The Hamptons

All powers to their lowest appropriate level. Ranked Ballot will put an end to war & all other forms of violence, whether ongoing effect, or “brand new”. A real source of all the world’s problems is the horse & buggy two-party system. RB is the solution. The world is on the precipice of the whirlpool that it has only just begun to climb out of, & it is not yet clear whether we will be falling back in, to kill, torture & exploit each other to the end of time, not having a second New World to save us again, be that descent by overpopulation, high-tech dictatorship, literalist or gangsterist contretemps (OR economic, environmental or tectonic collapse). On the one hand, all powers to the atomistic/indivisible individual, but, on the other (even if anyone may have heard of it) unifying Ranked Ballot (aka IRV, Preferential, Australian or Choice Voting) voters ranking all candidates in order of preference, will give us the answer to ALL these things, whether desired of feared, even if not necessarily in the form imagined, & that virtually instantaneously. Justice, is the redress of past violence, Freedom its current absence & Non-Violence the basis of all morality, be the violence by individuals, groups or the state (except, of course, in case of self defense).

The first choices are counted & if no-one has 50%, the next choices are added in, & so on ’til someone finally does. This is the “additive” form of RB. Because this gives an equal chance of winning to not just all parties, but all combinations of programs, RB has brakes, reverse, 3D, hyper-drive, subtlety, light-footedness, objectivity, & so is the only thing that’s truly simultaneously both most Just & most Free. RB will give us instant, TRUE Democracy for all the world, no matter what ladders they pull up to prevent it. Because it always picks the candidate most exactly in the middle, & because of its shining example to all of the world’s 99%, of giving an equal chance of winning to all, RB is more top-dead-center counter-extremist than all the many recent retrenchments combined. Both more Freedom & Justice (free market & commun[e]-ity) can be found in RB than in any ideology. Brakes & Reverse mean no more need to suppress popular movements around the world. Light-footedness means that the concerns of both passions, (both Justice AND Freedom) will be constantly given consideration at every point in time. RB is to the horse & buggy two-party system as shopping at the Mall of America is to shopping in Soviet Russia.

Everyone just needs to run on the SINGLE ISSUE of RB, promising a citizens’ advisory board, based on Organized Communications (“OC”), to guide us in the rest. OC is small randomly assigned discussion groups electing reps to higher & higher randomly assigned levels, by means of RB, till one small group, exactly in the middle of all participating, remains. Within the movement for RB, a committee chosen by OC would, by its mere invite to speak, indicate the next winner of the next election. (They’ll be falling all over themselves before we even get organized.) This is the instantaneous part. RB would be equally useful for all systems, parliamentary or presidential (the parliaments by picking their Prime Ministers by RB, from among their members, so as to prevent the rise of yet another extremist monster) coops, collective leaderships, tribal groupings, religious confessions, political parties, associations, or even cabals. RB would be the sole unchangeable plank and bylaw of a Preferential Ballot Party, the only practicable third party. Of course, it’d mean lots having to let go of their nut (to get their hand back out of the tree) resting in the knowledge of RB’s sure aim, as if anyone could then care. Or, we might just go with satellite solar collectors to fulfill everyone’s dreams, but then, we’ll only boil the atmosphere away before we’re done. Putting any program before needed reforms to the system means you’ll get neither, but RB will give us both.

