Posts by Keir Leslie
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Day trading does have an economic benefit tho'; liquidity in the financial markets is a good thing, and day trading helps provide that.
Now, sometimes particularly vicious forms of it are bad - Keynes' casino, basically. But I don't think the state should get too moralistic about economic matters. Just introduce higher taxes on rich people and have done.
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Antypathy? Is that where the cute ants go for walks?
(On point: property is a productive asset, it makes shelter. That's pretty handy. Also, this CGT is a really good idea, and best of all, it's Labour going on the offensive and on policy for once.)
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I don't know how ambitious it is. The Greens have been heading away from the protest vote constituency at a rate of knots, and that would be where I'd be looking for the list votes. I don't know what or how Mana will do in general electorates.
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There are 72 million registered Democrats, for instance, and about half of them voted in the most recent primaries.
(A) first past the post; you haven't addressed the issue of complexity here, and (B) are you really putting forward Clinton/Obama as an example of party democracy? Looked to me like a rather grim farce of million-dollar advertising campaigns desperately avoiding any real confrontation on the issues.
By the way, has anyone here actually read the Green Party list process? There are all sorts of explicit restraints on the membership's ability to set the list, including some quite brutal rules on gender equality and so forth, and most importantly, you can't get on the list ballot unless you are either a member of the `candidate pool', a group anointed by a central committee, or are an electorate candidate! Hardly `the membership votes on the list'.
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Voting on the list is also one area that Arrow's Theorem really is applicable.
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Yup, if you feel the membership can’t be trusted to decide the direction of a party, then having branch committees elected on a rainy Tuesday night in June, who then elect area delegates, who then make indicative nominations for regional delegates, who make non-binding recommendations subject to leadership and caucus veto is definitely the way to go.
(By the way, branches elect LEC delegates and regional delegates directly, and regional list conferences can be attended by any member. It's only the moderation committee that meets privately.)
It isn't so much a matter of trust as a question of scale. The active membership of the Green Party in the whole of New Zealand is probably smaller than the active membership of the Labour Party in Auckland. (If we go by financial members, I wouldn't be surprised if there are branches with more members than regions of the Greens.)
Further, the Green list realistically consists of fifteen people, none of whom are going to win electorate seats. The Labour Party List consists of 65 people, and some of them might win electorate seats, some might not etc. I mean, is it a Megan Woods likely to win her electorate or not? Well, I think she will, but that's cause I live in the next one over and know she's doing a good job (and it's Wigram.) If I lived in Auckland & she wasn't running in Wigram I wouldn't have a clue.
The Labour Party list is just a more complicated thing than the Greens, and needs more administrative machinery.
I am not saying that the Labour Party isn't a bit sclerotic. But I am saying that Green members really need to lay off the unthinking propaganda about party democracy. Everybody thinks their party has internal party democracy, and that the rest are autocracies with unthinking slaves at the bottom. Generally, that's not true.
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And if you want a say on the list, join the Green party, whose members vote on their list. Be funny if about 100,000 Nats did that one year, eh.
You know, I used to read Greenies saying things like this and ignore them, but really, you know that if you want a say on the list you can also join the Labour Party, and attend the various meetings and so forth that are involved in producing the list. You obviously can't attend the final list moderation meeting unless you've been democratically elected by various parts of the party, but then again that's one of the facts of life in a party as large and diverse as Labour.
In fact, all political parties are required, by section 70 of the Electoral Act, to select candidates democratically.
There are more ways to be democratic than direct democracy, and in the case of a large political party, I think it is entirely defensible to have selection processes slightly more sophisticated than a simple referendum of the membership.
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Bullying? I wish I could be bullied like Wells.
(Look at Venice tho'. The one really good show we sent was shamelessly attacked here, and ever since we've sent desperately safe things.)
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Brothels may well be perfectly legal, but so are various businesses that I'd make a point about an MP having advertised --- say, loan sharking or whatever.
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Certainly not a power grab by the Tories, of course, but I honestly can not see how the LDs were engaged in anything but an attempt to reform the system to give themselves more power. They may think they deserve it, and they may be right, but it was still an attempt to change the procedures in their favour. And given that, I can't see why the British public shouldn't have treated it as a referendum on the Liberal Democrats.