> it’s always going to be possible that that company simply liked how the representative did their job and hired them
There's actually no reason why the voting record of a citizen legislator needs to be released to the public. They do it with elected officials, because if you're going to vote for someone, you want to know how they voted. But with unelected officials, it could be secret ballots, so nobody even knows how they did their job.
> they like the PR of hiring ex-reps.
There's no PR in hiring a randomly selected person who was only in office for 1 year. Nobody even knows the randos.
> or any number of reasons a lawyer could bring up in court
Which reasons? All of the reasons that exist now relate to politicians having long experience, connections, and other things that go along with having a "career" in politics. None of the reasons hold for what is essentially a temp job.
> I think you’re confusing “representatives” with “elected representatives”. they would be representing the population at large
No, I'm not confusing anything. Getting randomly selected from the public is not the same as representing the public. An elected representative is expected to get the opinion of and serve their constituency. There's no such expectation in sortition. Compare with juries. A juror is mostly randomly selected from the public but doesn't "represent" the public. A juror doesn't need to consult the public about the trial; to the contrary, jurors are not even allowed to consult outsiders about the trial. A juror simply decides the case base on its merits and nothing else. There's no representation.
I think you're underestimating the inherent corruption of the current political system. By the time a politician takes office they're usually a "known quantity", because (1) they have to run an election campaign to introduce themselves to the public, and (2) in order to finance such a campaign, they have to raise money, which mostly involves going around begging wealthy interests for money. So such interests can already develop a relationship with the candidate before they get elected, by contributing money to their election campaign. Running for election is inherently corrupting in that way. Whereas government officials randomly selected from the public are wild cards. You can't just go around bribing a thousand unknown random people, because while some may take the bribe, the chances are decent that you'll run into a honest, ethical person who won't take the bribe but rather turn you into the authorities, and then you'll go to jail, because bribing a government official is a felony. All it takes is one honest randomly selected citizen to blow up the entire bribery scheme. So it would be massively dangerous for the briber. It's difficult to build "trusting" relationships with such short-term unknown legislators. This is why most political bribery takes the form of legal campaign contributions, which pose no danger to the contributor and are quite effective at getting results. Eliminate election campaigns, and you've eliminated the primary source of corruption.
We have to compare sortition against the current system, not against some ideal of perfection. If sortition is simply less corrupt that the current system, it's a win. You can always think of ways to game any system, but our current system is practically designed for corruption.
you’re repeatedly sidestepping the core of what I’m saying. we are talking about the practicalities of trying to legislate against this one specific kind of corruption
no sane court of law is going to convict representatives for getting a good job post hoc. there is far too much possibility for reasonable doubt. unless you fundamentally change the way the justice system works, that is not going to change
>which reasons?
do I really have to come up with these reasons? bear in mind that they don’t have to be rock solid, they just have to introduce reasonable doubt. since you almost certainly have no other evidence, “perhaps that could be true rather than collusion” is enough.
“their term made us aware of them and they seemed competent”; “they’re famous now and that’s good for sales”; “they made connections that could prove useful to the company”; “they look good to foreign investors/trading partners”; “patriotism!”; “we feel we have a duty to support our ex-reps!”; etc etc etc. there are a million reasons that any lawyer could come up with and sell to a jury
also, please don’t specifically try and defeat each thing I say. just address the central issue. I say that just like you can’t convict people for using drugs because they possesa drug paraphernalia, properly functioning courts will struggle to meet the burden of proof to convict this kind of bribery
> please don’t specifically try and defeat each thing I say
Heh, this is an interesting request.
> properly functioning courts will struggle to meet the burden of proof to convict this kind of bribery
I think this frames the issue in entirely the wrong way. My claim is that you can't safely offer bribes to a randomly selected citizen legislature.
Suppose the legislature has 1000 members, and they serve 1 year terms, maximum 1 term per lifetime. So as a wealthy interest attempting to trade jobs for political favors, you start out with 1000 complete strangers. They're unknown to you, and you're unknown to them. Moreover, they don't need to take meetings or phone calls with you, because you didn't vote for them (nobody did), you didn't finance their campaigns, they don't represent you, and they're not running for reelection, because they aren't elected, and they can't serve another term. Indeed, these legislators are likely to be suspicious of unsolicited inquiries, and rightly so. They probably don't even have time for your crap. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to somehow meet them, gain their trust, and offer them a bribe in less than 1 year, all while avoiding the honest citizen who responds to your offer by calling the cops. The burden of proof is pretty easy when the person bribed testifies against the briber.
