> Bureaucrats making rules and then seeing if voters reject them by electing people to make different rules is how things work in a representative democracy. N

> Bureaucrats making rules and then seeing if voters reject them by electing people to make different rules is how things work in a representative democracy. No, it's not. In an actual representative democracy, the elected representatives write the rules. That's what they're elected to do. And when the US was originally founded, that's what they did. In what we actually have now, which would be better described as a "bureaucratic oligarchy with a veneer of representative democracy", elected representatives don't even bother to read the umpteen-page laws the bureaucrats write before they vote on them. And no voters have a strong enough incentive to actaully hold the representatives accountable because of the well known problem that doing that requires lots of work and the chance that any particular voter's vote will make a difference is much too small to justify doing all that work. So the only people who actually vote on the substance of issues are those who are driven by ideology or special interests--i.e., those who have other incentives to do all that work and don't care whether their individual vote makes a difference or not. > I'm very glad we do licensing for cars and drivers The question is, why? The only argument I've seen made in this thread is "it helps to catch people who violate traffic laws". That's the argument I have been rebutting. Is that the reason you like it? I ask because there are other arguments for licensing cars and drivers besides that one, but nobody has mentioned them here.