The Population Grows As Representation Dwindles
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I discovered a not-so-well-known blog by Dwight Johnson. He wrote a post in August which makes an interesting point. Let me read part of this:
What is wrong with government? Essentially the problem is that all the power to spend taxes rests in too few hands.
In Article 1, Section 2 of the US Constitution, it states that there should be no more than 30,000 “Free Persons” per representative.
For the year 1800, then, with a total US population of 5.3 million, one Representative per 30,000 citizens equals about 177 Representatives.
As the population grew, Congress decided that it needed to limit the size of the House of Representatives. In 1910 they decided to set the limit at 435 members. Since the population of the US at that time was about 92.2 million, that meant each member of the House represented approximately 212,000 citizens. By 2010, with the population just below 309 million, each member represented about 710,000 citizens. If Congress had kept the initial 1/30000 ratio, the current number of Representatives would be just over 10,000, which would make taking a roll call vote a bit unwieldy and time-consuming.
But we begin to see the problem: Representatives become more and more powerful, and less and less accountable. Each individual citizen becomes less important to his or her Representative.
This is interesting, right? I talk about Israel of the Old Testament quite a bit because Israel as it was in the beginning–not the monarch-run Israel they were later in their history–was an ideal nation in my opinion. How could it not be? After all, it was the Lord who set the whole thing up. He gave them instructions for their so-called government and their laws and every aspect of their society. At the very core of their society was the principle of freedom. In fact, they had more freedom in Israel during that time then the United States has ever seen. Honestly, they were just as close to anarchy as a nation can get without actually being in anarchy.
Let me just make this point while I’m thinking about it. The United States is not a modern-day Israel. We’ve been richly blessed by God throughout the years but that’s not to say we’re God’s chosen people in the world like Israel once was. You might think that’s an obvious point but there’s a lot of people who fundamentally believe that and it’s led to the blind patriotism and willful ignorance we’ve seen in this country. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of Christians today who drape the American flag over the cross, if you know what I mean.
There’s a great post on LibertarianChristians.com today about this. Laurence Vance asked a series of questions like, Is America the nation of Israel? Is the United States the client state of God? Is the U.S. military the Lord’s army? Does the United States enjoy a special relationship with God that other nations don’t have? Does the Bible command any Christian to go on a crusade against Muslims? He listed a whole bunch of questions and then he says, “If you are a Christian and answered in the affirmative to one or more of these questions, then I understand why you are an imperial Christian.”
He defines an imperial Christian by saying, “The tenets of imperial Christianity include things like blind nationalism, belief in American exceptionalism, willful ignorance of U.S. foreign policy, childish devotion to the military, cheerleading for the Republican Party, acceptance of the U.S. empire, and support for a perpetual war on terror – all, of course, with a Christian twist for effect. In other words, the views of Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry.”
My point is the United States is not Israel of the Old Testament. However, I wish we could be more like them. In any nation, there are scales to be balanced between those who have power. On one side of the scale are the leaders and on the other side are the rest of us. It’s always a bad thing, of course, when the leaders tip the scale and obtain more power than the citizens. In ancient Israel, they really didn’t have a traditional government. They had judges and those judges did not even have the power to enforce their verdicts. So, the power was almost entirely in the hands of the people.
As for the United States, the power is significantly in the hands of our leaders. The people of this nation have virtually no power. I know we get to elect the leaders but even that’s a sort of twisted system in favor of the leaders. We have two parties which are nearly identical to one another outside of their rhetoric. The extremely small number of candidates we have to choose from are practically handpicked for us. Plus, we have the issue of gerrymandering where those in leadership positions redraw the election boundary lines to work in their favor.
Think of the balance of power in this country as a game of checkers. The more pieces we have on the board, the more freedom we have. But when our opponent–the government–has more pieces on the board, we have less freedom. The point of Dwight Johnson’s post is that while our population in this country has grown, we’ve not increased our number of representatives. So, the government has, in turn, passively captured our pieces from the board and we’re left with less freedom. The less representation we have, the less freedom we have.
If Dwight’s numbers are accurate, each member of Congress represents 710,000 people. Of course, it’s not feasible that a person can truly represent that many people. It’s a far cry from the system Israel had in place. They had one judge among every ten families. Then, there was another for every group of fifty families and another for every hundred families and then another for every thousand families. Of course, these men were not full-time judges. They didn’t get paid and they didn’t spend all day doing it. They were truly public servants that fulfilled their civic duty only when it was necessary. Otherwise, they work their own chosen profession throughout the weeks.
Dwight Johnson does put into mind an interesting idea. What if we did expand the number of representatives we have in the federal government? What if we did have 10,000 representatives? What do you suppose would be some of the problem there? I guess, the feasibility of paying that many representatives comes to mind. It would probably be nearly impossible to host them all in one place. They would probably have a tough time getting things done. Now that I think about it. I guess I don’t really see a downside.
Let’s not pay them. We’ll let those who truly care about the nation do the job. We won’t need to pay them either if we stop sending them to Washington and let them do the job right from home. We’ve got the technology. Let’s embrace it. They can vote on stuff from home or from their day jobs. Yeah, it might be more difficult for government to get things done, but in 99 percent of cases that’s probably a good thing.
What do you think? 10,000 representatives? Sound good?
“10,000 Representatives | 067 Coffee & Cigarettes” Transcript
Power in too few hands | Government by Contract | 2011Aug25
http://governmentbycontract.com/2011/08/25/power-in-too-few-hands-2/Are You an Imperial Christian? | Libertarian Christians | Oct 7, 2011
http://libertarianchristians.com/2011/10/07/are-you-an-imperial-christian/
About The Author
Jeremy Sarber
I'm the pastor of one of the most blessed churches in all the world. I'm married to the most wonderful woman to walk the face of the earth. I'm host of possibly the most unconventional podcast on the Internet. I am thankful because I deserve none of it. Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn | Email
