The current voting system makes no sense as part of a real economy. It acts as a government-mandated incentive to hoard money. This is a well-known problem that other nations with similar systems have also acknowledged. Governments don't incentivise hoarding. They should incentivise *investment* and *work*. Besides, in a more complex economy the voting system would auctally be essentially impossible, given the problems with quickly and accurately assessing equity - and we want to eventually make the economy more complex and rich, don't we?
The obvious way to get the money moving is to require dukes to actually pay to get legislation passed. I've spent a little while working this out, and it seems a simple English auction would be more than good enough as a system. Dukes call their bids and votes, and keep calling them until the end of the voting period. At the end, the Praetor adds up the highest bids of each of the dukes, announces the winner, and requests the winning bidders to pay the prices they bid. That way we get price discovery (it's unlikely you'll know the value you're willing to put on a bill before you find someone who disagrees with you on whether it should pass), a lot of fun voting intrigue and hijinks, and an easily determined price for the winners to pay (their highest/latest bid, obviously).
The one really major problem with this system that I can see is sniping. Say everyone in the Landsraad is against a bill except one duke who's for it. Once everyone's placed a small bid against it (presumably 0), he could come in right at the end of the voting period and bid for the bill. I'd like to avoid any informal "let the Praetor sort it out" kind of solutions here - the Praetor's not supposed to have the kind of power over whether bills pass or not that being able to *always* snipe them would give him. I mean, we trust the Praetor, but not so much as to make him the only one whose vote in the Landsraad actually counts
.There's several solutions we *could* use, though. We could try a candle auction - I could easily put together a script to place a "Voting's closed now" message in a Landsraad thread at a certain time, with some random fudge about exactly when that time is. Or, we could strike a balance between filibusterability and sniping resistance by making each bid when there's less than a day of the bidding period left extend the period with one more day, up to a maximum of, say, one week (so, up to three extensions). I'm afraid a system like that would still be quite snipeable, though...
What say you guys?
and support research into alternatives.
. That way you can drain at most, uhh, about 0.01 erb per bill, which oughtn't be much of a problem. Yeah, the everyone-pays rule is kind of rarely used in actual auctions, but I think it makes sense in this situation. Opinions?
