Washington, DC is really quite nice, leaving aside the taxation without representation. My grandfather lived there, when I was growing up. (My family was just north in Maryland.)
Taxation without representation as a phrase for DC is just leftist sloganeering.
Do you realize how GROSSLY disproportionate it would be to give two U.S. Senate votes to D.C. (besides violating the U.S. Constitution)?
[For the record, I think a voting House seat would be a reasonable “solution”. But it will never happen, because if somehow Republicans accepted it, the second after it passed, demands for two U.S. Senate seats would restart.]
If you genuinely have a problem with “‘taxation without representation” living in DC (which is supremely ironic, imo, since taxes from the rest of the country hugely fund the resources of DC, both directly and indirectly), there is a very easy answer: Move!
> Do you realize how GROSSLY disproportionate it would be to give two U.S. Senate votes to D.C.
Well it has more population than multiple US states, so unless you're suggesting we abolish the Senate entirely (or change it to assign Senators on a populaton-proportional basis, the answer to "how grossly disproportionate would it be?" is "not even a little bit, relative to the status quo."
To be clear, I would be totally fine with abolishing the Senate. Ideally I'd prefer to have a unicameral legislature elected from multi-member districts using a proportional representation system (either Single Transferable Vote for PR, which is IIRC used for the Australian Senate, or Sequential Proportional Approval, which is cheaper to implement, easier to explain, tends to have lower ballot spoilage rates, and has the advantage that simple Approval is better for single-winner elections for complicated reasons that are beyond the scope of this comment, though if you really want to know look up the "center squeeze" problem). And I'd also go parliamentary and just let the majority coalition appoint the executive and implement policy, rather than having the Presidential system. (There's a _reason_ that the US, when guiding other countries like Germany or Japan on setting up a democracy in the 20th century, did not recommend out own system. https://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/american-democracy-doomed )
If we were scrapping things and starting over, I'd also drastically increase the _size_ of that unicameral legislature (like 10k members, which would mean each member is representing on the order of 35k people, the size of a town or large urban neighborhood -- small enough that members can _really_ make themselves available to their constituents on a day-to-day basis), but then do almost all the work of legislating by way of committees and subcommittees, with the full body _only_ taking final up/down votes, not engaging in debate. Maybe you can still have something like an Executive Board made up of the first winner out of each of the 500 twenty-member regions, and they can have debates akin to what the current 435-member House does.
Yes,I get that you’re a leftist who seeks to appropriate wealth from others and redistribute it based on a mob-rule highly centralized authoritarian government. I prefer living in a constitutional republic with a government with limited enumerated powers and strong protections for minorities, and distributed, decentralized power as much as possible
[Yes, it’s true that the U.S. government has moved fairly far from the system at the founding (and yes, I know the founders weren’t perfect…), but we are still closer to that than what you are suggesting.]
But so long as we are playing: I’d change things to still a bi-cameral legislature [and same separate executive branch] but the Senate would be elected partly based on regions as today - say, roughly, 1 Senator for each of the 50 states - while the other half of the Senate would be elected proportionately based on taxes paid. A more equitable variation of the old House of Lords, and a bit like the original intention of the Senate (prevent the central fed government from having too much power over the states. The House would be more or less exactly as today.
And I said up states in the identical fashion, although the state Senate elections would be purely based on state taxes paid.
With such a system, it would make it harder for political authoritarian mobs to tax wealth to redistribute it. Not impossible, but harder.
And of course I’d make it much harder to pass new laws, and to do crony-type stuff at the Federal level. But now we’re getting into way too much detail.
thanks for playing… 😏
Back to the original point, “taxation without representation” is still just a slogan to try to increase Democrat power in Congress. period. the idea that the people in D.C. are actually not represented in practice is ridiculous. and again, anyone who feels that way can always move. It’s still a (relatively) free country…
LOL. I'm a moderate-left fan of folks like Matt Yglesias. I'm an "abundance agenda" guy, I'm in favor of finding ways to compromise with people like Glenn Youngkin in VA or Greg Gianforte in Montana, who have pushed some good pro-supply measures.
