I’m done with democracy. It turns into people wanting the authorities to confirm their wishful thinking & their biases. In a country where people think Hauser’s Law is for real, or that the Laffer Curve has a steep slope with a peak below 20% of GDP, or that cutting federal employee salaries by 10% will make a meaningful difference to the federal debt, clearly the populace are too stupid to have the franchise.
These are things people want to believe, & it’s as true of the rich as of the poor. Everybody’s trying to get more out of the state than they put in, & that’s impossible. No machine is perfectly energy-efficient, no institution, public or private, gives you back more money than it costs to run.
And that’s just my country. Democracy is the protector of superstition around the world–so long as it’s the dominant superstition.
Democracy is too stupid to work. And I could say that I’m stuck with it. But that’s not really good enough.
In Britain the royal family are national symbols & adored by the people’s silly side, while the elected governments have to do the hard job of governing. Maybe in this country it can work the other way around. Let electoral politics become a shallow game, put celebrities in charge, then hire professionals to do the real work. It’s called bureaucracy, & the more ridiculous we make the elected pols, the better the bureaucrats look.
Maybe the way to save, nay, reestablish good government is to stop trying to elect competent Congressmen.
Alternatively, I could back a good old absolute monarch right now; just crush any idea that you’re allowed to govern yourselves, you cretinous mob.
Actually I think the problem is that most people have just the right level of intelligence and education to be a danger to both themselves and others. They are smart enough to think that they have opinions on the way the country is run, but not smart enough to realise that their opinions are just the bullshit they heard the pundits say on TV.
You’ve heard of the quip attributed to Churchill, “Democracy is the worst system of government apart from all the others that have been tried”? Sums it up for me. Look at any other form of government - dictatorship, monarchy, totalitarianism, theocracy, etc etc. It always ends up with injustice, resentment, social unrest and authoritarian brutality building up and feeding on each other till it all ends in bloody revolution. Democracy? Not so much.
If foolsguniea really disliked democracy, he would have moved to China or Saudi Arabia. The fact that he’s still here indicates that he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying.
You don’t really have democracy. You have representative democracy, which is just a weak shadow of the true thing. We should strive for much more direct control by the people. The Athenian model still has much to teach the world. (The Athenian Constitution)
Dear god that would be a terrible idea. At least with representative democracy you have somebody with a brain between the mob and the reigns of power.
Well, admittedly in America this isn’t always the case. But I don’t think that’s a fundamental problem with the system, just a problem with the implementation.
California has nothing of the sort. Although I do like the part of the system where propositions (like the one on hashish which unfortunately was voted down) can be put out to general referendum. If that is what you refers to.
Things worked reasonably well when we still had appointed senators. When we moved to elected senators, that removed a protective layer from between the mob and power. Appointed senators did not have to pander to the mob in order to insure re-election. They could actually make decisions based on what was in the best interest of the nation without worrying about what the voters would think, though they didn’t always do so.
In a democracy, the idiocy of the people in power is revealed, even to the most stupid, in a decade. After that they get changed to others, who may or may not be idiots. If there is no transparency (and it seems there never is in a non-democracy), you’re stuck with the same idiots forever.
The U.S. has orders of magnitude more citizens than Athens did. I’m not sure direct democracy works on that kind of scale, and I’m more confident the vast majority of people aren’t interested in returning to a more communal and less interconnected existence.
We haven’t defined what works means here. I’m not sure that democracy is supposed to work. It is definitely not the most efficient method for solving problems and it’s not intended to be. It’s intended to be a system where citizens have basic rights that are protected and where they have input into their government.
All this is code for you don’t agree with the decisions being made by the current batch of politicians and you presume that some absolutist government would be at least as “wise” as you and institute policies you agree with.