Belgium’s Quiet Experiment That Might Fix Politics.

Can a tiny Belgian region rescue democracy? In eastern Belgium, a small German speaking region called Ost Belgian is running a quiet experiment in fixing democracy by literally handing power back to ordinary people. According to the times, about 30 residents are chosen by lottery each year. Truck drivers, teachers, lab assistants to sit in citizens assemblies that advise parliament on real policies like health, housing, education and retirement. They meet on Saturdays, get a modest stipend, hear from experts, and then draft concrete recommendations. Some of these ideas have already become law. A full cell phone ban in middle and high schools, looser rules for low income housing, more say for families in assisted living centers, and incentives for young people to go into nursing. Participants say the process transforms them. One woman said her political Life went from 0 to 100. Another was inspired to run for office. It's not perfect, but it's making people believe in government again. Okay, so what's the real message here of this experiment in Belgium? It's that there's more than one way to have a democracy. And we already have jury pools that are pulled randomly and people are given power to make decisions. We don't have to do that just for judicial issues. We could also do it with actual public policy. Get people together, let them hear all the experts and competing factions and then take a vote. It would probably end up with much better policy than what we have today. Let's dig a little deeper here. I've long been a proponent of, of the idea of essentially having juries decide major public policy issues. The reason for that is if you ask people, where do you have your most faith in American government? People, even when your guy is in power in the White House, very few people really trust the president or the executive branch to truly make decisions that are in the best interest of the long term of Americans. There's too many competing interests of a. I can line my pockets selling this, selling this pardon as we're seeing these days. Forget about the long term impact of letting a murderer, con artist down on the streets. If you are in the legislative branch, it's so easy to say, I could vote for this way to regulate this particular scam drug that isn't going to help people. But I need their campaign contribution. So I'm going to say yes, let's keep things the way they are. So if you're an elected official running for office, you've got to worry about a couple of things. You've got to worry about voting the way that rich, powerful interests want. So they give you money to run your campaigns and you've got to vote in A way that diffuses the anger of really, really organized special interest group, like people who think that, you know, every five year old needs to have a gun and you can't have any regulations on guns, a jury pool wouldn't have to take any of those things into consideration. You could in fact create a community, a city, a state, arguably parts of a country where you have power reside in actual jury pools. You can have citizens sign petitions to propose a law and then rather than having it just voted on by all the citizens, because the problem there is whoever has the most advertising is going to win. You could have that proposed law go in front of a nonpartisan body to rewrite it in some kind of a neutral way, and then allow individuals, people and experts to essentially give presentations to a jury pool. And maybe they're there for a week, maybe they're there for two weeks and they never have to do it again. But I believe if you brought together 12Americans, average people, and said, okay, we're going to create a health care system from scratch and you're going to listen to every player involved. You're going to listen to consumer advocates, you're going to listen to the insurance industry, you're going to listen to the largest HMOs, you're going to listen to surgeons, you're going to listen to average citizens. And you're then going to vote on a system that will save the United States the most amount of money and create the highest level of health care to make the most number of people happy and do things that respect our, our systems of government and our economy. I think that you could do that and you would end up with something radically different from what we have now. Now, an honest person could disagree over what the best policy is. But I can tell you right now, there's one policy that nobody who's really active in our political scene today considers. Talk about it a little bit, but no one really gives a lot of thought to. If you could start over, how would you create something that is similar to how we take care of public schools or roads in America, or police departments? In fact, how could we have a government system that is more conservative than what we have now, meaning fewer tax dollars are spent and that has better results? And I believe if you actually did that, what you would find is a jury of your peers would say, well, I'm looking at what's happening in Canada and United States and Great Britain and Switzerland, and we want to have a system where we're not spending an extra $2 trillion for no reason. Let's model our system after countries, wealthy countries, wealthy G7 nations that spend on average $6,500 per person, not 13,000 a person. And they would then put together the system that makes that happen. I'll leave it to you to figure out what that is. We don't have time get into a big debate. But my point is simply that I think this small town in Belgium is on something that empowering citizens to make decisions outside of court cases, outside of juries would be a wise thing. Because it's the only way of making decisions truly in interest of the commonwealth of public. Because right now, in our current system, every politician is conflicted. They got to worry about how can they pander to the richest, wealthiest interest to get enough money to run the campaign for next time. Or they have to think about not what 90% of the country would benefit from. They got to think about who are the 2% that are the angriest, most vocal, who will make my life miserable if I don't give them what they want. A jury pool would not have to take that into consideration. So would it be hard to implement? Is it going to be implemented overnight? No. But before we give up on this whole concept of democracy, as more and more have been doing lately, I think it's time all of us get a little more creative about how we actually draw the lines, the contours of democracy. Because a lot of what we have now is just kind of random. It doesn't necessarily have to be that way. We could do more things decided by juries.