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>"the more democratic the better" I no longer believe this to be the case. I am pro-democracy but I am not a suffrage maximalist. During the last election cycl

>"the more democratic the better" I no longer believe this to be the case. I am pro-democracy but I am not a suffrage maximalist. During the last election cycle I looked at the myriad of obscure positions I had the right to vote for on the ballot and I realized most of what I was voting for I was unqualified to weigh in on. For instance, why do I vote for the Railroad Commissioner? Why do I vote for my local county's community college board of trustees seat 5 and 6? You could say that I should be informing myself before I go to cast the ballot. While you wouldn't be wrong for saying that is my responsibility as a voter, I can assure you virtually no one actually does this. I also find the down ballot candidate's pitches so generic and milquetoast that there isn't enough substance to actually distinguish between them. What's worse is that the obscure positions have either unopposed candidates or just two. And most of the time, people just look for the (R) or the (D) by the name and that's what they go on.

igorkraw 5y ago
More democracy does not necessarily mean more committees in a big centralised state. One problem I personally have with representative democracy is that the representative class will proliferate. If e.g. the railroad/community was organised as a co-op with special legislative constraints, you could have democratic oversight without these meaningless elections. Compulsory, random chance representation or coercive voting with a review by your successors are also mechanisms which could be explored. Even a well designed market could serve that purpose. "more democracy" simply means we do not just give one dude (and it's still most often a dude) the keys to power and call it a day and instead think about how to distribute this power so that it stays functional enough to produce public goods, but smeared around finely enough that it's hard to abuse.

igorkraw 5y ago

More democracy does not necessarily mean more committees in a big centralised state. One problem I personally have with representative democracy is that the representative class will proliferate. If e.g. the railroad/community was organised as a co-op with special legislative constraints, you could have democratic oversight without these meaningless elections. Compulsory, random chance representation or coercive voting with a review by your successors are also mechanisms which could be explored. Even a well designed market could serve that purpose. "more democracy" simply means we do not just give one dude (and it's still most often a dude) the keys to power and call it a day and instead think about how to distribute this power so that it stays functional enough to produce public goods, but smeared around finely enough that it's hard to abuse.