And since you're obviously incapable of reading comprehension or arguing in good faith, you're getting blocked now. Bye, Felicia.
Spoken like a typical leftist snowflake. Since I don't agree with you and I type things you don't like, your answer is to shut down the conversation. And call me by a female name.
But I am the one incapable of arguing in good faith. Got it.
He/she said many things that make it easy to pass laws with slim majorities, as well as that he/she wants to eliminate the bi-cameral legislature and separately elected executive offering a real division of power.
It was directly connected to what he/she actually said.
Okay fine, so the "centralized" part, one word of your comment, does have a connection to what he said. It's still a gross strawman. And your argument that it would be disproportionate to give two Senators to D.C. is still complete nonsense.
Your state does not have to be tied for your vote to matter. This assumption makes the math easier, but in reality "affect the outcome" means your vote made it more likely your candidate wins with no recount needed and more likely your candidate wins if there is a recount. Looking at it this way might help inspire a voter who might otherwise not vote, but it might not correct any systematic errors in the math.
Well I've been thinking about this for a while so I do have immediate thoughts.
1) I first ran across the argument in section one after reading this post by Scott Aarsonson: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1162, who I think would reject anything not within the traditional game theoretic framework, or at least claim agnosticism verging on atheism about decision theories which give "correct" answers to various famous thought experiments. Interestingly he does give an argument for one boxing, but it's due to the particulars of the setup so beside my point: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=30. Personally, I think it's even more obvious that we should be voting than, say, cooperating in a one shot prisoner's dilemma, assuming there is an actual difference between candidates and the election is fair, both of which might be debatable in real life. The thing is, this argument is never going to work for me personally IRL any time soon. I don't just spend a couple hours going to the polls, I ruminate constantly about US politics and what it might mean for the future. It's got some entertainment value, which seems to have lessened lately unfortunately, but otherwise is wholly unpleasant to say the least. I was born inclined to hate politics so much that the value of not caring about the news or politics would be incalculable, much more than a few thousand or even million dollars, which I realize might make me an outlier, yet it is obvious to me that I should still vote and put at least some thought into it. Also, I don't just care about an integration of EV over all possible universes, if that can even be made into a coherent concept, I would try to put a single value on the distribution itself, this is why we have the Kelly criterion. Otherwise I'd be brushing up on my poker, borrowing as much as I could against my assets, and driving to vegas to play a single session. Anyway, it's still nice to have some lower bounds on the value of voting, and I imagine you'd agree the actual value is higher than what would be doing the type of calculation you showed above.
2) I agree the broad rejection of participating in lesser of two evils decisions by certain segments of the left is a mistake, a grave one, it's not consistent with other positions they've taken, for example in their historical analysis of various revolutions, and a default narrative should have as few cracks as possible. And it's a hard sell to people because you have to first convince someone the both sides are evil part and really make it ring true, not an easy task.
3) The heuristic "if you want X, you should give power to people who also want X and not the opposite of X" is probably a good one, but in politics it's not a simple calculation. We don't actually know what candidates want, whether they have a chance of getting what they want, or what sacrifices they're willing to make to do so. This information is intentionally obscured and I think just about everyone knows this, so the importance of symbolism is magnified and practicality diminished, the waters are just so muddy... I would liken this heuristic to the also timely and relevant "if tech bros are hyping something up it's probably either vapor, a scam, or just outright bad", in other words usually true but in certain situations not enough to rely on to make a decision. To be blunt, I believe we may be in a special situation where both heuristics fail, and this is of course referring to AI and the upcoming US election. And I'll just outright say my hot take: if I lived in a swing state I am not sure who I'd vote for in the general election, but it would definitely not be a third party candidate. And I hope it goes without saying that I think Trump is probably more evil and wants more bad things than Harris, but in this specific time I believe other considerations might be extremely important, thankfully I will not have to use this information and will not be voting for either.
Washington, DC is really quite nice, leaving aside the taxation without representation. My grandfather lived there, when I was growing up. (My family was just north in Maryland.)
Taxation without representation as a phrase for DC is just leftist sloganeering.
Do you realize how GROSSLY disproportionate it would be to give two U.S. Senate votes to D.C. (besides violating the U.S. Constitution)?
