– the number of citizens per each of the 50 states in the U.S. is today, on average, 6,300,000 (or more than 27 time larger than in 1789);
– the average number of citizens represented by each of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives today is about 724,000 – meaning that the typical member of the U.S. House today represents a number of citizens 13 times larger than was represented by his or her counterpart in 1789;
– – the average number of citizens represented by each of the 100 members of the U.S. Senate today is 3,150,000 – meaning that the typical member of the U.S. Senate today represents a number of citizens 23 times larger than was represented by his or her counterpart in 1789.
For a long time, I have made an issue of this. I believe that as government scales up, it gets worse. My recent essay offered international evidence for this. I discuss it in the widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced. Michael Lotus and James Bennett in America 3.0 also suggest that a country with more states, each less populous but with more governing autonomy, would be a desirable future. Almost ten years ago, I wrote We Need 250 States.
George Mason made a big deal out of this in the Congressional Congress debates. It was a common theme of the Anti-Federalists.
Take a look at our neighbors to the north. While I am not inclined to agree with the philosophy of the Canadian government, I certainly respect their greater competence and responsiveness.
There is one MP per hundred thousand Canadians. If yo call your MPs office, there’s a decent chance you will get a call back.
Try that with your senator in a big state.
This is a “democratic distance” problem. In a big state, you have no clue who the people are on the ballot, so the political challenge is getting on the ballot at all for a party that has a chance to win. This means the ballot is all about political insiders, and the electorate is irrelevant.
Short of dissolving the country – which I think would be hugely dangerous – I think we should go to a simple lottery system for choosing at least some significant part of the legislature. Possibly something like having the House expanded by 10x and picking the members by lottery. Yes, we’d get lots of incompetents, but we already get these, and nearly all members would actually have done something in their lives other than politics. Also, terms would need to be longer so these obviously inexperienced people could learn a bit about legislating before casting votes; I often wondered if an 8 year term would be good, with the first two years being as nonvoting observers. And salaries would need to be a lot higher ($500K+/year tax free?), otherwise you’d keep out a lot of people who simply couldn’t afford to give up their careers for an extended period and move to DC.
So, are you advocating expanding government payrolls by a factor of more than 10 times?
Only Congressional payrolls. For all the whining we do about Congress, the one I think is actually a huge problem is they’re actually underpaid. An ordinary person simply couldn’t afford to be a Congressperson (without some corruption on the side). Sure, if you’re thumping the populist tub, you can make the salaries look high, but for fifty-something professionals in most fields, the salaries are actually not that great, especially as you have to maintain two households.
In my “Congressional draft” idea, it would be like extended jury duty, so you’d need some compensation to make it something people don’t fight hard to get out of doing. To avoid making it too much like conscription, you’d probably make it opt-in or opt-out rather than absolutely mandatory, but you want something that gets good – and probably otherwise highly-paid – people into it as well as a mix of more “ordinary” people. And the pay needs to be high enough that bribery is expensive.
My question was to Arnold, not you. You can tell by the fact that my previous post was not indented to yours and colored differently.
Wouldn’t your lottery system run into problems with the 13th amendment? I mean, putting aside the fact that it has no chance at all of being adopted.
Aggressively applying the principle of subsidiarity to empower municipalities at the expense of the state and federal levels would achieve the same result. In my ideal United States, the municipal government would manage the vast majority of services including and especially the social safety net. Tax rates be would reflect the distribution of power, with highest rates at the municipal level. I would also revert selection of Federal Senators back to the state governments so that state government interests were better represented at the Federal level.
In addition to shortening the distance between the representative and the citizen, this structure would also increase the number and diversity of “experiments” in government services. Presumably, each municipality would be providing different levels and types of services. The successful experiments could be applied to other municipalities and the failures would be small and limited.
Tom H.