A gram of circumvention is worth a metric ton of lobbying.
Charles Johnson
Tagged: Democracy RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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mazsa
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mazsa
The perils of extreme democracy – California offers a warning to voters all over the world http://www.economist.com/node/18586520?story_id=18586520
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mazsa
“[...] The problem with the U.S. government is that its allocation of resources is highly inefficient. We spend vast amounts of money on subsidies for housing, agriculture and health, many of which distort the economy and do little for long-term growth. We spend too little on science, technology, innovation and infrastructure, which will produce growth and jobs in the future. For the past few decades, we have been able to be wasteful and get by. But we will not be able to do it much longer. The money is running out, and we will have to marshal funds and target spending far more strategically. This is not a question of too much or too little government, too much or too little spending. We need more government and more spending in some places and less in others.
The tragedy is that Washington knows this. For all the partisan polarization there, most Republicans know that we have to invest in some key areas, and most Democrats know that we have to cut entitlement spending. But we have a political system that has become allergic to compromise and practical solutions. This may be our greatest blind spot. [...]” http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2056610,00.html
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mazsa
The democracy of the state will always be of the state, by the state and for the state.
David D’Amato -
mazsa
[Video] Voting is violence, Riley Yieding
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#Egypt: Yuppie Revolution Is Over, Islamist Revolution Has Begun:
Now that Mubarek is gone, the western media mostly has moved on to the next revolution, secure in the perception that Egypt is moving in the right direction. But that is a false comfort. [...] over a million Egyptians turned out in Tahrir Square last Friday to cheer the vile anti-Semitic Sunni cleric Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who had been exiled by Mubarek, and who espouses the fundamentalist Islamic view that Jews must live as Dhimmis under Islamic control. http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2011/02/yuppie-revolution-in-egypt-is-over.html
Google executive Wael Ghonim, who emerged as a leading voice in Egypt’s uprising, was barred from the stage in Tahrir Square on Friday by security guards, an AFP photographer said. Ghonim tried to take the stage in Tahrir, the epicentre of anti-regime protests that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, but men who appeared to be guarding influential Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi barred him from doing so. http://www.hindustantimes.com/Egypt-protest-hero-Wael-Ghonim-barred-from-stage/Article1-663996.aspx
The end of the Camp David accords? Two million Egyptians aim to ‘liberate’ Jerusalem:
For those whose Arabic is a bit weak, the first commenter on YouTube translated what they were shouting into English.
“To Jerusalem We go, for us to be the Martyrs of the Millions.” http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2011/02/end-of-camp-david-accords-two-million.htmlTranscript: Leading Sunni Scholar Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi Calls for the Egyptian Army to Replace the Government and Prays to Allah for the Conquest of the Al-Aqsa Mosque http://www.memri.org/clip_transcript/en/2815.htm
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mazsa
The Myth of the Rational Voter [video]
Audio: https://fee.org/media/the-myth-of-the-rational-voter/
Book: http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Policies/dp/0691138737
Homepage: http://www.bcaplan.com/
mazsa
merely informing people about indirect effects is far from enough to get more consideration of indirect effects in policy. Creating near-common knowledge about such effects might be sufficient if our fear was looking bad to those ignorant of indirect effects. But if the issue is showing that we feel, this won’t work either. Instead we’ll need to find ways to frame indirect effects so that strong emotional responses seem appropriate, to allow people to signal feelings via considering indirect effects. Easier said than done, I know.
Robin Hanson
mazsa
PROPERTY RIGHTS IN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY “This month at Cato Unbound, Daniel Klein touches on a topic I’ve long found fascinating — Where do property rights come from? Although he doesn’t answer directly, he does challenge one popular modern idea, namely that property rights are merely grants of permission by the state, which retains a residual ownership. This idea, which Klein terms “overlordship,” I find disturbingly popular among my left-of-center friends. [...]” http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/cato-unbound-property-rights-in-social-democracy/
Against Overlordship http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/12/06/daniel-b-klein/against-overlordship/
http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/december-2010-property-rights-in-social-democracy/
mazsa
What the attacks on WikiLeaks tell us: “The current row over the latest WikiLeaks trove of classified US diplomatic cables has four sobering implications.
1. The first is that it represents the first really serious confrontation between the established order and the culture of the Net. [...]
2. [...] The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the US and its allies see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this tunnel. [...]
3. Thirdly, the attack of WikiLeaks ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. The Terms and Conditions under which they provide both ‘free’ and paid-for services will always give them with grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so. Put not your faith in cloud computing: it will one day rain on your parade.
