> we need to get money out of politics.
We need to get the power out of politics.
We need to get the power out of politics.
if the government exerts less democratic power, money will still exert too much capitalist power
Sounds good to me.
Perhaps the billionaire can't buy your willingness to do something, but they can very much affect the material world around you, and therefore, you.
If you rent they can probably find a way to kick you out of your apartment. If someone around you _is_ willing to take an order, influencing what people around you do very much influences you. If they want something from you, and you're not willing to sell it, there will be people willing to steal it, etc.
Money very much is proxy of power. Perhaps not everything can be bought, sure. But money gives you operational range to attempt to impose your will when it doesn't.
You're answering a comment saying money is power by saying that it isn't if it's not used?
Even if the billionaire doesn't pay you, they can pay someone else to force you to do what they want.
Its happened before, over labor disputes and unionization.
A LOT of people died, both in anti-union and union sides.
And thats why we have, well, had, the National Labor Relations Board. It was to make a peaceful way to negotiate worker rights.
Maybe if it did go away completely, and the violence comes back, that people in power would be reminded WHY we had union structure and law in the federal government to begin with. It wasn't for the warm fuzzies.
The civil court system is basically a way for wealthy people and corporations to use money to silence and/or coerce behavior out of less wealthy people. If Elon Musk or Larry Ellison woke up one day and decided to sue me, and defending myself would cost 100X my net worth, I'm probably just going to give up and do whatever they want me to do.
There's a lot of money in Dubai, so if your operation is to just hope to impress and be offered power without much effort on your end, 1 billion won't be enough. Perhaps 100 or 1,000 billion could work? Hard to tell.
If you only have 1 billion though, you need to play your cards in a smarter way. Who can you become friends with? What clubs and parties do you need to attend to make it happen? Which politicians and royals can you get dirt on? Who can you bribe for information? What gifts can you give to gain someones trust? 1 billion is enough operational range for this.
for a lot of people in the newly rich class, a kind of virtual currency best compared to a high score in a videogame. Symbolic and representing status. It's why when they attempt to translate it into power this particular class thankfully fares fairly badly, from the article:
"TogetherSF, a similar nonprofit backed by venture capitalist Michael Moritz, crashed and burned after the 2024 elections when its $9.5 million ballot measure to reform the city charter lost to a progressive counter-measure backed by about $117,000."
Power needs to be placed in the hands of better decision-makers. That starts from getting money out of politics.
It has actually been scientifically proven otherwise in crowd theory : with the right setup, the crowd is more effective to take a good decision that the top1 best decision maker.
Exemple : a crowd playing chess may beat the top1 chess player, even though the crowd individually cannot beat him.
And yea, no surprise, the masses do not win. Even when in the latter case, a huge chunk of the 132k was obviously using stockfish cranked to the gills (though the did get a draw out of it?).
Nobody really advocates for Direct Democracy. It isn't viable: 'tyranny of the majority' etc.
Most Western governments are Liberal Democracies - where some issues aren't subject to a vote - partly so that the mob can't persecute outnumbered subgroups.
You have an implicit assumption that the delegates are going to be smarter and better people that are going to lie to the majority to get elected and then will valiantly protect the subgroup.
But that have not happened anywhere. In fact in every case it is the delegates who organize persecution of various subgroups, even in situations when the share of population truly wanting to persecute subgroup is far from being a majority.
There is no foolproof system that can guard against it, however declaring 'rights' and delegating the responsibility to protect them to the judiciary at least is a mitigation.
Can you bring one example where the public wanted to treat a group unjustly and parliament elected by that same public have defended the group?
Direct voting does not replace judiciary or even senate, it only augments the house of congress.
What I originally commented on was this:
So do you believe in democracy or not?
The representative democracy has a problem with delegates not faithfully representing the people they are supposed to represent. It allows politician to be elected by campaigning for issue X which is popular with majority, then do Y and Z that almost no one wants, and then campaign again on other party undoing X, leaving people no way to communicate that they want X and not Y Z.
Social media have greatly increased the impact of this instability, the only way to improve situation is adding some elements of direct voting that would improve efficiency of communication between people and the government.
No one in this thread have suggested to completely replace everything with direct voting, and yet many people vehemently argue against that. Meanwhile there is a much more interesting discussion: how to make cooperation between people more efficient using the new technologies that we have.
No one in this thread have suggested to completely replace everything with direct voting
the only way to improve situation is adding some elements of direct voting that would improve efficiency of communication between people and the government.
1) What are a good set of rules for the system.
2) If the existing system can no longer self-correct, how can one implement a good set of rules.
