31–40 of 76 posts
Direct democracy enables citizens to vote for every service imaginable and vote to pay no taxes for them.
Representation rather than direct democracy does not help at all here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone who has lived in California at some point in the past decade knows that direct democracy is a disaster. Ballot initiatives create service (and corresponding spending) increases and forbid tax hikes, leaving the elected legislature unable to balance the state budget.
But direct democracy seems to work pretty well in Switzerland: http://post-gutenberg.com/tag/secret-of-switzerlands-success...
This is the wrong soution to this problem. The _right_ solution is to quadrouple the number of senators and house members. This effort shows that yes via technology we can have more people voting on the important business of the country , but it doesn't mean we should ignore the benefits of representative democracy and pretend everyone will know everything about everything. The right solution is to water down congres…
+1 Moving towards more state-level government instead of centralized federally.
We already have governmental overhead of 1 person on public payroll for every 6 people. I figure you could easily have 1 direct representative per 1,000 people if you change the system to an elector tree like the old US Senate rather than direct voting for too many positions.
Also, +1 for username 😉
Am I the only one who thinks this is a terrible idea? Normal people don't have the time to vote on every single issue; we have our own jobs to do. A system like this just means he'll be voting with the loudest minority for everything that comes up.
Exactly. We have representatives for good reasons. Almost no one cares about most bills (which means they also won't know all the intricacies that often make the difference between a good bill and a bad bill). Even with the high-profile ones that we do care about, people will often vote for what they want now instead of what they need in the longterm (though our legislators aren't much better since they constantly ar…
Senators have access to a list of registered voters, which could help curb fraud.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a terrible idea? Normal people don't have the time to vote on every single issue; we have our own jobs to do. A system like this just means he'll be voting with the loudest minority for everything that comes up.
Direct democracy permits the majority to trounce the rights of the minority.
A better answer would be that candidates for public office could only accept campaign contributions from registered voters in the candidate's district. This would beholden the candidate to his voters.
This is the wrong soution to this problem. The _right_ solution is to quadrouple the number of senators and house members. This effort shows that yes via technology we can have more people voting on the important business of the country , but it doesn't mean we should ignore the benefits of representative democracy and pretend everyone will know everything about everything. The right solution is to water down congres…
The only potential catch is that this is a lot MORE targets for espionage. You only need to find one person with some life circumstances (new kid, long commute, conflict of interests, etc) and spearfish/blackmail/torture/teach scala accordingly. Granted, your proposal does address a lot of things, but this is something that would need to be addressed. Thoughts?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But direct democracy seems to work pretty well in Switzerland: http://post-gutenberg.com/tag/secret-of-switzerlands-success...
Switzerland is just over 2.6% the size of the U.S. and much, much more homogenous a culture. They're not remotely comparable.
Direct democracy enables citizens to vote for every service imaginable and vote to pay no taxes for them.
Direct democracy enables citizens to vote for a balanced budget as well.
If I can reliably observe someone voting, even with their consent, votes can be influenced through purchase or coercion. And unless new laws get passed to cover online pseudo-voting, such things wouldn't even be illegal, and I could roll around poor-income neighborhoods with a bullhorn advertising $10 per vote.
It's a solvable problem, and maybe I'm overstating the risk, but I think it's a problem worth paying attention to while pursuing these (worthwhile) experiments.
This is the wrong soution to this problem. The _right_ solution is to quadrouple the number of senators and house members. This effort shows that yes via technology we can have more people voting on the important business of the country , but it doesn't mean we should ignore the benefits of representative democracy and pretend everyone will know everything about everything. The right solution is to water down congres…
I think the right solution would be to allow the public to overturn laws. Let the House and Senate do their jobs, but enable an electronic voting system by which the public can automatically overturn any law that enough of the public feels is wrong at any time. This is a more balanced approach, and would also curtail the divisiveness that we see in our political system. The public wouldn't spend the time in between elections either pouting about or praising the results of the last election. Instead they could put their energy toward helping us craft a better country regardless of who is in office.