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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

> It's a tragic topic to put to a referendum though

How one can reach such conclusion is beyond me. People will discuss the question, and democratically decide. You'd be surprise the fierce debates that erupts among citizens when a serious question is on the table, and how everyone makes oneself enlightened before vote. This is what actual democracy is. This is how it should work everywhere for any serious issue.

Designating a cherry-picked representative who carries exactly zero obligation to hold his promises is NOT democracy, but elective oligarchy. Almost all countries calling themselves democracies certainly don't deserve the name.

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I'm curious to which country you're assigning these noble ideals.

In no place I've lived would the average person walking into the voting box have spent time studying the history of banking law and policy to make a well-informed rational decision. They'd at most have read the opinions of some journalists or listened to a news reporter, and would make their decision after discussions between similar poorly informed friends/colleagues.

Fierce debates != well-informed debates.

We elect representatives because it's known that the body politic, once it reaches a large size, doesn't have the time to be well-informed on all decisions they'd need to make as a pure democracy. To suggest so exposes a serious need for a second look at the situation.

Representative democracy isn't elective oligarchy.

Switzerland, actually, is bloody good at this referendum thing. They do it all the time, and because of that the level of debate is relatively high and the populace make far better choices than you would see in a country without the same situation.

Can you point to a Swiss referendum campaign with a high level of debate? I've only closely followed one referendum campaign in Switzerland, I'll admit, but the level of debate in that one was quite low, even by the standards of a typical European election campaign. That was the 2014 referendum on whether to put quotas on Schengen-zone immigration [1]. It was basically the usual shouting match over immigration you'd expect anywhere, full of a lot of vitriol and not much in the way of rational debate or accurate statistics. The outcome was also what you'd expect anywhere else too, predictable more by demographics than argumentation: rural areas and less-educated people voted to restrict immigration, cities and the highly educated voted not to, so the final outcome depended mainly on voter turnout among each of those groups. Since getting your base as riled up as possible is a better way of getting turnout than rational debate, that's what both sides did.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_immigration_referendum,_...

>the level of debate is relatively high and the populace make far better choices than you would see in a country without the same situation.

What about the Swiss referendum on an absolute ban on the construction of minarets? (note: not a ban on building mosques)

Switzerland, like many other European countries, has planning laws that decide on the architectural appropriateness of a building in its surrounding environment on a case-by-case basis. But this referendum, passed by a majority of the Swiss population, placed a complete ban on a minaret ever being built again in Switzerland. That was a completely democratic decision by the people of Switzerland. But was it based on informed debate? Or reactionary and emotional appeals? [1]

[1]http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/files/2010/11/ch-1.jpg

> I'm curious to which country you're assigning these noble ideals.

Actually all of them.

> In no place I've lived would the average person walking into the voting box have spent time studying the history of banking law and policy to make a well-informed rational decision.

Because most people have been mercilessly been beaten into obedience, and the belief that they aren't actually able to think by themselves, that they're inferior to the oligarchs in command (hint: they aren't. The President is no better than me and no better than the garbage man).

In 2005, in France, the "referendum on a European Constitution" lit an immense debate, and there was an incredibly well-formed decision on an enormously obtuse tome of legalese.

You can check that similar debates are common in Switzerland. People actually think about the problem, discuss it, and vote in conscience.

If you think people aren't able to think and decide autonomously for themselves, you are actively opposing democracy.

Ordinary elective oligarchy is the ideology that mostly pass as "democracy" nowadays, but please don't stay abused and go on pretending you like democracy when you don't.

> You can check that similar debates are common in Switzerland. People actually think about the problem, discuss it, and vote in conscience.

Or in 90%+ of the case they just follow the opinion of the federal council.

> [...] (hint: they aren't. The President is no better than me and no better than the garbage man).

I would be surprised if he would be better than The Garbageman.

http://dilbert.wikia.com/wiki/The_Garbageman

Both of you are correct. The problem with direct democracy these days is that it ignores the power of mass media, which is to say it ignores the influence of money on a statistically significant portion of the voters.

Premise 1: if you continue adding people to the voting pool on an issue, at some point (X) you're going to exceed the number of people who have interest / time / capability to render themselves informed.

When you do, mass media begins to exert a much greater effect on the outcome (as these people are more susceptible to having their opinions swayed).

Premise 2: If you shrink the pool of potential voters, but keep the money involved the same, then corruption increases

There are of course things you can do legally to fight both of these negative outcomes, but I feel you'll always be fighting the basic tendencies. The solution then isn't direct democracy (where mass media overrides logic) or oligarchy (where corruption rules) but some point in between.

> Both of you are correct. The problem with direct democracy these days is that it ignores the power of mass media, which is to say it ignores the influence of money on a statistically significant portion of the voters.

