61–68 of 68 posts
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Plato preferred aristocracy; how many people do you think would like to live under a government that abandoned any pretense and outright called itself an aristocracy?
Does that make his criticisms of democracy any less valid?
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Yeah, well those guys thought only land-holding males should vote, so maybe they didn't. Did the men designing a system of government for a nation limited to the eastern coast have special insight in what governing 300 million people would look like?
Okay yeah fuck the patriarchy too but they weren't idiots. What they did was no small task and it's.. disrespectful.. to ignore that because they weren't progressive enough for your taste. We could appreciate the fact that they created a system that lets us change the rules as it evolves because they themselves admitted it would be impossible to forsee all the future context needed to make a perfect government. IIRC…
That we've corrected issues over time is evidence that they didn't have all the answers, as wise as they were.
Even if Congress were paying any attention to what constituents want (and they rarely seem to), it’s laughable that such a small number of people are expected to faithfully understand the wishes of so many people. Right now it’s on the order of one million regular people per representative! Moreover, with such a small number of people, buying them becomes “easy”; it just doesn’t take that much money to corrupt a few…
Go down the path even more and you land at direct democracy, where every citizen can vote on any legislative decision. Corporations can not buy half the people. Because it can be a lot of work to dive into the details of a decision every citizen could delegate his vote to someone he trusts - delegate his vote in general, per topic (economical decisions to Betty, foreign affairs to Tom) or just for a single decision.…
You don't have to buy anyone just influence.
You can buy influence by: building a media platform that everyone uses, buying a media platform that everyone uses, building a media source, or buying a bunch of media sources. Or most economically buying a handful of the most valuable Influencers, because most people love to love someone, and the platforms for Influencers are infinite now.
Most of the representation drawbacks to current systems you mentioned are intended to be safe guards against human whim, and to mitigate the power of super Influencers, originally the church. A substantial portion of the bureaucracy, forced slowness, involved in current systems are also deliberately placed for the same reasons.
When I look for causes for the current issues regarding ineffectiveness of parliaments, beyond their structure, I think that the huge change in the PERCEIVED ease of communication is having huge impacts on the actions of delegates. While all of us communicate a huge amount more than 30 years ago, I believe that generally we convey less. What is actually being conveyed by the current communication tools is relegated to the most compelling. The most effective communications are usually the topics with the most emotion charging them, because emotion conveys the most information in the current deluge of communication.
All of that hyper emotional and constant communication nearly paralyzes delegates, and also pushes all of us towards divisiveness because "for and against" become almost completely dogmatic as a result of level of emotion embedded.
Even if Congress were paying any attention to what constituents want (and they rarely seem to), it’s laughable that such a small number of people are expected to faithfully understand the wishes of so many people. Right now it’s on the order of one million regular people per representative! Moreover, with such a small number of people, buying them becomes “easy”; it just doesn’t take that much money to corrupt a few…
Imagine adding nodes to a fully connected graph (complete graph). The number of edges grows exponentially. That's sort of how congress, or any meeting, is. Each additional person adds a burden to the communication and negotiation costs.
As a result of that, and the fact that a party is most powerful if they always vote as a block, you see a tendency to vest power in party leadership (majority/minority leaders), or committee leaders. Adding a bunch of extra people would presumably amplify that.
Anyone have thoughts on exams that require a passing grade to serve in Congress? I.e. demonstrate certain levels of knowledge in order to participate in certain conversations with new bills listing requirements at top thereby eliminating the ability to vote if that Congress person has not met the minimum? I realize this may be a bit off topic but my thought is that if more people in Congress (or other agencies/depart…
American democracy is designed to elect a geographically representative legislature. I wish it could also elect an ideologically representative legislature. Currently, I really appreciate how Senator Ron Johnson is fighting to give small business the same preferential tax treatment given to corporations by early drafts of the tax bill [1]. And you guessed it, he's doing it because he spent much of his career as a sma…
Large businesses (C Corps) pay corporate tax and then when shareholders profit from their shares (either via dividends or cap gains) they pay individual income taxes.
Small businesses (LLCs and S corps) don't pay corporate taxes but individual shareholders pay individual income taxes like above.
What this bill does (and Johnson is trying to do more of) is create a whole new system for shareholders of LLCs and S Corps so that they don't even pay regular income taxes but a new tax at an even lower rate.
This isn't giving preferential tax treatment to small businesses that corporations already get. It's creating a whole new thing that shouldn't exist in the first place.
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Well, yes, for two reasons: 1. If democracy is bad, we should have some other system. Surely we should take into account the proposed alternative when we consider any criticism of democracy itself. 2. Implicitly any reference to the writings of Plato is burnished by the image of "wisdom of the ancients," so it is worth considering the flaws of these philosophers' work.
Direct democracy has flaws, we do have another system: representative democracy. The Greeks were certainly wise, but my main point is this is not untrod ground, we've got at least 2000 years of experience to draw from.
Even if Congress were paying any attention to what constituents want (and they rarely seem to), it’s laughable that such a small number of people are expected to faithfully understand the wishes of so many people. Right now it’s on the order of one million regular people per representative! Moreover, with such a small number of people, buying them becomes “easy”; it just doesn’t take that much money to corrupt a few…
They are listening to their electorate.
Even if Congress were paying any attention to what constituents want (and they rarely seem to), it’s laughable that such a small number of people are expected to faithfully understand the wishes of so many people. Right now it’s on the order of one million regular people per representative! Moreover, with such a small number of people, buying them becomes “easy”; it just doesn’t take that much money to corrupt a few…
...or because the positions are smaller (and even less salient), it becomes easier to buy off a bunch of smaller reps. If the rep for Chattanooga is corrupt, would you know? Do you even know who they are, right now? I'm not aware of any academic research on this off the top of my head, but it must exist, that's probably a better reference than a belief that everything changes if we adjust some numbers. That's a very…
I've been trying to harp on this point for a while. Any proposed changes to how our government functions and how representatives gets elected isnt going to work because it's addressing something that isn't causing the problems we're seeing. The problem IS the electorate and the choices the electorate is making under its own will.
We are here, because the electorate chose to be. And the portion of the electorate that seems perfectly willing to make uninformed or irrational choices isn't exactly small, and often only counts as a technical "minority" when compared to the over all population.
You might alleviate the problem at best, and most likely only temporarily with any proposed changes. Every change that's been proposed in these discussions always assumes that the presence and amount of rational actors is sufficient, if not the norm. That's not what we currently see.