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Comment by tunesmith | Hacker News Reader

I used to be in favor of this but now I think it's in precisely the wrong direction. We need more ways to educate individual voters of the complex tradeoffs and compromises in policies, and teach people to appreciate the complexity of system effects. We don't need more ways for people to capriciously offload their civic duty to whoever seems most willing to responsibly accept their proxy.

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People are given the opportunity to vote on issues in liquid democracy. In the U.S. we have a representative democracy where people aren't allowed to vote on issues, they can only vote for reps that they think will have their best interest at heart.

Liquid democracy is the opposite of offloading civic duty. It's an opportunity for citizens to assert their voice directly in the policymaking process.

For instance, if you are a republican living in a blue district, you won't have very good representation under our current system. But with a liquid democracy, you can represent yourself directly whenever you want, effectively bypassing your regional politician.

It's the best of both worlds of representative democracy and direct democracy.

> We need more ways to educate individual voters of the complex tradeoffs and compromises in policies, and teach people to appreciate the complexity of system effects

The effort, to be educated, is not optimal on a capitalist playing field withing a nation as large as the USA. The information is overwhelming and the result (individual voter franchise) is pathetically ineffectual. It's a fool's errand, which is the outlook shared by many americans.

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