That's why the example of the 2005 French referendum is so important. All of mainstream politics were campaigning for "Yes". All of media, papers, TV, radios were exclusively campaigning for "Yes". However, the "No" vote won by a comfortable margin 55% to 45%, and the campaign for the "No" almost entirely took place on the internet and social networks.

The outcome and the results are useless without normalizing against an unadvertised baseline.

If either traditional/big media or the internet and social networks influenced the vote by pursuading people who didn't do their own research -- that's a fundamental problem.

> Actually all of them.

I suspect you live in a bubble. Have you met many average voters?

Quite a lot, and I try to and avoid the self-satisfying feeling of smug contempt or disdain. And I've met people pretty close to the highest level of command of this world, too. Therefore I feel entitled to compare them and I'm absolutely certain that the difference between the lowest pavement sweeper and POTUS is much, much smaller than the oligarchy wants you to believe. Because you know, that would mean that democracy, equality, freedom are actually possible. That the rich and powerful don't actually deserve any special treatment. etc.

It would imply no such thing.

Voters do not have much incentive to make informed votes since the expected impact of their vote is very small. As a result, they tend to use their vote for signaling purposes, as a way to reflect the type of person they want to be, rather than based on what they anticipate the consequences of their vote will be.

If voters are so astute and informed, how do you explain that they radically disagree on the consequence of various policies, and that their disagreement can be predicted based on their parent's politics? How do you explain that in polls, voters position align so well with the left-right axis?

We aren't just talking about values here, but about a non subjective assessment of the consequences of policies. How odd that it would cluster in this way!

*> Voters do not have much incentive to make informed votes since the expected impact of their vote is very small.

True. This is called learned helplessness. But people can also learn autonomy, emancipation instead, given the possibility to make an impact.

I'm not pretending that people are "astute and informed", they aren't; but they're definitely able to become so.

Because most people have been mercilessly been beaten into obedience, and the belief that they aren't actually able to think by themselves, that they're inferior to the oligarchs in command.

I don't agree. I've read quite a bit of economics, I read serious newspapers from a range of political viewpoints, and I have a technical degree. All of this merely helps me to appreciate just how ignorant I am, and how complicated the world is.

Imagine that my local council asked its residents how much money this year should be dedicated to renewing the sewerage system, which is a typical example of the small but important decisions that have to be taken on behalf of the public. I don't know the first thing about sewerage engineering. If the council tells me that they recommend $10M then I have literally no idea whether this is the right number, even to an order of magnitude.

The Pointy Haired Boss is a character in the Dilbert cartoons. He doesn't understand the technology Dilbert is working on, but that doesn't stop him from telling Dilbert how to do his job. Direct democracy puts the public in the role of the PHB, and the results would be very similar.

But the thing is, the members of the council don't know either. Do you think the retired economist or the graduate in communication studies - the two most senior members of my local council - know about sewers?

> In 2005, in France, the "referendum on a European Constitution" lit an immense debate, and there was an incredibly well-formed decision on an enormously obtuse tome of legalese.

On the contrary, the outcome of the referendum was less about the merits of the proposed constitution, and more an expression of growing anti-Establishment social opinion and a demonstration of discontent with the majority parties and President Chirac.

> If you think people aren't able to think and decide autonomously for themselves, you are actively opposing democracy.

If you think people aren't able to determine how to choose reasonable facsimiles of their moral/social/economic position through which to abstract their effect on the daily operation of a state, you are actively opposing democracy.

Being able to choose when and how to make decisions must be a core component of the free exercise of democracy.

> Representative democracy isn't elective oligarchy.

It's kind of funny, because when I looked up the word oligarchy, I noticed that Wikipedia had an entry for the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy#United_States

Both the ruling class and the public of the 21st Century United States have a great deal of emotional investment in pretending that we are some sort of hyper-equitable nation, governed wisely by the public in the interests of freedom and the general good, instead of our government being a plutocratic shit-show.

To be fair, the indoctrination starts at a very young age.

> In no place I've lived would the average person walking into the voting box have spent time studying the history of banking law and policy to make a well-informed rational decision

It is the responsibility of those advocating for a position in favour/against fractional reserves to inform voters and debate in front of them. Experts who can't or refuse to communicate to laypersons on matters than concern the latter are near useless.

>In no place I've lived would the average person walking into the voting box have spent time studying the history of banking law and policy to make a well-informed rational decision.

Do they study laws, ethics, psychology, sociology, or criminology before making laws? The average voter on any issue is not educated. Why should any issue be given special consideration for this? And if this is an issue with every issue, then the issue is with democracy itself.

We can observe from the american congress that an elected minority is no better informed than the population at large. They have passed laws that were far to large for them to have read in the given time, they don't even have debates.

