What do you think are the biggest problems of modern society?

[Kantor]

Mr Khan said:

Kantor said:

A: Not really, if we have public funding for elections. Parties would still exist, they just wouldn't be made up of opportunists.

B: You would get an influx of MPs from all walks of life. Mr Pig-Seller may initially start voting for pork subsidies, but presumably that's not his only interest, and the other 599 MPs/700 odd congressmen are not going to share his enthusiasm for pork.

The "ideal solution" if you can call it that is a benevolent dictatorship where one man has all of the power, but that causes far more problems than it will ever solve.

There's really no way around having full-time politicians, because it is necessarily a full time job in our world. The citizen-legislators would at the very least have to be dependent on a core bureaucracy to do the full-time work, but then you end up with a system like Japan, whereas if you think reform moves too slow elsewhere, well...

Which brings back the point that citizen-legislators would be required to be independently wealthy (the sticking point not being elections, here), because they wouldn't have time for any sort of job without conferring a dangerous amount of responsibility on some unelected individuals.

I'm not advocating the creation of part-time politicians. Being a politician should be a full-time job, just not a full-life job. The idea is that, once you've had some experience with another field of work, you move into politics. Being a minister or Secretary should necessarily be a full-time job, and here Members of Parliament pose a bit of a problem, because they require a lot of work and achieve very little. Perhaps a much smaller house (a Senate) elected by proportional representation with a separate Cabinet would be the way to go. Local government structures could still exist.