Mancur Olson suggested offering generic benefits to attract people to his large groups.
The difficulty in that is where do these benefits come from? Small groups don't have the resources to put that together. So we came up with First Nation - something large and stable enough to put together core packages of benefits for any other Nation to offer to their members.
Then there's the problem of what groups should be able to get them? A group of 10 people? 1000? 10,000? First nation would have to set some kind of criteria.
It's a non-profit. There are a dozen ways you can set it up to avoid it becoming a king-maker.
We realized we could also use First Nation as a Watchdog group. They're not necessary for this part of the system to work, but it could be effective.
Congress voted on a financial overhaul bill last week, for example. First Nation would have polled the other Nations to see how they felt about what needs to be done, what they'd like to see.
The financial industry had lots of lobbyists involved in the bill, but there were few, if any, representatives from consumer protection groups or similar. In this scenario, I'm pretty sure at least one or two Nations would propose some new ideas or have some comment on what was passed.
They'd try to convince other Nations to lend support. This "encompassing coalition" of Nations could sway the direction of financial overhaul to something that's beneficial to the larger public rather than the bank lobby.
SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS
These aren't special interest groups.
I'd join a Science Nation, for example. What's their agenda in financial regulation? None. But I bet some of the people there might have some interesting and good perspective on what should be done. These are "general interest groups". If the bill being discussed were about funding a supercollider, on the other hand, then I think you could say they're biased. And the other Nations would know it.
GRIDLOCK
That's a terrible argument. If your car can only go 10 mph, then it might help you avoid fatal crashes, but it also makes it difficult to go anywhere. Take Immigration Reform. The system has been broken for 20 years. Did you see the bit in the comic about why negative campaigning works in a winner-take-all system? Immigration hasn't been fixed because right now all a politician needs to do is discredit an idea instead of proposing a new one. There is no "win" for anyone who proposes an idea.
WHAT'S THE 67,000 FOR?
Fair question. I'm running for office and using the campaign to pitch an idea that might help fix the system a little bit. Even if you don't buy Olson's ideas, the worst that happens is that you end up with groups that offer benefits similar to AARPs. I do need to fund my campaign. I didn't think asking for a dollar was so onerous that it would raise suspicion of impropriety.
I tend to look at the special interest groups as the problem of distributed costs and concentrated benefits. In the case of the off-shore drilling, the minority has much more to gain individually than the majority has to lose individually, so it's worth the minority's time, money and effort to advocate fiercely, while resisting would expend more effort than the result justifies.
So, if we want to dis-empower special interests, we need to empower the general people, specifically by affecting this equation: by decreasing the cost of advocacy, and/or increasing the expected benefit of advocacy.
You seem to be attempting to increase the benefits by tying nations to group benefits, and decreasing the cost by redefining advocacy as joining a 'nation.' The challenge here is that for the advocacy to influence the existing system, it needs to result in election results as well, and I don't see that connection quite so clearly. Could you elaborate?
I do think there's something here - with a little help on the advocacy cost/benefit side, voter power could definitely put a damper on special interests in general. That's the thrust of my own effort in this area, focused on the voter side: http://votereports.org/
I certainly want something like this to work, but I still don't understand your explanation why these aren't special interest groups. I'm a member of the ACLU, which is already a large group that lobbies heavily to retain basic freedoms; what benefit would there be to them becoming "ACLU Nation"? I'm a member of NARP (Nat'l Assoc. of Rail Passengers), which is a somewhat smaller group that lobbies for better rail policy (both Amtrak and more local commuter rail and mass transit), AND they've negotiated a 10% discount on Amtrak travel. What would NARP Nation be able to do that NARP can't now?
>what benefit would there be to them becoming "ACLU Nation"?
I don't think there is one. The idea is to get far more people to join something similar and get them engaged (which I see as the biggest problem. Shallow engagement requiring no effort is easy, getting people to actually vote is apparently incredibly difficult).
I may be wrong, but it seems like the idea is to be a group against special interest groups. That is, to monitor the pieces of legislation that could be pushed through by a small but passionate minority, that could potentially be detrimental to the majority. Who knows if it will work though...
I'm not really sure that an uber-interest group that decides which special interest groups' policies it supports/opposes on any given issue adds much to political discourse.
