Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelBurge | Hacker News Reader

> If voting is mandatory there's no situation in which a majority decision is actually suboptimal, unless you believe that a minority should somehow be able to override a majority.

What if the majority make a law saying "anyone gay or black is to be executed"?

Or "anyone with more than $1 million in assets should pay a 90% tax rate"?

Or "wildfire prevention, nuclear power plant inspection, SEC regulation, should all be defunded in favor of a federal football team with free bread at the stadium"? Maybe it takes 10-20 years for huge-impact consequences to be felt, and in the meantime you get free bread.

View on HN

> What if the majority make a law saying "anyone gay or black is to be executed"?

What you're saying has already happened. The majority realized that was a terrible idea and undid that law.

> Or "anyone with more than $1 million in assets should pay a 90% tax rate"?

What's wrong with that? If it ends up being a bad idea the majority will undo the decision.

> Or "wildfire prevention, nuclear power plant inspection, SEC regulation, should all be defunded in favor of a federal football team with free bread at the stadium"? Maybe it takes 10-20 years for huge-impact consequences to be felt, and in the meantime you get free bread.

Yes, and once the realize the consequences the majority will undo their decision.

There are no problems with any of your examples. What's the alternative? The minority of the population makes all of the decisions?

> What's the alternative? The minority of the population makes all of the decisions?

That some decisions are based on evidence and expert-knowledge. Of course, this can be gamed, but it's not clear at all that this risk is greater than the risk of damage by the short-term thinking or false reasoning of an uninformed majority.

I disagree - in your post you're assuming an "uninformed" and "false reasoning" with respect to the majority but not this so-called "expert" minority. Knowledge spreads - the majority will take it into account, and if they're wrong the majority will undo it as the majority will feel the effects.

I would argue this claim is empirically false.

> and if they're wrong the majority will undo it as the majority will feel the effects.

This assumes the majority will correctly identify the root cause. Whereas, in fact, they cannot do this even in simple cases, let alone a case where the root cause was an innocuous-seeming policy enacted 10+ years ago. Especially while the current politicians du jour are providing dramatic, simple, alternative narratives of the cause to suit their own goals.

> This assumes the majority will correctly identify the root cause. Whereas, in fact, they cannot do this even in simple cases, let alone a case where the root cause was an innocuous-seeming policy enacted 10+ years ago. Especially while the current politicians du jour are providing dramatic, simple, alternative narratives of the cause to suit their own goals.

I agree, but it's still no worse (and in practice much better) than trying to let the minority figure it out, whom are no more likely to figure out the root cause either.

We can probably agree that governance is complicated though.

> We can probably agree that governance is complicated though.

Yes. I don't think there is an obviously correct solution either way. I'm really only arguing that "trust the majority" is not something I trust. Not that "trust experts" is without its own (possibly equally fraught) set of problems.

Basically, the main reason we have a Supreme Court is so the majority doesn't have absolute power.

No, if the entire population of the United States, except the members of the Supreme Court agreed on something they can and would override all Supreme Court decisions. The Supreme Court does not function the way you think it does.

The main reason the Supreme Court appears to have so much power is because our Legislative Branch has been slow to actually pass new laws, meaning the interpretation of existing laws to new scenarios is becoming more and more important.

If an overwhelming percentage of the population disagrees with the Supreme Court on something, they can of course pass a constitutional amendment. For example, if enough people didn't like the Obergefell v. Hodges decision (gay marriage), a constitutional amendment could presumably (IANAL) have been passed that said states can only recognize marriage between a man and a woman.(This may get into state sovereignty issues but not important for this discussion).

Now, as a practical matter, the Supreme Court is a political creature and tends not to stray too far from popular opinion. Thus, the decision above was possible in 2015. It's likely not a right they'd have "discovered" in 1980.

However, the Supreme Court has certainly made decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education that were almost certainly not majority opinion even in many relatively liberal locations.

I think we have a slight misunderstanding. I'm not saying that the Supreme Court doesn't make decisions that are not popular. I'm simply responding to the original claim that the Supreme Court exists so the majority doesn't have absolute power, as you originally stated. This we now apparently agree on.

Now, as for the rest of your post - I completely agree.

You're splitting hairs. The Supreme Court is absolutely a check on majority rule--even if it's also the case that it can effectively be over-ridden by a supermajority that goes through a typically lengthy constitutional amendment process. That it's a check doesn't mean that it has absolute final say for all time.

>> the Supreme Court is a political creature and tends not to stray too far from popular opinion.

Supreme Court's role is to be a stabilizing factor, because majority can switch from Democrats to Republicans every four years. Supreme Court's partisan composition is basically a moving average of the last 5-6 presidential election's results, thus smoothing out temporary whims of the society.

> majority can switch from Democrats to Republicans every four years.

Two years, actually, assuming only regular elections and ignoring other changes in office-holding.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com