded, vague, or contextual. If we can't solve those problems (as hundreds of years of history will already attest to) then let's at least get them to write down what they were thinking at the time, examples of things they wanted to prevent, things they wanted to protect, areas they thought a law might apply to in the future, etc. Yes, I know, it's hard enough to get legislators to agree on what to do, it's probably actually harder to get them to agree on why they're doing it. (Counter-intuitive, maybe, but I feel a lot of legislation gets passed with everyone agreeing to it having differing reasons for doing so, just as those who disagree do.) Maybe ask them to write unit tests, too.

Also, they should maintain a publicly-visible bug tracker. As problems with laws are identified & voted on, they go up the priority list and get assigned to someone to work until the bugs are fixed.

Also, we should be free to run older versions of the software (legislation) if we want to. Upgrades shouldn't be mandatory. We should be able to fork (secede) and keep going with our own branch. The market will decide which laws are truly good that way.

Too much, maybe?

Said this...

[jduhls]

...like, an infinity ago:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1591456&cid=31583092

Re:Legislative Development with CVS, SVN, Hg, or G

[atisss]

Everything sounds great until "older versions" :)

Well, you could keep them in different country(state) but single country is usually the machine laws are running on.. On the other hand, something like UN could actually be the central repository developing, etc..

Gov't == OS

[hey]

Gov't == OS
Agencies == daemons
President == superuser
Election == kill or exec

I gave this some serious thought

[bill_kress]

You could pretty easily implement a democracy inside a republic like the US. Simply start a party where each representative is bound to place every decision he encounters onto a public discussion board--and is required to vote with the majority.

If the board involved discussions like those at slashdot, the process would involve many more voters and ensure that they were more educated--perhaps even improving on a pure democracy by allowing people to vote on individual arguments and not simply the end result--this would record the true meaning behind election results for future refinement.

It would also be reasonable to require members of this party to install a microphone and camera in their office with a 24 hour broadcast.

Yeah, it would have to be iterative--like anything else it would have dozens of bugs and exploits to work out, but in the long run I think it could be made to work--reducing corruption and external financial influences by corporations and lobbyists to almost nill, and wouldn't require a single change to our existing laws.

Re:I gave this some serious thought

[cdrguru]

All this would do is make it even easier for there to be bought-and-paid-for laws.

Instead of having one Congressperson to say "No thanks." there would be millions of people that would have to say "No thanks." End result - lots and lots of people would volunteer their vote for payment. I suspect the overall price per vote would go down, probably way, way down making government far more attractive for "collective bargaining" of the sort that is done by lobbying today.

Think about it, if you reduce the US Government to American Idol what do you really get? One TV ad that says "Vote Yes on Bill 12345 and we will send you a $25 gift card."

Re:I gave this some serious thought

[Shoe Puppet]

Everyone getting a share of the bribe instead of just a select few? That does sound like an improvement to me.

We will live in a just society when I get texted:

[clustro]

"Hello citizen, Congress requires your vote on the matter of Bill XYZ. As required by The Constitution, all bills that pass Congress must possess at least 40% of the popular vote. The full text of the bill is available here. It is 5 pages long. When you are ready to vote, dial this number and press "1" three times for yea, "2" three times for nay, or "3" at any time to cancel. Deadline is in 48 hours. Have a good day sir! -The United States Congress"

flaw

[TiggertheMad]

any proposed law should have to sit, unchanged, for a set period of time (weeks) before being voted on. (New changes reset the clock.)

Where I an opponent of a particular law, I could keep making trivial changes to it right before the timeout expired to perpetually keep it from being voted on. Because almost any law you can think of will have a least 1 opponent, no laws would ever get passed.

But your sentiment is a good one.

Re:We will live in a just society when I get texte

[st_adamin]

Isn't that sort of what Ross Perot wanted? If only someone would have let him finish, or get a word in edge-wise... I like it, especially the 5 page part, but you forgot "standard 3.99 text charges apply." so you could Crow it up a bit.

US Code Wiki

[mbstone]

I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a Wiki with full history.
Could someone please stand up a Wiki with the entire U.S. Code and every change ever made to it, so that it can be viewed as of any date in history. Also I would like to see a graph of sizeof(USCODE)/time.

Re:Legislative Development with CVS, SVN, Hg, or G

[Unordained]

Right, so you need a VM ... cloud ... thing. Actually, in all seriousness, there are a couple known solutions for this:
a) seceding / splitting the jurisdiction. (american revolution?)
b) millet system. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_(Ottoman_Empire) )

Re:We will live in a just society when I get texte

[Blakey Rat]

Well, hell. I could text you that right now. What's your number?

Re:Legislative Development with CVS, SVN, Hg, or G

[Fareq]

The problem is that the people doing the drafting don't want these problems to go away.

They benefit greatly from being able to say whatever is convenient, do whatever is convenient, and then later claim whatever intent is convenient.

Older drafts -

[SgtChaireBourne]

The 'older versions' would be specific snapshots of the draft (in no particular order): Introduced in House, Engrossed in House, Enrolled Bill, Referred to Senate, Reported in Senate, Received in Senate, etc. It's like v0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.4.1, 0.5, 1.0RC1, 1.0RC2, 1.0, etc. You get the point.

The legislative process already follows a development process rather similar to open source software development. Many can review and provide input, or just yammer. Only a few have commit privileges. At specific events, a line is drawn and a version of the bill is released.

If you follow some of the hearings, a lot of time is devoted to reading out loud what are essentially diffs expressed in prose. We can keep that for tradition's sake but it does not preclude using a proper versioning system.

one possible reason to use a distributed versioning system would be to allow schools to tear off a chunk and play with it.