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Plenty of existing interest groups are well-funded and organised enough to offer benefits to members; many do. The ACLU, the Catholic Church and reddit readers were perfectly able to articulate their views on financial reform that werent motivated by [obvious] special interests. The reason that the banks have been more effective in their lobbying is because they're much better connected, more-highly motivated and more knowledgeable when it comes to pushing for the financial reforms they want. Forgive me for judging your policy plans based entirely on a witty cartoon, but I'm not entirely convinced that simply going online, having a budget and claiming to be a non-aligned faction is going to help you unite different factions with different views on financial reform effectively enough to beat the bankers. They might even convert First Nation to their way of thinking (they're the ones providing the credit cards, right :p)
Yes, I apologize for summarizing your point a little over-hard. But... it's over-summarized only a little.
Look, just replace "Nation" with "Special Interest Group" and the whole thing reads just fine. I normally hate this semantic trick, but in this case it works because it's what you're really saying.
um, the idea is to bribe everyone to join something rather than only having the people who are especially motivated by a special interest. Its like giving everyone $100 just for voting regardless of who or what they vote for.
I can replace "Republican" with "Baby-eater" in a description of the GOP platform and it reads just fine too, that doesn't make it any more true.
"I can replace "Republican" with "Baby-eater" in a description of the GOP platform and it reads just fine too,"
Well, I'd say that says more about you than Republicans. It does change the semantic content of the text, whereas my replacement doesn't. That's my point. Special interests bribe people too, or haven't your read the AARP literature?
Well, you probably haven't, but somehow someone with a vaguely similar name got crossed with mine and I started receiving solicitations from them. (I keep the fake solicitation membership card in my wallet. Fun gag to pull out at parties. At least while I'm still young enough to obviously not be a member.) Believe me, they don't really spend a lot of time laying out their political platform in that literature, a lot of which is rather more liberal than their base would really appreciate. They lay out all the benefits you get.
This is what I mean. Finding an actual difference in behavior between the "nations" and "special interest groups" is pretty hard. "Group of people of political interest where the group is kept together by benefits and collective action is taken on political matters both in and not in their direct charter"... if you rubbed out the word "nation" and asked me to fill in the blank, I'd write in "special interest group".
My point was that your substitution changes the meaning too. Special interest is a well understood term, and Nation in this context is defined. While its true in this scenario some special interests could end up being nations, nations are a superset of special interest nations. The difference I perceive in this terminology is between "special interest groups" and "interest groups". AARP is an interest group (and more, while they are a powerful lobbying group, that is only one of their stated purposes, just as a labor union's only function is not political lobbying). The tea part is an interest group filled with crazy people. Marijuana legalization groups, pro-life/pro-choice groups, and the american corn farming lobbying group are special interest groups. Interest groups have a wide swath of generally shared interests and views. Most old people share certain interests and AARP caters to those. In other interest areas old people's views/concerns are as disparate as the general population's. The AARP does not in general pay attention to those. By contrast a special interest group has a single or narrowly defined set of issues they care about, and they care a great deal about that tiny part of life.
Taking this into the context of the proposed nations. Some people care about a single issue enough to be single issue voters and join a special interest nation. The majority of people could find a community that shares their views on a wide swath of issues of varying priority to them.
I don't really think this idea would actually get the desired effect of having general interest groups be effective in counteracting special interest groups if they aren't already passionately concerned with the issue, but effectiveness is not an argument for/against underlying motives.
edit: oh, and I have seen AARP literature trying to inform members about political issues, as well as informing them of benefits of being a member. AARP shouldn't be trying to sell its members on any view, AARP is supposed to find out what its members care about and what can benefit them and lobby the government for those things.
The problem I see with this entire notion is that groups have to do something to make themselves a political force. AARP is powerful because it has a huge audience of high turnout voters to wield. Likewise for certain unions in particular areas.
Facebook groups have no power because they're full of people who waste their time on social networks playing farmville.
I'm all for getting people to engage in the political process somehow, but I fear the people who would take this seriously and use it to motivate their voting are already voting. Injecting ideas only works if you have a credible (or at least powerful) voice.
It's not live yet. Probably Tuesday by the looks of it. We gave this interview hoping to flesh out the natural questions that people might have. So far, Hacker News has done the best job. We're compiling things for the FAQ and the other 80% of the comic not shown on the newspaper site.
Do you need someone to design/build a website for you? Your current site displays in a very thin column that is difficult and frustrating to read. Not to mention it's a bit lack luster.
No, but thank you. There's actually a full, beautiful site behind that hastily hacked together front page. That's what will go live soon - probably Tuesday or Wednesday.
