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Farmer-Rick

(10,072 posts)
14. What Democratic system would be the most difficult to capture by uber rich capitalist and criminals?
Tue Aug 7, 2018, 09:13 AM
Aug 2018

A Demarchy and Sortition.

"The Greeks never really trusted elections. They saw them as an oligarchic feature all too often manipulated by demagogues to serve their political agenda."

"Sortition played a key role in Classical Athens. Randomly chosen citizens carried out most ordinary administrative duties in law courts, the police, public finance, etc. Voting was only used for choosing high rank military leaders and a few other officials." ttps://medium.com/kleros/the-revival-of-demarchy-kleros-as-a-political-technology-589eff29806d

"Demarchy (or lottocracy) is a form of government in which the state is governed by randomly selected decision makers who have been selected by sortition (lot) from a broadly inclusive pool of eligible citizens. These groups, sometimes termed "policy juries", "citizens' juries", or "consensus conferences", deliberately make decisions about public policies in much the same way that juries decide criminal cases.

Demarchy, in theory, could overcome some of the functional problems of conventional representative democracy, which is widely subject to manipulation by special interests and a division between professional policymakers (politicians and lobbyists) vs. a largely passive, uninvolved and often uninformed electorate. According to Australian philosopher John Burnheim, random selection of policymakers would make it easier for everyday citizens to meaningfully participate, and harder for special interests to corrupt the process." http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Demarchy

My ideal would be to put every able citizen's name in a hat (figuratively) and randomly pick out names to act as our governmental decision makers. Not only would this be hard to capture, it would be hard to rig because absolutely everyone would have an interest in keeping it random. It would ensure everyone is treated fairly and decently with a full lustrous education because some day they could be your chosen leader or making a decision that will affect you.

If self interest and randomness of the market are a good system for an economy (those perhaps are the only reasons capitalism is even viable), why not also use it for a government? A Demarchy would force otherwise narcissistic people to look out for others in the society because that person could one day be their political leader. The Randomness of the selection would make it very hard to manipulate.

Just throwing it out there as we fringe radical liberals are wont to do.

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