We Are the 99.98%

According to this report, as of May 2010, 65,710 people were employed as legislators in the U.S.  That comes to roughly 2 hundredths of one percent or 0.02% of the population of the U.S.  These people obviously wield a disproportionate influence in government.  The overwhelming majority of these people are at the state or local level, which controls only about 1/3 of government spending.  The other 2/3 is controlled by the Federal government, which has only 535 legislators, less than 2 out of every million people.  When we consider that much of the power in government is in the executive branch, which is largely controlled by a single individual and that power within the House and Senate is by no means distributed equally among the membership, the situation is even more extreme.

Many people find it deplorable that such a large proportion of income and wealth are controlled by such a small segment of the population.  What we need to consider is whether political power is any more evenly distributed.  Since acting to remedy economic inequality necessarily involves taking money from the private sector and giving it to the government, we will want to know whether this is a concentration or diffusion of power.

Some might argue that the numbers that I have given are misleading.  Legislators cannot vote in any way that they please if they want to be re-elected.  However, most of us are not even given that option.  Each legislator can vote in any way he or she pleases for two or six years, then the voters can replace them if they choose.

That decision is made more expensive by the fact that political power is distributed within the legislature on the basis of seniority.  This inequality is so extreme that some of the more powerful members of the larger House, would consider a move to the Senate to be a diminution of political power.  This despite the fact that the House has over four times as many members, so theoretically a Senator should have roughly four times as much power.  Thus the decision to replace a legislator could result in reducing the political influence of the district by a factor of four or more.

Perhaps it's wise to delegate political power to a small minority.  If we make everyone a legislator perhaps thinking about what sort of legislation will take up too much of people's time and attention.  You could make the same argument about the economic elite.  Maybe they can run companies more profitably.  While some see profits as being harmful, this doesn't seem like a very practical principle.  What would happen if all of these people ran their companies in such a way that they ran out of money?

In any case we need to look at how much accountability there is in politics.  The more costs there are associated with replacing a legislator, the less accountable that legislator will be to the voting public.  In addition making it easier to replace legislators will more widely diffuse political power since a larger number of people will, over the course of their lives, be able to serve as legislators.

In the case of the presidency, the office can easily be abolished.  A strictly parliamentary system is in place in many countries.  I have heard persuasive arguments that it works better and no persuasive arguments that it is worse than a presidential system.  Parliamentary systems are better at protecting property and are less likely to transition to dictatorship, particularly in newly established democracies.

Efforts to reform the legislative process have focussed on supplementing the elected legislature with the tools of direct democracy, initiatives and referenda.  The voting public can directly vote on legislation.  Few have suggested that the legislature should be entirely replaced in this manner.

Another popular idea is campaign finance reform.  I don't think this will be effective.  The Supreme Court often rules that this is unconstitutional.  We need to be concerned that giving the legislature control over campaign spending might make it more difficult to replace incumbents.  In any case there is the issue of free speech.  Political spending can be seen as a form of political expression.  To give the legislature the power to control political expression is dangerous.  Even if you find these arguments unpersuasive, the Supreme Court has interpreted our constitution in such a way as to make effective campaign finance legislation unconstitutional.  Thus enacting this type of reform would require us to make changes in the most popular head of the three branches of government.

I have suggested changing the way that legislators are selected.  Instead of voting for specific legislators voters could decide on what proportion of the legislature should be replaced.  The appropriate number of legislators could then be dismissed at random and replacements could be randomly selected either from the general population or from a pool of candidates who passed a qualifying examination.  If we chose an examination, the public could vote on a minimum score.  There is no reason why this couldn't be implemented in conjunction with tools of direct democracy.

All three of these reforms, abolishing the presidency by implementing a strictly parliamentary system, allowing initiatives and referenda and selecting legislators in the manner that I suggest, would be steps that we could take to more widely diffuse political power.