> If you want to FIX America, start by teaching people to think for themselves and dislodge themselves from the meme that everything in the political arena has to be constructed under an "us versus them" mentality,
This is, I believe, not possible.
Our media has every incentive to carve out a demographic and get them angry at others. We have a winner-take-all political system with two political parties, which creates polar arguments. Duvarger's Law makes fixing this impossible.
And I think you have the wrong impression of what these are. They are very limited, but the newspaper story doesn't go into those rules. It's a way to remove differences so that one group, say people who believe Obama is the Anti-Christ, can try to achieve something for themselves free from those of us who prefer reason. In any peace process, there a few tried and true steps. One is to separate the two warring sides so that they can't escalate fear or damage.
This is a massive undertaking, but i don't see anyone trying to bring America back together. You ask good questions. Your worries about where we're headed are justified. And I'm going to add at least four answers to the FAQ based on this. Thanks!
Have you considered joining forces with Lawrence Lessig for this? His Change Congress is a drastically different mechanism but the end results seem roughly similar.
Besides the Voltron aspect he is a recognized legal scholar and might quiet some of the "this could never work" arguments if he signs off on it.
Thanks for that example, Gormo. We hadn't seen that one. Most of the other examples we'd found were separate, but geographically overlapping systems based on secular vs. religious laws.
This has nothing in common with that. It's really just as simple as allowing enforcement of a group contract. And people look for legal workarounds all the time. The really expensive lawyers are excellent at it.
Yes, so there can't be a true "universal" public option that lets in everyone at first. But a nation would have control over their membership requirements so they can control the flow. Also, many nations might join a health care alliance to increase the network size and economies of scale.
Yes, we've re-defined domestic nation law constantly since the Marshall trilogy in the early 1800s.
You're right. There's no way it could work that way. There'd have to be a bunch of rules to limit it and be a benefit for the states, too. Which there are, but the newspaper story only carried the introduction segment. I'd wait to see the full thing. :-)
Sure, if you make the case based on the Establishment clause and try to sue your way to creating them. Legitimate Native Americans have tried to sue their way into their own nations and it's been thrown out.
But I'm not. It's based on Congress' Plenary Authority over the Indian Nations. Congress can modify the rules however they see fit, including creating a new class.
Mancur Olson suggested offering generic benefits to attract people to his large groups.
The difficulty in that is where do these benefits come from? Small groups don't have the resources to put that together. So we came up with First Nation - something large and stable enough to put together core packages of benefits for any other Nation to offer to their members.
Then there's the problem of what groups should be able to get them? A group of 10 people? 1000? 10,000? First nation would have to set some kind of criteria.
It's a non-profit. There are a dozen ways you can set it up to avoid it becoming a king-maker.
We realized we could also use First Nation as a Watchdog group. They're not necessary for this part of the system to work, but it could be effective.
Congress voted on a financial overhaul bill last week, for example. First Nation would have polled the other Nations to see how they felt about what needs to be done, what they'd like to see.
The financial industry had lots of lobbyists involved in the bill, but there were few, if any, representatives from consumer protection groups or similar. In this scenario, I'm pretty sure at least one or two Nations would propose some new ideas or have some comment on what was passed.
They'd try to convince other Nations to lend support. This "encompassing coalition" of Nations could sway the direction of financial overhaul to something that's beneficial to the larger public rather than the bank lobby.
SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS
These aren't special interest groups.
I'd join a Science Nation, for example. What's their agenda in financial regulation? None. But I bet some of the people there might have some interesting and good perspective on what should be done. These are "general interest groups". If the bill being discussed were about funding a supercollider, on the other hand, then I think you could say they're biased. And the other Nations would know it.
GRIDLOCK
That's a terrible argument. If your car can only go 10 mph, then it might help you avoid fatal crashes, but it also makes it difficult to go anywhere. Take Immigration Reform. The system has been broken for 20 years. Did you see the bit in the comic about why negative campaigning works in a winner-take-all system? Immigration hasn't been fixed because right now all a politician needs to do is discredit an idea instead of proposing a new one. There is no "win" for anyone who proposes an idea.
WHAT'S THE 67,000 FOR?
Fair question. I'm running for office and using the campaign to pitch an idea that might help fix the system a little bit. Even if you don't buy Olson's ideas, the worst that happens is that you end up with groups that offer benefits similar to AARPs. I do need to fund my campaign. I didn't think asking for a dollar was so onerous that it would raise suspicion of impropriety.
TEA PARTY
Well, they really are bogeymen. :-)