From: juan <juan....@gmail.com>
On Sun, 6 Aug 2017 19:27:23 -0400 Steve Kinney <ad...@pilobilus.net> wrote: >> The Nolan Chart, beloved recruiting tool of the Libertarian Party, >> works reliably as such because - along with the associated diagnostic >> instrument - it measures and graphs the desire of the individual for >> ego gratification and freedom of action. I doubt whether that is true. In about 1991, I volunteered to help staff a Libertarian booth at the Clark County (Washington) county fair. We had a large chart showing the Nolan chart, and we asked people to take the test and self-score it. They were each given a colored self-adhesive dot, which they could place on the Nolan chart at the place corresponding with their test results. As such, I doubt that "ego gratification" had anything to do with it. Nobody else knew if their test results matched the location that they placed the colored dots. Further, if they were truly a lefty, or a righty, or even a statist, they could think to themselves that they were happy to place their dot where their test results were. So, whose ego would have gotten gratified with a false (or even a true) answer? Incidently, the results seemed to center around a Nolan score of (70/70), which didn't surprise me or other libertarians. >> Anyone who passes the Nolan test by landing in the "Libertarian" >> quadrant - a foregone conclusion for most healthy adults - should > proceed from this introspective analysis to consideration of which > political / economic system would offer the best shot at implementing > their lifestyle choices as "rugged individualists." The Nolan > instrument provides no help, as its diagnostic output indicates > personal preferences among a set of stereotyped partisan sales > pitches - not the net impact of competing public policy agendas on > individual "freedom." The Nolan test indicates what people believe > about themselves, not the actual motives that affect their actions - > otherwise, the inevitable conversion of our society to a Libertarian > model of governance would have happened decades ago. > I'm not following. Are you saying that most "healthy adults" are > libertarians? If that was the case, then indeed we would expect > society to be libertarian. But since the US (in this case) is > anything but libertarian, then your premise is false? It seems > kinda obvious that most 'healthy' adults are either left wing > fascists or right wing fascists. Not healthy at all of course. You aren't considering at least one factor. The United States Congress, and at least the very large majority of state legislatures, are based on the "first past the post" voting system. That system while not initially obvious, invokes an effect called "Duverger's Law": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law "In political science, Duverger's law holds that plurality-rule elections (such as first past the post) structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system and that "the double ballot majority system and proportional representation tend to favor multipartism".[1][2] The discovery of this tendency is attributed to Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist who observed the effect and recorded it in several papers published in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of further research, other political scientists began calling the effect a "law" or principle.""Duverger's law suggests a nexus or synthesis between a party system and an electoral system: a proportional representation (PR) system creates the electoral conditions necessary to foster party development while a plurality system marginalizes many smaller political parties, resulting in what is known as a two-party system." This, Duverger's law, strongly protects the formation and maintenance of the two-party system, and the two parties which make up the majority. People who are in favor of a third-party system, for example the Libertarian party (or Green Party, or just about anything else) are deterred from voting: Generally, they are told that they are "throwing away their vote". I have long advocated a different system: Every candidate for a Congressional Office "wins", but the weight of their influence is based on the proportion of their vote in the general election. If, for instance, the Democrat gets 50% of the vote, he gets 0.50 Congressional votes. If the Republican gets 40% of the vote in the general election, he gets 0.40 Congressional votes. If the Libertarian gets 10% of the vote, he gets 0.10 votes. The second- and third-party candidates are given relatively small offices, back in the home district (or state), and can phone/fax/email their votes in. Modern electronic communications makes all this practical. The advantage of this system is that nobody's vote can be said to have been "wasted". . And, I believe that this system would allow the Libertarian party to gradually increase in side and influence, unlike the current system limited by Duverger's Law. It would also effectively force both the D's and R's to become more libertarian. Jim Bell
