> moves power from the people to the government
In a functioning democracy, the government is the people. If the government is against the people, it's not a functioning democracy.
And needless to say, a non-functioning democracy is not a proof that the concept of democracy doesn't work.
If 100 people were about to embark on a journey on a ship, what makes you think 51 of them know who should run the ship if none of them have ever even been on a ship?
The US, for example, apportions representatives and votes for President in a way that overweights less populated states, and there are various aspects of parliamentary systems that help avoid landing in a two-party system where a simple majority gets the say in everything—they force compromise and coalition building among disparate groups. Additionally, Constitutional systems will enumerate the rights of its citizens such that they cannot simply be taken away by a simple majority of any body.
Democratic countries are also basically never "pure" democracies where everyone votes on every decision as in your Plato's ship analogy—we elect people who audition for the role of running the ship, ostensibly those among the people who are best suited to the task.
Only if those are enforced. The wealthiest are the ones with the power, as they can pay for the guns.
If you take an example of a non-functioning democracy, it's not a good way to describe a functioning democracy.
Ultimately it comes down to who has the power. The more that power is concentrated the more fragile it becomes. It doesn't change overnight.
I wish I knew :-). A functioning democracy seems to be an unstable equilibrium.
But it remains that a functioning democracy is what we should aim for.
> Ultimately it comes down to who has the power.
Well it starts with the people giving them power. Trump did not seize the power in the US, for instance. He was elected. Twice.
If the government ends up filled with incompetents that's a failure of the people that elected them.
I think you're confused.
First, it is not always the case that there are only two parties. You can totally have a government made by representants of all "relevant" parties (by "relevant" I mean that the party needs a minimum size, otherwise anyone could create a party of one person).
Second, your ship example is pretty weird. The people gets to elect representatives regularly. It's not embarking on a ship with complete strangers: you have been on this ship all your life. "Never have been on a ship" would mean electing a newborn baby... that wouldn't count as a functioning democracy :-).
Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them, and for their own taxes to go down. The problem is this is a collective negotiation, not a discussion about what to ask the genie for when we rub the lamp. If the middle class wants to decrease their own taxes (which is the political issue that objectively affects them the most, and how they lose their power), then they are going to have to meet the wealthy half way. Idealism is the enemy of the the common sense, rational, self-interested move.
> And needless to say, a non-functioning democracy is not a proof that the concept of democracy doesn't work.
Yes, democracy is a good idea precisely because imperfect implementations of it work well. If it worked in theory and not in practice, then it wouldn't be a good idea. Contrast it to communism, which is literally an info-hazard. If you try to bring it in to existence, you won't achieve your goal, and the system you do create will be much worse for you. Even if it works in theory, it's a bad idea because it doesn't work in practice.
That doesn't change the state of the negotiation, which is that cutting taxes for the middle class will also require cutting them for the wealthy. If you optimize for your own personal notion of fairness, or retribution, you may very well fail to coordinate in your own self-interest.
Neither our democracy nor our position as a world power survived capitalism eating itself and everything else. We are down to single individuals holding more nominal wealth than whole continents, and the worship of the billionaire has replaced the worship of Jesus Christ for most Americans, a palace cult committing national suicide on your behalf. If you want any of the things that America pitched as its merits in fighting for influence in the Cold War, you want this situation over with.
Let them eat three commas and not a penny more. When you become a billionaire we give you a medal and confiscate every dollar above 1 billion. Using a carrier strike group if necessary.
It sure sounds tough though! Literal war with people for being successful, how much time have you spent on this line of thought?
We haven't passed a budget in almost 30 years, we've been routinely filibustering nearly all legislation for 15 (breaking the gameplay loop for electoral democracy), we're unilaterally withdrawing from trade and military alliances week by week. We have fascist armies on the streets pulling people from their cars and houses. Our leaders openly brag about their corruption and a good fraction of our people praise them for it simply because it pisses other people off.
We are allegedly about to "Federalize Elections" and also enter a war with Iran that a supermajority of voters do not want.
In terms of state capacity, in terms of our agency in the world, in terms of what we historically regarded as our legacy and our culture and our material security and our institutions, we are in freefall. And it is mostly down to having far too much wealth concentrated in far too few people.
Just not, you know, a space program and a larger military than Krushchev's reporting to you personally.
That's basically my main argument for replacing election-based democracy by lottery-based democracy. Electing the right representatives is a coordination problem in and of itself, a process which the wealthy are already quite adept at manipulating, so we might as well cut the middle man and pick a random representative sample of the population instead, who can then coordinate properly.
