“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.” — Bertrand Russell

Corruption is pervasive in America. Here are three examples:

· Filing taxes is a nightmare. The tax code is incomprehensible. Even a very well-educated citizen cannot be expected to know all of the provisions of the tax code that apply to her. Why can’t Americans file taxes for free with but a text message like citizens of many other countries can? In short, because of lobbying by Intuit, the maker of TurboTax. The company spends millions of dollars annually to prevent the government from developing a tax code and/or a tax filing system that is comprehensible to the citizens. Tom Campbell, a former senator, wrote that he “never saw as clear a case of lobbying power putting private interests first over public benefit.”

· Internet access is overpriced. The main benefit of free markets is that competition drives down prices for consumers. A necessary feature of this mechanism is that new entrants be allowed into the market. Internet service providers in the US have ensured that this doesn’t happen. Through intense lobbying they have gotten the lawmakers and the FCC under their heel. Most consumers in the US don’t have a choice of their Internet Service Provider as only one company serves their house, and it can charge them whatever it wants. France allows competition in the ISP space, and, because of that, internet access in France costs about half of what it does in the US.

· Nowhere else, though, is corruption as prolific as in the US healthcare system. The US spends approximately 50% more on healthcare per person than any other developed country and 3 times more than the UK does. And yet, the US healthcare system is poor to average as far as developed countries go — a recent Bloomberg study ranked the American healthcare system 50th best out of 55 countries assessed. The reason for that is aggressive lobbying by everybody involved in the industry. Drug companies can charge whatever they want, and Medicare cannot negotiate prices. The reimbursement system at hospitals can lead to them charging patients $25 for a single aspirin. Doctors in the US are paid more than just about anywhere else in the world. Insurance companies capture 250 billion dollars a year. All of this is due to powerful lobbying groups successfully maximizing how much their sponsors get paid.

A common argument is that lobbying is not corruption because it is legal. That is both false and dangerous. Private actors paying lawmakers to extract benefit from the public is corruption. Everybody knows this. Silicon Valley legend Bill Gurley might describe it as “regulatory capture”, while many more people would call it “the game being rigged” — but everybody understands the nature of the problem.

Some problems can exist in perpetuity, but corruption will have to be addressed in our lifetime. It is mathematically impossible to continue with our current level of healthcare spending. Government entitlements (largely Medicare and Medicaid) went from under 30% of the budget in the 60s to about 70% today. Because healthcare is most expensive for seniors and the ratio of working age people to those over 65 is going to fall from 4.5 today to under 3 by 2030, there will be no way for the country to maintain the present healthcare system and its levels of spending. While the public dispute focuses on single payer versus private insurance, the real issue is that costs are going to have to be cut. And they are going to have to be cut right out of the slice of the pie captured by special interests — pharma companies, insurance companies, hospitals and doctors. There is nowhere else to cut.

The current corrupt political system has not shown itself capable to take on special interests. Bernie Sanders promised to repeal Citizens United. Donald Trump famously promised to “drain the swamp” and has so far banned administration officials from taking on lobbying jobs for five years after they end their employment after leaving the administration. I posit that neither approach would succeed because they fail to address the root of the issue, which is this:

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY BREEDS CORRUPTION

As long as only a small number of people write, approve and modify laws, special interests can corrupt these people to extract value from the public. That corruption can take the form of donations to Super PACs, direct bribes, job offers after public office, internships for children, etc., etc. Trying to legislate the means of corruption is like fighting a Hydra — you cut off one head only to have two new heads grow in its place.

Representative democracy was a necessity in the 18th century. It was impossible to have every citizen vote on every law because the cost of voting was weeks of travel by horse. Today, the cost of voting is zero, seeing as smartphones can be voting devices. Now it is possible to have direct democracy — to have citizens voting on bills directly instead of choosing representatives to vote for them.

Eliminating corruption is not the only benefit of direct democracy. It also addresses the current political polarization. Having two parties in America led people to picking a side. That led to a lot of them hating the other side and blaming it for all the country’s problems. However, if you give people the ability to vote on every issue, they will discover that each of them has a unique set of views. They will talk and argue about specific issues, agreeing on some and disagreeing on others, but the notion of “you are either on my side or my enemy” will go away because there will simply be no sides to pick.

The establishment’s argument against direct democracy is invariably some form of this: leaders make better decisions than crowds; people are not educated enough to vote on laws; the masses are stupid; people can’t make hard decisions. Right now, people are encouraged to not think and leave the thinking to the politicians. They have the least amount of choice possible — once every few years between alternatives that are equally corrupt. Encourage people to think, make their decisions matter, give them control and their wisdom will amaze you. The argument that crowds are stupid was the aristocracy’s argument against democracy. In hindsight, we can see that it was wrong then; it is equally wrong now.

Assuming you are willing to entertain the possibility that direct democracy is desirable, here is a short description of what it might look like:

People vote on bills on their smartphone[1] or any other Internet connected device[2]. There are no elected representatives. Bills can be written on open collaborative platforms like Google Docs or Github or in private. When the bill is ready, the authors submit it to a signature gathering system where it needs a certain number of signatures to get it on the ballot. When a bill is on the ballot, a deadline for voting is set and people vote on the bill. Bills have to get both a majority of the vote and some meaningful number of votes to pass. There are “tiers” of bills — some small corrections require only a simple majority to pass, while constitutional reforms require a much higher percentage to be enacted.

All laws have an expiration date and need extension votes to be renewed. Thomas Jefferson argued for this, but that feature didn’t end up making it into the Constitution. It is unfair that people are governed by laws that they have not — nor will they ever have — the opportunity to vote on. The same goes for the executive branch. Agencies and departments have expiration dates and renewal votes to reduce the self-proliferation of bureaucracy. Heads of agencies and departments are voted on directly and not appointed. I am not at all certain that a chief executive is needed for the executive branch at all times.

The people are the legislative branch. Everybody’s voting record is public. This leads to better legislative outcomes. It is no secret that people behave better in public than they do in private. Domestic violence, for example, rarely occurs in public. With a public voting record, people are more likely to vote for the public benefit, rather than for their own private benefit.

The primary role of the judicial branch in direct democracy is identifying inconsistencies in different laws. Then, if judges find two laws to be in conflict, rather than judging one law to be superior to another[3], they will put the issue directly on the ballot for a public vote.

Note that this essay is very preliminary. It makes judgments on some contentious issues, like public voting records, but does not address others, like which election methods are used for heads of agencies and judges. It is likely that some of my ideas are suboptimal or just plain wrong. I do not claim to have all other answers — I just present hypotheses that will need to be tested.

US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that a “state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country”. This can be extended even beyond states — cities and counties can experiment with new forms of government.

In the case of direct democracy, such experiments are necessary. We don’t know which election methods work best. We don’t know what pitfalls direct democracy will have and how to fix them. We need to test and refine the concept on smaller scales before we arrive at a system that will be desirable and effective for the whole country. Moreover, unseating a corrupt elite cannot be democratically accomplished from the top. It must be done from the ground up. Nearly every progressive cause in the US — from abolishing slavery to allowing women to vote — started at local and state levels. So must direct democracy. It is up to you, my reader, to push for direct democracy in your city and in your state. If you want to do it, but don’t know how to start — shoot me an email to s dot alexashenko at gmail dot com and I will be glad to help.

[1] I am not addressing security in this essay. There are more qualified people to design a secure system for voting than me. I will just say that we trust computers with our money and our communication already; I see no fundamental reason why we couldn’t trust them with voting.

[2] And public voting places for people who don’t have Internet access.

[3] Assume for this example that laws are of the same tier.