In my last post [oversight-should-be-done-by-courts-with-juries/] I noted that most organizations need a “built in court” in order to ensure that adjudications are made fairly. I used the example of setting salaries, which is currently done by “juries” composed mostly of buddies and fellow executives from the same Country Clubs currently, advised by companies that make a specialty of maximizing executive salaries. The current system results in 100-400:1 salary ratios between senior executives and employees. It is anything but fair.

Oversight, prior to the 20th century was done exclusively by judge driven courts. This wasn’t much better. The regulatory commission was an invention aimed at rectifying the biases and excesses of ordinary Judge headed courts. It was tried to combine these two organizations, but that was oil and water because the judges and the commissioners almost always had turf issues. Nevertheless, I believe commissions would function better if their heart were a Commission court made up of ordinary citizen Jurists. The Full commission would be made of Commission Officers; Subject Matter experts, A Judge, An Auditor, Investigators and other Officers depending on the mission of the commission, but the heart would be a Commission of Citizen-Jurists serving no more than a year and drawn by lot from ordinary citizens. Imagine what they’d decide on Executive Salaries!

Commission courts should provide both adversarial and inquiry forms of investigation. But the key is to keep the officers, deputies, professional politicians, career types, and vested interests off the decision making body. Make both sides prove their case.

Some will say that common folks can’t understand complex questions of law or science. But I think that is elitist, arrogant and untrue. Often they understand these things better for not having invested so much of their heart and soul into the subjects.

We need to have ordinary people involved in our Government to make sure it works right.