source & rights: bit.ly/1pN5mjR (modified), bit.ly/1WOXwAj (modified)

This hideous U.S. election season could lead a person to doubt our capacity for self-government. A new poll on energy policy is thus a welcome reminder that we’re often better on policy preferences than on electing officials. Seventy-three percent of Americans, Gallup says, favor emphasizing alternatives to oil and gas production in addressing our energy problems. That number includes majorities of both major parties—89% of Democrats and 51% of Republicans.

Unfortunately, while we favor emphasizing alternative energy, we often elect politicians who don’t. There’s no getting around this kind of discrepancy in electoral politics. We have views on issues, but we choose politicians more for their imagined personality traits. And when we do choose someone based on issues, it’s never more than a few issues that control the outcome of an election. Politicians don’t tend to care about our views on the others issues, or at least not as much as they care about the views of the moneyed interests that donate to their campaigns.

The democratist solution is to take resource allocation questions like this—questions that, as Gallup framed it, are about emphasis—out of electoral politics. Here’s a democratist proposal for this one: Let Congress set up an online voting system, open all the time to everyone with the right to vote, that would modify tax rates on various types of energy production. That is, you could vote to increase or decrease taxes on oil, gas, coal, solar, wind, etc., and then every three months, the rate would shift up or down a small amount, based on how we voted during the quarter.

A tax increase on gas or oil production or a tax decrease on alternative energy would shift investment from the former to the latter, reducing carbon gas emissions in the same way that cap-and-trade or a static carbon tax would. The difference is that a system like this would allow the people to decide how much to emphasize what, and keep adjusting it until it hit the desired level.

You might object that ordinary people aren’t experts in this, but that objection dissolves when you consider how the decision is made now and compare it to the polls. And it’s also a safe bet that the self-selecting group that would actually participate would be better informed than average.

Admittedly, there’s a big electoral-politics hurdle to getting a system like this through Congress. I have plenty to say about that, but it’s another post.

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