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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Democracy is a very silly way to do anything. How many people in your town or city do you think could give you seriously valuable political advice? Think of the most effective companies in the world: Are they democracies internally?

(No. They have a board of directors who appoint a CEO-person with wide latitude and therefore real political will to implement improvements. Shareholders watch or they can revolt, but not much else. Thankfully.)

If you want to do democracy, the best way to do it would be as bottom-up. The more distributed things are, the harder it is for money to make a mark.

The best democracy would be one where people care fiercely who their local politicians are, and are more or less disinterested in who the president might be.

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I would take it a step further... Why should it be hard for money to make a mark? Why should the voice of someone who sacrifices little or who has no or next to no "skin in the game" be considered equivalent to the voice of someone who is willing to sacrifice real, tangible resources?

In modern corporations, there is a distinction between those who have stake in the future of the firm (shareholders), those who are trusted to act on their behalf (board, executives, and employees to a lesser extent), and those who receive services from the firm in exchange for revenues (clients and customers).

Customers do not make managerial and strategic decisions for the firm, and for good reasons. Indeed, does anyone really care exactly who is running walmart or amazon or apple so long as their products and services provide value? Why do people tend to see governments, essentially massive corporations, as inhabiting such a different realm, expecting them to follow entirely different laws of human behavior?

I do think bottom up is a good idea, but the democracy has to be fiercely protected at all levels. The fear is that eventually a party/leader emerges at the top and never lets go of control. Then they have enough power to control all the local elections, pushing out candidates/voters they don't like (eg China).

The thing about democracy is that most people don't care all that much - until they do.

If you mess up in a way that steps on too many toes, too many people are going to do what they can to get you out of office. If you don't, most people won't care all that much about the election.

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