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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skip Danger who wrote (234220)	12/24/2009 12:53:43 PM
From: shades	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

I am stoopid and lazy too, but I am smart enough to know it doesn't matter who gets sent to washington at this point, the kleptocracy is too well entrenched. 500 of the most well meaning congresspeople are too easily corrupted, our representative government has not expanded as our population has grown. We need 5000 national congresspeople, that would make them much more beholden to their local voters, the system we have now is total garbage and far too concentrated. Your vote is irrelevant in the current system - this is a very old problem that needs fixing: tcsdaily.com It is always costly to ensure that agents [government officials] act on behalf of the citizens and that they do not use their power to extract rents from their constituents... The costs of monitoring agents increase not only with the geographic size of the collective but also with the number of people in the collective. This is because in a larger collective each member captures a smaller share of the rents created by collective enforcement and therefore has less incentive to monitor the agent...With the stake in the collective inversely related to group size, we can expect less monitoring and more rent seeking and rent extraction as group size increases." -- Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, The not so Wild, Wild West, p. 30 (article continues) Terry Anderson and Peter Hill make an argument that suggests that democracy does not scale well. As the size of the constituency group gets large, the politician becomes less accountable. Politicians find it easier to extract rents and abuse powers. The end-of-session legislative victories for President Bush and the GOP illustrate the problem. CAFTA passed, but with large concessions to special interests that threaten to undermine the trade benefits. The energy bill was an exercise in pork, as was the transportation bill. To anyone outside of the political/lobbyist complex, it was an all-too-typically dismal legislative performance. I think that Anderson and Hill offer a clue. The sheer size of modern electoral constituencies makes politics a matter of financial muscle and mass marketing. Only with smaller electoral constituencies would the incentive structure change to reduce the arrogance and rent-seeking of elected officials and powerful interest groups. We Need 250 States In 1790, the largest state in the union, Virginia, had a population of under 700,000. Today, Montgomery County has a population of over 900,000. Our nine-member County Council answers to about the same number of registered voters as the entire House of Representatives of the United States at the time of the founding of the Republic. We cannot have an accountable democracy with such large political units. We need to break the political entities in the United States down to a manageable size. Here is what the founding fathers said about a too small congress: progress.org The chief complaints, according to Madison, were that, under the proposed system, Congress would be so small that it would become an "unsafe depository of the public interests"; that the districts would be too large and diverse for any politician to "possess a proper knowledge of the local circumstances of their numerous constituents"; and that such a tiny House would have the net result of attracting the more elitist types whose aim would be the "permanent elevation of the few on the depression of the many." Who is talking about increasing the size of congress to be more beholden to the people they serve - I don't hear that talk anywhere anymore. We need to completely restructure our government.