People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say

Multiple reasons:

1. Because our ability to measure g (the general intelligence factor some psychologists think exists and others do not) is somewhere between marginal and nonexistent. Our attempts are better than they were but I don't know of anyone informed on the topic who would claim with a straight face that they're actually good.

2. Because intelligent people can be very, very wrong, and not just that, but wrong in more exciting ways than the average person. Libertarians tend to be intelligent, educated, and wrong about so many things it's barely worth debating them on politics or economics; doctrinaire Marxist Socialists are essentially the same way.

3. Because we're not starting from scratch, here; we're starting this system in an established political and social order, where opportunities for people to game this system as it's being born will be everywhere. If ensuring that my children have a berth on the deluxe class means redefining 'intelligence' to include them, I'll do it without looking back. Most people involved in politics now are like that, if not moreso.

Perhaps finishing HS could earn people a second vote. Finish college, you get a third vote. If you serve in the military, you get an extra vote. Experts in a particular field could get extra votes, etc.

This is so biased towards a certain subculture I don't know where to begin. It's almost tailor-written to cater to middle-class and rich people, predominantly White and Asian, especially those who are not gay or transgender or otherwise going to be effectively locked out of certain preferred careers or lifestyles, such as the military or top-flight schools. It is, in short, precisely what you would implement to turn America into Brazil or the Soviet Union or China, where there is no vertical mobility and birth absolutely determines outcome.

we can't do much worse at picking leaders and making policy decisions than we currently do in the US

I bring Russia, China, and most of Africa to your attention.

Are laws not written in an assembly by majority vote?

Are you not electing representatives by majority vote?

And this has always been the case in the US system.

See my other post here about the different types of majority and how they can represent different things and/or failing at representing the will of the demos. The fact that the founding fathers were trying to avoid the worst elements of democracy doesn't mean they didn't want a democracy at all; if that was the case, they'd have just nominated a new King and be done with it. No, they were establishing a government by "we the people", which is the exact definition of a democracy. Whether or not they misused the term to indicate the "tyranny of majority", which is a separate concept, does not mean that we should keep misusing it in modern scientific and political debate.

You seem to be putting words into my mouth; I may indeed believe that for a world where market forces are the only forces, that world is a better one than our current world, but I don't see how you would arrive at that from my above comment alone. There are plenty of people who see the obvious problems that for instance patents in the health industry cause yet don't want to remove all regulation or government influence in the industry. For my own views of the FDA specifically, I think it's important to have an agency whose word the public can trust that a particular drug or whatever is "safe". But such an agency doesn't have to be public, and in any case its power should closer resemble the ESRB's power rather than the FDA's current power (which unless I missed something over the past decade has included the power to arrest anyone at gunpoint who tries to sell an orange on the premise that it prevents a disease like scurvy).

Since you did ask it, this rhetorical question does have an interesting answer you're probably not aware of:

> What next, should we buy and sell the right to vote?

This seems to be working pretty well for corporations. Extrapolated to a government leads to neocameralism: http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2008/12/18/rampant-m...

If the majority wants to build a bridge, and a minority doesn't, well, the majority gets their say.

For one, this makes the most people (the "majority", nudge nudge) get what they want.

For another, if it all comes down to raw power struggle, i.e hitting each other, the majority will win anyway. Voting is a way to ensure you get the above effect without the blood.

Consider also that for different courses of action, what is a majority and what is a minority changes. You can be pro "more taxes" and a majority, and also pro "legalize marijuana" (and a minority at that --just an example, doesn't mean the maj/min it talks about is accurate).

If democracy somehow limited itself to cases where you can't have it both ways, that would be great.

It doesn't.