We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty, but that should be expanded into more roles and duties. That's one way to make society truly democratic.
In any case, you might be interested in Georgism, which is an anti-monopoly ideology most famously associated with very Strong Opinions on taxation of land and natural resources and untaxing production, along with taxation on pollution and negative externalities.
My impression is that sortition is very much in vogue within Georgist circles.
> We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty,
...and even there, it's terribly corrupted. There are all kinds of bizarre ways that people are excluded from juries which bias the result. One commonly-cited example is that people who report moral objections to capital punishment are excluded from being empaneled on a federal jury, under the pretext that because capital punishment is legal under federal law, they'd be unable to carry out the gammut of their duties. Of course this has the convenient result of dramatically biasing juries in favor of the state.
There's also no commonly-implemented proof-of-randomness for selection. We're told that people are randomly selected and get a notice in the mail, but there's no public event where one can go and watch a number tumbler generate the entropy used to select names from the voter rolls, etc.
Well, and for grand juries in particular, you're told that (more or less) this will be your life for six months. I certainly opted out as best I could.
I just say "I believe in jury nullification and will use that power if necessary".
Easiest out from jury duty ever, and if the judge want's to be a bltch and force me on anyway, well, let's just say that if the law is immoral than the defendant is going to walk.
The last time I was called for jury duty someone said this during jury selection and we were all immediately dismissed and a new pool of jurors brought in.
I unironically want to be on the jury. It's the judges fault for refusing to let principled believers in nullification on. I'm unironically not trying to shrink civic duty.
Then be quiet and don't mention it, lol. EVERYWHERE one learns about jury nullification makes it clear not to mention it in the selection process if you're anywhere near interested in participating.
It's an extraprocedural consequence of how the system is designed to function, the same way the right to revolution is an extralegal option in the Union. Yeah, you can know it and apply it - but don't say it out loud if you want to show any semblance of virtuosity.
> Easiest out from jury duty ever, and if the judge want's to be a bltch and force me on anyway…
“Easiest out” is clearly you avoiding the responsibility. If you wanted to be on a jury you wouldn’t be talking about easy outs or the judge “forcing” you to be on the jury.
"Public funding doesn't get you great coders, it gets you coders who are great at filling out government forms."
Getting paid to deliver a software product that someone wants advances humanity. Getting paid to make your own personal project provides jobs for politician's cousins.
Just don't grade essay? Make it clear that eassy are optional and not required to get a grade, but it's a good way to learn. That will cut down the amount of work to be done too.
They failing exams because they don't do the work is on them.
Subsides tend to get absorbed by monopolists of all kind.
This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords. This is why you need to break up monopolies or tax them. The problem is societal endorsement of monopoly rights all kind to the point of invisibility. Witness any conversations about IP rights and lands.
But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market rather than specializing in profitable but more labor intensive crops.
> This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords
Not necessarily. People live where they live because there are jobs. If they don't need jobs because of UBI, or they can take lower-paying jobs, they can move wherever housing is plentiful.
Not necessarily? Not that we've had one recently at the federal level, but there are multiple studies that show that state or city level minimum wage bumps tend to show an increase in average rental price, by the same percentage, within sometimes as few as four months.
You have to live in or near the city to collect the higher minimum wage. With UBI you could live anywhere. Even outside the country maybe. They aren't comparable.
UBI doesn't fix this because whereever someone live will start the process of someone absorbing income, regardless if it's income or not. You need to break the chain between income of people and land ownership by taxing land ownership.
There'll always need to be other constraints on landlords because there's zero reason why they won't just all screw renters over in every area no matter how plentiful housing is.
You have to make it impossible for them to exist. Rentiers are the lowest form of business, and incentives need to make it difficult for them to prosper too much.
These issues are why policy was oriented around individual home ownership for decades.
Orienting policy around individual home ownership just ends up eventually with more people’s voting interests aligned with landowners, and is part of the reason why increasing property values and NIMBYism is so entrenched in American government structures
We could definitely stand to orient some policy around making sure that first time homeowners aren't typically buying their starter homes at age 40. Having voting interests aligned with landowners wouldn't be a bad thing if most people were landowners.
There's an argument that landlording gets entirely too favorable treatment from the tax code compared to any other type of business or investment. Seriously proposing eliminating property rentals is weapons-grade stupid.
> But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market
Hard to predict the future. It was only a few years ago when crop prices were at record highs and some countries were on the brink of starvation because we weren't producing enough community crops.
The cure for high prices is high prices. But also, the cure for low prices is low prices. The older farmers are used to it. It seems the problem right now is that a lot of the younger guys went through an unusually long stretch of good times and have never felt the bad times before.
Commodity markets are necessary for survival. If we cannot make them work as a society something is deeply wrong.
Someone needs to be farming the food we all eat... If every farmer decided to just plant saffron who would farm the wheat and rice and vegetables that it is used to season?
I am told that farms are optimized for labor efficiency rather than profits. These farmers often have a second job when they're not out there farming.
With a low tax on land, we may not actually be encouraging the most efficient use of farmlands.
Given that people are loathed to sell their land for any reason, this makes it impossible for farmers to start new farm, leading to a gradual depopulation and collapse of rural economies.
Growing excess amount of food is part of food security, but farmers are going bankrupt because they focused on labor efficient agricultural commodity products to the exclusion of everything else. For many farmers, it's not even a full time job
I rather we focus on increasing food security in other way.
Maybe we shouldn't be turning corns into cows as that reduce the amount of energy we are able to access. But how do we keep access to farmlands that we don't use now that we aren't turning corns into cows? I suppose we could just use these lands as pasture.
~60 million acres of corn and soybean in the US, the size of Oregon, is grown exclusively for biofuels. This is unnecessary as you mention, as are the subsidies to farmers for these row crops.
Do those crops contribute to the negative numbers reported since most people don't buy biofuel? Or does it contribute something positive to the numbers with government subsidies guaranteeing returns?
I haven't studied the economics of the biofuel farming.
Corn is turned into ethanol, and is then blended with gasoline. The US consumes ~14B gallons of ethanol per year. It’s a net negative because it’s carbon and water intensive and farmers advocate for more ethanol than is necessary as a subsidy via government mandate.
Asset inflation going into non-productive assets like land or monopoly privileges. Tech monopolies are famous example of this, which is why they're large percentage of the SP500.
Most loans are for land, which mean your banking system isn't directing loans toward productive assets which increase economic activity.
In any case, you might be interested in Georgism, which is an anti-monopoly ideology most famously associated with very Strong Opinions on taxation of land and natural resources and untaxing production, along with taxation on pollution and negative externalities.
My impression is that sortition is very much in vogue within Georgist circles.
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