I'll take them in order: the one thing we know that politicians are competent at, if they have been elected, is being elected. That is it. In that sense, I would submit that the average politician is no more qualified to run a government of even moderate size than my next door neighbor. Worse, politicians are self-selected and often deluded about their basic intelligence and competency. Given that, I would be against the idea of any kind of selection on the basis of competence (or probable competence). A jury has none; I am fine with whomever we get. William F. Buckley once famously stated that he would rather “entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”
I agree entirely, and for the same reason.
Frankly, with a lottery, we are far more likely to stumble across the sort of people you would like to see in public office than we do now. We will also get an assortment of regular people, some smarter or dumber than others. Which, from my perspective is fine. I am terribly happy with government that doesn't do much unless it has to, and when it has to, the solutions are pretty clear.
The Founders were not necessarily slave owners. Most people weren't. The problem was that unless they made some provision to allow for the existence of slavery, the South would not join the Union; the South also wanted the slave population to count in apportionment, even though they would never vote. Non-slave owners extracted two compromises, neither perfect. One forbade Congress from banning importation of slaves until after 1800; the other was that slaves counted as 3/5ths of a person, somewhat reducing the size of Southern apportionment.
As for the system of government, it was definitely a republic, and voting was based on whether or not you owned property. The idea was that you needed to have skin in the game to vote. And in some places, even early on, there were no property requirements.
I find restrictions on campaign finance tantamount to restrictions on speech. Given that, I don’t fundamentally care if Bill Gates gives a million to elect Fred to the Senate, so long as we know that he did it. (And anyone of any sense at all would immediately run against such a person as being the Senator from Microsoft.) What we have now is nowhere as direct, a great deal more secretive, and every bit as corrupting. And it takes politicians a great deal of time to fundraise that would be better spent actually reading the damn bills and sitting in committee meetings. Unless. Unless the politician is rich, in which case, they fund their own campaign, and rule by the people, for the people, slips farther away. It is no coincidence that people like Michael Bloomberg, Eliot Spitzer, Herbert Kohl, Edward Kennedy and John Kerry got and stayed elected. What I find baffling is that people generally disposed towards campaign finance restrictions don’t scream louder about self financing by millionaires (or billionaires).
But under my system, it wouldn’t matter how rich you are; if you are selected in the lottery, you serve. Otherwise, no amount of money or connections will get you an office, even assuming you want one.
A note about education commissions and the like. Again, members are self selected, as the system sits today. They are nominated and confirmed by politicians, and serve until they leave, are thrown out, or their term is up. But they would be neither in place nor seeking a commission job under my system. If it happened, they would serve a term and then it would be over.
I do not expect that this sort of arrangement would result in governmental utopia. I don’t trust such things anyway. But I do believe that things would be relatively cleaner, if only because gaming a system takes time and understanding, and citizen legislators would have little of either.
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