A random-sample Congress might work, but there’s two major problems:
-The expert problem: Running a government is not easy. There’s a whole slew of problems (including the organization and nuances of the bureaucracy, for instance) that require extensive knowledge to make informed decisions about. “Professional” politicians alleviate this somewhat, since they can (ideally) devote all their time to learning about these issues, over the course of several terms if necessary. (That’s at least one good reason why freshmen members of Congress usually aren’t committee chairs.) Without the benefit of experience, the de jure decision makers would have to rely (even more than they do now) on lobbyists, meaning government would be even more in the hands of those with the most money. Longer terms or more stringent selection would help with this, but then that runs into the second problem.
-The civil rights problem: Random selection may work for composing juries, but running a government is a full-time job that would take several years to become acquainted with (see above). Not only are people going to be rather unhappy to be pulled from their lives to do something they may not be suited for, but from a purely economic standpoint, you’re removing productive members of society from their places. (Imagine if, say, Steve Jobs was chosen—suddenly a major corporation has lost the leader it has been taking a significant amount of its direction from.) Exemptions based on various circumstances might help, but that would at the same time result in a lower quality of legislator.
To be fair, this is part of how the original Athenian democracy worked, which functioned well enough. Perhaps in an entirely new government, where society would then grow based around the expectation of being randomly selected as a legislator, it might work, but I can’t see this functioning in the U.S. system without major concurrent overhauls.
The biggest issue I see is the “lawmakers end up getting seriously owned by lobbyists” issue. I think that limiting, at the very least, to people who actively WANTED to be a lawmaker would solve several of your problems.
There are potential issues with the education requirements I outlined in my post (the question of “who controls the education requirements” leaves open possible corruption, a la literacy tests). But I think it’s worth considering.
I agree that this would work better for a new government than retrofitting an existing one.
The biggest issue I see is the “lawmakers end up getting seriously owned by lobbyists” issue. I think that limiting, at the very least, to people who actively WANTED to be a lawmaker would solve several of your problems.
One of the main advantages of the random congress is that it doesn’t favor people who want to be lawmakers. See HHGTTG.
I think that limiting, at the very least, to people who actively WANTED to be a lawmaker would solve several of your problems.
This, however, leads to the tragedy of the commons problem that it’s in each faction’s interest to increase the number of it’s members who WANT to be lawmakers to increase the chance that one of them is selected.
A random-sample Congress might work, but there’s two major problems: -The expert problem: Running a government is not easy. There’s a whole slew of problems (including the organization and nuances of the bureaucracy, for instance) that require extensive knowledge to make informed decisions about. “Professional” politicians alleviate this somewhat, since they can (ideally) devote all their time to learning about these issues, over the course of several terms if necessary. (That’s at least one good reason why freshmen members of Congress usually aren’t committee chairs.) Without the benefit of experience, the de jure decision makers would have to rely (even more than they do now) on lobbyists, meaning government would be even more in the hands of those with the most money. Longer terms or more stringent selection would help with this, but then that runs into the second problem. -The civil rights problem: Random selection may work for composing juries, but running a government is a full-time job that would take several years to become acquainted with (see above). Not only are people going to be rather unhappy to be pulled from their lives to do something they may not be suited for, but from a purely economic standpoint, you’re removing productive members of society from their places. (Imagine if, say, Steve Jobs was chosen—suddenly a major corporation has lost the leader it has been taking a significant amount of its direction from.) Exemptions based on various circumstances might help, but that would at the same time result in a lower quality of legislator.
To be fair, this is part of how the original Athenian democracy worked, which functioned well enough. Perhaps in an entirely new government, where society would then grow based around the expectation of being randomly selected as a legislator, it might work, but I can’t see this functioning in the U.S. system without major concurrent overhauls.
The biggest issue I see is the “lawmakers end up getting seriously owned by lobbyists” issue. I think that limiting, at the very least, to people who actively WANTED to be a lawmaker would solve several of your problems.
There are potential issues with the education requirements I outlined in my post (the question of “who controls the education requirements” leaves open possible corruption, a la literacy tests). But I think it’s worth considering.
I agree that this would work better for a new government than retrofitting an existing one.
One of the main advantages of the random congress is that it doesn’t favor people who want to be lawmakers. See HHGTTG.
This, however, leads to the tragedy of the commons problem that it’s in each faction’s interest to increase the number of it’s members who WANT to be lawmakers to increase the chance that one of them is selected.