Government of the poor, by the rich, for the rich
So, I have been thinking about how often our ostensibly “representative government” does not represent. One impressive demonstration of this is marijuana legislation, but there are many. If one does some digging, one can quite often find things that 70% of the population or more is in favor of, but congress has no interest in implementing. A less evil health care system would be one obvious example. And I realized, the reason for this is that our government is in fact of the poor, by the rich, for the rich, and always has been. Our founding fathers had no intention originally of letting poor folks (them as don’t own land) vote at all, and the republican party has been keeping up the tradition of voter suppression in ways small and large for most of our lifetimes. And, while the democrats are marginally less evil (they generally are willing to allow some small social safety networks), they are also a bunch of rich old white dudes (with a few exceptions that they routinely lambast, like Bernie and AOC) who have no intention of taking care of the poor – the goal here is to make sure that the poor stay nicely enslaved so the rich can afford multiple yachts.
If we had the ability to make any changes.. which we don’t, really, the rich have always been in charge and probably always will be in charge.. one thing we should consider doing is requiring congress to consist of individuals that are proportionally representative in wealth to the people they represent. (We could also try to get them to be representative in gender and race)
I’m not actually sure how this would work given that you need people to opt in to being representatives for representative government and them as don’t have are not likely to have the spare time and energy to run for government. But what we’ve got right now is clearly not representing us at all.
December 6th, 2020 at 1:31 am
Actually, you don’t need people to opt in. You could treat it like jury duty. And I don’t think too many people would shirk Congressional duty, as the annual salary is $174,000.