The U.S. political system is completely broken

Massively increasing the number of elected representatives might be a way to counter the power of Pharma and the bureaucratic state.

In the evenings I’m watching the Danish political drama Borgen. People have been telling me to watch the show since it came out in 2011 and I’m just catching up with it now that it’s on Netflix (and I can watch all 3 seasons without having to pay for each episode separately!). It literally has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes and is perhaps the most extraordinary TV show I’ve ever seen.

At the end of Season 1, the Prime Minister gives a speech on the opening day of the legislative session and states that, “Each of us in Parliament represents 30,000 Danes.” And I said, wait, what!? That’s like a city council member in Pasadena!

So I looked it up. And sure enough the population of Denmark is now 5.831 million people (about half the size of LA County) and the Danish Parliament has 179 members so each member of Parliament represents 32,575 people.

Well, that explains a lot doesn’t it — why there is still a sense of possibility in Denmark and why they smile in spite of the bad weather and four months of darkness every year. Danes can actually get to their elected officials and make their voices heard.

So then that got me wondering about our system.

When the 1st United States Congress met from 1789 to 1791, the number of House members reached 65 (as new states ratified the Constitution and were added) and the number of Senators reached 26. The 1790 Census showed a U.S. population of 3,929,214 so each House member represented 60,449 people — about half as representative as Denmark today. And lots of the people counted in the 1790 census were slaves who did not have any representation at all.

Since then, things have gotten much less representative. The Pew Research Center explains:

The U.S. House of Representatives has one voting member for every 747,000 or so Americans. That’s by far the highest population-to-representative ratio among a peer group of industrialized democracies, and the highest it’s been in U.S. history. And with the size of the House capped by law [at 435] and the country’s population continually growing, the representation ratio likely will only get bigger.

Members of Congress usually hire one or two smart, experienced, legislative aides and then fill out the staff with a bunch of kids straight out of college who do “constituent services” which really just means keeping the public away from the politician. To be clear, these junior staffers do not relay your message to the politician and they do not make a tally of “Pro” and “Con” phone calls on particular issues. These people are what Robert Reich calls “heat shields” — they absorb the heat from the public so that the politicians can go on about their business — which is calling donors all day so that they will have enough money to get re-elected.

Things are also bad at the state level where the population-to-representative ratio is completely out of whack.

For example, a member of the California Assembly represents at least 465,000 people because the California legislature has not been expanded since the state Constitution was ratified in 1879 (when the population of the state was 70 times smaller). And they put the capitol in Sacramento, away from the major population centers in the state, and so these 80 Assemblymembers are just sitting ducks for the permanent lobbyists who live there.

Each member of the LA County Board of Supervisors represents 2 million people.

Each member of the LA City Council represents 255,000 people.

While concentrating so much power in so few hands might be great for politicians’ egos (I’m so important!), it’s a terrible way to run a government. The lack of representation means that people cannot have their voices heard, innovation is stymied, and problems fester for decades without resolution.

The U.S., California, and Los Angeles have all become failed states in part because they do a bad job of representing people.

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A better way forward?

The usual flex in response to the current political disaster in the U.S. is to argue for less government/ smaller government/ eliminate as much government as possible (the libertarian position). In my opinion, that approach is half right and half wrong.

One reason the bureaucratic state is so massive is because you actually do need people to carry out the tasks of running a society (from building bridges to national security). But one reason our system is such a mess right now is that the bureaucratic state is not elected, so they have little incentive to do right by the people and a lot of incentive to just accumulate power in their agency and their position. That’s how we get monsters like Tony Fauci who are more powerful than the President.

One way to diminish the power of Pharma and the bureaucratic state would be to massively increase the number of elected representatives at every level of government which would reduce the size of each legislative district.

My quick back-of-the-envelope calculation is that the Danish Parliament is 22.93 times more representative than the U.S. House. So if the U.S. House were to become as representative as Denmark, we would need about 10,000 House Members.

I can just feel my readers tensing up and screaming, Nooooooooooooo!

But hear me out. Right now, the members of Congress are just sitting ducks in D.C. There are 3 full time Pharma lobbyists for every members of Congress. Pharma runs the place and writes the bills that have created the iatrogenocide.

But we the people massively outnumber this one corrupt industry. Forcing Pharma to try to move their junk science bills through 10,000 House members would be a much heavier lift. And if each Congressional district just had 32,575 people in it (can you imagine!?) then we could actually have a conversation with our Representative and force them to look us in the eye when we talk about vaccine injury.

A Congress with 10,000 House members would have to meet and deliberate differently. The small legislative chamber in D.C. would be out, huge convention centers and electronic voting systems would be in. Having thousands of elected officials on our side might create a countervailing force to offset the power of the bureaucracy.

All sorts of other reforms could and should take place too.

There’s actually an interesting precedent for this. Chris Hughes was one of the founders of Facebook and he cashed out early to pursue other projects. In 2008, he set up a Facebook-equivalent for the Barack Obama presidential campaign. It was amazing. The site enabled Obama supporters in each local area to find each other and provided call lists, campaign materials, and fundraising tools so that supporters could start canvassing for Obama without ever waiting for permission from headquarters. The “Obama for America” (OFA) platform that Chris Hughes built enabled Obama to move more quickly and reach more people than Hillary Clinton and it’s a big reason why he became President.

The OFA platform had another very important feature — it had a tool for proposing legislative ideas and a system whereby everyone could upvote or downvote that idea — so that the best legislative ideas could rise to the top (and presumably get the attention of the candidate).

After the election, there was enormous hope that Obama would retain, expand, and adapt the OFA platform as a way to govern — to allow the people to propose legislative ideas and vote the best ideas to the top for action by the Congress and the President. Alas, once Obama became President he retained the fundraising side of the OFA platform but jettisoned the popular participation piece. Hope & Change (TM) quickly dissolved into More of the Same.

But if there were 10,000 members of Congress, I imagine they might need some sort of tool to facilitate discussion and enable the best ideas from the public to rise to the top. The OFA platform provided an early model for how something like that could be designed and I’m sure that other even better platforms already exist (if you know of any, please tell us in the comments).

I doubt that my proposal to massively increase the size of the U.S. House of Representatives will be popular with my readers. I’m just jealous of Denmark and the fact that they can actually have a normal conversation with their elected officials while U.S. politicians usually hide behind unhelpful staff while they do the devil’s bidding. And I’m intrigued by the question of whether increasing the size of the playing field might tip the balance of power in our favor? I look forward to the conversation in the comments.

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Blessings to the warriors. 🙌

Prayers for everyone fighting to stop the iatrogenocide. 🙏

In the comments, please share your thoughts on how we might improve our government either before or after it collapses from the enormous weight of vaccine injury.

As always, I welcome any corrections.

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