The pure mathematics of voting systems, being mathematics, exists likewise, but its application to the physical world, like all applied mathematics, is contingent on the real world conforming to its ontology and its axioms.
I never would have disputed this. But you’re being binary: basically “either we know it or we don’t”. It’s not that you’re wrong, it’s that your categories aren’t useful in practice. You’re implicitly bucketing things you’re 99.9% sure about with things that you’re 20% sure about.
In contrast, my view is that you should assign some credence to your set of assumptions being true. And given that, we can say that your credence in a valid logical argument’s conclusion must be at least as high as your credence in its assumptions. (It’s higher because, of course, there can be other sound logical arguments that support your conclusion.)
If you’re restricting your knowledge to known mathematical truths, you’re not going to make any government policies at all.
it seems vanishingly unlikely that the Presidency or the US will even exist in 100,000 years
Conceded, but that’s not a substantive issue to my argument. The electoral system of an office that doesn’t exist anymore hardly matters, does it? I only posed the 100,000-year question to illustrate my point. That underlying point still stands: We should be confident that changing the electoral system is good, no matter what the future holds. Or rather, that we should be as confident as we can be about any policy change.
I suggest you look up the formula for the value of a 50-year inflation-adjusted annuity, and the value of an inflation-adjusted perpetuity, and plug in some realistic values. You’re 100% wrong here, so I don’t know why you’re making this claim so strongly. (A caveat, which I’ve already stated, is that the discount rate at the 50-year mark is around the same as it was upon issuance.) It’s $1T exactly because of the lottery argument I gave.
To be clear to other readers, I didn’t recommend making gay marriage illegal.
I asked you specifically what constitutional reason an enforcement perpetuity for a land value tax could be voided. If you can point to a reason that my actual proposal could be constitutionally voided, that’s fantastic, I will change my mind. But you keep avoiding the class of policies that I would advocate for (illustrated by the land value tax). Instead, you try to make me defend a class of policies that are arguably unconstitutional (illustrated by your anti-gay marriage example), which I wouldn’t advocate for.
It’s like if I said “Ukraine should continue the war against Russia”, and then you say “But some wars are unjust”. So? It’s not that even that your claim is wrong, it’s that the truth value of your claim is entirely irrelevant to my claim. I don’t need to defend “all wars” in order to correctly claim that “Ukraine should defend itself”.
You’re essentially trying to get me to defend the class of “all possible policy proposals”, which is just silly.