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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

What alternative do you propose? The politicians are elected representatives of and by the people.

Eurpean Commison is not elected by citizens of EU. They are nominated by the European Council and confirmed by the European Parliament.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission

Similar system is for WHO. They are not elected organisations, yet shape our laws. This bother quite a lot of people and don't bring a trust in system.

Neither are government cabinets, ambassadors or generals.

Assuming that you're taking about liberal democracies, ambassadors and generals don't pass laws that the rest of us have to abide by.

The government cabinet has some more democratic legitimacy in so far as that they generally comprise of elected representatives.

So your statement is a non-sequitur.

The Commission doesn't pass laws neither...

No idea why don't bother to read the wikipedia articles for all of 5 minutes before repeating objectively false things.

In the UK, there's no requirement that the cabinet is formed of elected representatives. Government ministers are often Lords.

Besides, even if the defense secretary is an MP, he wasn't elected on a platform of national security by the population. So if there's a non sequitur anywhere, it's in application of any democratic legitimacy to the job of holding a significant cabinet post by winning the votes of a few ten thousand people for commons seat.

Sure, but the UK cabinet draws its power from the fact that it explicitly has support of a majority of the directly elected members of Parliament.

When it's established that they don't, they end up getting ousted (as happens with no confidence motions).

> Assuming that you're taking about liberal democracies, ambassadors and generals don't pass laws that the rest of us have to abide by.

Thats fine because the EU commission also doesn't pass laws. It proposes them and the EU parliament & comittee pass them.

The commission is still democratically representative even if indirectly as long as member states are democracies.

If you want all European institutions to be directly elected you essentially want the EU to no longer be a confederation and instead be a federation.

National governments having power in EU affairs is by design because otherwise the EU would never have formed.

I like to call this:

victory of the executive branch

EU should be more lightweight a kind of European (United) Nations.

> European Commison is not elected by citizens of EU.

The European Parliament who approves the laws is directly elected. And as noted by sibling, the Commission indirectly also is.

Take the money out of politics as much as possible and there will be less incentive for politicians to sell out their people

What do you mean by that? There’s already anti-corruption laws, and corruption is actually being prosecuted. To have less incentives, you’d actually have to pay politicians more, which would constitute putting more money into politics.

Anti-corruption laws don't deal with collusions much, as there is no tangible proof of "pay for play" in such situations. Look at the US Senator Menedez case of late: he and his wife are stupid to accept cash, gold bars, Benz cars, etc. Sophisticated players in the beltway don't accept such "play for cash", because these colluders trust each other beyond the term limits.

> and corruption is actually being prosecuted.

In which world do you live?

> To have less incentives, you’d actually have to pay politicians more

This theory presumes that when people have more money, their desire to have even more money diminishes. This presumption is not true.

(It might be somewhat true for common sorts of people who find pleasure in simple things and only want enough money to satisfy their basic material needs (food, shelter, medical care). But it's definitely not true when you're talking about people with high levels of ambition, which includes virtually all politicians.)

Oh, yea I'm for paying politicians directly. Meant more like, the money you need to run a campaign

Swiss style direct and decentralized democracy.

https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-ge...

"Switzerland is governed under a federal system at three levels: the Confederation, the cantons and the communes. Thanks to direct democracy, citizens can have their say directly on decisions at all political levels. This wide range of opportunities for democratic participation plays a vital role in a country as geographically, culturally and linguistically varied as Switzerland."

If a law doesn't pass, the contents can't be brought up in a new law for a minimum of 5 years.

How do you define that? It’s never exactly the same contents, usually has substantial changes in the approach.

So now malicious users can give bad proposals, get it rejected, and block other potentially good proposals for 5 years? Sounds like a good DoS scheme.

Please explain how you would forbid these from being serially brought without allowing bad actors to disrupt normal legislative business.

"No abortion after 49 days."

"No abortion after 50 days."

"No hospital shall be used for abortions."

"Doctors cannot perform abortions."

Something like "There are only X laws allowed. Every time you want to add a new law and already have X laws, you must remove one existing law". Then we'd get laws covering the most important things without a bunch of bureaucracy on top of that.

How do you define “number of laws”? Laws usually consist of many individual rules, and one can just make the law “bigger” to reduce the nominal number of laws without actually reducing the contents. In addition, I don’t see how this would cause the laws to become more in the interest of the citizens than of the legislators.

>How do you define “number of laws”

It's not an easy thing to do but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done. Maybe something like defining it as a limit on the total sum amount of text in all laws?

A limit on the amount of new laws that could be passed would make it much easier for citizens to keep up with the proposed changes and oppose any they disagreed with; they couldn't be ddossed by the legislators.

Certain details (procedural and technical specifications) of laws are often relegated to secondary texts. This would just start a game of how to encode the desired legislation so that it still nominally fits the rules (law golfing instead of code golfing). The whole approach is a fool’s errand, IMO, and would just make the legislation even more inscrutable for the layperson.

That's a brilliant game mechanic.

I think for reality we should still remove power out of politicians

Elon once mentioned an interesting idea, just make removing laws easier than approving them. For example, if you require something like 2/3 of the votes to approve a law, then require only 1/2 to remove a law

What about every service owned by the government becomes private and offered by private companies and we remove the goverment completely?

I'd kill to see The Machinery of Freedom by D. Friedman in real life

then you have everything run by the equivalent of insurance companies. That would be much worse. Companies are not inherently more responsive or even more efficient.

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