As editor of The Miniconomist for Virtua, I have the advantage of being able to react on articles before others might have read them. I want to use this advantage to react on the article of Andoversr about the government reform the Board of Consuls passed this round.
“IF (and thats a big IF) all of those people in BOC Public and Board of Consuls voted on stuff then at most we would have only 20% and nothing would pass.”
If I read this, I wonder whether Andoversr actually did read the proposal. Although I don’t really understand the meaning of what this line should be saying, I think it means that we never get the whole Assembly to vote, and with only 20% voting nothing can pass. That assumption is wrong, as I quote the law proposal:
“Only the Council and the Assembly have legislative power within Virtua. This power includes the right to propose an unlimited amount of proposals, and vote on proposals.
A proposal is accepted when 50%+1 of the amount of legal votes is in favor.”
I can’t find the text which makes the whole Assembly to agree with it, only 50%+1 of the legal votes has to be in favor. Whether this are 20 votes or 3 votes doesn’t matter. So this is a non-problem. Then I will move to the next presumed issue:
“The next issue I would like to address is the actual vote count itself:
As we know the Population is always changing as new immigrants arrive at the shores of Virtua all the time, each day the requirement for the 50%+ majority would increase as more people arrive and begin to trade.
This will only make this harder to pass as the trading period progresses. Another reason it is doomed for failure.”
Andoversr is making an mistake here as well. If he’d read the proposal properly, he could have seen that the amount of people with voting right within the Assembly is fixed within the first 48 hours of the round. So it doesn’t matter whether people come to Virtua or not, if you aren’t a voter from the beginning of the round, you can’t become one later. So this is a non-problem as well.
“Next let’s look at the sheer amount of bureaucracy to this:
Everyone would get a input on this and everyone would have their own opinion, thats not a bad thing, however the lenght of time it would take to get everyone to finally agree on something would mean that the amount of new laws that could be passed would be reduced by alot and each law would take days to a week or more to finally get to a vote.
My fear of this system is that it will turn us into the US in the sense that laws are overly debated, and nothing gets done, not to mention there just won’t be enough active Virtuans to pass anything.”
Again, reading the proposal might’ve helped preventing this kind of misunderstandings. Of course I realized that it could take forever to discuss matters if everyone had to keep contributing. That is why there is a time limit on both voting and discussing proposals, as stated here:
“Paragraph 2.4b: Voting procedure
For every proposal a discussion time of at most 96 hours will be provided, in which all members of the Assembly may take part. After that, a voting will follow in the Assembly Forum, where all members of the Assembly may vote. The voting will last at least 24 and at most 48 hours. If necessary, the Tribune can decide on decreasing or increasing the discussion time.”
I cannot keep expressing the meaning of this reform, as the current Virtuan government is just done. It has done what had to do, but it has outlived its functionality. Whether it will succeed or not doesn’t really matter actually. I think it will bring some more people into Virtuan politics, but even if this new form of government fails, I think it will open the way to a better form of government then we currently have, because the Board of Consuls became an uninteresting and boring government system, and it did that many rounds ago.