I'm swiss and you'd be surprised how many don't even know what we voted about after the vote. Less than 50% of all people vote and everytime it is over 50% it's because the right-wing parties shouted really loud and spend a lot of money.

It is getting really absourd. Next year we have a vote about if we should enforce a vote back from 2010.

Would you prefer a nice dictatorship instead?

Participatory democracy is the lesser evil from what we know so far, and it's not absurd that only the people interested in the subject at hand go to the voting booth.

Poor argument. As if direct democracy or dictatorship are the only choices...

Maybe just a representative democracy like the rest of Europe.

Representative democracy is terrible. Italy's current prime minister was elected directly by the people only as mayor of Florence. From there he went on being nominated and elected by various representatives.

The problem is that representation in politics is not transitive. B might represent A and C might represent B, but this does not mean that C represents A.

In my experience, most people simply vote for the opinion shouted loudest and the one their relatives/friends vote. Only a very few investigates the topic independently, but their votes are lost in the noise. I would not trust decisions, that require specific knowledge and that can't be explained in layman terms, to the masses.

  In my experience, most people simply vote for the opinion shouted loudest 
  and the one their relatives/friends vote. Only a very few investigates 
  the topic independently, but their votes are lost in the noise. I would 
  not trust decisions, that require specific knowledge and that can't be 
  explained in layman terms, to the masses.

Could you provide some examples?

---

Personally I don't trust politicians as much anymore these days to make choices in the benefit of the people. Most often the politicians' votes seem more aligned with business interests compared to the people interests, especially in large powerful constructs like the EU. I've also seen politicians make plenty bad choices in my country.

My opinion is that we should get more referenda in the future. The innovation of internet makes it possible to do this very cheap.

I agree that politicians make some terrible and downright malicious decisions (namely TTIP) and citizens should have more power (stop NSA, anyone?), but some decisions are best left to the specialists. Utopian government should be some kind of a mix between democracy and technocracy imho. An anecdote to answer your question: in Lithuania (where I live), few elections ago, the most vote received a party consisting of the local TV and pop stars that, no need to say, had absolutely no clue about politics. Of course, they didn't last long and only caused few months of turmoil.

"makes oneself enlightened before vote"

How long does it take for someone to be competent to vote on monetary policy?

It's ridiculous to expect a voter to spend that amount of time on every issue.

It may take a long time, but the debate is 18 months long, more than enough for everybody to get on board on the issue.

It's ridiculous to believe that citizens have no business in important matters. If you're not deciding, you're not acting, and your voice doesn't matter at all.

In case you're not just trolling, I'm wondering if your argument would change in case of matters that require medical or nuclear engineering expertise.

Why shouldn't voters get a say in these matters? If it is so important that experts make the calls, then convince the voters to vote for allowing the experts to make the calls. If the voters don't trust the experts to such an extent they rather risk screwing everything up, then that is what we will have to live with.

For a interesting thought, what about matters of brain development and ability to reason? Why should voters get to decide on matters such as when we are considered adults or when consenting to contracts or sex is possible. For nuclear or medical expertise, there is at least expertise. For matters of brain development, the science is still very young and limited. Or even on a greater extent, why should a voter be given power in matters that require ethical expertise? Matters that require legal expertise?

I've spent more than that amount of time casually trying to make sense of monetary policy, simply out of interest.

I do not feel competent to take part in a decision about the reserve requirement.

I guess you could set up a system where you delegate your vote to a third party on an issue-by-issue basis. An interesting thought experiment, but quite a few things to work out. My guess is, at the end, it would be similar to the system we have.

> How one can reach such conclusion is beyond me.

Actually, if you don't trust democracy, labeling topics for a referendum as tragic or awful goes without saying.

I trust democracy to decide on complex financial issues as much as I trust it to design a chemical factory or offer medical advice: not at all.

It's a republic not a democracy. The problem with a democracy is the majority rules. If the US were a true democracy the civil rights movement would have never happened. The white majority could have simply out voted the black minority. Pure democracy is mob-rule.

The white majority was in favour of the Civil Right Act and of the Voting Rights Act.

http://volokh.com/2010/05/24/public-opinion-anti-discriminat...

http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/voting-rights-act/

The idea that the "republic" part of the system protects minorities despite vast opposition from the majority sounds nice, but it's not supported by reality.

> It's a republic not a democracy.

That's like saying that it's an animated film, not a comedy. The republic is a form of government and democracy is a way to involve the people in deciding who governs them. Some republics are democracies, some democracies are republics.

> The problem with a democracy is the majority rules.

When the minority rules, like in a plutocracy, you've got a bigger problem.

> everyone makes oneself enlightened

Really.

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