[pp.int.general] This year, I'm voting against representative democracy.

[Charly Pache]

"
Bram Cohen <https://www.facebook.com/bram.cohen> · 10,500 subscribers
Thursday at 7:07pm<https://www.facebook.com/bram.cohen/posts/10152218683280183>via
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This year, I'm voting against representative democracy.
Here in California we have this ridiculous system where effectively all tax
increases have to be put to a vote and new laws can be created by a simple
majority of people who actually vote.
I think both of these are insane. We elect people so that laws and taxes
can be done by professionals, and the results of California's experiment in
direct democracy are reliably disastrous. The state chronically doesn't
have enough money and tax increases are at best mixed with gimmicky
feel-good measures. Laws passed by ballot are typically corrupt and make
money for their corporate sponsors, and even when that isn't the case
they're usually poorly thought out and misleading. So I'm voting with the
following strategy, as a protest against my right to vote:
Voting IN FAVOR of anything which undoes a previous ballot measure, for
example three strikes. There are frequently a lot of these.
Voting IN FAVOR of anything which primarily raises money for the state.
Voting IN FAVOR of keeping the ballot districts which were drawn up by the
citizens commission (this year brings a new innovation in things which
shouldn't be subject to referendum!)
Voting AGAINST everything else. Yes this means voting against a lot of
seemingly touchy feely things, but most of those don't mean what you think
they mean, and even the ones which approximately do tend to be extremely
poorly drafted pieces of legislation. Many of the descriptions of what the
new laws will do are downright fraudulent, a predictable effect of being
able to get possible new laws on the ballot just by raising enough money to
collect signatures.
My one exception this year will be voting in favor of getting rid of the
death penalty, because it's very clear what the effect of that legislation
is, it's an embarrassment that it hasn't been done already, and it saves a
ton of money.
"

On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 3:14 AM, Richard Stallman <rms at gnu.org> wrote:

> I hope many of us have no Facebook accounts and can't access that page,
> so can you show us what it says?
>
> --
> Dr Richard Stallman
> President, Free Software Foundation
> 51 Franklin St
> Boston MA 02110
> USA
> www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
> Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
>   Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call
>
> ____________________________________________________
> Pirate Parties International - General Talk
> pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
> http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general
>
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