this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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Cribbage players are massively underrepresented in Congress, so we need a third chamber that's designed to give equal representation to cribbage and non-cribbage playing Americans. It's only fair, and we all know that fair and equal are good. Maybe we should have a fourth chamber where trans people have equal representation too, to keep Republicans from continuing to try to trample their rights.
Land shouldn't vote, people should vote. No, I don't think rural Podunk should have equal representation to Metropolis. One person, one vote. That has absolutely nothing to do with "populism" by the way.
Reductio ad absurdum. The conversation at hand has nothing to do with classes of people or their specific interests.
I do agree that our current Senate structure was specifically designed to give more political power to states with lower populations. That may have made more sense when the country was being established. The senate isn't exactly about land having a vote though. It's about states themselves voting. The geographical size and the population of the state are both irrelevant.
It probably made sense in the 1700s. States needed that level of autonomy, and someone to speak on behalf of the state so that a federal policy that made sense to some states wasn't forced upon other independent states.
In the year 2023 I'm not so sure but I think there is still an argument to be had for states to have their own votes. For example, if the federal government wanted to levy taxes based on geographic size of the state, or the amount of land owned by individuals. Such a policy probably sounds great to people living in eastern states which are smaller but more densely populated compared to western states. If it came down to a vote based on population, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, the Dakotas are now stuck with a decision that negatively impacts their citizens unfairly.
The problem has to do with the way the two houses are combined. Both houses have to agree even though they have different representation needs and goals. It was a lazy compromise to just say "both houses must agree", but drawing a line between whether an issue is about a state or individuals on a national basis is very hard to do.
My example of cribbage players is indeed absurd, but it's no less absurd than the reality we have learned to accept through conditioning. That's not reductio ad absurdum, it's legitimate use of unfamiliar absurdity to make familiar absurdity visible.
The distribution of power to the states instead of the people was a political necessity to keep some states from leaving the table, not a visionary principal of anyone's ideal democracy. It never "made sense" at all, but was made necessary by the political realities of the time. No, it was not intended to give the vote to land, but that was it's effect.
Your example of taxation by land mass is a far better example of reductio ad absurdum. If democracy is to be viewed as tyranny of the majority, then any alternative is, by the same exact logic, a tyranny of the minority. Any power caries with it the risk of tyranny, no matter how it's distributed. Generally speaking, the less centralized power is, the less likely it is to be abused, but the risk is never zero.
Distributing power to the states instead of the people sounds like a step in the right direction from putting it in the hands of the federal government, but it's actually the opposite. There are countless examples where states get trapped in a race to the bottom. For instance, a state that raises the minimum wage has to risk jobs shifting to another state, or failing to find a privately owned business could move it to another state. Much of the power states have only exists until they try to use it. Since states can't control their borders and regulate trade with other states, the whole system just becomes an obstacle to reform.