6 ms·

It's no longer a democracy, but at least it'd be transparent and honest.

JanezStupar 15y ago
Democracy in classical sense means participation of the aristocracy, not wide populist participation as practiced in 20th century. I along with many of people I discuss politics agree that for wellbeing of democracy the civic duties and privileges should be limited and not available to everybody as a universal right. Ignorance is the worst enemy of democracy. Letting the ignorant majority participate in democratic process on principle alone does nothing for democracy.
- toyg 15y ago
  Bollocks. Democracy is, literally, "rule by the people"; you can twist the definition of "people", but once you do, they stop being "people" in other contexts too, and you really don't want to go there, if you really care about your fellow man (if you don't, you can pick your preferred system that favours your preferred type of assholes: with the right blood, with the right money, with the right degrees, with the right veneral disease, whatever). The real problem is that the Greek concept of Democracy was implemented at the town level (their "cities" were really villages in the modern sense), and it has struggled to scale ever since. It's not surprising that the best "democracies" tend to be the smallest in terms of population. A literal democracy would have everyone being able to vote on any law at any level, which is clearly impractical; unfortunately, once you introduce human intermediaries / aggregators (i.e. your "representatives"), the dynamics change massively, so you introduce corrections, which further sway the dynamics, and on and on...
  - wladimir 15y ago
    A literal democracy would have everyone being able to vote on any law at any level, which is clearly impractical It used to be impractical due to obvious infrastructure reasons. But with the internet, is it still? And I'm not sure that there always needs to be an "ignorant majority". If people are closely involved with any aspect of lawmaking, they'll feel more responsible for being educated about political issues. Most "politically ignorant" people I know are that because they feel voting is hardly worth the time, because it only contributes indirectly and abstractly to decision processes (and politicians say one thing and do another...). I think an important responsibility of a democracy is to educate people in critical thinking and make sure they are not "ignorant".
    - hermannj314 15y ago
      It sounds like Congress needs an ignorance quorum before passing any law: "Congress shall pass no law, unless 51% of the electorate can pass a quiz on the content of said law. Also, individual legislators must abstain from voting until they receive passing marks."
    - toyg 15y ago
      It used to be impractical due to obvious infrastructure reasons. But with the internet, is it still? The history of electronic voting is not particularly encouraging for the various "democracy in technology" theories. Besides, even if you sorted out the infrastructure requirements (see security etc), you'd still be left with the day-to-day drudgery of real politics: reading thousands of pages of bills, proposals, analysis, point, counter-point, etc etc etc, is boring and a time-sink. Which is why a professional "political class" has emerged in most countries, and why part-time politicians are invariably rich from the start (i.e. they have a lot of spare time). To fix that, we'll need good AIs to summarize and simulate. I'd actually prefer to have that over a fully-networked, always-on poll booth.
      - wladimir 15y ago
        reading thousands of pages of bills, proposals, analysis, point, counter-point, etc etc etc, is boring and a time-sink A crowd-sourcing approach could certainly work here. People will go through boring work if they think it is worthwhile. Having free time is by no means restricted to the rich anymore. Github for politics? (people could do something useful online instead of playing BlaVille, for a change...) we'll need good AIs to summarize and simulate I don't believe that such AIs will be feasible any time soon. Also, it would raise even more security issues. Who controls the AI?
  - JanezStupar 15y ago
