Yes, it's interesting that people, who normally are interested in individual freedom, or say so, begin to be interested in what other voters can and cannot, instead of concentrating what other advantages direct democracy would have for them personally. And it would have, because they personally would have more control over politicians.
Ok, let's say we are voting about increasing patient rights. Why should doctors have more say in this than patients? Who will decide what area of specialty is touched by the given law?
If the general public decides, it may as well see that the doctors would vote "no" to this proposal, so they may decide to mark it outside of the area.
If the doctors decide, they would mark it inside they area and decide, against the will of the patients.
You still don't understand. You just added another decision in chain I talked above - decision whether a given "expert category" is touched by the law or not. Whoever controls this decision can control (in some cases) whether the law will be passed or not.
In practice, in Switzerland, direct democracy scales well up to 7 million of people. If it scales up to millions, it will scale to 100 millions without other big issues.
Also, they have a rule that local or cantonal level is preferred, but still decide some stuff on federal level too. I don't see why such a rule couldn't work in the US too (and it often works there, in fact).
Also, common people do not create bogey men. Only politicians do. This argument is completely backwards - politicians use fear for control. If the power is in hands of the people, there is no need for irrational fears.
This wouldn't be a good system. Quickly, a power-grabbing elite would appear, and they would care about no issues. They would then give themselves more power. To give each voter a different weight is a way to tyranny.
Unless the weight given to the experts would always be in the hands of the voters. But this is just more complicated system than direct democracy with no real advantage.
Instead, each voter has right to vote, and if he doesn't understand the issue, he can decide what expert opinion he wants to hear, or he can decide not to vote at all and thus leave the decision on those who believe they are experts themselves. That's as fair as it can ever be.
You just don't understand the basic problem: Someone has to decide at the end of the chain. It must be the voters themselves (with everyone equal), or this will lead to tyranny of minority. If the voters themselves are let to decide at the end of the chain, they can as well decide directly, and having all the intermediate steps as advisors only, as this results in a simpler system.
Well, as I note elsewhere, this is about social capital. If people don't trust each other, they will have to find out hard way that it's not a good thing.
However, I really doubt that elected government would do any better. There is a general ideological trend everywhere in the world to decrease taxes now. Our government also decreases taxes without any reason.
They are not an unusual failure, they are a common failure. In our country, the system fails precisely the same way. The same goes for most of European countries.
It surely helped, but the key there is something called "social capital", described in the book I mention in other replies. It is basically general trust of people with each other. The countries that have larger social capital tend to be more advanced, because cooperation is the cornerstone of human society.
Of course, this trust must be supported by an efficient legal system, which quickly deals with cheaters of any kind. Unfortunately, in the last 30 years or so, this legal system deteriorated in the US, so US started losing this advantage of social capital. But I believe that during the most of the last century, US was a real world leader with huge amounts of social capital.
Direct democracy is one of the things that promotes creation of social capital (because it keeps lying politicians more in check, and so increases trust).
The polarization of political views is due to your party system, which emphasizes differences between people and neglects the similarities. It is also generally useful for people in power to divide population as much as possible. You (as citizens) have to realize and fight that division.
It's true that DD doesn't solve all problems, but it solves all problems at least a bit better than representative democracy. The same arguments you have could be raised at representative democracy, and for any irrational decision made by referendum one can find an irrational decision made by a representative (in fact, I even shown you a study which proves that).
In the book I pointed out it is also shown that the good educated citizens are result of direct democracy, and not the other way around, as you seem to think.
I don't believe in your safeguards. The problem with them that careers of people in those safeguards depend on each other, so once they are all placed with cooperating people (against the common citizens), they will fail (which is what happened under Bush).
If you really want to know what Switzerland is doing, read the book about direct democracy I mentioned in other posts.
And you can do it with any citizenry. It has been shown that engaged/educated citizenry arises from a good democracy, not the other way around.
Actually, I believe this is a problem that can be easily solved in general, but I don't know if it has been tried yet. You can auction off the place. The town parts that do not want the airport will pay some amount of money to the part that will have the airport. The part that now has the airport can now spend the money for improving other things.
