Wikigovernance

Eric Cantor (R-VA) started up an interesting project called YouCut, where people can vote for what they want to cut from the budget.

In its current form, it's beyond ridiculous. As many have noticed, it's nothing short of gimick. Not only will these votes have no impact at all on what Congress does, but the "savings" Cantor presents don't amount to much at all next to the entire budget.

But I think it's an interesting tactic. You could call it "common law 2.0". Simply voting on issues is only the most obvious thing to do. Presumably, though, we could have a Wikipedia-like site where actual legislation could be posted and amended. An obvious problem would be internet trolls that sabotage a potential wikilaw, but a solution might be to have self-policing communities with membership requirements and reviewers produce many different laws. You could have, for example, a conservative wikilaw community, a libertarian wikilaw community, and a progressive wikilaw community each with hundreds of users. Each could set up its own rules (that's kind of the point), but we could a imagine a situation where an aspiring wikilaw participant could apply for membership, and have an application reviewed and approved or disapproved by current members. Current members could also elect a review committee that keeps an eye on wikilaw revisions and on all the members in an effort to identify trolls. Each wikilaw community could have its own rules for arbitrating differences of opinion on changes. And ultimately, the community could vote on a wikilaw they think they've perfected. They could even have two circles of membership - one for people who would actually have a hand in crafting legislation, and a more open circle for wikilaw voters. Perhaps a potential wikilaw would have to be approved by both communities.

Once a wikilaw community builds a law in this way, they could submit it to an overarching website where anyone could vote for it. Or, the wikilaw text could be passed on to legislators would would then submit the law in Congress. Amendments in Congress to the original wikilaw could be highlighted by the wikilaw community.

The reasons why direct democracy can be dangerous, and why a republic can be preferable, are well understood. However, there can also be legitimate concerns about the extent to which an opaque republic can do away with the very real benefits of democracy. User-generated legislation in the context of a republic can overcome some of these concerns, I think.

There would be bugs to work out. "Technocrat" is often thought of as a dirty word, but the fact is there are a lot of things that the state does that are very technical and hard to understand. Budget policy is one of those things, particularly insofar as the budget plays a role in macroeconomic policy. Part of me sympathizes with the Bryan Caplan school of thought about democracies making bad policies and "The Myth of the Rational Voter". Then again, part of what Caplan ascribes to poorly informed voters is probably simply a difference of opinion (but of course it's harder for him to sell a book highlighting the fact that there are differences of opinion out there!). I think quite a bit of what Caplan himself would put in place would be "bad policy", but that doesn't mean that I think he's poorly informed or unworthy of voting. This is largely why we have democratic institutions - because the voters that Caplan would exclude aren't necessarily the voters that I would exclude (if I were to accept the underlying logic of a more limited suffrage).