I request that as your style seems to be to attack details, which goes nowhere as each reply gets longer and less relevant until every reply is a marathon and you’ve lost sight of the actual issue being discussed
speaking of that, you’ve moved the goalposts. you said that it would be easy to catch the people taking this style of bribe because of the more abrupt job change. I said that it’s almost impossible to legislate against that
now you’re trying to argue a separate issue: whether reps will take these bribes at all
however, your initial comment assumes that they might take these bribes, and my reply is based on that assumption. when you abandon that assumption, you’re not actually responding to me
if you’d like, you can reread our original two comments, but I’ve laid out the bones of it here:
your claim: easier to catch takers
my disputation: yes easier to catch but impossible to convict
your response: but takers wouldn’t take in the first place
Each gets longer and more detailed, as I defend my position. If length and details are a problem for you, then we'd better end the discussion here.
me: "This is actually why bribes to randomly selected citizens would be easier to catch."
you: "you said that it would be easy to catch the people taking this style of bribe"
I said easier. You misquoted me as saying easy. Easier != easy. We're comparing sortition to the current electoral system. Sortition just has to be better, it doesn't have to be perfect. Moreover, I said, "Many elected politicians have been criminally convicted of corruption", so it's not in fact impossible.
> now you’re trying to argue a separate issue: whether reps will take these bribes at all
> however, your initial comment assumes that they might take these bribes, and my reply is based on that assumption. when you abandon that assumption, you’re not actually responding to me
This is a misunderstanding. Of course some legislators (I won't call them "reps") might accept bribes. The problem is when some don't. When you're trying to bribe a bunch of random strangers, the number who don't accept bribes, even if the number is small, will blow up the whole bribery system and will send the bribers to jail.
Even if there's some level of bribery in sortition — which I believe can't be high, for reasons explained earlier — it would be vastly better than the current electoral system, which is legalized bribery via campaign contributions.
yet again you're trying to argue multiple points irrelevant to the initial discussion: the semantics of easy vs easier; whether it's easier to bribe in the first place; whether sortitioning is better or worse than the current system. this is called the Gish gallop[1], and it is not conducive to good debate
stop trying to move the goalposts
it is difficult to prosecute someone who has taken this kind of bribe, even in a system of sortitioning. do you have a refutation to this argument?
This is pointless, because you seem to lack the capacity to follow a complex argument, and I disagree with you about what's relevant and irrelevant to the discussion. I'm done here.
if you had a refutation, you would have said it by now. as it is, you’ve tried a gish gallop, then thrown your toys out of the pram when it’s been pointed out to you
did you really think I was going to engage you in an exponentially growing series of piecemeal arguments growing less and less relevant with each iteration?
let’s close this by saying that you completely failed - and even resolutely avoided - giving any evidence or arguments that it would be even remotely possible to convict anyone for this, and then tried to prove yourself right in some alternative discussions about: sortitioning as a whole, the word “representative”, easy vs easier, the difficulty of bribing a representative, whether they have constituents, whether I have a correct grasp of corruption as a whole, etc etc etc etc, not a single one of which mattered to the central question of “would you be able to convict an ex-rep for having a sudden upwards change in job?” to which the answer is a resounding and unchallenged: no
> the central question of “would you be able to convict an ex-rep for having a sudden upwards change in job?”
I think the problem here is that you believe it's the central question, whereas I don't. It's a minor issue in the larger question of whether sortition is better than elections.
yes, there is an overall question of whether sortitioning is better or worse, but did I say to you: "the current system is better than sortitioning"? no I didn't. we were never talking about that. if you'd like to discuss that separately, we can, and I suspect we'd agree, but I did not sign up for that discussion, so surely you can see why I only want to talk about the only issue I've ever even mentioned?
what I said was that it would be extremely hard to convict someone for this specific corruption, you disagreed, and we proceeded. if you don't have an argument to back up your disagreement, you misspoke, or misread, or jumped to a conclusion, that's fine, but you're just ignoring it and talking about other things as if you were right. does that seem to you like a rational mode of thought?
