Okay, let's deal wtihthat point by point: -- Left-Wing Discussion

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Date Posted: Fri 2003-08-01 12:14:47
Author: Redeye
Subject: Okay, let's deal wtihthat point by point:
In reply to: Occam 's message, "Re: What would you say about the following suggestion for constitution?" on Thu 2003-07-31 21:53:03

2. Accepted.

6. I'm not sure how it applies here. If this applies to Article 2, then protection from fundamentalists can be achieved thru Article 3 and while enemy troops may enter under Article 6, they'll probably be in violation of gun control laws (which Congress may enact under Article 59).

7. It probably would... However:
a) The United States' current enemy is not a power that can invade it but a terrorist organization. You don't need 500,000 troops to fight a terrorist organization, you need to be kinder to the people in the area it operates from, a couple of spies, a couple of informers, and a combat chopper or two. The mode of warfare of the future is terrorism, not conventional war.
b) When the people believe the war is just, there'll always be enough of them willing to sign up for cannon fodder.
c) When the country is unable to protect its citizens without forcing some of them to die for it, it fails its mission and thus doesn't really deserve much protection anyway.

8. a) I see your point. The best way around it, methinks, is that if initiative or recall fails (there's a provision in Article 26 for recall votes in Congress, so there can be a recall initiative), no similar proposal may be submitted in the next year. The Davis recall would've proceeded anyway because Davis' approval rate is lower than Nixon's at the height of Watergate, but at least there will be no attempts to disrupt the political process.

b) Elections are already done by approval in my proposal, i.e. everyone can vote for as many or as few candidates as he wishes. The other method you suggested, Instant Runoff Vote (IRV), suffers from several deficiencies, such as counting nightmares (under plurality or approval, you can sum up each vote as a matrix of size N where N is the number of candidates, but under IRV the number is N! so when there are many candidates the votes have to be first shipped to and counted in a central location).

c) I don't think it's so unreasonable. The idea is that every voter may specialize in up to five issues out of the twenty-seven, in order to maximize the infromation every voter has (I have yet to meet a single person who is informed about 10 issues, let alone 27). Moreover, by limiting the number of legislatures a voter may vote for, the number of people per specialized legislator can be reduced by an order of 5.5.

11. a) I think that while guarantees of basic quality of life are in order too (I now realize I forgot to include them, perhaps as another sentence in Article 12), the loophole here ensures that the government will supply those guarantees. It's a little like guns: the right to resistance as in Germany's constitution is one thing, but the right to bear arms, without which resistance is much harder, is the thing that guarantees it.

b) No; a ban on retroactive legislation is different from a ban on retroactive judgment. The former takes the form of "since we've abolished manual recounts of votes in elections, and since the current president lost in the machine conut but won in the manual count, he needs to step out in favor of the guy who came in a close second."

12. So, does "Every person has the right to government-paid health care" solve the problem?

14. Good point.

16. Eight nations, at least three of which are quite hostile to the USA (Russia, France, and China) need to approve of UN action; hence, there's little room for unilateralism here.

17. Right.

18. Oops...

23. a) Interesting idea, actually. The costs won't be prohibitive anyway because there will probably be many referenda on odd years' Election Days anyway.

b) Lists, as in party lists. For example, the Democratic Party will run as a list of 400 names from number 1 (e.g. Gephardt) to number 400; if it gets exactly 41% of the vote, then the first 164 names on the list will enter Congress. While we're at it, I'm not sure that this idea is better than that the Democrats will run as a coalition of, say, 500 people, and people will be able to vote for one party and one person in it; if the Democrats get 41% this way, then the 164 people with the highest vote totals inside the Democratic party will enter Congress.

