Dictatorship

I posted an item on reddit about Ikanocracy with a link to this blog. I was trying to generate some publicity and discussion for the ideas about this alternate form of government. Unfortunately, my item was immediately autobanned. Not because of political censorship (I am told), but because  this is common with first posts to reddit, especially those which contain links. By the time I got the mod to unban my post, it wasn't considered new and so the reddit ranking algorithm buried it. I only got one comment.

That comment was about the possibility about Ikanocracy leading to Dictatorship. The commenter was concerned that if any one person ( or a bloc of persons) accumulated more than 50% of the vote share, from that point on we would effectively have a dictatorship, since they could not only force any decision to go their way, but they could also control the hindsight votes which determines the distribution of future vote shares.

How likely is this scenario? Let's do a quick, back of the envelope calculation. Suppose our Wannabe Dictator (or WbD) starts with one vote share (like every citizen in Ikanocracy) and in their march to world domination, systematically increases their vote share by making good decisions. Suppose WbD make 100 good decisions in a row, and each time WbD's vote share increases by 10%. Then WbD would have (1.1)¹⁰⁰,  or 13,780 vote shares. This is a lot of vote share, and would certainly make WbD an influential decision maker, but nowhere near enough to become dictator in country with a population over 30,000,000 (Canada) or 300,000,000 (US) (and in the meantime, society has benefitted by WbD's contribution to 100 good decisions.)

If you were going to implement an Ikanocratic decision-making process in a smaller group, then you would probably have to institute a cap on vote share. You could say that no person could have more than 10% of the vote share. Such a rule could be added in general, but doesn't seem likely to be needed in large population societies.

But, if there is even the slightest chance that Ikanocracy would lead to Dictatorship, should we take the chance? Well, you could argue that we already live in a (semi) dictatorship now. Consider the following quote:

Although we like to think of ourselves as living in a mature democracy, we live, instead, in something little better than a benign dictatorship, not under a strict one-party rule, but under a one-party-plus system beset by the factionalism, regionalism and cronyism that accompany any such system. Our parliamentary government creates a concentrated power structure out of step with other aspects of society. For Canadian democracy to mature, Canadian citizens must face these facts, as citizens in other countries have, and update our political structures to reflect the diverse political aspirations of our diverse communities.

Was this from some left wing radical manifesto? No, it was from an article written in 1997 by none other than Stephen Harper, the current Conservative Prime Minister of Canada. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm for updating our political structures disappeared after he achieved power, and he has continued and even increased the concentration of power in the Prime Minister's office that was a legacy of the the Liberal Party.

What about in the USA? Recently Republican Newt Gingrich made some disturbing comments saying that, as President, he would impeach judges whose decisions he thought were wrong. A historian like Gingrich should know that the three branches of government in the US were designed to be independent for a reason: to ensure that power does not concentrate in the hands of any one branch, especially the executive branch (i.e. the President). Having achieved independence from one autocratic system, the founding fathers were careful to put checks and balances into their Democracy to ensure no Dictatorship took root in the United States.

Whether in a Democracy or an Ikanocracy, as Thomas Jefferson said,  The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.