>these links:
this is the same thing again. we're not talking about general convictions for corruption, we're talking about convictions for this very specific kind of type of bribery, where your only evidence is a change of jobs
> did I say to you: "the current system is better than sortitioning"? no I didn't. we were never talking about that. if you'd like to discuss that separately, we can, and I suspect we'd agree, but I did not sign up for that discussion
Sigh. Well, I've always been talking about that, and I didn't sign up for this conversation either. In any case, though, here's what I said before you first replied to me: "This is actually why bribes to randomly selected citizens would be easier to catch."
Note that catching is not the same as convicting, and that's not mere pedantry. In order to convict, you have to catch first, and my claim is that in a political environment where the legislators are randomly selected, the kind of corruption you talk about would stick out like a sore thumb. Whereas in our current system, the revolving door between government and corporate lobbying is pervasive, so a former representative getting a cushy job when they leave it not even notable, it's commonplace, the norm. In a sense, it's harder to catch a criminal when everyone is a criminal. If that continued to be the norm under sortition, it would indicate a massive flaw in the new system. It's one of the problems that sortition ought to fix, otherwise we're no better off than before. So as I said, "After a maximum 1 year term, a randomly selected citizen would be expected to go back to their previous line of work." It's automatically suspicious if they don't! Regardless of whether there's a criminal conviction at the end, there would be a level of personal scrutiny regarding the acceptance of post-service jobs that doesn't exist now, especially because under sortition there would be very little if any practical value in the "experience" of a temporary legislator to a potential employer, i.e., political connections, networks, and knowledge that currently take many years to acquire.
On the matter of conviction, you seem to assume that the laws would remain exactly the same as before, whereas I make no such assumption. Rather, I assume that the laws would get stricter, so it would be easier to convict a government official of corruption. Our current elected representatives who make the laws are too easy on themselves, precisely because soliciting money from corporate donors is how they got into office in the first place, so they don't want to cut off their source of power. If somewhat more honest folks were in charge, they wouldn't allow legislators to get away with a lot of the crap that's currently allowed.
There's actually no reason why the voting record of a citizen legislator needs to be released to the public. They do it with elected officials, because if you're going to vote for someone, you want to know how they voted. But with unelected officials, it could be secret ballots, so nobody even knows how they did their job.
> they like the PR of hiring ex-reps.
There's no PR in hiring a randomly selected person who was only in office for 1 year. Nobody even knows the randos.
> or any number of reasons a lawyer could bring up in court
Which reasons? All of the reasons that exist now relate to politicians having long experience, connections, and other things that go along with having a "career" in politics. None of the reasons hold for what is essentially a temp job.
> I think you’re confusing “representatives” with “elected representatives”. they would be representing the population at large
No, I'm not confusing anything. Getting randomly selected from the public is not the same as representing the public. An elected representative is expected to get the opinion of and serve their constituency. There's no such expectation in sortition. Compare with juries. A juror is mostly randomly selected from the public but doesn't "represent" the public. A juror doesn't need to consult the public about the trial; to the contrary, jurors are not even allowed to consult outsiders about the trial. A juror simply decides the case base on its merits and nothing else. There's no representation.
I think you're underestimating the inherent corruption of the current political system. By the time a politician takes office they're usually a "known quantity", because (1) they have to run an election campaign to introduce themselves to the public, and (2) in order to finance such a campaign, they have to raise money, which mostly involves going around begging wealthy interests for money. So such interests can already develop a relationship with the candidate before they get elected, by contributing money to their election campaign. Running for election is inherently corrupting in that way. Whereas government officials randomly selected from the public are wild cards. You can't just go around bribing a thousand unknown random people, because while some may take the bribe, the chances are decent that you'll run into a honest, ethical person who won't take the bribe but rather turn you into the authorities, and then you'll go to jail, because bribing a government official is a felony. All it takes is one honest randomly selected citizen to blow up the entire bribery scheme. So it would be massively dangerous for the briber. It's difficult to build "trusting" relationships with such short-term unknown legislators. This is why most political bribery takes the form of legal campaign contributions, which pose no danger to the contributor and are quite effective at getting results. Eliminate election campaigns, and you've eliminated the primary source of corruption.
We have to compare sortition against the current system, not against some ideal of perfection. If sortition is simply less corrupt that the current system, it's a win. You can always think of ways to game any system, but our current system is practically designed for corruption.