Electing Representatives That Represent The Electors
If you’re like me, you used to ask your first-year college students, “If you could change or introduce one law, what would it be?” It was a fun way to begin civics week and I always got a kick out of the answers.
There was a good chunk of the class that brought up marijuana legalization. (This was a few year ago.) More than anything, I think those students simply didn’t know what else to say. That was an interesting juxtaposition with the 2 or 3 students per class that had specific laws ready to go because they had found themselves in a legally disadvantaged place. This last category usually involved child custody or some kind of protection order.
I had one student who simply asked to not renew his canoe registration. He bought the sticker. The boat was registered. To his understanding, all the renewal got him was a new sticker.
One student wanted there to be a mandatory day off in the week. He emphasized that this wasn’t a religious thing, he simply thought there should be a unified day in the week for everybody to relax and do whatever they wanted. Businesses all close for the day and everyone can take a breath. There are some logistic issues with that idea, but I like the logic behind it.
I had a few different ideas over the years: flipping the drinking and driving age, school entry and progression based on ability rather than age, universal naptime, that kind of thing. The one that I brought up the most though, dealt with a logical consistency of a representational government. If an elected official is theoretically a representative of the people that elected them, their income should be the average of the people they represent.
Now, I’m not an economist, an accountant, I don’t even like being the banker in Monopoly. It just seems odd that the person who is supposedly fighting for my economic security almost always lives in a world that is intrinsically more economically secure. Local to federal, an elected representative should live a similar life to the people that they represent.
It could be based on taxes. The average income of the population that an official represents is their income. I know there is all kinds of tax cheating that goes on, but this might help clarify some of the issues. It also gives the representative a direct motivation to make sure they’re constituency is doing well. The more financially secure the population is, the same goes for the representative.
When one enters an elected office, any private holdings are put into a blind trust and the representative has to live like they are one of the people they represent. You shouldn’t be able to represent an area of derelict buildings and cratered roads and live in a home with more garages than people.
But wouldn’t they be incentivized to only tax the rich? Oh no. What a terrible state of affairs that would be. Let’s not fool ourselves, the wealthy will always find ways to circumvent paying the price of citizenship, but this system might put a little more attention on the situation.
Aren’t representatives supposed to be the best of us? Shouldn’t they live a more comfortable life because of the responsibilities they take on? Serving in elected office is just that, a service. If serving makes you worthy of a higher paycheck, we need to talk about the waitstaff at restaurants and stockers at the grocery store. If a representative doesn’t live the hardships of the populace, how can we expect a solution?
