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> Imagine a collectively owned bank with a democratic decision-making process. You'd propose your idea for a Netflix competitor, and after a period of public de

> Imagine a collectively owned bank with a democratic decision-making process. You'd propose your idea for a Netflix competitor, and after a period of public debate the bank invests in the ideas that people decided are worth investing in. There is no difference between what you write here and my example. Whether you call it a "collectively owned bank with a democratic decision-making process" or simply "ruling government, it's still a government body deciding what will and won't receive funding, and if you disagree with it there is no opt out or alternative route to investing in competitors, resulting in state-owned media. > With our current technology we could make such decisions using direct democracy. Direct democracy is impossible given the scale of the number of decisions required. We can't even get 50% of the populace to show up for elections once every 4 years. Every single issue the constituency might vote on in a direct democracy wouldn't involve 99.9% of the actual populace's input. What proportion of the population have the time and will power to follow and investigate even a fraction of the bills being voted on by their national representatives? Their state representatives? Their local government? Their school boards? Their HOA? All of that represents a pittance of the amount of decision making that would be required for the government to assume the decision making that goes into managing what currently happens in the free market. Do we really expect direct democracy to work there? That's the hubris of socialism. It assumes that the aggregate direction required to manage modern day nation-states is something that can be handled in a centralized way. Which is how the largest famines in human history have been self-imposed through communist regimes trying and failing to do so. Capitalism, for all its many faults, is decentralized enough to offer more resiliency.

TFYS 5y ago
No, it's people deciding what will and won't receive funding. It's not that much different from today, where people vote with their money. The number of votes would just be the same for everyone. It could even result in better investment, since the voting process would guarantee some level of demand for the product as well. You don't really need competition if anyone can influence the organization by making propositions, debating issues and voting. If there's a problem with the media, you can propose a fix for it. That's already much better than what we have today, where very few rich people own most of the media and therefore decide what most people think and talk about. Even if you need competition, it can be done in such a system. There's no reason there couldn't be multiple competing collectively owned, democratic banks, newspapers, etc. Capitalism is not a requirement for markets. You don't need everyone to vote on everything. You just need the process to be open to everyone and fully transparent. If any small group were to start abusing the process, it would immediately be visible and fixable. People would notice and start voting against the group. Mostly they would vote on things that interest and affect them. If that's not enough, you could have randomized voting duty on issues that need it.

TFYS 5y ago

No, it's people deciding what will and won't receive funding. It's not that much different from today, where people vote with their money. The number of votes would just be the same for everyone. It could even result in better investment, since the voting process would guarantee some level of demand for the product as well. You don't really need competition if anyone can influence the organization by making propositions, debating issues and voting. If there's a problem with the media, you can propose a fix for it. That's already much better than what we have today, where very few rich people own most of the media and therefore decide what most people think and talk about. Even if you need competition, it can be done in such a system. There's no reason there couldn't be multiple competing collectively owned, democratic banks, newspapers, etc. Capitalism is not a requirement for markets. You don't need everyone to vote on everything. You just need the process to be open to everyone and fully transparent. If any small group were to start abusing the process, it would immediately be visible and fixable. People would notice and start voting against the group. Mostly they would vote on things that interest and affect them. If that's not enough, you could have randomized voting duty on issues that need it.