[For the record, I think a voting House seat would be a reasonable “solution”. But it will never happen, because if somehow Republicans accepted it, the second after it passed, demands for two U.S. Senate seats would restart.]
If you genuinely have a problem with “‘taxation without representation” living in DC (which is supremely ironic, imo, since taxes from the rest of the country hugely fund the resources of DC, both directly and indirectly), there is a very easy answer: Move!
> Do you realize how GROSSLY disproportionate it would be to give two U.S. Senate votes to D.C.
Well it has more population than multiple US states, so unless you're suggesting we abolish the Senate entirely (or change it to assign Senators on a populaton-proportional basis, the answer to "how grossly disproportionate would it be?" is "not even a little bit, relative to the status quo."
To be clear, I would be totally fine with abolishing the Senate. Ideally I'd prefer to have a unicameral legislature elected from multi-member districts using a proportional representation system (either Single Transferable Vote for PR, which is IIRC used for the Australian Senate, or Sequential Proportional Approval, which is cheaper to implement, easier to explain, tends to have lower ballot spoilage rates, and has the advantage that simple Approval is better for single-winner elections for complicated reasons that are beyond the scope of this comment, though if you really want to know look up the "center squeeze" problem). And I'd also go parliamentary and just let the majority coalition appoint the executive and implement policy, rather than having the Presidential system. (There's a _reason_ that the US, when guiding other countries like Germany or Japan on setting up a democracy in the 20th century, did not recommend out own system. https://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/american-democracy-doomed )
If we were scrapping things and starting over, I'd also drastically increase the _size_ of that unicameral legislature (like 10k members, which would mean each member is representing on the order of 35k people, the size of a town or large urban neighborhood -- small enough that members can _really_ make themselves available to their constituents on a day-to-day basis), but then do almost all the work of legislating by way of committees and subcommittees, with the full body _only_ taking final up/down votes, not engaging in debate. Maybe you can still have something like an Executive Board made up of the first winner out of each of the 500 twenty-member regions, and they can have debates akin to what the current 435-member House does.
Yes,I get that you’re a leftist who seeks to appropriate wealth from others and redistribute it based on a mob-rule highly centralized authoritarian government. I prefer living in a constitutional republic with a government with limited enumerated powers and strong protections for minorities, and distributed, decentralized power as much as possible
[Yes, it’s true that the U.S. government has moved fairly far from the system at the founding (and yes, I know the founders weren’t perfect…), but we are still closer to that than what you are suggesting.]
But so long as we are playing: I’d change things to still a bi-cameral legislature [and same separate executive branch] but the Senate would be elected partly based on regions as today - say, roughly, 1 Senator for each of the 50 states - while the other half of the Senate would be elected proportionately based on taxes paid. A more equitable variation of the old House of Lords, and a bit like the original intention of the Senate (prevent the central fed government from having too much power over the states. The House would be more or less exactly as today.
And I said up states in the identical fashion, although the state Senate elections would be purely based on state taxes paid.
With such a system, it would make it harder for political authoritarian mobs to tax wealth to redistribute it. Not impossible, but harder.
And of course I’d make it much harder to pass new laws, and to do crony-type stuff at the Federal level. But now we’re getting into way too much detail.
thanks for playing… 😏
Back to the original point, “taxation without representation” is still just a slogan to try to increase Democrat power in Congress. period. the idea that the people in D.C. are actually not represented in practice is ridiculous. and again, anyone who feels that way can always move. It’s still a (relatively) free country…
LOL. I'm a moderate-left fan of folks like Matt Yglesias. I'm an "abundance agenda" guy, I'm in favor of finding ways to compromise with people like Glenn Youngkin in VA or Greg Gianforte in Montana, who have pushed some good pro-supply measures.
And since you're obviously incapable of reading comprehension or arguing in good faith, you're getting blocked now. Bye, Felicia.
Spoken like a typical leftist snowflake. Since I don't agree with you and I type things you don't like, your answer is to shut down the conversation. And call me by a female name.
But I am the one incapable of arguing in good faith. Got it.
"Yes, I get that you're [complete strawman with no connection to what he actually said]."
