jmg@houxk.UUCP (08/26/83)
Larry Kolodney's article brought out some good points although the
suggested solution is impractical:
1. many congressmen are clowns (or corrupt)
2. they belong to a small class (lawyers) which is not representative
of the general population
3. they represent special interests which are often contrary to
welfare of the general population
Let's examine this for a moment. I think we can draw a valid analogy
between the congress and an open loop amplifier.
1. the output is not well regulated because there is little or no
feedback
2. what frequently comes out is noise
3. the darn thing has a tendency to break into oscillations
I suggest that no matter how we try to adjust the volume of the
amplifier it will never work properly. The only thing to do is to redesign.
Because of the abuse and overuse of the term "democracy" ("Let's make
the world safe for democracy.") many people are not aware that the U.S. is
a republic. "I pledge allegiance to the flag and to the REPUBLIC for which
it stands....". If you think about it you'll realize that there are no
democracies in the world today. There were some in ancient Greece when there
were city-states small enough so that you could call everybody together for
a vote. But with the birth of the modern nation-states it became impractical
to call everyone together to vote on things because of the tremendous distances
involved. So, the expedient thing to do was to elect a representative and send
him to the capitol to represent our views. This was always regarded as a
temporary expedient and a necessary evil as evidenced by our frequent use of
the term "democracy". In the back of our minds that was always the ideal. But
with the arrival of modern communications technology we now have the means
to finally achieve that ideal. By means of the communication media we can
inform the public of questions to be voted on and all the various aspects
of each question and the communications media (the telephone system using
digital data tranmission) can send our votes back to the capitol for counting.
To avoid tying up the phone system we could send our votes out during early
morning hours when the system is under-utilized. We could enter our vote on
a small digital device attached to our phone along with a pre-arranged secret
identity code to prevent tampering. A local vote tabulating machine in our
local district could poll us by calling up the box attached to the phone in
the middle of the night while we are sleeping. The box would automatically
answer the phone, transmit the vote, receive a secret acknowledgement code
and hang up the phone. The local vote tabulating machine would then transmit
the vote totals by encrypted communication to the capitol or some higher
district vote counter.
By this means we could gradually eliminate the voting power of the
congress (keep them on hand to debate the various aspects of each public
question but without real voting power) and the governing of the nation
could be returned to the people. And that's what's called democracy.
Joe McGheeparker@psuvax.UUCP (08/29/83)
re: Joe McGhee Your idea about having everybody vote on every issue ignores a few important problems. 1) How will the issues to be voted on be chosen? 2) How will the phrasing of the question to be voted on be done (assuming you want a simple yes-or-no answer)? 3) How will people become informed of the different sides of the issue? 4) Do we care to do anything about voter apathy? Indeed where are people going to find the time and inclination to do all this? Setting agendas, formulating the questions, and properly distributing the information are not things easily accomplished by 250 million people. If you could solve these problems, we would have a democracy in the sense that each and every one of us would participate and exert a proportional control over the direction of the government. Unfortunately, these problems appear insurmountable. I guess this says more about why we are a republic, though folks like Alexander Hamilton never did trust the common folk anyway. Bruce Parker Penn State