#94 Wurst is Best

One of those old sayings that we still use like “there’s nothing more certain that death and taxes” is about sausages. Specifically, anybody who cares about laws and sausages shouldn’t watch either of them being made. Sausages, as we all know, but choose to forget, are made from lips and sphincters. So are laws. And whether your congressman is a lip or a sphincter depends on whether you voted for him or not. We all know anything created by a committee is liable to be less than optimum to each of the members on the committee. Benjamin Franklin, in his address to the constitutional convention shortly after its final vote on the final version of the constitution said he wasn’t pleased with it, but because of that he thought it was most likely a very good document. Meaning of course that the spirit of compromise keeps the extremes from getting too extreme. Always important to remember that the extreme left is totalitarian communism and the extreme right is totalitarian Nazism. I’ll take that soft gooey center any day of the week. And you know what, sometimes sausages are really tasty. But sometimes they’re head cheese.
So it’s always interesting to me when folks try to come up with better ways of doing stuff. Like the “top two” primary we’ll have here next election. Maybe. It’ll be interesting to see if the public is served better by not having a minority voice get through the primary. Voting is tricky. And when you start to mess with it, you could be asking for trouble.
Recently we had this chowderfest in Olympia. One of the awards was for Chef’s Choice. 12 restaurants were participating in the event. The public voted on the overall winner. One vote per person like normal elections. But each of the restaurants was allowed to vote for three choices among their competition for the Chef’s Choice award. Funny thing happened, the winner of the Chef’s Choice award wasn’t even in the running for the people’s award. Why? Is the public palate that screwed up? No. The principle behind voting is that we all vote in our self-interest and therefore the final result reflects the majority opinion. But not when you get three votes, and business competition enters the fray. Then you have competitive instinct versus truth. I wonder which is going to win. If I’m a businessman and I have three votes, I’m going to vote for myself first and my two worst competitors for second and third, figuring that the worst guy can’t possibly get enough to win but sure as hell the best won’t beat me either. Problem is, if everyone else does the same thing then the restaurant with the most second place votes will win. Because everyone picked the worst restaurant as their second choice, it will have the most overall points. So the worst wins. Worst, by the way, with a slightly different spelling, is what the Germans call sausage.
And what is it you don’t want to see made? Oh yeah, sausage. And perhaps new election laws...
America, ya gotta love it.