In a referendum situation you are carrying your own water in terms of you are making your own choice and placing our own vote, so nobody is the proxy to perform either task for you. The ambiguity in this conversation arises from a single action (granting a consent for something) involving a secondary thing (choosing what to consent to) but either of those tasks can be outsourced.Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Aug 28, 2020 2:53 pmAre referendums like proxies in that referendums address particular problems then disappear?FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Thu Aug 27, 2020 5:33 pmIf a board member at a company cannot attend a meeting in person to cast their vote in a matter of importance, they are likely to authorise another to vote on their behalf in this single matter using the phrase "you have my proxy". Given Henry's prediliction for small government and his frequent mention that politicos are servants not masters, it seems that he intends that form of limited proxy where we delegate the performance of a specified task, rather than the usual political proxy where we grant decision making powers on our behalf.Skepdick wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 5:42 pm
Representatives that act on your behalf, I figure?
But as you see, henry is already insisting that proxies aren't members of parliaments or subordinates (and other special pleading)
Either way, he has all the chess pieces in place for principal-agent problems to arise when you can't hold your "proxies" accountable.
As such it's the normal way of doing politics that has the principal-agent problem, as evidenced by the many politicans who would for instance stop opposing some government action in return for a seat on some parliamentary committee, something I would say could not happen in a minarchy, where there are no committees. You might say of Henry's plan that it's primary strength is that it does not have that particular problem, or you could say that it exists as nothing but a wild overreaction to that problem.
So we all were once babies with no capcity to enforce any choices of our own whatsoever. At that time we had decision makers operating in our interests to make all our of our choices on our behalf. That's one sort of proxy relationship.
As we progressed from infancy to adulthood, the list of things we could not decide for ourselves shrank, we gained control over when we went to the toilet and how clean our butts would be afterwards, all the way through what to eat and eventually where to live and how to earn money. But we have to deal with a lot of stuff we don't want to do for ourselves still. We may have an accountant who operates as our money movement proxy officer, an MP or a Senator who is our political proxy dude, and when you go to work you might have an IT dude who is your email gathering proxy.
All of these relationships are much more limited than the parental proxy one where somebody else decided whether your bung hole was sufficiently clean. But do you know exactly what your accountant is doing with your money right now, or every deal that your MP is doing with vested business interests? Do you even know whether your IT guy is reading your emails?
If the IT guy is secretly deleting emails from your ex husband before you read them so that you don't get angry and smash your laptop and cause him extra work, he's either the best, or the very worst IT guy in existence, depending on what you want from that sort of proxy. If you hate your ex husband, and you want a life free from his trollish emails, you may have a yearning for the nanny state of IT services where someone else makes lots of choices about your life so that you can get on with more productive tasks unmolested. If you are horrified by the unwarranted intrusion, perhaps you are more in favour of the night watchman state that ensures you have email but leaves you to your own devices about what to do with it. The key is how much of the task you actually proxied, and given that nobody ever read the usage policy, it's probably more than you thought.
Then at some time in the future, we will gradually lose all of those capabilities. Some relative will have power of attorney proxy to make our big decisions, and some nurse will occasionally put her phone down to check whether our butts are clean enough. So that's something to look forward to.