71–80 of 232 posts
[deleted]
A direct democracy would probably be even more shortsighted than today's flawed system. It would almost certainly be hell on earth. No, the answer is NOT direct democracy. For samples of what your average fellow human thinks about the world and whether you think it's a good idea to entrust them with governance, please search a random keyword on Twitter and see what you find. It will not be pretty.
I think this is fighting the symptom rather than the cause. NSA is a symptom of a much larger problem, which is taxes. If you didn't have them, you wouldn't have to demand those things in the first place, because all the money you'd give would be given voluntarily and to organizations that you choose and think are important.
Meanwhile, back on Earth... Taxes are the means of transferring worth to folks like firefighters, police officers, construction works etc... You know, the folks who hold up infrastructure and need to eat food and stuff. And I can count on one hand the number of people I've met who would donate to these institutions in this economy. Now if there's a way to reroute existing tax funds that used to go to rubbish into thi…
[deleted]
The vast majority of Americans don't care about most issues. In fact, I would go so far as to speculate that there is no American who cares deeply about more than a handful of issues. But giving everyone a vote would give everyone the opportunity to sell that vote to the highest bidder, whether literally or figuratively.
You know who will vote on every single solitary proposal? Old people. Old people who think a monitor is a computer and the Internet is a series of tubes that young people use to give each other venereal diseases. As it stands today, we can shine light on corruption, Snowden helped with this. In a HUGE direct democracy, how would we even begin to figure out if someone had usurped control? Would it even be illegal to do so? Instead of writing letters to our representatives we'd all just end up sending daily letters to our grandparents begging them not to blindly do whatever Rupert Murdoch tells them to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A direct democracy would probably be even more shortsighted than today's flawed system. It would almost certainly be hell on earth. No, the answer is NOT direct democracy. For samples of what your average fellow human thinks about the world and whether you think it's a good idea to entrust them with governance, please search a random keyword on Twitter and see what you find. It will not be pretty.
[deleted]
Obviously ending the nightmare that is Citizens United would be a start. And enacting other strict rules about campaign financing....
I think this is fighting the symptom rather than the cause. NSA is a symptom of a much larger problem, which is taxes. If you didn't have them, you wouldn't have to demand those things in the first place, because all the money you'd give would be given voluntarily and to organizations that you choose and think are important.
Meanwhile, back on Earth... Taxes are the means of transferring worth to folks like firefighters, police officers, construction works etc... You know, the folks who hold up infrastructure and need to eat food and stuff. And I can count on one hand the number of people I've met who would donate to these institutions in this economy. Now if there's a way to reroute existing tax funds that used to go to rubbish into thi…
I think this is a misstatement. Taxes are not the means of transferring worth to those individual people, taxes are the means of paying for that very infrastructure.
Instead of voting to block funding for programs, why not repeal the laws that enable those programs in the first place? I don't understand this logic.