pktechgirlbackup | voting by name

Problems arise in a democracy when the costs and benefits of an action have different distributions. For example, farm subsidies cost all of us a little bit, but strongly benefit the farmers that receive it. Farmers are more invested in receiving those benefits than the rest of us are fighting it, so they continue, even though everyone I know and read on every part of the political spectrum think they're a bad idea. Or consider building a new prison, or a nuclear power plant (assuming a new prison or plant is needed): the benefits are distributed across society, but the costs are highly concentrated in the geographic area around the new construction. For a more recent example, consider sleeping bags. Senator Sessions of Alabama is threatening to kill a trade bill unless it maintains an unusually high tariff on sleeping bags. Why? Because a major sleeping bag factory is located in Alabama. And he'll probably succeed, because no one cares enough about a small increase in the cost of sleeping bags. Some of this is unavoidable, but it's made worse by the way the federal government is organized. People in geographic areas often have interests in common. Congresspeople represents a geographic areas. This is basic math.

One of the reasons it's hard to cut pork is that it's hard to define pork: hospitals are good, research is potentially useful, and we need a certain number of army bases. But the calculus of how many and where is screwed by our geography-based representation system. What if, instead, we divided everyone in the country into 100 geographic groups (could be random, could be alphabetical, could be some other thing I haven't thought of), and each group got a senator? We could do the same thing with 435 groups for Representatives, with the groups maybe or maybe not being subset of the senator groups. Now the Iowa corn farmers are mixed in with a bunch of people who would like to not pay people to not grow things, and so the senator has less incentive to screw the rest of the country to help them. Not zero incentive, because the corn growers will still lobby more for free money than other people will lobby against it, but definitely less. The army could make decisions about base closings based on whether or not they needed a given base, not based on which congressman was most influential.

This doesn't solve every problem- I still see a need for state and municipal governments, so the Michigan governor who does the useful thing and helps people leave still gets screwed- but in one fell swoop, we've eliminated the small-state bias problem and made a significant dent in the geographic concentration of benefits problem. There would be some logistical problems, but how hard could be it be to solve them, compared to the benefits?