If that were a viable model for the real world, we could make existing elections just as tamper-proof.
That is a different debate. I think what the parent means is that taxing the rich is a way to prevent them from becoming too powerful.
I do agree that it should be illegal to be too powerful. One should not be more powerful than an entire country, it makes no sense.
Everyone except about 90% of republican voters, aka temporarily poor millionaires
That's not true at all. I make a good salary as a software engineer, I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create.
I believe this attitude is pretty common in many parts of the world.
That being said, I do think the extremes of wealth (there is a big difference between a millionaire and a billionaire) have a particularly detrimental effect on society by completely distorting our economic system (there can be no such thing as a free market when such a small number of individuals control such a large proportion of the spending power).
This confusion is precisely why the middle class has less power than ever before. You and many others have been sold a meme that your tax dollars are in service to a greater good, and you are a bad person if you recognize this to be a scam.
At an individual level, for each person in the middle class, 90% of the social programs they pay for are negative EV for them personally. It would be better for each of them if they just kept what they earned, and didn't expect to get it back "later" or "when they really need it" whenever that is. This is an empirical, testable claim, and the math will be slightly different for each person. You should check for yourself.
If everyone turned off the news, and totally ignored the messaging around taxes and government programs and just looked at their own cash inflows and outflows to/from the government, the middle class would retain far more power than they do.
This whole "expected value" concept when taken to the extreme is just rationalist patter. It's a useful exercise when you're running a business, but there is more to life than fiscal efficiency. Empiricism, when taken to an extreme, is as dystopian as anything else.
90% of those social programs are what keep us from being killed in the street for our watches and jewelry. They keep people less fortunate than us from becoming desperate. They level the playing field so our children aren't all victims of the circumstances of their birth. By those metrics, which are my preferred metrics and not the size of my paycheck, they are a huge benefit.
Also one could argue that the US military is the world's largest social service program in that it provides jobs for a large part of the country that otherwise has no prospects for a good life.
Are you only counting material benefit that you personally get from the government rather than the benefit that other less well off people get in your calculations? Because if my tax dollars enable otherwise less well off people to live a lifestyle closer to my own, then I would consider that a benefit to me and a large part of the intended outcome of that taxation.
That's a very big 'if'. Less well off people have to pay taxes too, such as payroll taxes on their labor income, or sales taxes on essential purchases that amount to a large fraction of what they spend money on. And government redistribution is extremely inefficient. They'd be far better off if most of these taxes were done away with for lower-income folks, letting them keep far more of what they earn from their work.
Well I'd certainly be in favour of a more progressive taxation system that taxes higher earners more and lower earners less, and puts more emphasis on wealth and income (incl. capita gains) taxes and less on sales taxes.
But I'm also realistic that as a software engineer, my salary is above the average, and thus in such a setup I'd likely end up paying more.
The federal government does have a system to accept gifts which you might want to check out: https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html
Whether your gift will make a better society, I can't know - much like your taxes you have very little control over what the money is going to be used for.
>...(there can be no such thing as a free market when such a small number of individuals control such a large proportion of the spending power).
A free market is generally considered a system where there are voluntary exchanges between buyers and sellers based on mutual benefit. It seems odd to claim that since there are some very wealthy people in the country that somehow a consumer can't buy bread from a baker, etc. Maybe you can expand a bit on how you are defining free market.
Not OP, but just look at a company town as an example in a bottle.
When the rich and powerful control the means of production so completely that they are the only people one can buy what one needs from, then in what way can the exchanges still be called "voluntary" and in what way is "mutual benefit" achieved vs the lesser of two evils: "perpetual debtorship that one must endlessly toil to slow the progress of" vs "abject starvation"?
At the end of the day consent and free will are actually really complicated topics, and they can be surprisingly easy to pervert by unequal power dynamics. The market cannot be free whenever feudalism forms to take its place.
Obviously actually vetting these organizations to make sure that your dollar accomplishes what you wish of it remains a Very Hard Problem, but at least while making baby steps from where we are right now (with our dystopian government) increases in taxation would not constitute a small step in the right direction.
EG: a better environment might look like a healthy government being supported by higher taxes than we see today, but without that first "healthy government" component the latter cannot be a net positive.
The U.S. are a republic not a democracy. The people vote for the government but are not expected to be directly involved with it after the fact.