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The government is granted those powers because of the legal and social contracts we enter into as citizens of the country... it isn't, won't, and shouldn't be j

• Houshalter 13y ago
  >The government is granted those powers because of the legal and social contracts we enter into as citizens of the country. That's bs post-hoc justification. There is no contract and few people agreed to it. Government is accepted because it works better than no government. We haven't found the perfect way to organize society (and it may not exist), so we stick around in the local optima. >It's an organized, representative extension of the population of the country. This is true in theory. In practice it's a big mess. Voters don't actually have that much control. Just a single bit of input "which party do you like more right now?" And maybe they shouldn't they because direct democracy isn't that great either. The real advantage of democracy is that if the rulers really screw up, if they make the population really angry, they will eventually lose their power when the next year divisible by 4 comes around. It also encourages the politicians to make an effort to be popular (which isn't necessarily what's best, but it's better than nothing.)