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What’s the biggest problem with our system of democracy? John McCain and Russell Feingold seem to think that it’s lax campaign finance rules that allow moneyed interests to funnel cash into campaigns. Others think it’s media bias or homogeneity of opinion between the two parties.

I happen to think the main problem is too much information.

The general public is often only aware of the hottest of hot-button issues — gay marriage, flag burning, the war in Iraq. And while sometimes our own personal stance on a particular issue is strong enough to tilt us in favor of one candidate or the other, it’s often a more nebulous decision-making process than that. There are a million issues that deserve our attention and a legislative trail a thousand miles long. So, overwhelmed by all this data, we end up voting for our national representatives strictly on the party line. Or, even worse, we vote on the basis of our feelings about a particular candidate — and as we all know, our feelings are easily manipulated by the mass medium of television.

And that’s just on a national level. What about all of those tens of thousands of candidates for local and regional office? Most of us know that we can tune in to the local newspaper on the last few days before the election and get a nice, concise summary of the candidates’ views. But we don’t necessarily trust these concise summaries. And so we end up staying home from local elections simply because we don’t know anything about these races.

One might think that you could conduct adequate research about political candidates via the Internet. But have you ever tried to wade through a politician’s website? They’re invariably stuffed to the gills with self-promotional blather and doublespeak. Like the television commercials, they’re generally designed not to disseminate information, but to give the prospective voter a warm and fuzzy feeling about the candidate.

So here’s a Grand Idea: what if someone built an independent voter information aggregator? Let’s call it Amazon for Voters. (You’ll see why I invoke the name of Amazon shortly.)

Here’s how it would work.

You, the voter, access the Amazon for Voters website and fill out a short questionnaire. Which issues are the most important to you? Choose from a set of drop-down menus a list of the top ten issues that you care about. Let’s say you choose gun control, abortion, and welfare reform. Amazon for Voters asks you where you stand on each particular issue. Pro-gun or pro-gun control? Pro-life or pro-choice? More money for welfare programs, or slash the heck out of those welfare budgets?

Click “Submit,” and the system instantly tabulates a list of the candidates for whom you’re eligible to vote that match your viewpoint. You get a numerical score: “Rep. John Doe is an 83% match on your views.”

How is this score calculated? Through legislative scorecards from independent organizations like the League of Women Voters, the National Rifle Association, NARAL, etc. Through a statistical analysis of that person’s actual voting history. Through endorsements by this or that organization.

Or better yet, through the candidates’ own self-rankings. Candidates (or rather, their staffs) fill out voter questionnaires like this all the time, but I’ve never heard of anyone compiling all of them into a comprehensive statistical database. (Or if someone has, they haven’t bothered to put it in a nice, user-friendly package for the masses and publicize it.)

There are certainly a number of issues in which most candidates are going to rank themselves squarely in the mushy middle — “I feel like government can’t afford to pay for our senior citizens’ prescription drugs, but I also feel like we can’t leave our elderly population out in the cold” — but there are also a number of issues where candidates are happy to make their positions widely known. How many politicians try to hide their position on abortion, for instance?

The best part about Amazon for Voters is that it’s completely nonpartisan. The system doesn’t place any judgment on the politicians’ views, or your views for that matter; it simply provides a numerical index for how closely your views match with each candidate’s views. It will work equally well for anyone from the hard left to the hard right.

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I bought Bruce Springsteen’s roots/folk/New Orleans jazz album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions a couple of weeks ago. I unwrapped it in the car, popped it into the CD player, and enjoyed it full blast all the way up to Baltimore and back.

A couple days later, the CD made its way to my computer, where all my music ends up. But Sony chose to release We Shall Overcome as a DualDisc (one side CD, one side DVD), and because the DualDisc doesn’t conform to the industry’s CD specifications, the damn thing won’t play on my PC. I can’t rip it to the hard drive either.

For me, the ability to listen to music on my PC isn’t optional. I don’t even own a stereo, and probably 80% of my music consumption takes place through Windows Media Player on my desktop PC. (The other 20% being in the car.) After several hours of frustrated Google searches for “crack DualDisc DRM” and “rip Seeger Sessions CD,” I finally just fired up BitTorrent and found a bootleg copy of the music. Problem solved.

This, of course, is illegal. Even though I own a copy of We Shall Overcome and am just looking for a way to play it on my computer, there’s no reason I couldn’t have downloaded some other album that I don’t own. According to the RIAA, I should be punished with a stiff fine.

But as anyone knows who’s been following this whole debate, the music industry brought this on itself. Industry pundits have been charting the rise of broadband Internet access and cheap computer hardware for years now. Any forward-looking industry would have tried to take advantage of this flourishing tide of consumer technology before it crashed on top of them. But the recording industry squandered its chance to build a digital jukebox system.

Instead the RIAA concentrated its efforts on meritless lawsuits against ordinary (and often innocent) consumers in a vain attempt to scare people away from their Napster or Gnutella clients. These efforts, of course, are failing miserably. Now, because of the recording industry’s bad gamble, their profits are plummeting and the bastard children of Napster have put large-scale music piracy in the hands of any 8-year-old with a PC. Steve Jobs has the recording industry over a barrel with his iTunes store, and there’s nothing the recording industry can do about it.

Why have the RIAA’s efforts failed? Are we, the public, simply a group of amoral, opportunistic thieves?

No, of course not. The problem is this: the traditional economic model for distributing music is a historical aberration that’s unsustainable in the long term.

We all know how things worked in the music industry since the middle of last century. You walked into your local Tower Records and shelled out $15-$25 for a CD. Once it left your hands, that $15-$25 got carved up by retailers, wholesalers, payment processors, distributors, record company executives, promoters, agents, managers, etc. The artist ended up with maybe $1 to $2 of this in the end, if they were lucky. (Then the government took its 30%.)

Far be it from me to knock the work that these middlemen do. In the twentieth century, these people were necessary for artists to get exposure and sell their work. But does all their effort improve the quality of the artist’s work? No. (Although one could argue that many a meandering batch of songs has been sharpened and focused into a classic album by a good producer.)

This is the thing that has the RIAA quaking in its (stormtrooper’s steel-toed) boots. What if all the record companies went under tomorrow? What if there was nobody around to pay music artists large gobs of cash and foot the bill for their ultrasmooth high-tech studio production wizardry? What if there was no record company pushing artists’ work into the stores and in the consumers’ hands? Would the music industry dry up? Would people stop making quality music?

No.

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