Few paragraphs above you are complaining that direct democracy would lead to "tyranny of majority". And now you complain that it is managed for "benefit of minority". So make up your mind. What do you prefer? Because there really is no other option - always, either majority or minority will win (though - there is also a 3rd possibility, that you would become a dictator, but you probably don't want that, because it means everybody is your enemy).
I would prefer rule of the majority over rule of the minority anytime. It's better probability I will end up as majority.
And the last and best thing. Direct democracy is no "rule of majority". It's true that majority always wins, but each time, the majority that wins is different. So statistically, with direct democracy, majority of the time you will win too.
Consider that in the US, we had an elite craft some restrictions and guarantees in the US constitution. Time and time again, the majority has attempted to pass laws, frequently on an emotional basis, that conflict with those guarantees. Our system of government can prevent these things from doing any damage, but only because we have another elite (a judiciary) keeping things consistent.
And you seriously believe that this system works, in the light of recent Bush's scandals (which are too many to list, and I don't really care about your president, but for example, secret emails, government spying program, lies about WMDs in Iraq, etc.)? Who is then being naive?
Oh, ok, that's right, there was classical Greek example. I am not sure if they really knew that such a system was worse than some other system of the era, or they just believe Plato.
About your questions:
1. In Switzerland, if you gather certain amount of signatures under a petition, then you get the binding referendum about the issue. There is also a way to vote retroactively on certain issues, so the government can decide quickly. I don't know the details, but I know it works. If you are American, you should know better since some states have system similar to that. Apart from that, there is normal political system in Switzerland, but it's in general more consensus based (not so partisan), because people have so much power to influence the result.
2. If U.S. would be direct democracy, it would probably be a neutral country and 9/11 would never happened. 9/11 happened because you were meddling in the Middle East. Under direct democracy, people wouldn't allow that in the first place, and there would be no reason why terrorists would attack your country. That's how it works in most European countries.
And if they won't approve the leader, then what? Practically, the result is the same. Either you get deadlocked, or you have to pick one possibility. You may also use a coin, which is about the most fair method there is. But still, it's all very theoretical situation. It's like saying that mathematics is complete failure and nothing can ever be proven, because of Godel incompletness theorems.
Well, I have already answered the above objections in other my remarks around here. My main point essentially is that direct democracy has been already tested for a long long time and it has been proven to work better than representative democracy, contrary to your hypotheses. If you want more details (and references), read this book. Also, if you want some proof that it works better, I recommend this study.
Sorry for being so harsh, I have some 30+ replies under this article and it's becoming boring to repeat the same arguments (which most people don't know and thus cannot refute single-handedly) over and over again.
Actually, I don't like what happened with Wikipedia either, but probably for a different reason. The people who have power there don't want democracy, and they instead prefer this fuzzy notion of consensus which allows them to pass anything anytime. There are no real rules about decision-making, so the result is anarchy.
People are no "branch". People are just people. It's their responsibility. If they fuck up, they'll fuck up. And they will also bear the consequences of such fuck up.
The qualified decision problem can be easily solved. People ask experts about their opinion, but the ultimate decision is in people's hands.
The other things you are talking about have been empirically proved as false.
But, I don't believe you can be convinced otherwise, if you are talking about your fellow citizens as of "the mob".
If we would take current issues you have with federal government aside (which are IMHO caused by the fact that you don't have direct democracy on federal level), trust me, you live in one of the best managed countries in the world. Just come to a visit to any post-communist European country (like ours), talk to local people, and you will be glad you live where you live.
Yes, there is a certain small limitation (about 1%?) of signatures on the petition they need in order to get referendum about the issue.
However, I don't think having a condition like "majority of voters has to vote in order vote would be legitimate" is a good thing. This is an obstacle in democracy. I as a voter should have a right to leave decision on others. Moreover, this opens the voting susceptible to manipulation with phrasing of the question. If the turnout is expected to be low, then the question can be phrased so that the desired result is when the vote is invalid. Therefore, real democracies, such as in Switzerland, avoid these stupid limitations.
OK, even if I would consider this infinity low probability event that this would go on forever, this really isn't an argument against direct democracy, it's argument against anything that isn't a dictatorship. The exactly same thing can occur if you have 3 people in the government.
