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Link: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/politics-industry-rebroadcast/
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And the proposed solutions.
presidential election voting system and creating non-partisan organizations to get into the game. But let me talk about election voting solution anyway.
Their proposed voting system basically is just France/Louisiana open primary system and they want to have it at federal election level, which is just very silly.
What if a candidate get over 50% votes in primary election? This is going to make general election meaningless. But it could also induce unnecessary error on voters because many voters may not go to vote in general election by thinking that candidate winning over 50% in primary is very safe. Also, unlike traditional party-primary system, the open primary system tends to elect fringe candidates. Racist (David Duke ) vs crook (John Edwards) is a good example. Ok, I know their solution isn't exactly Louisiana. They let voters have 4 choices in general elections and prioritize their choices. This is just impractical. How many voters can have 4 candidates? If they only fill 1 or 2 or 3 candidates in their ballot, are you going to invalid their votes?
Isn't their so-called non-partisan organization just another party? Why bring another player into this competition, not change the nature of competition as they claimed? I also think emergence of Trump falsified their solution. They answered the question of emergence of Trump. But their answer is not convincing to me. Trump made me believe 1. The change can happen within party itself; 2 Trump is the best bipartisan president from R that D should work with. But unfortunately the bitterness of losing election and Trump's own character issues made D lose this great bipartisan opportunity.
If it makes you feel better to blame the Dems this go-round, okay. But the Reps where the same when Obama was Pres. Also, you have no further to look than the sham tax cut to see failure.
system. Eventually let voters decide if the party in charge did good job in next election. I am not saying I endorse the parliamentary system. I am just addressing their concern, i.e. partisan politics caused stalemate and couldn't move on to solve problems.
Ya know, a representative form of government, with checks and balances.
One party rule has been a disaster everywhere it has been tried historically. Here, lately, we just vacillate from one to the other and predictably, nothing good gets done and the voters tend not to be appropriately represented.
government with checks and balances don't get lost. It is just that checks and balances become weaker for parliamentary system. But, the biggest check & balance mechanism, 4-year election cycle, has become stronger. Election campaign has become a 2-year event with extensive media reports. 20+ states now have ban faithless electors, which means popular votes of each state solely determine the election result, i.e. more direct democracy. It's empirically true, democracy with checks and balances didn't work well in a deeply divided country.
Anyway, in my opinion, these people from your link failed to identity the real issue: Today's politicians are driven by election. Even you change some game rules of election, sooner or later politicians will figure out a way how to play new election rules and take advantage of them.
We should take a continuous improvement approach to this, the only way to improve it is to attempt solutions, evaluate results and adapt. The way to find out if the folks on the podcast are right or not is to try their solutions. The "this won't work because..." is a mindset that I believe is a part of the problem. We can't fix health insurance because... We can't solve crime because... We can't fix education because... Failure is a part of growth, if you try something and find out it doesn't work at least you can eliminate one possibility and you'll often learn something about the problem through the exercise.
I do appreciate you making the effort, everyone else is apparently too busy tracking our pols on twitter or something.
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