Better late than never, eh Stanton?

From hughes@toad.com Sun Aug 22 20:07:28 1993 To: plmoses@unix.cc.emory.edu (Paul L. Moses) Subject: [plmoses@unix.cc.emory.edu (Paul L. Moses): forwarding] Date: Sun, 22 Aug 93 17:07:20 -0700 From: hughes@toad.com

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From anton@hydra.unm.edu Sun Aug 15 03:21:35 1993 From: Stanton McCandlish Subject: Re: On The Inherent Evil of Electronic Democracy To: plmoses@unix.cc.emory.edu (Paul L. Moses) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1993 01:21:25 -0600 (MDT) In-Reply-To: <9308121908.AA06721@emoryu1.cc.emory.edu> from "Paul L. Moses" at Aug 12, 93 03:08:00 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL21] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 3327

Quoth Paul L. Moses, verily I say unto thee: - -=> - -=>Regarding the Electronic Democracy idea, I vote with Tim May. Look at the

Just the opposite here.

One factor has been missing from this discussion.

Representative "democracy" is a statist imposition.

One other factor:

The number of issues to be voted on is quite large. Even with easy access via cable-tv data networks, public voting kiosks, etc, no one will be able to keep up. This will immediately result in demand for LESS legislation, which is a good thing no matter how you look at it.

Simple requirements for quorums before a proposition comes up for voting would head off most goofy bills right from the start. If you have to have at least, say, 10% of the population to vote to ALLOW AN ISSUE TO EVEN BE VOTED ON, most idiot bills will be nipped in the bud. One other thing you'll see disappear is "private laws". Our congress wastes an incredible amount of time and money working on laws that affect only one corporation, or one small area. For one thing, most of this stuff is irrelevant as far as the Law of the Land goes. It's not something our legislature should be involved in. Let companies work out their own damn problems. For another, local-area laws should be handled by local areas. Period. In my opinion.

The main objection I keep seeing is that all them loonies will vote for stupid laws. I'd like to ask you how many of these people vote NOW? Not very many. The idiotic, the lazy, and the careless do not vote, by and large. The people that vote are the people that think about issues, and decide that they want to do something about them.

Anyway, when some of this comes about, and it is quite inevitable, I would hope that a very least e-voting gives the people veto power, to directly overturn anything passed by congress and the prez, and even the power to kill bills before they even get past the discussion stage. Add to that the right to directly propose legislation, provided there is a quorum, and I think that would be a good starting point.

If all Tim and others with the same views are upset about is that a sudden change could result in utter chaos, I have no argument with that. The changes must be gradual, so as to not cause a governmental backlash. I can see just installing the system and cutting congress out of the picture entirely. The resulting mess would be allowed to go on for about a month, before the pres declared martial law due to national emergency, and then it'd be all over. One thing that irritates the hell out of me about many anarch[o-capital]ists and libertarians, is an all or nothing stance. Some of you folks don't seem to clue to the ideas of compromise, gradual change, long-term planning, and strategic retreat to throw an enemy off balance. You aren't going to take the world by storm, and Tim's dire predictions of a hell hole that would result if such occured are right on the mark. Play our cards right, and we'll take the world by whispering breeze.

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