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0 pointspermo-w3y ago0 comments

let’s say you’re a farmer. you get selected to be a representative. then your term ends and a big company wants to hire you. so you take the job

how on earth are you going to legally differentiate this from a company simply hiring someone with experience in the political sphere? how are you going to prove that an after-dinner speech is proceeds from corrupt behaviour, and not just a speech from someone interesting that people may want to listen to? you’re going to ask a court to decide if someone is genuinely an interesting speaker?

there’s a good reason they're able to get away with this right now: it’s nearly impossible to legislate for. it’s very easy to spot, but without direct evidence of prior communication between the parties it’s extremely difficult to prove

my solution would be to give each of them a huge pension and ban them from ever working again. but that has its own problems

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lapcat3y ago· 2 in thread

> how on earth are you going to legally differentiate this from a company simply hiring someone with experience in the political sphere?

Experience in the political sphere is no longer a thing when the entire government consists of 1 year lifetime term limited random selections. Experience only has value now because there are "career politicians", political parties, campaign fundraising, etc.

Also keep in mind that without elections, they are no longer "representatives" and don't have "constituents". Therefore, the legislators no longer have to take private meetings or phone calls with anyone. This doesn't mean they won't listen to anyone or take advice, it just means that this can all occur in public hearings and not in private where deals are made. Lobbyists as such should cease to exist.

permo-wOP3y ago

none of this resolves how incredibly hard it would be to legislate against and convict for this

think about it like laws for drug paraphernalia. [1] no one is going to ban pipes and papers and lighters, because people use them for other things. obviously, when you see a weed pipe or papers designed for spliffs, you can tell that that’s what they’re for. but it’s extremely difficult to convict someone for possessing or selling them, because there are feasible alternative uses

this form of bribery is the same. obviously it’s very easy to spot someone bribed into a cushy job, but without actual evidence of collusion, are you going to get a conviction in a court of law operating under the principles of reasonable doubt? highly unlikely. it’s always going to be possible that that company simply liked how the representative did their job and hired them. or they like the PR of hiring ex-reps. or any number of reasons a lawyer could bring up in court

if it could be done safely and reasonably, it probably already would have in our current systems

>they are no longer “representatives”

they would be representatives. I chose that word deliberately. I think you’re confusing “representatives” with “elected representatives”. they would be representing the population at large

[1] yes throughout time and space there have been and are laws against weed and drug paraphernalia, but they’re widely seen as a bad idea, and easily side-stepped

lapcat3y ago

> it’s always going to be possible that that company simply liked how the representative did their job and hired them

There's actually no reason why the voting record of a citizen legislator needs to be released to the public. They do it with elected officials, because if you're going to vote for someone, you want to know how they voted. But with unelected officials, it could be secret ballots, so nobody even knows how they did their job.

> they like the PR of hiring ex-reps.

There's no PR in hiring a randomly selected person who was only in office for 1 year. Nobody even knows the randos.

> or any number of reasons a lawyer could bring up in court

Which reasons? All of the reasons that exist now relate to politicians having long experience, connections, and other things that go along with having a "career" in politics. None of the reasons hold for what is essentially a temp job.

> I think you’re confusing “representatives” with “elected representatives”. they would be representing the population at large

No, I'm not confusing anything. Getting randomly selected from the public is not the same as representing the public. An elected representative is expected to get the opinion of and serve their constituency. There's no such expectation in sortition. Compare with juries. A juror is mostly randomly selected from the public but doesn't "represent" the public. A juror doesn't need to consult the public about the trial; to the contrary, jurors are not even allowed to consult outsiders about the trial. A juror simply decides the case base on its merits and nothing else. There's no representation.

I think you're underestimating the inherent corruption of the current political system. By the time a politician takes office they're usually a "known quantity", because (1) they have to run an election campaign to introduce themselves to the public, and (2) in order to finance such a campaign, they have to raise money, which mostly involves going around begging wealthy interests for money. So such interests can already develop a relationship with the candidate before they get elected, by contributing money to their election campaign. Running for election is inherently corrupting in that way. Whereas government officials randomly selected from the public are wild cards. You can't just go around bribing a thousand unknown random people, because while some may take the bribe, the chances are decent that you'll run into a honest, ethical person who won't take the bribe but rather turn you into the authorities, and then you'll go to jail, because bribing a government official is a felony. All it takes is one honest randomly selected citizen to blow up the entire bribery scheme. So it would be massively dangerous for the briber. It's difficult to build "trusting" relationships with such short-term unknown legislators. This is why most political bribery takes the form of legal campaign contributions, which pose no danger to the contributor and are quite effective at getting results. Eliminate election campaigns, and you've eliminated the primary source of corruption.

We have to compare sortition against the current system, not against some ideal of perfection. If sortition is simply less corrupt that the current system, it's a win. You can always think of ways to game any system, but our current system is practically designed for corruption.

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