Replace Voting With Spending

Your argument is that it's bad for rich people to have more influence than poor people. But, for some reason, you seem to believe that your argument is only applicable to the public sector. I don't see any logical explanation for your double standard. I asked you to provide one but you failed to do so. Earlier this year the Libertarian Party used the BMD to choose its convention theme... $6,327.00 - I"m That Libertarian! $5,200.00 - Building Bridges, Not Walls $1,620.00 - Pro Choice on Everything $1,377.77 - Empowering the Individual $395.00 - The Power of Principle $150.00 - Future of Freedom $135.00 - Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness $105.00 - Rise of the Libertarians $75.00 - Free Lives Matter $42.00 - Be Me, Be Free $17.76 - Make Taxation Theft Again $15.42 - Taxation is Theft $15.00 - Jazzed About Liberty $15.00 - All of Your Freedoms, All of the Time $5.00 - Am I Being Detained! $5.00 - Liberty Here and Now Donors used their donations to rank the potential themes. Obviously a rich donor would be able to have more influence on the order of the themes than a poor donor. Is this a bad thing? Well, according to you, it isn't. Why isn't it? It's because this ranking didn't take place in the public sector, it took place in the private sector. But it makes absolutely no sense for everyone to be helped by inequality in the private sector but hurt by it in the public sector. Consider this list of things... food cars clothes video games furniture computers Let's say that you want a video game. You exchange your money for it. Now you have it. Now you own it. But your money didn't just allow you to acquire the video game, it also helped to improve the ranking of the video game. The more money that's spent on video games, the higher their ranking. The higher their ranking, the more of society's limited resources (ie brainpower) that's used to produce them. The more of society's limited resources used to produce video games, the less resources available to produce everything else. In the private sector consumers use their money to rank things. That's what we all do when we spend our money. We rank things. We don't perceive that we do so, but this doesn't change the fact that we do so. It's a logical fact that a rich person can buy more video games than a poor person. Therefore, a rich person has more influence over the ranking of video games, and everything else in the private sector, than a poor person. You seem to think this is a GOOD thing. You seem to think that we all BENEFIT from the massive disparity in their influence over the ranking of video games and everything else in the private sector. Even though you think it's a GOOD and BENEFICIAL thing for a rich person to have more influence than a poor person over the ranking of video games and everything else in the private sector, you also think it's a BAD and DETRIMENTAL thing for a rich person to have more influence than a poor person over the ranking of environmental protection and everything else in the public sector. Your double standard is entirely illogical. There is absolutely no logical justification for our dual system. Kings used to have sole influence over the ranking of things like wars and infrastructure. Why? It's because people believed that kings had divine authority. People believed that God gave kings the sole authority to rank public goods. This belief began to die, and some barons decided that they didn't want all "their" money to be spent on unnecessary wars. So they took the power of the purse from kings. Then the people were given the opportunity to use voting to choose their representatives. This is how we ended up with our current system. Our current system has absolutely nothing to do with science. There aren't any experiments that prove that politicians chosen by voting are better at ranking wars, infrastructure, healthcare and education than politicians chosen by spending. When you believe something, despite the complete absence of any scientific evidence, it's called faith. You perceive that using voting works to rank things like wars and healthcare. Maybe you can also perceive that we use spending to rank things like video games and food. The question is... would voting work better than spending to rank things like video games and food? If so, then we should replace spending with voting. Nobody benefits when we incorrectly rank things. Nobody benefits when too many resources are used to produce video games and too few resources are used to produce food. So it's absolutely imperative that we scientifically determine whether spending or voting is the best way to rank things. In my opening argument I made the case that this website, Debate.org, should replace voting with spending. If it did so, it would be the only sizable social website using spending rather than voting to rank things. All other websites... Reddit, Youtube, Netflix, Facebook and Twitter use voting to rank things. What would happen if Debate.org used spending, rather than voting, to rank the debates? Would the ranking by spending be inferior to the ranking by voting? If so, HOW COULD THIS ONLY BE TRUE FOR DEBATES? Why wouldn't it also be true for computers, food and video games? I challenged you to come up with a coherent story to explain our dual system. But the fact of the matter is that it's an impossible mission. There can't be two best systems for ranking things. There can only be one best system. I'm sure that spending is an incredibly better way to rank things than voting. But maybe I'm wrong? This is where and why we need science. We need experiments. We need tests. Debate.org replacing voting with spending wouldn't be a perfect test, but it would be a test. It would provide some evidence regarding the effectiveness of using spending to rank things.