Reenigne blog

Suppose you own a large successful business which makes money by telling customers things they want to hear - reassuring stories, comforting platitudes and advice and guidance about how to live their lives. Suppose also that, for tax reasons, you are not allowed to use your influence over your customers to push them towards voting for one particular candidate over another, and you're also not allowed to donate any of the company's profits to political parties or candidates.

However, you'd still prefer to have one candidate elected over another because your preferred candidate might lower your taxes or give you more freedom to run your business the way you want to run it, or maybe just because he's a good customer. How could you covertly support that candidate?

One thing you could do is a pick a couple of social issues which aren't fundamentally a big deal to you one way or another but which differentiate your preferred candidate from their opposition and which the opposition is unlikely to change their minds on (perhaps because they are objectively correct in their position). Then you can use your platform to tell your audience that your preferred position on said social issues is vitally important, and deciding the wrong way on them will lead the country to ruin. You don't even need to mention the names of the political candidates or the upcoming election to your audience at all - they can figure out themselves what they need to do.

For this reason I think we need to avoid making "tax deductions for political neutrality" deals - it's too easy for the organizations in question to be covertly politically non-neutral and the tricks they use cause pressure to move candidates away from objectively correct positions in this kind of issue.

So we have some ideas about how we want the world to look - the next question is "How do we get there from here?" It seems to be very difficult to get anything changed at least in US politics because there are so many entrenched interests, but here's the best idea I've had about it so far.

We use this fantastic information transfer medium of the internet to get as many people interested, involved and well informed as possible. We get these people to vote in on-line elections (that are at least to begin with unofficial, non-binding and informal but are as secure as possible and only open to registered, authenticated voters). We then try to persuade politicians to take these polls into account (as well as what they suppose the opinions of the rest of the electorate to be) when making their decisions. Participating in this system costs the politician nothing at first (since when they disagree with what the poll says they can say "oh that's just the opinion of a small minority of people, most people have the opposite opinion"), but as more and more people participate in these polls they eventually become impossible to ignore ("it's the will of the people"). When politicians vote against the will of the people, we call them out on it and hopefully get them voted out of office in the next election. Once the system has sufficient momentum, we start to field candidates who run on a platform of voting according to the results of these polls rather than their own opinions. Then eventually we can transition away from having elected politicians at all and just have a system of direct delegated democracy so that the people can vote (directly or by proxy) on every piece of proposed legislation. This is much less susceptible to corruption by corporations, because decisions are not made by wealthy minority.

In the meantime, we have to do something about the media. It's no good having a democracy if people are voting against their own interests and blindly following the instructions of corporate mouthpieces. I think this is more of a US problem than a UK one the BBC is much more impartial than private media can be. Here in the US there are massive numbers of people who get all their information from Fox News and conservative talk radio which are really just fronts for organizations like Koch Industries. This is how we get public support for absurd wars and other policies that are disastrous for almost all of the people who are voting for them. The usual method we use as a society for determining which side of an argument is true is the judicial system, so I'm wondering if we can somehow make news organizations liable for things that are not true that they present as news. Don't make the penalty too big because sometimes mistakes happen but make it large enough so that the likes of Fox can't continue their current scam. And if that puts too much power in the hands of judges, then we'll need some entirely new system of checks and balances to prevent abuse there. I guess to avoid stepping on the first amendment there would have to be some kind of voluntary labeling scheme for news organizations, and we would have to learn to take with rather more salt news from sources which don't stand by what they say by participating in this scheme.

We still need to keep the economy growing as fast as possible. Unlike the conservatives, I don't think the way of doing this is reducing taxes on the rich and reducing services on the poor. I think we need more small businesses, and that there are a lot of impediments preventing people from setting up or taking over small businesses. These impediments need to be identified and removed. More small businesses means more competition for large corporations. In the US, creating a functional public healthcare system would be a great benefit for small businesses (companies in the US are can't attract the best employees without providing health insurance plans, which is much more expensive for small companies than for big ones).