Since the disadvantages of dictatorship with respect to democracy are well known, I wouldn't consider it being a big deal.
The influence of Arrow's theorem in practice is really overstated. I don't see that anyone could point out an example in the history of democratic countries of these things occuring.
It's a lot more likely that cycles will arise from some small power gaining group over others, and society regresses in the legislature that prevented certain bad things to be done. An example could be negative results from banking deregulation in the recent years in the US.
I think I already answered this elsewhere, but (semi)direct democracy in Switzerland and some US states have been implemented, about a century ago, and there are still no significant problems you describe. So I am not sure I get your argument - are you somehow suggesting that people are less educated and engaged in politics than they have been 100 years ago? It's nice that "founding fathers" thought about this, but I think their point of view was rather limited, in light of these facts.
I didn't want to mock them, however, there were certain cases in Switzerland that took quite long to be voted for by popular vote, and that we now consider granted. Two examples come to mind - voting rights for women and some rights for disabled people. So such cases certainly do exist in direct democracy, and it would be dishonest to claim the opposite.
Anyway, my point still stands and I agree with you - people in direct democracy tend to avoid risk, even to the point they will refuse legislation which is undoubtedly at least partly good.
That's why I believe that the competition of states (or legal systems in general) is necessary to complement direct democracy. Both Switzerland and US have such a system. This allows some experiments to be made on smaller level (local, cantonal/state) first and then, if the law gives positive result, it can be enacted in the whole nation.
Well, in a real world, if such situation occurs, a person with common sense would immediately solve it by serving all the 3 meals. So this only proves that economists are missing it.
Anyway, even if you would came up with more practical example (one where compromise is not possible), how can you say what is "real progress" in society? This is a very elitist statement in itself. Is better society with no "cycles" where all the people are unhappy? Or society where everybody always does the most optimal thing, even in their "free time", but some are unhappy because such society is soooo boring?
Such statement however doesn't surprise me from someone who studied economics, since these schools are intentionally made to produce elitists.
Slashdot Mirror
..but since we are talking about films, I would like to see Tim Burton's version of Hobbit. I can't imagine it, but I know it would be fantastic.
(If you agree, please spread this meme. :-))
Yes, it's interesting that people, who normally are interested in individual freedom, or say so, begin to be interested in what other voters can and cannot, instead of concentrating what other advantages direct democracy would have for them personally. And it would have, because they personally would have more control over politicians.
Ok, let's say we are voting about increasing patient rights. Why should doctors have more say in this than patients? Who will decide what area of specialty is touched by the given law?
If the general public decides, it may as well see that the doctors would vote "no" to this proposal, so they may decide to mark it outside of the area.
If the doctors decide, they would mark it inside they area and decide, against the will of the patients.
You still don't understand. You just added another decision in chain I talked above - decision whether a given "expert category" is touched by the law or not. Whoever controls this decision can control (in some cases) whether the law will be passed or not.
In practice, in Switzerland, direct democracy scales well up to 7 million of people. If it scales up to millions, it will scale to 100 millions without other big issues.
Also, they have a rule that local or cantonal level is preferred, but still decide some stuff on federal level too. I don't see why such a rule couldn't work in the US too (and it often works there, in fact).
Also, common people do not create bogey men. Only politicians do. This argument is completely backwards - politicians use fear for control. If the power is in hands of the people, there is no need for irrational fears.
This wouldn't be a good system. Quickly, a power-grabbing elite would appear, and they would care about no issues. They would then give themselves more power. To give each voter a different weight is a way to tyranny.
Unless the weight given to the experts would always be in the hands of the voters. But this is just more complicated system than direct democracy with no real advantage.
Instead, each voter has right to vote, and if he doesn't understand the issue, he can decide what expert opinion he wants to hear, or he can decide not to vote at all and thus leave the decision on those who believe they are experts themselves. That's as fair as it can ever be.
You just don't understand the basic problem: Someone has to decide at the end of the chain. It must be the voters themselves (with everyone equal), or this will lead to tyranny of minority. If the voters themselves are let to decide at the end of the chain, they can as well decide directly, and having all the intermediate steps as advisors only, as this results in a simpler system.
Well, as I note elsewhere, this is about social capital. If people don't trust each other, they will have to find out hard way that it's not a good thing.