    But literally all historically successful democracies have limited what set of populace are the "people". I am not US citizen however I know that when the US was created "the people" were pretty much in minority. It was also expected that "the people" will respect and defend their civic freedoms. The Switzerland for example historically only allowed armed men to vote and even today if one rejects their military service they give up their voting right. As noble as this popular democracy concept seems in theory in practice it means throwing pearls before the swine. In modern west 50% of people are just to willfully ignorant to understand what civic rights and duties mean. I am not in favor of any kind of representative model I am also not in favor of direct democracy. One mechanism would be imposing a citizens tax of 5% of income for those who want their civic rights. That should clear the field pretty fast.
    - maxerickson 15y ago
      What are your examples of historically successful democracies?
      - JanezStupar 15y ago
        Athens, Rome, Sparta, Switzerland, United States
        waqf 15y ago
        Rome's been around a while and it has had several significantly different forms of government. Which period have you in mind?
        JanezStupar 15y ago
        Obviously the republic era, before Caesar. The civic virtue within the republic of Rome was so great that to this day our institutions mirror those of their age. They were extremely democratic. But not in a modern sense. Do note that all systems are bound to get corrupt, whither and die. But the best are extremely resistant to corruption. And strong anti populist safeguards are a property of all of them.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    Splitting hairs over the literal meaning of a term defined literally thousands of years ago is pointless. Democracy is a philosophical institution and you need a lot more than a dictionary of ancient Greek to define it. Democracy is about the rule of the people. Voting, direct or indirect through representation, is merely a means towards this end. Other important elements of democracy is free speech and free assembly - if the people aren't free to organise themselves, they can't effectively rule. There are plenty of examples of non-free elections, and it's obvious that the presence of those doesn't make the host country a democracy. Another very important - and much forgotten - factor is the protection of minorities. Americans often lament that a minority of 40 senators can filibuster a law, because supposedly it's undemocratic to give such power to a smaller fraction than 50%. Originally, it was just one senator, although he had to physically filibuster the vote - and the purpose of this rule was to protect the minority from getting run over by the majority. This protection is paramount to a democracy - whether or not the filibustering rules, current or original, in the US Senate is a good way of securing this protection is another matter. If you want to get technical, anything less that full consensus on everything can be considered undemocratic - because when one part of demos imposes it's will on another part, then it's not rule of the people any more - it's rule of a part of the people.
- hermannj314 15y ago
  It is hard to agree or disagree with you when you don't say exactly what your eligibility criteria would be. I, for one, find felony disenfranchisement to be deplorable.
  - JanezStupar 15y ago
    Lottery would be way better than what we have today. I would also prohibit government employees from voting. With an exception of military veterans. But these are not honest criteria. I have no idea about what would be a set of good criteria. Thus far I can only see that populist rule is leading us nowhere fast.
toyg 15y ago
From one-head-one-vote to one-dollar-one-vote. We should call it "pecuniacy". (Note: "pecunia" is Latin for "money"; I know, the right way to do this would be to use the ancient greek equivalent for "money" and replace it for "demo", but I couldn't find it.)
- rrhm 15y ago
  Perhaps "plutocracy" would work. The root "ploutus" is the ancient greek word for "wealth".
  - toyg 15y ago
    Yeah, but that has already assumed negative connotations; you cannot use it for tongue-in-cheek jokes.
    - georgecmu 15y ago
      leptocracy: lepton[] + cracy is exactly what you want and is an easy allusion to kleptocracy. [] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_lepton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_lepton

