Thomas Lord <[email protected]> says: >> Requiring supermajorities is tantamount to minority rule. > > California almost went bust because of the problem you > are talking about.
This is, imho, a dangerous metaphor. The California legislature, like all such political bodies, is /not/ a forum of colleagues struggling to work out the common good. It is a battleground to which a myriad of subsets of the super-rich people send their gladiators to fight out which subset gets to take home the spoils. In such a context, where there is no principled basis for voting, no commitment to a common purpose, and no right answers, but there /is/ a need to reach /some/ answer, simple majority rule is the most practical system for reasons that, as you say, the California budget process makes evident. I hope things have not reached that point among Schemers! If we're going to look at real-world metaphors for decision-making, I propose the Society of Friends (the Quakers). At a Friends' Meeting for Business, decisions large and small are made on the basis that any change requires 100% agreement. As a result, changes often don't happen until an old generation dies off. Most famously, the American Friends were quite late to enter the Abolitionist movement, because for a long time there was no consensus. But as soon as they /did/ approve an Abolitionist position, Quakers very quickly rose to positions of national leadership in the fight against slavery -- because every Quaker was wholeheartedly committed to that fight. [I'm not a Quaker; when I was a grad student I took a scholarly interest in consensus decision-making and that's when I learned all this.] That's how people who share a common set of core beliefs make decisions. P.S. "100% agreement" doesn't actually mean that everyone has to be terrifically enthusiastic about the proposed new policy, just that everyone has to feel comfortable with it. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
