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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A “perfect” voting system: “[...]
1. MPs run as they currently do – a smallish number of candidates stand for a single constituency
2. People cast a vote as they currently do – each selects a single candidate to cast their vote for
3. Once all of the votes have been cast, you pick one voter at random and use their choice
4. Wait, what? [...]”

http://www.drmaciver.com/2011/04/a-perfect-voting-system/

Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2484677

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Taxes & Voting: “[...] Thoreau [...] argues that people should be allowed to decide to not pay their taxes if they decide to withdraw from the political system. He does, however, make a point of saying that people should pay for what they use, such as paying the highway tax if one uses the highway. [...]” http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=2695

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“[...] 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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David D’Amato

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[Video] Voting is violence, Riley Yieding

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Setting standards without kings or votes: “[...] In the intervening 25 years, it turned into a standards organization that creates standards related to the technical operation of the Internet.

However, the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] is quite a bit different from traditional standards organizations such as ANSI, ISO, or the IEEE Standards Association. Standards organizations typically have high thresholds for membership—in some cases, you can only join the club if you’re a country—and only make their standards available for a (high) fee. Not so with the IETF: “There is no membership in the IETF. Anyone may register for and attend any meeting. The closest thing there is to being an IETF member is being on the IETF or Working Group mailing lists.”

This comes directly from The Tao of IETF, which is the best introduction into this strange and wonderful world—short of attending a meeting in person. If you don’t have that kind of time, two quotes provide a pretty good feel of how the IETF sees itself: “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code” (David Clark). And: “Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept” (Jon Postel). [...]” http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/25-years-of-ietf-setting-standards-without-kings-or-votes.ars

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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/

Blog: http://econlog.econlib.org/

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Swiss Voters Reject Proposal to Impose Higher Tax for Top Salary Earners: “Switzerland’s voters rejected a proposal to increase taxes for the nation’s top earners, following the recommendations of most national leaders.

In a referendum today, 59 percent of voters turned down the proposal by the Social Democrats to enact minimum taxes on income and wealth. Residents would have paid taxes of at least 22 percent on annual income above 250,000 francs ($249,000), according to the proposed changes.

Switzerland’s executive and parliamentary branches had rejected the proposal, saying it would interfere with the cantons’ tax-autonomy regulations. [...]” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-28/swiss-voters-reject-proposal-to-impose-higher-tax-for-top-salary-earners.html

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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

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[Begin at 3' 20"]

Update: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/03/1419200/An-Anonymous-Verifiable-E-Voting-Tech

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Against Majority Rule: https://fee.org/from-the-archives/against-majority-rule/

Cf. The cliché of socialism number 46 https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/cliches46.pdf
Collected Works of James M. Buchanan online http://www.econlib.org/library/Buchanan/buchCContents.html

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Benchmark in UX and voting: http://voteeasy.org/

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Der Liquid Democracy e.V. ist ein gemeinnütziger Verein, dessen Mitglieder an Ideen und Projekten arbeiten, die unsere heutige Demokratie flüssiger, transparenter und flexibler gestalten sollen. Dazu gehört die theoretische Konzeption aber auch die praktische, direkt anwendbare Umsetzung in Software-Projekten.

Adhocracy ist die Software, die hinter liqd.net steht. Liquid Democracy ist nicht nur als Staatsform denkbar, sondern auch als eine neue Form des kooperativen Managements. In Adhocracy können Organisationen wie NGOs, Netzinitiativen oder Firmen durch einen demokratischen Prozess ihre Ziele, Strategien, interne Regeln oder Positionen entwickeln. Adhocracy ist die praktische Umsetzung unserer Theorie des Direkten Parlamentarismus. Durch das Betreiben der Plattform liqd.net entwickeln wir beides – Theorie und Praxis – in einem offenen Prozess kontinuierlich weiter.

Votorola ist eine LD-Software zur Realisierung von Abstimmungen/Wahlen sowie zur Strukturierung des politischen Diskurses – in beliebiger Größenordnung (lokal, national, global). [Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/votorola-is-software-for-building-consen ]

http://liqd.net/

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“[...] consider: passion about pacifism. There have been times, when the world was divided into sides fighting vicious and deadly wars, that some folks took the side of stopping the fights. They took the natural passion of fighting an enemy and channeled it into fighting the fighters. I’d like to get folks to similarly see the wasteful pointlessness of today’s political battles. Today we induce millions of people to make up mostly-random political opinions on hundreds of diverse complex policy topics they hardly understand, split into warring factions based on shared opinions, and then fight vicious political battles over which factions get to make the government implement their random opinions. I’d rather folks focused on generating meta-political-opinions, not about particular policies like wars or bank bailouts, but about what political processes best choose effective policies.

[...] nations where citizens can effectively control their government by just specifying a national welfare function, and tweaking it a bit periodically, should be higher status than nations where ordinary citizens must continually form opinions on the effectiveness of hundreds of rapidly changing policies.”

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/fight-the-fighters.html

Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/futarchy

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