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May 28, 2014, 07:40:38 PM |
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Average voting would not work. Neither would the most votes for a certain budget.
Median Voting on important numbers is not subject to politics because there is no motivation for each person to vote more or less than the number they actually want, since it only matters if you voted less or more than the median but not by how much.
Many people worry about "mob rule" giving the people too much power, but this is a high level thing to list our priorities in terms of where the money goes, proven a balanced democracy by the math properties of median, not a source of argument about the details of what those departments do.
If you do not want to think about it, you could simply vote the way the government recommends, or better, how somebody you trust recommends, but its important to have the option there when government departments expand like we can't do anything to stop them without providing services the people consider valuable.
Theres a few ways to handle when the total budgets exceed the available money: (1) Whats normally done is to not accept any of the budgets until people change their votes so the total of departmentBudgets is within the limit, resulting in temporary "government shutdowns", and to avoid that the negotiation usually happens quickly. (2) The amount of taxes could be defined as the total of these departmentBudgets, so people would be motivated to vote less. (3) The vote could be on what percent of the available money each departmentBudget gets.
Would you vote Yes on starting to do all government department budget totals this way?
This can be decided without asking government permission, since the people have secure tools to count things on a large scale.
I would, for example, vote 0 on the NSA's budget until they make public their goals and methods and justify their existence. If a majority agreed with 0, thats what they would get, but probably it would just be reduced. Because of things like this, its important to hold these median votes continuously so such negotiations can proceed quickly.
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