[EM] party co-operation on electoral reform

[Narins, Josh]

Please read Esprit de Lois, by Charles-Louis deSecondat, Baron de
Montesquieu.

Our nation was founded by people who...
1. Loved Montesquieue's contribution to the science of Politics.
	(esp. Madison, Jefferson, and Adams, when he was younger)
2. Would be, by M's definition, not Democratic Republicans, but Aristocratic
Republicans.


I would not as an aside that the greatest Democratic Republic in history was
Athens, where
1. Only ~10% of the Athenians were actual participants in the Democracy.
2. They had no "elections" per se, except later for Ostracism.

I am an Arisotcratic Republican.

I believe that advancing the science of elections, advances all multi-party
deliberative processes, and the most important of those generally happens to
be ones for political office.

<grin />

-Josh





-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Weinstein [mailto:jweins123 at hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2002 4:23 PM
To: election-methods-list at eskimo.com
Subject: Re: [EM] party co-operation on electoral reform


Here's basically seconding Mike O.:

In terms of the substantive messages from today's parties, my political mix 
rates close to 3/4  Green,  1/4 Libertarian !!  (By way of comparison, what 
substantive messages are we getting from either of the big two parties?)  
But how can the Libertarians (or any minority party) pretend to be 'for 
real' in electoral politics without being keenly interested in reforming the

unfairly antagonistic electoral rules? and therefore being ready and indeed 
eager for common action with other victims of these rules?

Mike speaks of electoral reform to get 'adequate democracy'.  By way of 
caution, in my opinion 'adequate democracy' will not follow just from having

even an excellent mass-election method.  The better and eventual expedient 
is a true democracy in which no citizens are 'more equal than others':  
wherein decisions will not require mass elections at all, because they will 
be made not by special long-term-serving (and therefore readily corruptible)

oligarchic officers (elected or otherwise) but by deliberations of 
short-term-serving randomly chosen problem-solving teams (or 'juries' or 
'panels' or 'seminars') of ordinary citizens.

Joe Weinstein
Long Beach CA USA

PS FOR MIKE - My Hotmail email program advises me that currently your 
Hotmail inbox is overflowing, and that therefore I am disallowed from 
sending you directly a copy of this message.  I hope that somehow you can 
soon clear your Hotmail inbox, or start up an alternative channel!

Joe




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