Democracy in classical sense means participation of the aristocracy, not wide populist participation as practiced in 20th century. I along with many of people I discuss politics agree that for wellbeing of democracy the civic duties and privileges should be limited and not available to everybody as a universal right. Ignorance is the worst enemy of democracy. Letting the ignorant majority participate in democratic process on principle alone does nothing for democracy.

toyg 15y ago
Bollocks. Democracy is, literally, "rule by the people"; you can twist the definition of "people", but once you do, they stop being "people" in other contexts too, and you really don't want to go there, if you really care about your fellow man (if you don't, you can pick your preferred system that favours your preferred type of assholes: with the right blood, with the right money, with the right degrees, with the right veneral disease, whatever). The real problem is that the Greek concept of Democracy was implemented at the town level (their "cities" were really villages in the modern sense), and it has struggled to scale ever since. It's not surprising that the best "democracies" tend to be the smallest in terms of population. A literal democracy would have everyone being able to vote on any law at any level, which is clearly impractical; unfortunately, once you introduce human intermediaries / aggregators (i.e. your "representatives"), the dynamics change massively, so you introduce corrections, which further sway the dynamics, and on and on...
- wladimir 15y ago
  A literal democracy would have everyone being able to vote on any law at any level, which is clearly impractical It used to be impractical due to obvious infrastructure reasons. But with the internet, is it still? And I'm not sure that there always needs to be an "ignorant majority". If people are closely involved with any aspect of lawmaking, they'll feel more responsible for being educated about political issues. Most "politically ignorant" people I know are that because they feel voting is hardly worth the time, because it only contributes indirectly and abstractly to decision processes (and politicians say one thing and do another...). I think an important responsibility of a democracy is to educate people in critical thinking and make sure they are not "ignorant".
  - hermannj314 15y ago
    It sounds like Congress needs an ignorance quorum before passing any law: "Congress shall pass no law, unless 51% of the electorate can pass a quiz on the content of said law. Also, individual legislators must abstain from voting until they receive passing marks."
  - toyg 15y ago
    It used to be impractical due to obvious infrastructure reasons. But with the internet, is it still? The history of electronic voting is not particularly encouraging for the various "democracy in technology" theories. Besides, even if you sorted out the infrastructure requirements (see security etc), you'd still be left with the day-to-day drudgery of real politics: reading thousands of pages of bills, proposals, analysis, point, counter-point, etc etc etc, is boring and a time-sink. Which is why a professional "political class" has emerged in most countries, and why part-time politicians are invariably rich from the start (i.e. they have a lot of spare time). To fix that, we'll need good AIs to summarize and simulate. I'd actually prefer to have that over a fully-networked, always-on poll booth.
    - wladimir 15y ago
      reading thousands of pages of bills, proposals, analysis, point, counter-point, etc etc etc, is boring and a time-sink A crowd-sourcing approach could certainly work here. People will go through boring work if they think it is worthwhile. Having free time is by no means restricted to the rich anymore. Github for politics? (people could do something useful online instead of playing BlaVille, for a change...) we'll need good AIs to summarize and simulate I don't believe that such AIs will be feasible any time soon. Also, it would raise even more security issues. Who controls the AI?
- JanezStupar 15y ago
  But literally all historically successful democracies have limited what set of populace are the "people". I am not US citizen however I know that when the US was created "the people" were pretty much in minority. It was also expected that "the people" will respect and defend their civic freedoms. The Switzerland for example historically only allowed armed men to vote and even today if one rejects their military service they give up their voting right. As noble as this popular democracy concept seems in theory in practice it means throwing pearls before the swine. In modern west 50% of people are just to willfully ignorant to understand what civic rights and duties mean. I am not in favor of any kind of representative model I am also not in favor of direct democracy. One mechanism would be imposing a citizens tax of 5% of income for those who want their civic rights. That should clear the field pretty fast.
  - maxerickson 15y ago
    What are your examples of historically successful democracies?
    - JanezStupar 15y ago
      Athens, Rome, Sparta, Switzerland, United States
      - waqf 15y ago
        Rome's been around a while and it has had several significantly different forms of government. Which period have you in mind?
        JanezStupar 15y ago
        Obviously the republic era, before Caesar. The civic virtue within the republic of Rome was so great that to this day our institutions mirror those of their age. They were extremely democratic. But not in a modern sense. Do note that all systems are bound to get corrupt, whither and die. But the best are extremely resistant to corruption. And strong anti populist safeguards are a property of all of them.
- mseebach 15y ago
  Splitting hairs over the literal meaning of a term defined literally thousands of years ago is pointless. Democracy is a philosophical institution and you need a lot more than a dictionary of ancient Greek to define it. Democracy is about the rule of the people. Voting, direct or indirect through representation, is merely a means towards this end. Other important elements of democracy is free speech and free assembly - if the people aren't free to organise themselves, they can't effectively rule. There are plenty of examples of non-free elections, and it's obvious that the presence of those doesn't make the host country a democracy. Another very important - and much forgotten - factor is the protection of minorities. Americans often lament that a minority of 40 senators can filibuster a law, because supposedly it's undemocratic to give such power to a smaller fraction than 50%. Originally, it was just one senator, although he had to physically filibuster the vote - and the purpose of this rule was to protect the minority from getting run over by the majority. This protection is paramount to a democracy - whether or not the filibustering rules, current or original, in the US Senate is a good way of securing this protection is another matter. If you want to get technical, anything less that full consensus on everything can be considered undemocratic - because when one part of demos imposes it's will on another part, then it's not rule of the people any more - it's rule of a part of the people.
hermannj314 15y ago
It is hard to agree or disagree with you when you don't say exactly what your eligibility criteria would be. I, for one, find felony disenfranchisement to be deplorable.
- JanezStupar 15y ago
  Lottery would be way better than what we have today. I would also prohibit government employees from voting. With an exception of military veterans. But these are not honest criteria. I have no idea about what would be a set of good criteria. Thus far I can only see that populist rule is leading us nowhere fast.

toyg 15y ago

From one-head-one-vote to one-dollar-one-vote. We should call it "pecuniacy". (Note: "pecunia" is Latin for "money"; I know, the right way to do this would be to use the ancient greek equivalent for "money" and replace it for "demo", but I couldn't find it.)

rrhm 15y ago
Perhaps "plutocracy" would work. The root "ploutus" is the ancient greek word for "wealth".
- toyg 15y ago
  Yeah, but that has already assumed negative connotations; you cannot use it for tongue-in-cheek jokes.
  - georgecmu 15y ago
    leptocracy: lepton[] + cracy is exactly what you want and is an easy allusion to kleptocracy. [] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_lepton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_lepton