Referenda Issues in a Conventionalist Ethos

Avoid Misunderstandings

Q: Will referenda let people get what they want?

Q: Will referenda produce honest politics?

Discriminate Consensus Issues

Consensus is required on items that emerge from the self-mobilization of civil society. Communal leaders must initially orient these to standards of behaviour. But it will become evident that many issues of apparent or hoped for consensus are not useful. For example:

Consensus on slogans will continue, but no one can implement, for example, “change we can believe in”. Slogans are not suitable for a referendum.
Consensus on values like freedom, security, justice, healthcare, nutrition &c. will also continue. It may make you feel good, but these are intrinsically abstract, and have no effect on governments. They won’t suit referenda.
Consensus on ideologies, ideals or religious beliefs is unlikely ever to emerge. Whatever consensus may exist will have been present in the cultural ideals of Primitive Pluralism-I, and offers no further guide.

Consensus on policy or projects, domestic or foreign, may be an aspiration. However, such issues are usually too complicated for the populace to grasp. Simplifications become meaningless; and votes can be sabotaged and/or distorted by both politicians and the bureaucracy. However, as conventionalist mechanisms became more appreciated and entrenched, I would not rule out the possibility for policy guidance or specific demands subject to criteria to be developed.

At the outset, suitable issues for consensus will need to be simple in the extreme. Referendum items must be devoid of subtle judgement, deep learning, complex analysis or logical reasoning. Such «popular extremism» appears feasible.

Release of «Popular Extremism»

Those in senior positions within civic associations understand political dysfunction very clearly. They can see how the system is abused from personal observation and the tangle of regulations. Being unable to finance lobbying and campaign contributions like wealthy vested interests, they find the experience of dealing with government and politicians frustrating.

Using the strategy suggested, communal leaders could certainly propose, explain and support referenda on issues like:

Should Government be held to accounting standards required of the private sector?
Why is this extreme? Governments typically fiddle expenses, hide costs, fudge future projections and manipulate statistics: activities that would land private individuals in jail. Providing accurate figures would be hated by politicians, but it would help prevent waste and possibly even economic crises.
Should a politician's vote, for legislation they have not read and know nothing about, be counted?
Why is this extreme? Many legislators now function on automatic. They vote without having read the legislation and know little about its effects. Testing politicians and ruling the vote invalid if there is ignorance would create screams of resentment. It would definitely change their outlook on bills that run for thousands of pages. But why shouldn't politicians be expected to know what they are doing? That is expected of doctors and lawyers.
Should pork-barrelling be regarded as acceptable?
Why is this extreme? Politicians regard it as their duty to bribe their own electorate with other people's money. However, pork-barrel projects are typically inefficient and lack economic justification.
Should citizens ever be detained without warning, their contact with family and lawyer blocked, and with a prohibition on publicizing this state?
Why is this extreme? Shock, horror! This suggests that citizens have rights to exist that cannot be removed from them by a government bureaucrat.

Click here for more details and speculative examples of serious issues that the general public is capable of understanding, and which the current political classes have shown themselves to be unwilling to address.

Remove inbuilt incentives for politicians to misuse finances in order to get elected.

Two simple and previously used ideas:

Limit the number of terms that any politician can serve to just one (or two at a maximum subject to various criteria).

Use sortition (lottery) rather than voting as the method of selecting representatives.

Stop bail-outs of the wealthy that encourage risk-free risk-taking at the public’s expense.

Two extremely simple solutions:

Immediately dismantle any firm that is judged «too big to fail» or «too inter-connected to fail».

Make individual senior regulators accountable for immediate costs to the taxpayer (i.e. bankrupt them) if they fail to identify such organizations in the future.

Stop financial mismanagement in government.

Some very simple notions:

Require government finances to be audited to business standards i.e. no cash accounting, no off-balance sheet vehicles.

Ensure failure of accounts to pass independent auditing leads to automatic suspension without pay of pre-identified officials.

Place a sensible limit on debt levels with automatic dissolution of the government and fresh elections as soon as they are exceeded.

Reduce rampant pragmatism ('kicking the can down the road') to deal with government-induced crises.

Here are simple suggestions:

Require possible effects on the next generation to be specified in all policies and be summarized in one page.

Require relevant knee-jerk policies to project likely consequences over a 1-year, 5-year and 10-year period, and update them half-yearly until no longer relevant.

Stop government, politicians and bureaucrats, acting legally in ways that would be illegal for citizens and private organizations.

Here are two simple examples:

Deny the current right to kidnap i.e. detain a citizen without warning for indefinite detention away from family and lawyers.

Deny the current right to politicians to use inside information to benefit financially from investments.

Stop political misuse and abuse of the tax system for electoral benefits.

You probably know that the tax system is used to support vested interests and inefficiently subsidize numerous other sectors. The most harmful effect is to rig or otherwise subvert markets. This nonsense also creates dependency on government, vast fees for an army of accountants and lawyers, unproductive diversion of business energy, and an intrusive and aggressive tax collection agency. Current systems generally benefit the ultra-wealthy at the expense of the middle class.

Here is a simple idea to cut through all the guff:

Tear up the existing code (which must currently run to tens of thousands of pages) and limit the new tax code to a total of (say) 200 pages.

Limit annual changes to (say) 20 pages: instead of hundreds or in some places more than a thousand pages of new regulations annually.

Stop the government-banking monopoly and abuse of money

Ownership of Central Banks: Central banks are creatures of their governments. The US Federal Reserve is a consortium of private banks created to serve those banks, but is wholly integrated into the US Government apparatus. The Swiss National Bank is listed on the stock exchange! However, it is majority owned by the Cantonal banks and integrated into government policy-making.

Here are some simple, if currently radical, ideas:

Allow free banking.

Abolish the Central Bank.

Mandate zero inflation.

Make it illegal to loan money that you (person or organization) do not have.

Return more government power to the people

Consider these possible solutions:

Set a target and start systematically to reduce the size and number of bureaucracies.

Set a target and start systematically to increase subsidiarity (i.e. increasing or returning powers to Regional and Municipal governments).

Note that none of these items deal with the purposes or policies of governments; and none favour any particular organized interest group, vested or not. Rather they put constraints on the pursuit of purposes in regard to any issue of interest. It is not proposed that these are the best issues to deal with. My goal here is simply to show:

it is possible to have a social consensus on issues that cross interest groups;
the result would be revolutionary, yet without chaos or violence;
the political system would mature in a way that involves and benefits everyone.

Existing politicians and bureaucrats will hate such popular votes: but that is the point. If the Conventionalist ethos is indeed emerging, I predict that the acceptance of public consensus will come to characterize governance, like it or not.

Continue to what generates the next (5^th) political transition.

Originally posted: 1-Nov-2013. Last updated: 11-Apr-2014.