He/she said many things that make it easy to pass laws with slim majorities, as well as that he/she wants to eliminate the bi-cameral legislature and separately elected executive offering a real division of power.
It was directly connected to what he/she actually said.
Okay fine, so the "centralized" part, one word of your comment, does have a connection to what he said. It's still a gross strawman. And your argument that it would be disproportionate to give two Senators to D.C. is still complete nonsense.
I made the same argument as Edlin et al in a paper in 1987 criticising public choice theory
Quiggin, J. 1987. Egoistic Rationality and Public Choice: A Critical Review of Theory and Evidence*. Economic Record 63 (180): 10-21.
and am working on a revised version now in a paper advocating IRV/RCV for a US audience
(The graphic from the Journal of Economic Inquiry seems to have not gotten embedded.)
Thanks! Fixed.
Professor Caplan should read this, and stop misguiding the youth :)
Your state does not have to be tied for your vote to matter. This assumption makes the math easier, but in reality "affect the outcome" means your vote made it more likely your candidate wins with no recount needed and more likely your candidate wins if there is a recount. Looking at it this way might help inspire a voter who might otherwise not vote, but it might not correct any systematic errors in the math.
Well I've been thinking about this for a while so I do have immediate thoughts.
1) I first ran across the argument in section one after reading this post by Scott Aarsonson: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1162, who I think would reject anything not within the traditional game theoretic framework, or at least claim agnosticism verging on atheism about decision theories which give "correct" answers to various famous thought experiments. Interestingly he does give an argument for one boxing, but it's due to the particulars of the setup so beside my point: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=30. Personally, I think it's even more obvious that we should be voting than, say, cooperating in a one shot prisoner's dilemma, assuming there is an actual difference between candidates and the election is fair, both of which might be debatable in real life. The thing is, this argument is never going to work for me personally IRL any time soon. I don't just spend a couple hours going to the polls, I ruminate constantly about US politics and what it might mean for the future. It's got some entertainment value, which seems to have lessened lately unfortunately, but otherwise is wholly unpleasant to say the least. I was born inclined to hate politics so much that the value of not caring about the news or politics would be incalculable, much more than a few thousand or even million dollars, which I realize might make me an outlier, yet it is obvious to me that I should still vote and put at least some thought into it. Also, I don't just care about an integration of EV over all possible universes, if that can even be made into a coherent concept, I would try to put a single value on the distribution itself, this is why we have the Kelly criterion. Otherwise I'd be brushing up on my poker, borrowing as much as I could against my assets, and driving to vegas to play a single session. Anyway, it's still nice to have some lower bounds on the value of voting, and I imagine you'd agree the actual value is higher than what would be doing the type of calculation you showed above.
2) I agree the broad rejection of participating in lesser of two evils decisions by certain segments of the left is a mistake, a grave one, it's not consistent with other positions they've taken, for example in their historical analysis of various revolutions, and a default narrative should have as few cracks as possible. And it's a hard sell to people because you have to first convince someone the both sides are evil part and really make it ring true, not an easy task.
3) The heuristic "if you want X, you should give power to people who also want X and not the opposite of X" is probably a good one, but in politics it's not a simple calculation. We don't actually know what candidates want, whether they have a chance of getting what they want, or what sacrifices they're willing to make to do so. This information is intentionally obscured and I think just about everyone knows this, so the importance of symbolism is magnified and practicality diminished, the waters are just so muddy... I would liken this heuristic to the also timely and relevant "if tech bros are hyping something up it's probably either vapor, a scam, or just outright bad", in other words usually true but in certain situations not enough to rely on to make a decision. To be blunt, I believe we may be in a special situation where both heuristics fail, and this is of course referring to AI and the upcoming US election. And I'll just outright say my hot take: if I lived in a swing state I am not sure who I'd vote for in the general election, but it would definitely not be a third party candidate. And I hope it goes without saying that I think Trump is probably more evil and wants more bad things than Harris, but in this specific time I believe other considerations might be extremely important, thankfully I will not have to use this information and will not be voting for either.
You *could* vote for Heaven, aka the Libertarian Party ticket.
Sure, if Hell freezes over.