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Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

Yes, what we need is more hecklers vetos over more spending.

Democratic control makes no sense. That's the entire reason the US has a representative government - direct large scale democratic control doesn't get anything done for starters. Heck, even the representative form has scaled to the point it doesn't get anything done.

If the control that already existed produced anything other than total dysfunction, things. never would have gotten to a point where half the spend isn't covered - there would be no reason for it to occur.

Your answer is to force it to happen anyway. Im sure that will end well

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I think the problem is the other way around: the population's lack of experience with actual democracy is what hampers any attempt at it. If we had more democracy people would learn to be responsible with that power out of necessity.

But of course, a functioning democracy needs some sort of shared goal among its population, to help people compromise on less important matters and agree on that which is important. This is usually not a problem with a company that makes a product or renders a service, but it can be problematic for e.g. nation states. I don't think the solution is for a wealthy few to bludgeon the dissenters into compliance but rather split the democracy up into smaller parts, that interface with negotiations and valuable exchange.

Agreed. This is my view on Brexit (as a Brit). There was a democratic referendum plus somewhere between 1 and 27 general elections, prime ministers and parliamentary rebellions (it all got confusing). We as a country made a decision - not one I agreed with but still. Somehow taking that back and saying "no try again" is going to make the next decision just impossible.

You concentrate on your balance without a safety net.

Personally I think the big advantage America has is they vote for everything - sheriffs, mayors, dog catchers and presidents. It matters, because it happens a lot. Is it perfect. Hell no. But we get good at what we do most often.

I don’t believe your first paragraph for a second. We would go practically extinct before we learned. We don’t get good at things at scale that fast and raising the stakes will not change some fundamental behaviors - heck they took thousands of years to change when we were going extinct

I think at best you would end up with a much much smaller population that is an easier problem anyway (ie we can already solve it now), or we kill ourselves off before we learn. I agree with your last sentence entirely, but it's funny to frame it as a wealthy few bludgeoning others. One reason we are in the current situation is because the wealthy pay for the majority of expenses but everyone keeps trying to get them to not have more say in what gets done with their money. Whether it's a good idea to do this or not, human nature doesn't work like this, and they want say commensurate with what they contribute. It's very easy for both "sides" to villify each other and they do.

That is at least one thing you have to claim would get fixed in your first paragraph and I don't buy it you could get it to happen.

Since the wealth part really triggers people imagine you are just a random small business owner, and one day people come in and are like "hey we know you put in 60% of the effort and work and money in your business but we're going to have these 50 other people who put in less than 1% each also have equal say to you in the business choices"

Humans don't really accept that, and if you want direct democracy to work out they would have to be able to.

In fact it's the opposite, most people really get off on being able to feel superior to others in various ways, whether money or status or power or whatever.

That is great to change but ain't gonna happen fast

We're in hockey stick growth. Maybe we need to enter a period of "not getting anything done" (by relative standards) in order to start threading the needle and pulling this fraying fabric back together

Well, I guess I give you credit for being openly anti-democratic…?

I don’t believe non representative democracies scale well at all and that even representative ones have a scaling limit like all systems. I’m not a believer in non democracy as scaling better as much as believer that you’d be better off governing groups of a million with democracies than groups of 300 million.

Like all systems, it is better to have more systems than scale single systems to work well from size 0 to infinity

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