The latest Congress has had almost two years to work on its business, and its achievements have been, as expected, pathetically thin. Why, we ask ourselves, do the mass of Americans want an end to escalating health care costs, want affordable health insurance and want a workable low-cost prescription drug program, but somehow, wealthy as the country is, we don’t seem to make any significant progress toward these ends? Why, when only the very wealthy get much benefit and the rest of us would have to pay for the shortfall, do our elected officials seem sympathetic to eliminating the estate tax and happily reduce the tax on dividends? Why do the majority of Americans feel they don’t understand why we have to slog away at four billion dollars a month in Iraq, while most of our elected officials assure us we do?

Asked if they would rather spend a hundred billion more on health care and a hundred billion less on staying in Iraq we are told we have a representative government and that free elections give the “people” a chance to vote on all those issues and thus have their will done. But somehow, the people’s will rarely gets done. The paradox is that free elections in modern democracies mean UN-representative governments.

Less than half of all eligible Americans vote. It’s nice to know that there are that many intelligent Americans. To vote in a modern American election is always a waste of one’s time. Even many of those who do it know it is a waste of time. The idea that free elections are the essence of representative government is utter nonsense. Our governments would be much more representative if we did away with our present system of elections.

With our present electoral process, those who are elected by the minority that bother to vote are inevitably from a narrow class of people—overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly rich, and overwhelmingly Caucasian. THIS is representative democracy!?

The process guarantees that no poor people will reach public office, many fewer women, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics than are in our population at large. The electoral process is structured to guarantee that rich whites will dominate, no matter what their party or platform.

The easiest way to realize that our present elections are inconsistent with representative government is to consider what would happen if we substituted for our elections a lottery system. With the governmental structures remaining as they are, all citizens who wish to run for a specific office sign up to “run” for that office, each able to run for only one, whether it be alderman, congressman, judge, or President. The “winner” for each office would be chosen by lot from the list of candidates who had signed up for it.

With such a system we would immediately see what real representative governments would be like. If women chose to “run” for office in the same numbers as men then women would soon constitute half (or more) of all government office holders. All minorities, if they chose to run, would be represented proportionally. Even rich white males would be represented in all governmental offices in proportion to their numbers in the general population. Of course, this would be perhaps five per cent of all office holders instead of eighty per cent, but most of us would feel we could live with this.

A second great advantage—Good Lord, what an advantage!—we would do away with all elections for governmental offices. No more elections! No more political ads! No more hypocritical speeches! No more dirty tricks! No more will our government officials have to spend half their time trying to raise money, a quarter of their time on electioneering, and only a quarter of their time on the job that in theory they were elected to do. With this single new system of choosing our officials we would improve the quality of American life a hundred per cent.

A third great advantage of choosing office holders by lot would be the doing away with the two party system, an historical accident that has cast a pall of hypocrisy and stagnation across our lives. Democrats and Republicans as we have known them would either cease to exist or become irrelevant.

New parties might well emerge in various governmental bodies as issues are shaped and alliances formed to deal in various ways with these issues. All the problems facing (and/or created by) the present American government would have to be dealt with by incoming representatives chosen by lot. The threat of terror attacks, rising budget deficits, poverty, inequality, our previous government’s ongoing occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations, and every other problem would all have to be faced. But now, instead of being dealt with and decided by men and women with close ties to the large corporations whose interests are hardly those of most Americans, these decisions would be made by a genuine cross-section of American citizens, most of whom would be able to speak for their own interests for the first time in their lives.

In our present governments almost no one speaks for the interests of average Americans. In our present system the vast majority of our elected officials assure the average American that he will gain from tax cuts for Corporations or stock holders or the very rich, the idea that these riches will “trickle down” to those in the middle and lower income groups. Strange that none of our elected officials talk much about a “trickle up” theory—where the government gives tax breaks and subsidies to the poor and middle classes, who will then spend it and create demand and new jobs and thus eventually more profits for corporations and more money for the rich. No, “trickle up” theories never seem to catch on with the governing elite, but we wonder how a truly representative government would feel about it.

Our average citizen was told by the Bush government that he needed protection from Iraq, although most of the world and even many Americans didn’t think so, and the overwhelming evidence since the war is that Iraq was no threat whatsoever. He has been told we need to spend hundreds of billions on missile defense systems, slightly faster jet fighters, more nuclear subs, more bombs and missiles, more troops overseas, but can’t afford a National Healthcare and drug prescription program that would cost much less. How often have the American people actually been asked whether they would rather have health care instead of new fighter planes, subs and more nuclear weapons?

In our new randomly selected representative government, the decision about how much is spent on what would no longer be decided by those who are beholden to companies who directly benefit from such decisions—like defense contractors and pharmaceutical companies, to name the most obvious, but be made by ordinary citizens.

Ordinary citizens. Aye, there’s the rub. Ordinary citizens are not smart enough, educated enough, experienced enough to make these decisions, but we (the smart, the educated, and the previously elected) are the ones who know best what is good for them. Although this is the theory of the elite, it is hardly the theory of representative government.

Although the very first great democracy, that of ancient Greece, chose its officials by lot, this idea is, of course, an appalling, ridiculous, “undemocratic” idea that doesn’t even rise to the level of possibility—or so, at least, all the elite pundits will assure us. The idea of truly representative governments throughout the land is such a clearly revolutionary and dangerous idea that we are sure our Attorney General will find it the secret plot of terrorists. It must be rejected out of hand.

But what is appalling is not the possibility of such representative governments, but the horrible fact that we live in a nation of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. As long as the nation has its present election system controlled by our “free” mass media (free to be dominated and controlled by the rich), then we will have unrepresentative governments that find dominating both its own citizens and the rest of the world is in its interest.

Better a roulette wheel.

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