However, I really doubt that elected government would do any better. There is a general ideological trend everywhere in the world to decrease taxes now. Our government also decreases taxes without any reason.
They are not an unusual failure, they are a common failure. In our country, the system fails precisely the same way. The same goes for most of European countries.
It surely helped, but the key there is something called "social capital", described in the book I mention in other replies. It is basically general trust of people with each other. The countries that have larger social capital tend to be more advanced, because cooperation is the cornerstone of human society.
Of course, this trust must be supported by an efficient legal system, which quickly deals with cheaters of any kind. Unfortunately, in the last 30 years or so, this legal system deteriorated in the US, so US started losing this advantage of social capital. But I believe that during the most of the last century, US was a real world leader with huge amounts of social capital.
Direct democracy is one of the things that promotes creation of social capital (because it keeps lying politicians more in check, and so increases trust).
The polarization of political views is due to your party system, which emphasizes differences between people and neglects the similarities. It is also generally useful for people in power to divide population as much as possible. You (as citizens) have to realize and fight that division.
It's true that DD doesn't solve all problems, but it solves all problems at least a bit better than representative democracy. The same arguments you have could be raised at representative democracy, and for any irrational decision made by referendum one can find an irrational decision made by a representative (in fact, I even shown you a study which proves that).
In the book I pointed out it is also shown that the good educated citizens are result of direct democracy, and not the other way around, as you seem to think.
I don't believe in your safeguards. The problem with them that careers of people in those safeguards depend on each other, so once they are all placed with cooperating people (against the common citizens), they will fail (which is what happened under Bush).
If you really want to know what Switzerland is doing, read the book about direct democracy I mentioned in other posts.
And you can do it with any citizenry. It has been shown that engaged/educated citizenry arises from a good democracy, not the other way around.
Actually, I believe this is a problem that can be easily solved in general, but I don't know if it has been tried yet. You can auction off the place. The town parts that do not want the airport will pay some amount of money to the part that will have the airport. The part that now has the airport can now spend the money for improving other things.
Few paragraphs above you are complaining that direct democracy would lead to "tyranny of majority". And now you complain that it is managed for "benefit of minority". So make up your mind. What do you prefer? Because there really is no other option - always, either majority or minority will win (though - there is also a 3rd possibility, that you would become a dictator, but you probably don't want that, because it means everybody is your enemy).
I would prefer rule of the majority over rule of the minority anytime. It's better probability I will end up as majority.
And the last and best thing. Direct democracy is no "rule of majority". It's true that majority always wins, but each time, the majority that wins is different. So statistically, with direct democracy, majority of the time you will win too.
Consider that in the US, we had an elite craft some restrictions and guarantees in the US constitution. Time and time again, the majority has attempted to pass laws, frequently on an emotional basis, that conflict with those guarantees. Our system of government can prevent these things from doing any damage, but only because we have another elite (a judiciary) keeping things consistent.
And you seriously believe that this system works, in the light of recent Bush's scandals (which are too many to list, and I don't really care about your president, but for example, secret emails, government spying program, lies about WMDs in Iraq, etc.)? Who is then being naive?
Oh, ok, that's right, there was classical Greek example. I am not sure if they really knew that such a system was worse than some other system of the era, or they just believe Plato.
About your questions:
1. In Switzerland, if you gather certain amount of signatures under a petition, then you get the binding referendum about the issue. There is also a way to vote retroactively on certain issues, so the government can decide quickly. I don't know the details, but I know it works. If you are American, you should know better since some states have system similar to that. Apart from that, there is normal political system in Switzerland, but it's in general more consensus based (not so partisan), because people have so much power to influence the result.
2. If U.S. would be direct democracy, it would probably be a neutral country and 9/11 would never happened. 9/11 happened because you were meddling in the Middle East. Under direct democracy, people wouldn't allow that in the first place, and there would be no reason why terrorists would attack your country. That's how it works in most European countries.
And if they won't approve the leader, then what? Practically, the result is the same. Either you get deadlocked, or you have to pick one possibility. You may also use a coin, which is about the most fair method there is. But still, it's all very theoretical situation. It's like saying that mathematics is complete failure and nothing can ever be proven, because of Godel incompletness theorems.
