4 ms·

_we_ are the government.

• tzakrajs 7y ago
  Enjoy your pension, but I am not part of the government. If I was the government, then why the hell do I want to leave this forsaken country?
• drdeca 7y ago
  No, I am not. The laws in the democracies that exist are not, in fact, determined by a uniquely/canonically defined aggregate “will of the people”. I don’t think that they even can be, as I don’t think that there can be a canonical definition for what the “will of the people” is. The laws are the result of a particular choice of set-up of democratic systems, along with peoples actions and choices within those systems. In practice as things currently are, and I believe also theoretically necessarily (except for randomness or other things not determined by a person’s choice), different persons have different degrees of influence over what laws are enacted, and over what the government does. If you are telling someone that you and they are a certain organization, but the influence they have is minuscule (by some way of measuring), and you have the rest of the control, it seems reasonable that that person would object to your framing. The government is not “us”, nor is it “those people”. The government is “it”. It is a useful structure which is generally good to have around, but does have a number of drawbacks at times, which it would be good for us to mitigate using what influence over it we may happen to have. I am not saying this as against government or against democracy, which both seem better than the alternatives. But democracy, I think, is good because of pragmatic reasons, not because it allows the government to “be us”.