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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

The democratic process is a red herring. As I pointed out elsewhere, if we really cared about improving the democratic signal/noise ratio, we'd just bar morons from voting.

As for society collapsing, I think you grossly underestimate the value low intelligence people can provide when suitably directed. Consider walmart - it's a vast command economy which employs about 1% of the US (mostly taken from the bottom percentiles) and has improved the standard of living for millions.

A bunch of morons couldn't create walmart themselves. But they can still create great value when directed by a small number of intelligent people.

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  we'd just bar morons from voting.

They tried that in Thailand. Replace Morons with Rural citizens and they tried to do exactly that.

This lead not only to a total political gridlock for years, but to actual death and mayhem.

You can't have a semi democracy where the elite decides, who's eligible to vote. It's either all or nothing.

> You can't have a semi democracy where the elite decides, who's eligible to vote.

Historically, that's just an oligarchy or plutocracy.

Heck even being governed by a "council of elders" is a semi-democracy if not all elders are approved by the council to join their ranks.

They also tried it in the American South as part of Jim Crow: "literacy" tests that were hard for anyone to pass, with grandfather clauses so that all of the illiterate whites could keep voting (in fact, that's where the term "grandfather clause" comes from).

The problem with the term "moron" is that it is too easily applied to mean, "people who I don't think should be allowed to vote, no matter how intelligent they might actually be."

Racists were also in favor of socialism, gun control, teaching evolution in school, reduced taxation, labor unions, and freshly baked apple pie.

The fact that racists favor a corrupted version of a certain policy does not imply that the policy is bad.

I think you have a point with the voting. If only it was that easy in practice - there are so many moral and ethical issues when it comes to drawing a line for "intelligent enough to vote".

A standardized test would be hard to impose, since how does one measure someone's ability to make good judgments about something?

> we'd just bar morons from voting.

Then, the next step would be preventing them from having kids...

You know it's a very, very bad idea. Morons are part of the society and deserve to have their voices heard. Any democratically elected government mirrors the society it came from.

I'm curious as to why the above comment is being downvoted. I'm aware that some people downvote for mere disagreement or dislike but I hope it's not that widespread yet.

Dictatorship of smart morons. Yay

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