PS: how are you going to prevent any self interested party from simply saying that such a government as described in the OP is “The system! It’s totally corrupt! They didn’t do X! They did Y! And they are covering up for Z!!”
Anyone have any luck with that strategy lately?
And if anyone points out that they are lying, they come back with “No, you’re the liar, YOU’RE THE LIAR! SAD!”
I would argue that’s not what we have. We have polling on WHO we want, not WHAT we want. In theory, particular WHO-s (politicians) should represent specific WHAT-s (goals/outcomes), but clearly that doesn’t happen as politicians lie their asses off and don’t deliver on their promises. Hence the low approval ratings (again, unless people really are satisfied generally, and are just being whiners).
The “benefit” of such an example polling system is that by forcing people to declare WHAT they want, you clearly define goals. Success is achieving measurable progress towards the goals. Failure is not achieving progress towards the goals. With the caveat that you have to assume that people generally know what they want, which may not actually be a valid assumption.
You don’t have to get everyone to agree on everything; you just have to get a significant majority (55%, 60%, 66%, pick a threshold you like) to agree that certain issues are worth addressing. If you can’t get a significant majority to agree that a problem is in fact a problem, maybe it isn’t a problem. Or maybe it is a problem, but it can’t reasonably be solved at the Federal level in an effective manner, so don’t bother; look for solutions elsewhere. Or something else.
As for your other post, this gets back to Euphonious Polemic’s point. If it’s genuinely possible to string along a meaningful number of people indefinitely with lies upon lies, then the whole idea of “results-based” governance fails outright. If, at some point, people wise up and go “hey y’know, you keep promising the same thing year after year, and you never actually deliver… what’s up with that?”, then deception, while still useful as a short-term strategy, becomes ineffective as a long-term strategy.
The way to combat a habitual liar is not to confront the liar or to try to sift through truth vs. falsehood. The way to combat a habitual liar is to address the people around the habitual liar. “Are you currently happy? Did you receive what you asked for? No? They why the hell are you still supporting this guy? Yeah, I know, there are probably valid reasons, but bottom line, he didn’t get the job done.”
I’m afraid that if we ask this question 4 years from now, we’ll hear from a certain subset of people that it’s all Obama’s fault that they are worse off, or that a wall was not built or that jobs are fleeing the country. Because they can’t admit that they were suckered by a con artist.
You see the polling and then giving in real time in the state Initiative system, and it can be disastrous. We had, literally, a “more services” and “less taxes” on the same ballot, and both passed. One state budget crisis later, we had an “ok, a few more taxes for these specific services” and it failed because the no-tax side didn’t like new taxes, it wasn’t enough services for the want-services side.
“The people” can’t compromise. That’s the legislator’s basic job description. And if the legislature decides to be equally uncompromising, it breaks down.
Caldazar: I get you. Like “What is it you really want?” as a solution to the fog of war morass of electing people for psychological reasons, misdirection etc.
I do think that we have a toxic information industry whose incentive is to make more fog out of this.
My question is how do you do the hiring for such a government? If you just overlay it over the current system the elections and campaigns will just continue the fog.
(Now imagine the hay someone will make with whatever you say)
I wasn’t proposing an alternate system of government at all, really. The heart of my question is really why it appears, at least superficially, the political system does not reward achievement and results, but rather rewards other factors. “People are easily fooled, especially by skilled liars” is the easy answer. But this doesn’t seem like a satisfactory answer in itself. Certainly, SOME people can be fooled by lies indefinitely, but not everyone can. Maybe enough people can be fooled by lies indefinitely to make the strategy work, as was mentioned.
All the talk of issue-polling is more of an attempt to frame the question in terms of results/outcomes. Hence the silly thread title “Why don’t Federal politicans just give people what they want?” i.e. why isn’t it a viable political strategy for Federal politicians to just ask people what they want, and then give it to them? Would that satisfy people and yield decent (say 50%-60%) approval ratings? Occam’s Razor would suggest that “no, such an approach wouldn’t reliably satisfy people”, because if it would, you’d figure politicians would adopt the strategy. Just trying to get folks’ thoughts on why.
Maybe for the same reason that economics is “the dismal science”?
Resources cannot supply all the wants of voters.
It might be that our election system is a soma to keep us from despairing over this.
This guarantees that nothing will be properly maintained. Unless your sewer system is actively breaking down, you won’t think of it at all. Do you know how often a street needs to have an overlay to prevent pot holes?
There are plenty of organizations polling WHAT. BTW, do you know how much polling costs? I guarantee if you propose a big, government sponsored poll, you’ll have significant numbers of people saying they don’t want their tax money wasted on such a stupid thing. (When, of course, all anyone has to do to know what’s important is use common sense.) It would never be enacted. There are people who are opposed to the census, for pity sake.
And if it was somehow enacted, there would be arguments over the questions and no one who disagreed with the results would accept them. You’d end up with the same ongoing arguments only you’d now have a few billion dollars less to argue over.
It’s what governments do, by all sorts of consultative mechanisms. Whether that works any better when policy isn’t entirely capable of being tied down in legislation, and administration and legislation are organised in separate and sometimes competing branches of government, is another matter.
Not that it always works that well in systems where policy development, legislation and administration are all organised through the same route. Governments can be panicked into knee-jerk “legislate in haste, repent at leisure” measuress. The classic example in the UK used to be cited as the Dangerous Dogs Act, but the whole Brexit hooha is shaping up to be the ultimate in poorly drafted legislation. Also, there’s often too much political capital/emotional energy invested in certain ideas and measures for politicians to just say “Oops, we got it wrong”, and expect to have much of a career thereafter.
Nor is it clear what “the people” want: one core problem is persuading people that if they want X, they’re going to have to pay Y in taxes, or alternatively, if they want -Y in taxes, they’re going to have to accept -X in services. Or in our case, that if they want out of the EU, they have to accept it’s going to mean not actually having your cake and eating it.
But this leads to a blame-the-victim phenomenon. If Person A is at fault, and Person B is not, then telling Person B “I don’t care who is at fault, just get it done” is excusing Person A and also treating victim and aggressor as if they are the same.