While it's certainly not ideal, I think it would be a vast improvement over the current system. This article makes the case for it. My favorite is this excerpt from its Pros & Cons graphic: My main reasons is favor are that it would representative, and also genuine rather than corrupt. Ordinary, randomly chosen citizens would be trying to do what they think is best for the country, rather than what makes them or their friends richer.

Maybe there could be some vetting, but it would have to be kept to a minimum to save ourselves from our own terrible judgment.

Does anyone think the currently elected Congress, or ones in recent history, are better than what a typical random one would be?

I'm not sure whether that's true or not.

A random person would be corrupt as **** on average, but might still be functionally less corrupt because they're too inept to pull it off without obvious bribery violations and they're not already hooked into the influence/money pipelines long before they reach congress. As a downside, if I got randomly chosen from my dead-red state, I'd have a life expectancy of about a week before somebody cashed me in for a new drawing.

someone who isn't capable of reading or understanding laws is exactly the kind of person you want writing laws for the whole country

This makes the false assumption that the level of skill, knowledge, and talent required to be an effective politician is low. It also overrates the problem of corruption in the US. For instance, in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index for 2016 the US was ranked 16 out of 176 countries. Definitely could be better, but not unusually bad by any means.

Someone is forgetting how stupid stupid people are. Also, assuming no corruption (or even less than what we currently have) from a random is laughable.

"Personally, as an inventor, when I need to file a copyright patent I prefer to avoid those corrupt copyright lawyers and instead have my legal documents drawn up by a random sample of doctors, grocers, software developers and fast food workers."

- nobody ever

Bull****. They ask George Foreman for help all the time FFS.

Realistically, what percentage of the budget is totally wasted? You guys legit think a random person would do worse? It's just mindboggling and defies all basic deduction.

Beats having lobbyists write the laws and congress members not even read them before passing them through. An avg citizen in that position can hire a lawyer to translate bills to/from plain English.

While it's likely not low, I find it hard to believe that the current politicians are more skilled, knowledgeable and talented than random people, at least in the things we want them to be skilled at.

Call it what you want, but billionaires and big lobby groups get virtually everything they want, and only the interests of a very select few are represented in US politics. Random citizens, while being generally inept, would at least not be actively trying to destroy the country and screw as many people as possible. Like, for the past however many years, we might have been better off had Congress done absolutely nothing.

Being an effective politician involves a few skills/talents. Fundraising, networking, public speaking, policy knowledge, charisma, a thick skin, management, etc. It also requires having good relationships with the people who hold influence and power in the district, eg the local political party, political and social activists, local businesses, unions, municipal, state or federal government, senior party leaders, judges, religious leaders, civic organizations, and so on. I think these are relatively rare.

What would actually happen in your scenario is that a few of the random people selected would have or develop these skills and then completely dominate the rest. Since their power wouldn't be subject to the will of voters, they would probably be even more corrupt and self-interested than politicians who are democratically elected, like they are now.

Yes, that doesn't sound exactly like our current system at all.

Spit-balling: what if those selected are kept anonymous, and if they don't do their work in a public building (at least not without hat + sunglasses)? You can't bribe or threaten them if you don't know who they are.

Then you lose whatever level of trust the public has that the system is even doing what it claims to do. Why would anybody believe anything is the result of randomly selected people voting?

Furthermore, the whole idea is just kind of silly. It's literally impossible to have a body that's competent to decide all the issues before it. It's probably impossible to have a congress-sized body that even has one person competent to decide every particular issue. You basically need to step back and see that the current system is totally absurd- who could possibly think it's a good idea to have ~500 people, effectively none with advanced science degrees, voting on matters of science or matters that are incomprehensible without science. If your goal is to have good decisions made, it's beyond ******ed, and replacing congress with even dumber, less-educated randoms isn't a step forward.

The best you can hope for is solid advice from outside experts. The problem is that there's so much at stake that the process is almost inherently guaranteed to be corrupted- stakeholders have huge incentives to spam favorable nonsense disguised as legitimate analysis, and that's before the legal bribery. If you replace congress with a bunch of randoms, they still won't tell legitimate advice apart from the network of corporate bull**** even if they're trying to.

You'd think it would be possible to vote out some of the most blatantly corrupt corporate buttpuppets, but they keep getting overwhelmingly reelected at every level of government. At some level, people get what they deserve.

Low key is actually correct. There is a very good reason so many of our elected leaders are trained in law. It's annoying when people make the point that we don't have enough of other groups involved in the process.

Knowledge and understanding of law is critical in being effective in passing legislation. The downstream effects of bad law can be catastophic. For example - I don't think anyone can argue the wisdom of a statement like "learn both sides so the pupil may see both perspectives". In general I agree with that. If a lawmaker wanted to teach both sides in something including creationist lines of thought in public schools, I would be horrified.

Secondly, we have some decently smart people on 2+2, I do not think anyone would disagree that the average intellect of 2+2ers would be dramatically higher than a random population of the country, just from the fact that most of us graduated college. That being said, the political views of many people here are absolutely horrifying to at least some of the other people here. We aren't even getting into the economic views, which are even worse than anything like social policies.

Finally, I'd like to think I'm smarter than the average guy. I would think it's safe to say most, or at least a large percentage, of users here feel the same way. If I was randomly selected to run government, I wouldn't have the faintest clue how to be effective. A public speaking event, of which I am actually phobic of, would be an utter disaster.

While the overall idea of randomly selected people is an amusing one, it should be treated like the idea of what you'd do with the money if you hit the Powerball.

Not to mention it goes against a little thing called the Constitution of the United States.

Along with all the other reasons why this is a terrible idea I'd like to add that a significant percentage of rich, successful and/or smart people would turn down this opportunity and very few poor, unsuccessful and/or dumb people would.

My thinking is that throwing darts randomly > always missing on purpose. The system would still suck, but wouldn't it sometimes produce good outcomes? Whereas currently, it's guaranteed to produce **** outcomes every time.

You wouldn't be allowed to decline. It's like jury duty, except you'd get better compensation.

I know this isn't a great response, but: at least they're genuine views. Our current politicians have next to no views or values, they're just puppets being pulled by people with invariably horrible views. At least the random people with horrible views would be mitigated by randoms with non-horrible views.

Well yeah and the chance of it being implemented is way worse than that of winning the Powerball. Of course if I'm going to dream up a better gov't, I can do better than this idea, but I just wanted to hear feedback on whether our current system is even better than complete randomness (which of course is a bad idea, but as you might have guessed, I really hate the current system). Even without completely dreaming, I can think of something better: campaign finance reform.

Only one of you made the correct vote, btw. The rest of you are lucky I made the poll anonymous!

By definition, 50% of Americans have an IQ lower than 100. And you want to randomly select them??

lolz

Term limits. One 6-year term for Senate and two 4-year terms for House. 2-year terms is stupid because they are perpetually running for office. Even 4-year terms is getting hard to stomach.