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10/14/2003: "California’s Bold Lessons for Democracy"

Now that California has once again shown national leadership in big ideas, I’d like to offer a modest plan for achieving the benefits of their vision across the entire country. I’m not talking about electing celebrities - nothing terribly innovative there. The real lesson of the California political experience over the last several decades has been the power of legislation-by-proposition to greatly improve on the system invented by America’s Founding Fathers. Not to put the FFs down, but they lived a long time ago, and maybe they just didn’t appreciate how valuable it would be to democracy for the general population to vote on individual issues. Fortunately, California has addressed this unaccountable oversight, and we now have enough data points to make a few minor improvements as we roll out California’s alternative system of government across the entire country. The first step in this rollout is to establish three annual election days. Having predefined election days is an improvement on California’s system of ad-hoc elections; it reduces chaos and expense in favor of the efficiency of routine. The first of the three elections will allow people to vote on the government services they need. Like Californians, we’ll be able to lock in specific blocks of spending on whatever is the issue du jour – highways, education, land conservancy, extended medical benefits, whatever. The second election will be for voting on caps or repeals of taxes. For example, rather than having to go to the trouble of electing a new Governor to get rid of the unpopular car tax, voters could have just done so directly had there been a pre-scheduled “tax fixing” election. The third election would be for President, in case the incumbent had demonstrated incompetence over the prior year. For example, maybe s/he was unable to perform that most basic of managerial tasks, coming up with a way to balance revenues to spending (without new taxes, of course). We all know how easy that is, so the fact that so few politicians seem to be able to do it only shows how much incompetence there really is out there. That being the case, it only makes sense to schedule a preemptive recall in the unfortunately likely event that the current governor turns out to be yet another incompetent. I’ll bet the Founding Fathers are slapping themselves on the forehead in their graves that they somehow overlooked this clearly superior system!