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Comment by petre | Hacker News Reader

Well the US federal gov't already has the bigger guns, the bigger iron to crack your crypto and more prepared and motivated people to do it on their payroll. Not to mention airplane carriers and nuclear subs armed with nukes. Just because everyone and their dog owns a gun, police can shoot you for "resisting arrest" especially if you are armed. The Swiss also own guns, but they have none of this madness. As a sidenote, your vote does count as a Swiss citizen in Switzerland and you never have the feeling that "the system is rigged". They do have madness of their own, yet it still looks more sane.

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I'm confident that heavily armed hicks trying to found some sort of confederacy 2.0 could offer at least as much resistance as the Taliban. The US government doesn't exactly have a great track record of successfully suppressing insurgencies, even without having to do it on American soil, which would increase the public relations hit for collateral damage (I imagine CNN would care more if predator drones started bombing American weddings, for example).

I wonder whether the Swiss system of proportional representation contributes to the relative sanity and/or to the Swiss people's confidence in the system. As a British person, I envy people who live in countries with proportional representation, but I don't understand the Swiss system.

The confidence comes from two things: proportional representation and direct democracy. The people vote about the tiniest of issues (should the sound-proofing be extended on this bit of highway?), which gives a feeling of direct power. It's awesome, but probably doesn't scale all that well since everything is 'scoped', i.e. only those affected by the outcome get to vote, meaning the bureaucratic effort is immense (maybe that's something where AI can help?).

Switzerland could be an inspiration for the UK, especially considering its financial sector and its unique relationship with the EU.

Direct democracy is talked about more and more here in the UK. We've had several referendums over the last few years. The questions are:

Were the referendum results determined by dirty tricks?

Why hold referendums when we elect (and pay for) governments to make decisions on our behalf?

Would referendums be necessary if parliament were representative (in the statistical sense) of voters?

Have the referendums really settled the issues, or will the same questions be asked again?

The downside with proportional representation is that it really only works as long as you have "near two party" conditions. I.e. two large parties plus a couple of smaller parties are ok. Once you have many medium sized parties, the outcome of your vote on a respective government becomes completely unpredictable as well, because you will get pretty random coalitions. Because this forces all parties to get rid of major disagreements, it feeds fringe demagogues agitating against the "mainstream". Eventually those conditions can lead to "great coalitions" of the remaining larger parties, which then have 2/3 majorities and similar things you would want to avoid.

The problem we have in the UK is that multiparty politics has arrived and the existing First Past the Post system has the same problems and more. For example, it has a habit of handing power to a party without a majority of votes (randomly, when it doesn't produce coalitions).

If you take the view that majority rule and minority rights is necessary for democracy, a majority government without a majority of votes is a problem. If you don't take that view, then you would probably want a different non-proportional voting system, but we've already rejected AV (instant runoff voting) in a referendum.

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