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zataomm  4mo ago (text post)   5346 thread views

Colorado Supreme Court Thread

Link to the decision

I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.

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This whole subject reminds me that I’ve long thought it would be a good change for the president to be appointed by state legislatures on a weighted majority-of-majorities basis, with a weighting system based on census data. So much of the issues with American politics are because congress has zero accountability to the states’ governments themselves, only to individual voters to some extent.

In general, direct elections to the federal level could be done away with as much as possible. It’s inefficient and confusing for people not only to elect 3+ levels of representative but then to do so in multiple forms (eg bicameral states, and congress itself for both senators and reps).

Recentering more politics around the states makes state politics more important and means that any president with a more radical plan is likely to be supported by a large ground-up movement in state houses across the country, instead of Trump being a one man band whose movement largely begins and ends with him.

Congratulations you've accidentally reinvented the electoral college.

Sure, and I think that was a better system. But even the originalists don’t seem to want to restore core aspects of American democracy like limiting the vote to property owners. $500,000 would be a good starting point.

Most counties already have records of owner occupiers of houses based on the tax system. It’s not that hard to restrict the franchise to people with provable residence and property, and it in general shows a degree of future orientation, good decision making, maturity, etc.

More than that, it's aligned interests. The places I've lived where I was renting and planning on only living there a few years, you better believe I didn't give two shits about the future of the place. Owning a home really changes the incentive structure.

I think people forget that democracy is a technology that improves upon what came previously -- violence. Instead of fighting and some dying, we can just count the fighters on each side and declare a probable winner without bloodshed. If the counting is a proxy for potential fighting power, whom should be counted? Men (because men do almost all the fighting) and landowners (because non-landowners have no incentive to stay and fight). Women's suffrage was a turning point in the republic, because it turns out you can just vote yourself other people's wealth.

More than that, it's aligned interests. The places I've lived where I was renting and planning on only living there a few years, you better believe I didn't give two shits about the future of the place. Owning a home really changes the incentive structure.

I hear this and it's such a strange concept to me. I live in an expensive west coast city. The people I know with close ties and care about the place are locals who, for the most part, have parents who own houses because they got into the market so long ago, and they can't imagine ever being able to afford to buy instead of renting. The people who own houses are either the aforementioned older generation or the people who moved here for high-paying jobs and can actually afford to buy into the market, but will happily hop off to some other city if the opportunity presents itself because the cost of owning a home just isn't a big deal to them. Obviously, I'm generalizing and a lot of people fall into neither group, but those two are very common in my experience and make me quite suspicious of claims that "landowner" is a remotely good proxy for "cares about the local government".

If you own a home, you can sell it, but the price you get is (to a first-order approximation) the prosperity of the surrounding area. A renter just picks up and leaves and gets nothing no mater how well or poorly the area is doing.

Data beats theory. Unless you’ve observed otherwise yourself, @token_progressive is the only one providing (anec)data here

Then I'll say the opposite as @token_progressive: In my experience, a) the homeowners I know explicitly state that they plan to stay in their house for a long time b) the renters I know explicitly state that part of the reason why they wouldn't take a mortgage to own a home is because they don't want to be tied to one place and finally c) the homeowners I know, even if they end up selling their house, do in fact stay mostly in one place and are very invested into a tight-knit community there while d) the renters do in fact end up travelling somewhere else very often. Mind you that I very clearly belong to the second category.

But I'm not living in an ultra-expensive large american city, merely in a moderately expensive middle size city.

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