Americans really only have debt to Blacks, Native Americans, & now, subsistence farmers, because of the dislocations resulting from dumping of high-tech corn. No woman ever got pregnant to have an abortion. A perhaps more practicable solution for health care than the current Rube Goldberg contraption would be single payer for generics & free market for all else. Single payer for generic & Wild West for all else. The single payer side of the coin because of convenience, like that of the interstate highway system, a natural monopoly. (Tolls are really just spinning wheels & electronic tolls, so anti-freedomist as to make the Libertarians look like fools). Full employment is an economic fiction not corresponding to the real lives of actual people. As long as health insurance is tied to employment, there will always be those between jobs & so without insurance &/or healthcare. Also, single payer will yield the greatest worker (& thus economic) mobility & undercut the last excuse for all-too-often-conspiring-in-restraint-of-trade-parochial-&-extortionistic big labor. We should start with the biggest health care users first & curing them, learn as we go how to prevent these conditions. All anyone should need is proof of identity & the location of the nearest primary care clinic. The Free Market side would be because of the great innovation that that provides, & as a message to the world to not do away, or interfere with, the right of individuals to make agreements with each other. We need to lay the housing shortage, & hence ethnic conflict, as well as the gutting of America’s industrial might, at the feet of the unions (who bid themselves out of existence). Subsidize food storage, not production, & educational infrastructure, broadband, distance learning & classrooms, not tuition. A geothermal heat pump ban to prevent greater tectonic activity. Committee Chairs chosen by members of committees, not seniority, & random committee assignments. Let those with special interest testify, not rule. Cable Choice, so we can all walk among each other without fear & anger, blissfully ignorant of our divisions, ’til that choice brings us all to laughter. Half of all legislatures women, ie: two seats per district, since gender is the only natural special/affirmative category. A No Strike for Wages Pledge by all unions, especially if some form of card check passes & everyone gets unionized, but really because its just chasing your tail. Paying for Defense with an Import Tax, on oil, & maybe all other imports as well. (Gradually, over a generation. Down with all shock therapy! They’ll long since have got the point before we get to too high a barrier.) Treat boo like beer & save billions a year, to totally end the unnecessary & wasteful Police-Industrial Complex. Prioritizing Bills in all legislatures by #/cosigners, & not dictatorial, deal making leaderships. A Random Primary Process, one state (county?) eleven months before the next election & one more than the previous month, each successive month, till the remainder votes in the month before the actual election. Tax consumption, not investment, so as to spread the productivity around. A supermajority for major appointments, like the Supreme Court, Defense & Law enforcement.

We could go silent, shut out the lights & disappear into the cosmos. It’s not like we’re going anywhere soon, & in any event, the fiercer the planet, the sooner it would have arrived at a state of ethnic homogeneity, & been blissed out behind Democracy. How can we ask it of others if we do not have it ourselves? It must be in somebody’s interest. Ten to the power of ten (ten levels of groups of ten) would be sufficient to include, organize & unite all indivisible, individual members of humanity, not just elites. You do the same, from the most local on up. Unless all the world’s women have total control over their own bodies (not yet necessarily permanently assured anywhere) no program or condition will ever amount to a hill of beans, because over-population will just eat it up. Good enough for New Zealand, Australia, Kerala India(?), Iraq (if not quite instantaneously, for the selection of its President & that by the parliament & not the people), London, Ireland for the selection of its President, Cambridge Mass, Burlington & 95% of the townships of Vermont, Pierce County Washington, the Twin Cities, the Utah Republican Party for the selection of statewide candidates (even if perhaps only once upon a time) the platforms of both the Green & Libertarian Parties & many college student bodies across the US, with more coming every year, but not good enough for the rest of us? All human evil is due to the out of phase fluctuation of population & food supply, so no-one alive is responsible for the mess we find ourselves in, except for what they do here & now. Just go out & collect signatures to get on the ballot, asking those who sign to collect them for you as well. “Consider that which is common in the sight of all men.”

