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Comment by firic | Hacker News Reader

If judges risk themselves politically if they release people on bail then that means that the will of the people is to rarely release people on bail. I know it may sound weird to you and me but apparently there are a lot of people in California who feel that someone accused of a crime should suffer in prison until they are proven innocent. That is the disadvantage of democracy, people with different opinions get to vote. The solution is to educate voters why you think that they should vote differently or to move to another place.

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Or maybe the solution is to remove the political (dis)incentive structure such that the will of an irrational population doesn't continue to cause harm.

Completely agreed, but how would you propose to navigate these waters within a democratic system?

It's really weird when it's completely normal for insurance companies to take out TV ads for the removal of a judge. On the grounds of something unrelated, of course.

So, we have the will of the people. So far, so good.

And then we have the complete freedom of capital to nudge the will of the people.

Something is wrong with this picture.

Sure, but it's not just capital right? Especially in the internet era if you somehow removed all capital influence you just shift it to the range of people between celebrities and confidence men. The fundamental problem is that people let others unduly influence 'their' worldview.

Seems even if you remove the influence of capital, you're just kicking the can rather than actually solving the problem.

Maybe, but I think capital must be the main driver. In an age when attention is scarce, paying for it must have a huge influence.

> complete freedom of capital to nudge the will of the people.

"Nudge" is far too weak of a verb, here. There are many structural issues between the population and exercising their will, and many structural advantages that allow capital to exert undue pressure on the political process. These advantages and dis-advantages are inherent to our system and have been described at length in academia.

I am maybe too cynical. I meant nudge in the most cynical way imaginable. If you can "nudge" that avalanche or land slide juuust a little bit to the left, you can crush that house.

> The solution is to educate voters why you think that they should vote differently or to move to another place.

Or, the solution is for the people elected by the people to write laws to take the decision out of the hands of judges and put it into a different mechanism; if this is a lesser political risk for them than it would be for the judges making decisions with the same result case by case, it shows that the will of the people is not against the result, as you claim it must be if the judges face a political risk for the outcome of frequent release, but against the mechanism of judicial discretion.

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