They allow voters real choice in electing officials.
They allow for primaries to help select both party’s candidates.
You create a wall between lobbyists and elected officials.
They unprofessionalize legislative bodies.
Fresh Blood. When you prevent a person from spending a life time in office, it allows new people to serve in the office. New people have fresh ideas.
Real Choice in Elected Officials. People say that term limits prohibit people from choosing who they want to vote for. Yet, we know elections with incumbents are rarely a series of fair choices. Incumbents use their official duties to curry support with special interests, ensuring that they almost always win.
Legitmate Primaries to Select Both Parties Officials. There are rarely legitimate or even competitive primaries against incumbents. Incumbents enjoy so much financial support from the special interests and political parties, that most challengers can not unseat them.
Create a Wall Between Special Interests and Elected Officials. With long-term incumbents, they have much more time to get to know and trust special interests. With long-term incumbents, they are much more likely to have served in office the same time as the people who are trying to lobby them.
Unprofessionalize Legislative Bodies. While you probably want your denist or automobile repair shop technician to a professional, you don’t really want your politician to a be professional. You want people not to be stuck in their ways, and to try innovative things. Leave it to the professional and non-political bureaucracy to implement things.
A common rallying cry these days from the Republicans is that the Democrat’s programs are socialism. They fear government-imposed equality that will deprive individual choice and the freedom to live one’s life as one chooses. The reality is that logic is faulty in a modern-era with big businesses staffed with lawyers that abuse the most basic principles enshrined in our laws.
Good government policy does not impose socialism or deprive choice. Instead, it protects and enhances the individual’s ability to make choices. People are allowed to make good choices based on accurate information thanks to government regulation. Government ensures that there is a basic level of quality or safety in the products they buy and use. It also protects sellers of products to ensure that they receive the compensation they are due, and labourers their pay.
Neither of the major political parties is advocating forced equality. What most Democrats want is to provide accurate and truthful information to consumers, and ensure that they get ensured a basic quality of life. Democrats don’t want to force people to one equal standard of living, but they do want to ensure that nobody is deprived basic healthcare or the ability to make ends should a terrible life event happen such as a job loss.
I don’t want the government telling me how to live my life any more then the next guy. Yet, I believe government can regulate businesses to ensure fairness without infringing on my personal choices. What one does to make money is fundamentally different then what one choose to do on their leasure time.
There are certain goods that government can provide to people that are largely indivisible and are little consumed by each individual use. While for sure all use consumes and degrades land and infrastructure slightly, the costs are so marginal that the public benefit of providing a good to the public as a whole vastly out weights the cost of maintaining such a property.
Public lands and infrastructure are good examples of public goods. Most parkland is not extensively damaged by a few people walking on them a day or using their facilities. Lands with back-country camping are quickly healed after people leave them. Roads, within their capacity limits, are not extensively damaged by vehicular traffic. Sidewalks generally are unaffected by whether 10 or 100 people walk on them every day.
Our lives are made better by the commons. On these lands we can meet other humans, we can get from one place or another. We can experience nature. Everybody benefits from the commons, even if they do not use them regularly. Certain individuals will inevitably benefit more from the commons, but their experiences enrich the public as a whole.
The tragedy of the commons is that it has to be regulated to prevent the overuse. People will disagree on how much any particular piece of land can be utilized until it’s experience is degraded to the point where the degradation is essentially intolerable. Indeed, some of the most important public policy debates of the day involved deciding how much to limit the use of the commons.
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