Everyone works hardest when they work for themselves, so the greatest good is to be found in the greatest # working for themselves, even if we still need an adequate, howsoever minimalist safety net, till we finally work out the up & downs of free markets. All things being equal, nothing should prevent individuals from entering into agreements with each other, or to engage in activities the collective does. Dems (& Reps & 3rd Parties) need to start running their own primaries, using RB, Organized Communications, a randomly scheduled primary system, & in the case of left parties, progressive party dues, or, in the case of right wing parties, bidding for seats on the board, or buying stock in the party. This will save vast sums, as TV & radio ads will no longer be needed, especially once the candidate has been named. It would be impossible for big media to ignore one, no matter how much they want to hold the parties up for the coverage. A random primary system might have one randomly chosen state’s primary eleven months before the election, two the next month & so on, until the remainder were held in the October before the election. No-one should be allowed to own stock in each type of broadcast station who doesn’t live within that station’s broadcast area, or no-one should be allowed to own more than one share in any station, or no-one should be allowed to be a partner in more than one, but public finance of culture is the same as of religion, really unseemly. The percentage difference between a 40 hour week & a 35 hour one is greater than the current unemployment rate. Yet the economy only needs to be a little more free market than all the rest; no shock therapy required. Greater global competition will not hurt anyone. We’ll just end up with better goods at lower prices. They’re investing it in whatever they think is most productive, which just may not be locally. Do away with free trade & everything will cost way more. Companies buying other companies can result in economies of scale, in which case it is a good thing. One of those economies is the need for fewer of the hated managers & administrators per worker, but now that great computing power is available of all, that trend should subside. There is a short list of things that will increase productivity & hence wealth & employment: man-hours, technology, skill levels, savings, efficiency & raw materials, not spending the wealth of our grand children. A golden opportunity is being missed to suggest a straight line progressive income tax from zero % for some low point, to 100% for some unimaginable income way up there at infinity, where all the Congress can do is set the slope of the line & any income, down to the penny, will give a corresponding % rate of payment, essentially producing an infinity of rates, not the two or three tiers they came up with, at the start of the computer age. Norman Thomas’s actual platform was right of most of what comes out of the Democrats today. Otherwise, taxing consumption, not investment, or a simple property tax, based on the total square footage of all land and levels for each property, regardless of improvements, would be the most efficient & incorruptible way to go. Good ole two-party system is only good in a crisis. A hundred years ago we also had no cars, or indoor plumbing, land was cheaper, cobblestone streets, practically no one went to college, we had no third world competition & most folks worked way longer just to feed themselves. Just cut 5 or more % across the board & work out the adjustments later. But just withdrawing from the world will only make us have to pay more down the road. Crucially now, with all the inevitable (US) talk about “independent” (read bi-partisan through duopolistic) redistricting commissions, a worthy yet apparently unmentioned possibility would be to limit the number of changes of direction of legislative district boundaries, or, to halve the average number of changes of direction of all the districts & let that be the new number of allowable changes of direction for any district, or, by extension, give the task to a computer to create districts with the fewest number of changes of direction possible.

RB will give us a perfect marriage of Freedom & Justice, Tradition & Modernity, Palestinian & Jew (They could be world wide coops, instead of struggling with each other iver a sliver of desert.) Free Market & Commun[e]-alism, all the fairness, payback & make-up one could wish for, clean back to the Cro-Magnons, a real solution to terror, ecologically sustainable politics, what’s best for all workers, instant global women’s liberation, world-wide luxury, a rationalization of the drug wars, human unity, ultimate retail politics, perfect compromise, “phantasmagoric subtlefaction”, real-time alternatives to all proposals, from wherever: market, coop or social, tribal, theological or universal, an answer to infinitely more questions at a time than the two party system’s “who is least bad”, an adequate safety net, no more need to suppress popular movements around the world, both more Liberty & Justice than can be found in any ideology, subtlety, responsivity, light-footedness, long-sightedness, economy, accountability, an end to all the various forms of hegemonism (whether up front, subterranean or unconscious, in exchange for the so great burden of leading the world to the light) no more need to fear self expression, politics as if a family discussion around the kitchen table, no more jumping back & forth between extremes, with its consequent absence of the economists’ requirement of predictability for growth, the Freedom of Justice & the Justice of Freedom & even eventually, more than inadequate global confederation (but with all powers to their lowest appropriate level). This is what is known as the formlessness of forms.

While all human evil is due to the out of phase fluctuation of population & food supply, from the time the first hunter remembered the first fight over stray game in a bad year. Let there be a RB Caucus in the Democrat-ish party at least to start. Occupy the Universe. Help put this idea, in time, to as many as possible. “zoe” “morgan” z, realzoe@hotmail.com, preferentiality@gmail.com, USA

note: we received this in our “comments” on thehamptons.com at 2011-11-12 10:28:48.0 and we found it so thoughtfully written that we felt compelled to publish it…for “the real zoe morgan” whoever she is!?