A Proposal for Representative Government
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
(Winston Churchill, from a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947)
The quote is usually offered as a defense of democracy. I prefer to read it as a critique of government. If the best form of government is still very bad, that is a strong argument against using government to do things.
I cannot, however, resist the temptation to offer my own proposal for an improved version of representative democracy. Not, I hasten to say, one that I have any reason to think would work better, merely one that more nearly lives up to the label. It works as follows:
1. Anyone who wishes may be a congressional representative.
2. Any voter may choose any representative to represent him, but only one at a time. A voter is free to switch from one representative to another on 24 hours notice--less if the relevant technology makes it practical.
3. A representative casts a number of votes in the house, or on committee, equal to the number of voters he represents.
4. Any representative representing at least 240,000 voters gets a seat in Congress, can introduce bills, speak on the floor of the House, act as a representative now does. Representatives with fewer than that number of votes can group with other such representatives to satisfy the requirement, giving them one seat which they can share among themselves in any mutually acceptable fashion. The limit can in the future be adjusted to keep the total number of seats in the house at about its present level.
I make no claim that this system would work better than alternatives, including the one we now have. It is, however, a more elegant solution to the problem of representative government than current systems and comes closer to justifying the label.