Well, I have already answered the above objections in other my remarks around here. My main point essentially is that direct democracy has been already tested for a long long time and it has been proven to work better than representative democracy, contrary to your hypotheses. If you want more details (and references), read this book. Also, if you want some proof that it works better, I recommend this study.
Sorry for being so harsh, I have some 30+ replies under this article and it's becoming boring to repeat the same arguments (which most people don't know and thus cannot refute single-handedly) over and over again.
For what reasons exactly?
Actually, I don't like what happened with Wikipedia either, but probably for a different reason. The people who have power there don't want democracy, and they instead prefer this fuzzy notion of consensus which allows them to pass anything anytime. There are no real rules about decision-making, so the result is anarchy.
People are no "branch". People are just people. It's their responsibility. If they fuck up, they'll fuck up. And they will also bear the consequences of such fuck up.
The qualified decision problem can be easily solved. People ask experts about their opinion, but the ultimate decision is in people's hands.
The other things you are talking about have been empirically proved as false.
But, I don't believe you can be convinced otherwise, if you are talking about your fellow citizens as of "the mob".
If we would take current issues you have with federal government aside (which are IMHO caused by the fact that you don't have direct democracy on federal level), trust me, you live in one of the best managed countries in the world. Just come to a visit to any post-communist European country (like ours), talk to local people, and you will be glad you live where you live.
Yes, there is a certain small limitation (about 1%?) of signatures on the petition they need in order to get referendum about the issue.
However, I don't think having a condition like "majority of voters has to vote in order vote would be legitimate" is a good thing. This is an obstacle in democracy. I as a voter should have a right to leave decision on others. Moreover, this opens the voting susceptible to manipulation with phrasing of the question. If the turnout is expected to be low, then the question can be phrased so that the desired result is when the vote is invalid. Therefore, real democracies, such as in Switzerland, avoid these stupid limitations.
I don't know what you argue with me about, I agree with you. And I already said the exact same things in other posts.
OK, even if I would consider this infinity low probability event that this would go on forever, this really isn't an argument against direct democracy, it's argument against anything that isn't a dictatorship. The exactly same thing can occur if you have 3 people in the government.
Since the disadvantages of dictatorship with respect to democracy are well known, I wouldn't consider it being a big deal.
The influence of Arrow's theorem in practice is really overstated. I don't see that anyone could point out an example in the history of democratic countries of these things occuring.
It's a lot more likely that cycles will arise from some small power gaining group over others, and society regresses in the legislature that prevented certain bad things to be done. An example could be negative results from banking deregulation in the recent years in the US.
I think I already answered this elsewhere, but (semi)direct democracy in Switzerland and some US states have been implemented, about a century ago, and there are still no significant problems you describe. So I am not sure I get your argument - are you somehow suggesting that people are less educated and engaged in politics than they have been 100 years ago? It's nice that "founding fathers" thought about this, but I think their point of view was rather limited, in light of these facts.
I didn't want to mock them, however, there were certain cases in Switzerland that took quite long to be voted for by popular vote, and that we now consider granted. Two examples come to mind - voting rights for women and some rights for disabled people. So such cases certainly do exist in direct democracy, and it would be dishonest to claim the opposite.
Anyway, my point still stands and I agree with you - people in direct democracy tend to avoid risk, even to the point they will refuse legislation which is undoubtedly at least partly good.
That's why I believe that the competition of states (or legal systems in general) is necessary to complement direct democracy. Both Switzerland and US have such a system. This allows some experiments to be made on smaller level (local, cantonal/state) first and then, if the law gives positive result, it can be enacted in the whole nation.
Well, in a real world, if such situation occurs, a person with common sense would immediately solve it by serving all the 3 meals. So this only proves that economists are missing it.
Anyway, even if you would came up with more practical example (one where compromise is not possible), how can you say what is "real progress" in society? This is a very elitist statement in itself. Is better society with no "cycles" where all the people are unhappy? Or society where everybody always does the most optimal thing, even in their "free time", but some are unhappy because such society is soooo boring?
Such statement however doesn't surprise me from someone who studied economics, since these schools are intentionally made to produce elitists.