24. a) The four years is mainly in order to ensure that people can vote for their Senators once every two years. Needless to say, theoretically they can whenever 2% of the electorate (maybe it should be a higher percentage for Senate races - say, 5% - given the ease that the GOP got 20% of the ~30% who voted last election in California to sign the recall-Davis petition).

b) Yes, pairs of Senators will have the same boundaries, even though they might change between their elections. So, for example, Hawaii will vote with one of NoCal's districts, Alaska will vote either with Washington or with Idaho/Montana/Wyoming/Utah, and so on.

c) Only in the same election.

26. I stand corrected.

28. Right, but on those issues that Article 59 prohibits the Federal government from legislating about, Congress can't say for example "criminalize marijuana," but rather, "decide if you want to criminalize marijuana or not."

29. No... What happens is that if, as in the example given above in 23 b), Pelosi (#2) resigns, then number 3 on the list becomes 2, number 4 becomes 3, and so on, and number 165 becomes 164 and thus enters Congress in Pelosi's stead. It may well result in a liberal replacing a conservative and vice versa, but only if parties run like the Democrats and the Republicans do today, i.e. as coalitions, as opposed to how third-parties and European parties run, i.e. as smaller groups of truly like-minded people. Moreover, there will be no vote splitting in any Senate or Presidential election because you can simply vote for all liberal candidates and for none of the conservative candidates. One of the benefits of Approval vote is that no candidate can change the outcome of the race by running or by not running unless he is the winner.

31. This will be like primary elections, or at least like primary elections in California: you request the ballots you want, and vote on them. You don't get the ballots of all parties in California's primaries, but only the ballot of the party you are registered for or the party you request if you're an Independent. Similarly, you'll be able to request five SL ballots of your choice, e.g. education, scientific research, foreign policy, international trade, and energy.

33. Right.

35. I think that this is a reasonable idea, both because the Senate has to approve secretaries anyway and because the interim president can be recalled if he does things similar to Andrew Johnson's cabinet changes.

37. The whole idea of pardon is that the president can pardon a convicted criminal. The impeachment exception is meant to ensure that the president doesn't pardon himself, because I can imagine Nixon doing just that instead of resigning.

40. The presidential candidates will most likely have to have governmental experience to be electable. The only presidents the USA's ever had who hadn't held any elected position before are Washington and Eisenhower, AFAIK. If the voters don't know somebody well enough, they'll unapprove him in the election so he'll be lucky to get Perot's 19%, let alone win the election. As for age limits, I'm not sure what their function is other than to ensure that candidates are educated enough, which doesn't have much effect beyond 30 or even 25. The National Knowledge Exam is a pass/fail thing, meant to ensure that presidents refer to children as "are" rather than "is" and know the name of Canada's Prime Minister. Ethics shoudl be something else, an exam that candidates can't fail but whose results are publicized so that the voters know how to treat someone who says "god is the sole proprietor of ethics and morals; without him [sic], there's no morality or good."

57. The voters in the state. Theoretically, 50 states (including DC) can secede and form their own government, thus throwing the remaining state into the dirt, but in almost all cases they can make the state's people's lives a living hell anyway without giving them independence.

59. First, a flat tax means that everybody pays the same amount, e.g. everyone pays $5,000 per year. When the proportion to one's income is fixed, the tax is proportional, and when it increases with income, as under your suggestion (as the exempt part becomes smaller relative to the whole as income rises), it's progressive. Second, 60% not only is larger than the size relative to GDP of every non-communist government in the world (even Sweden's is ~50%, even though the rich pay 80% in marginal income tax) but also gives a lot of leeway for progressive taxation. The main function of this limit is to prevent situations as in 1970s' Britain, when marginal taxes at one point were something like 104% (89% income + 15% investment or something like that).

60. First, the debt rises by more than 1% every year thanks to a certain president's tax policy. Second, 1% every year means that even with a compeltely balanced budget the debt's half life is 69 years. Third, it's really not the USA's debtors' fault that the said president can't balance a budget properly. Fourth, there is the issue of a balanced budget article, but I'd rather not deprive the government of its ability to run deficits in times of need.

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