4. What WikiLeaks is exposing is the way our democratic system has been hollowed out. Governments and Western political elites have been shown to be incompetent (New Labour and Bush Jnr in not regulating the financial sector; all governments in the area of climate change), corrupt (Fianna Fail in Ireland, Berlusconi in Italy; all governments in relation to the arms trade) or recklessly militaristic (Bush Jnr and Tony Blair in Iraq) and yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted in a really effective way, their reaction is to try to silence the messenger [...]” http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2010/12/04/12387
mazsa
Smári McCarthy: My Agenda and Emphasis for the Icelandic Constitutional Assembly
http://www.smarimccarthy.com/issues_english.pdf
If you like his Agenda, like him @ FB: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Smari-McCarthy-a-stjornlagabing/161452417212255
mazsa
Tim Berners-Lee: Long Live the Web
“The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web
admin
Open Direct Democracy: Open Source project aiming at creating software in support of citizen driven direct democracy for organizations and governments at any level. https://github.com/rbjarnason/open-direct-democracy
mazsa
The inescapable trilemma of the world economy: “Sometimes simple and bold ideas help us see more clearly a complex reality that requires nuanced approaches. I have an “impossibility theorem” for the global economy that is like that. It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.
Here is what the theorem looks like in a picture:
[...]”
http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/06/the-inescapable.html
mazsa
Inter-Group Conflict and Intra-Group Punishment: “In many areas of social life different parties interact under conditions of rivalry, striving for something that not all can obtain. Examples of such rivalries in the economic and political realms are R&D competition, promotion tournaments in internal labor markets, lobbying for government favors and electoral competition between political parties. As a result of such rivalries considerable resources are spent on activities that have no direct productive value. For example, […] previous to the adoption of auctions by the FCC, the real resources spent on filing applications for cell phone license lotteries (with an estimated market value of one billion dollars at that time) was about 400 million dollars. Extreme instances of rivalry are military conflicts and socio- political conflicts, like those that arise between parts of a country, when one of them is fighting for a different political status or independence, and those between ethnic groups. Actual conflicts of this type are often very costly, both in human lives and in material losses. […]
“In [many] rent-seeking experiments […] it is individuals who compete for a prize. In many naturally occurring situations, however, players are groups, since political parties, social movements, and associations like trade unions, lobbyists, terrorist groups etc. are invariably composed of more than one individual. Rent-seeking competition between groups rather than single players introduces an additional layer of complexity to the strategic characteristics of the interaction. Although groups clearly have the potential to be more powerful competitors than individual agents, they face internal coordination problems that may severely undermine their efficacy.
“[…] thus far it is poorly understood how human decision makers actually behave in simple collective rent-seeking contests. Consider a setting where all group members reap the benefits of success, while the likelihood of success depends on the efforts of individual group members. If formal enforcement measures are absent, the conflict parties effectively compete on the basis of voluntary contributions although informal sanctions against defectors, like social ostracism or mobbing, may help to overcome the inherent free-riding incentives. To date we have no systematic empirical evidence on how inter-group conflict is likely to evolve in such a setting.
“In the work we present here we use laboratory methods to study how conflict in contest games is influenced by parties being groups instead of individuals and by the existence of the possibility of punishment between members of a party. […] One can see this as a representation of a situation where the prize has a public good flavor for the successful party as is the case in some political confrontations in which all members of the winning party benefit from the outcome.
“Our results for the case without punishment show that expenditure levels in contests between groups are much higher than in contests between individuals, and both exceed equilibrium levels. On average, we observe that teams spend on conflict more than four times as much as predicted and about twice as much as single players. We also find that individual parties fighting against group parties invest similar levels to individual parties fighting against other individual parties. Group parties fighting against individual parties invest like group parties fighting against other groups.
In contests with punishment opportunities expenditure levels are in turn much higher than in any of the treatments without punishment. In the final rounds of the experiment, investments in conflict are more than twice as high with punishment as without. The consequence is a large waste of resources: more than three quarters of the prize parties are fighting over are dissipated by direct conflict expenditures. However, to determine the true efficiency loss the costs imposed by punishment and the costs borne to punish others need to be added. These costs included, material losses are now 869 percent of the equilibrium level and rent dissipation is in excess of 100 percent. These results strongly contrast with those from those public goods experiments where punishment tends to enhance efficiency.”
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya/article_pdfs/d13GardnerRich.pdf