Let's Vote On Everything!

I just got my ballot in the mail. It includes the following:
  • Some people I've never heard of running for the board of an obscure special district (the Conservation of Angular Momentum District)
  • Election of an employee of an obscure and relatively insignificant unit of state government (the Oregon State state department, similar to the Department of Redundancy Department)
  • Election of some government lawyers
  • Election of a police officer for the county
  • A Consititutional amendment keeping any unit of government in Oregon, at any level, from even thinking about adopting a tax on sales of land and buildings. Oddly, it does not include a cap on the amount that real estate salespeople can siphon off on the sale of your home.
  • A decision on techniques commercial fishermen should use to catch fish
  • A decision on the difference between a square knot and a granny knot
  • A decision, based on the evidence, as to whether the scientists in Geneva really detected the Higgs boson.
Why stop here? Let's vote on the hiring of all 161,000 employees of state and local government. And let's vote on each of the roughly 52 million policy and administrative decisions that are made each year by the elected and appointed officials in the state. This would include, of course, tomorrow's menu choices at the high school, and the color of the carpet in the hallway outside the Governor's office.

Or how about this? Maybe have the CEO's of the various executive branches (governor, county administrator) or whoever they delegate do the actual hiring of all their respective executive branch employees BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT WE PAY THEM TO DO.

Let's roll all the obscure under-the-radar special districts (over 50,000 in the US at last count) into the nearest real government (counties, or cities when most of the district is in a city).

And except for a few public-value-based straw polls, like making Oregon the pot capital of America (new state tourism motto: Come Get High With Us!), remove the Yes and No boxes from ballot initiatives and replace them with a single box labelled: "What good is the best legislature that money can buy if it doesn't make decisions on stuff like this??"