The Majority Is More Important Than The Minority

You can't make an omelette without cracking a few eggs

The Electoral College

Everyone knows what the Electoral College is. Each state gets a number of electors, get the majority of those electors and your the President.

The defenders of the Electoral College claim it is a hallmark of our federal system. That’s just cope. In reality, all the Electoral College does is empower a very small group of people.

Here are the states visited by Kamala and Trump in recent months:

There are 36 states that Kamala and Trump have not visited a single time since August. 36! Meanwhile, Pennsylvania, the state where I live, has been visited a combined 40 times. Is Pennsylvania 40 times more important than 36 different states? Hell no.

It gets even worse. In 2016, Trump won PA by 0.72%. In 2020, Biden won 1.17%. About 7 million people voted in PA in 2020. So, they are fighting over 1% of that. That comes out to 70,000 votes. For all intents and purposes, the fate of 335 million people come down to 70,000 people.

That’s great if your one of those 70,000. Both candidates have to get on their knees for you. But, what about if your a Republican in California, or Democrat in Texas? There are millions of each, but neither side courts them because they are in safe states. They are de facto voiceless.

This is obviously a huge incentive mismatch. Making a few thousand steelworkers in Pennsylvania more important than millions of people in California naturally leads to the retarded populism on both sides we are now stuck with.

Instead of protecting federalism, all the Electoral College does is promote ineffective minority rule.

Unions

Earlier in October, about 45,000 dockworkers went on strike with the goal of raising their wages and stopping automation. The strike ended quickly, but if it continued, it could have cost the economy $4.5B to $7.5B every week.

Even putting aside the strike, the efforts of the dockworker union has been nothing but negative. The union has stopped the automation that would make our ports more efficient, greener, and cheaper. If automation can even make one port one ship more effective, trade increases by 0.67%, with aggregate welfare increasing by 0.5%, an effect equal to upping import volumes by roughly $16.75 billion in 2019 or about $25.5 billion in 2023.

This means that just 85,000 dockworkers are making 335 million people considerably poorer.

If this argument doesn’t resonate with you because you are staunchly pro-labor, then consider the case of police unions. The police union has about 355,000 members, and is best known for doing everything possible to keep bad cops on the beat. This means that 355,000 people are making 335 million people less safe, just for their own interest.

We can debate whether unions “protect” workers, but it’s not debatable that unions sacrifice the interests of the many for the interests of the few.

Gentrification

I was talking to a Kamala staffer in Philly a few weeks ago. We were debating the merits of 76 place, the Sixers plan to build a stadium in Market East, which is the area of Market Street near Chinatown.

He was very against the stadium. As I pressed him for his reason why considering that the stadium isn’t actually in Chinatown, has the potential to revitalize an area currently filled with empty storefronts, bankrupt malls, and homeless people, and is privately funded, he said that it’s because the stadium risks making the area too nice, and thus, pricing out some Chinatown residents.

In other words, he was against gentrification.

Chinatown has anywhere between 2,000 and 4,000 residents. Let’s go on the high end and say that it has 4,000 residents AND that all of them will lose their house (which isn’t true) if the stadium is built. This means that my Kamala staffer friend wants to stop the development of a stadium that can benefit a city of 1.6 million people because of 4,000 people.

I love Chinatown, but does that make any sense to you?

Conclusion

Minority rule doesn’t just make zero intuitive sense, but it’s actively hurting the all of us.

There will always be a few thousand people that loses out. If we keep allowing these people to block progress, we will never get anything done.