Tuesday 9 September 2014

The state is like land and is a shared asset

We know that we cannot own land if we have not left enough and as good in common for other people to use. But, in the context of democracy, we can think of the state as an asset which is shared equally among the people, and is not owned by anyone. We as the people share the state with each other when we have elections. So then the state can be viewed as a kind of land in the Georgist sense, something no person can claim to own.

The first-past-the-post voting system doesn't share the power held by the state equally among the voters as it favours the larger parties compared against the smaller parties. This is (at least partial) ownership of the state by individuals who are not the voters so it is invalid since the state is like land and is owned by everyone. No one owns the state and this is reflected in the democratic process but the fptp method denies this by making the assumption that the state can be fairly owned in an undemocratic way. Anything other than full democracy assumes that the state is the property of someone (or people) who is not the voters themselves, which is false since the state is a shared asset.