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Comment by throwaway4aday | Hacker News Reader

More like that's how democracies fail. Our current method of "fixing" failures of the state involves layering more and more legislation and regulation on top of the broken legislation and regulation. We do nothing to address the root causes of those failures because that would mean closing a lot of the loop holes that allow politicians to get rich by leveraging their positions aka corruption. Why else would we need bills that are thousands of pages long and seem to accomplish absolutely nothing?

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> Our current method of "fixing" failures of the state involves layering more and more legislation and regulation on top of the broken legislation and regulation.

The UK is the perfect example. Hundreds of years of out-dated laws layered on top of each other to the point where nobody can tell what is law and what is a joke.

Absolute nonsense.

English law is the preferred basis for cross-border contracts and English courts are the preferred venue for litigation between entities from different jurisdictions. This is very well attested - e.g. first result from Google:

https://www.qlts.com/blog/why-english-law-governs-most-inter...

>The UK is the perfect example. Hundreds of years of out-dated laws layered on top of each other to the point where nobody can tell what is law and what is a joke.

Literal nonsense.

But hey, at least they banned knives. They really know how to destroy crime there.

Allowing politicians to get rich by leveraging their positions is still better than the alternative. What's the alternative, by the way? What do you suggest we replace democracy with?

> x is better than the alternative y. I don't know what y is.

They didn't propose replacing democracy.

You can have democracy with less corruption. There is no reason why politicians should be in politics for the money.

So... how? You speak as if you have solved corruption. Let's hear it.

You could start with a lot more transparency. Everything that isn't critical to the defense of the nation should be public and auditable. Hot button issues like stock trading while in office, term limits and corporate lobbying could be fixed with simple laws if you ignore the whining of current office-holders. If you want to be more drastic, then start shifting power away from the federal government and towards local governments. Politicians who are close to their constituents are the only ones that can be sufficiently supervised. Reduce the role of the faraway central government to that of referee and coordinator and make sure that 99% of representatives time is spent in their own districts where the people can get a hold of them. Finally, if you want to flip the table completely then institute some form of sortition where another branch of government with equal power is formed from randomly selected citizens who are given the opportunity to represent their communities at the levers of power.

"We could change everything if the status quo stopped resisting" is very self-evident, and not at all helpful.

What change is possible without breaking the status quo?

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