Office lottery in ancient Athens.

In short, the lottery – and the great Iron Age pachinko machine that was its finest expression and most powerful tool – made the first democracy what it was. Together, the system and its technology enabled Athenians not just to recognize but to live what Aristotle, in his Politics, considered one of democracy’s defining principles: “ruling and being ruled in turn.”

Amendment XVII to the U.S.Constitution removed a bit of diversity – and thus a layer of sanity-checking – from the Federal legislature, by making both houses elected in the same way. If indirect election had to be replaced, better to replace it with something else entirely; lottery is the obvious choice.

People say a lot of unkind things about John Glenn, and I won’t rule out the possibility that there might be good reasons for that. But I’d like to record that he did one good thing that I’ll never forget.

Seven years ago, a Republican majority had just taken power in Congress, threatening a number of reforms, including a rule that all legislation must carry a preamble specifying its Constitutional authority. If I am not misinformed, it was the Senator from Low Earth Orbit who naïvely blurted, “But that would make most of what we do illegal!”

The meme “why not regulate guns like cars?” was much blogged last week. Anthony Swenson wrote:

The real reason we should dislike the driver’s license model: Driving is not in the Bill of Rights. The right to keep and bear arms is.

I wrote to him:

Are you sure that driving is not in there?

Freedom to travel is as fundamental as self-defense; it’s near the top of the Articles of Confederation (“the people of each state shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other state”, Art.IV); and therefore is covered in the Ninth Amendment if anything is. Just as the RKBA does not go away with new technology, neither does a 9A right to exercise the normal means of travel.

In my humble opinion.

Swen wrote back:

I guess my short response would be: Fine, you defend your vision of rights and I’ll defend mine. The long answer would have something to do with the ‘Commerce Clause’. But this is thought provoking.. would you mind if I blog this?

Better yet, set up a blog – it is an awful lot of fun..

So I did.

Later: See also.