'Direct vote' might address the second issue. It's not the only way, but it's better than a violent revolution.
I'm not opposed to all direct voting, but it does have inherent problems. The most obvious is that the world is far too complicated for a majority of citizens to research all the issues that affect them. In a well-functioning representative democracy, a politician would have the resources and time to understand the issues. Granted, that seldom is the case in reality.
More direct voting allows representatives to better represent people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy so it is a part of the first issue too.
A planned economy under direct democracy would be at least as bad as a planned economy under a representative democracy because the average voter has even less knowledge about economics and business than a government planner.
The best thing about direct democracy is that, unlike representative democracy, we don't have it and therefore cannot instantly think of its flaws.
The average person reads under a sixth grade level, cannot perform long division, and quite possibly couldn't tell you how many years have passed since Jesus was born.
Whether a direct vote is appropriate for an issue depends on which is a greater danger: the corruption of a politician, or the ignorance and flakiness of the average voter.
We only need to make sure that decisions affect the smallest number of people possible and only those who make decision bear its good or bad consequences.
Same can work with other issues, like do we want to build a road or stadium, how do we want to deal with homeless in our part of the city etc.
Online, open voting, with possibility to trade votes, and requirement to reach almost 100% accept vote for decisions, can work much better than systems we have now.
As for average person being not smart, average buyer poorly understands biology, and ends up buying things that are harmful to eat or eats to much, but we do not have representative doctors who will decide who eats how much in restaurants. The important thing is to create an arrangement where poor choices of a person do not affect others.
It’s never meant that.
So people can “believe” in Democracy just fine and still think direct voting is bad.
Also, Democracy doesn’t even mean “if a majority of people believe X, therefore X”.
Voting should be done without anonymity, online. One should be able to either vote for everything manually, or delegate the vote to any other person.
If some change is supported by 100% of the voters it should be implemented immediately. But if smaller percent supports the change, then there needs to be a vesting time (e.g. 10 years for 60%, infinity for 50%+1).
This allows people to either trade support for policies (i'll vote yes for your initiative if you vote for mine, or give me money), or to get high level of support locally and try out various laws on local level.
The same site that manages voting should also show detailed budget of city/state/country, where people can see where their taxes are being spent and should be able to redirect the money they have paid.
This is a spectacularly bad idea.
There are other parts of your scheme that are also spectacularly bad ideas, but let's just deal with this one for now.
The issue was that the poor people could vote for Gracchi brothers, but were too afraid to protect them, and one without the other only have brought to a worse outcome where they could not vote at all.
Even today if you are afraid of saying openly what policies or which politician you support, how can you hope to enact these policies?
Secret ballot started being introduced in US starting from 1888 and it did not bring any of positive changes that its supporters thought that it would.
In places where a group can intimidate majority of voters and force to vote one way, secret ballot does not help at all because that group can also fake the results. It even makes situation worse, by hiding the actual data from opposition.
Billionaire goes: get $10 off at my store, called Scamazon, for these votes (lists votes). And naturally even the $10 is manipulated to be recouped with dynamic pricing.
Eliminating the middleman makes things better already.
But more importantly with vesting time, large number of votes, ease of reversing a decision in a new vote, take $10 and vote for something that costs you more simply won't work.
And that goes to the heart of the matter, that corporations aren't people, no matter what some court or law says. And they should be heavily restricted on speech. (I include spending money on political adverts and similar.)
Humans can commit crimes worthy of the death penalty. Wells Fargo shouldn't exist due to their decade long fraud. Nor should United Health Care, for actively denying humans their health coverage until the humans died. Or countless other cases.
When a company gets "killed", and all assets get assigned to the wronged, I'll start to believe they are humans. Haven't seen that yet. Likely won't ever, in the USA.
I got injured with a malfunctioning pallet jack. Went to ER and got Xrays.
Week later, was fired. My paperwork explicitly said I got fired for getting injured at work and costing the company money.
Went to 6 different lawyers. Had to ask for pro-bono. I couldn't afford a lawyer.
All refused. Why? None of them could deal with a Walmart lawsuit. None.
I had them dead-to-rights with a wrongful termination. Double manager signature. Even recorded their termination on my phone, on the sly (in single party state). They even admitted to forging a different manager. None of it matters.
Parts of the US is mature enough to implement a similar system as Switzerland, which has a superior form of democracy.
And what costs are we talking about anyhow? Tax shortfalls for local government? Decades later that has been rectified through other taxes and funding mechanisms and we still get new roads and schools in california. Housing costs increasing? I would say the fact that cities today are zoned within a few percentage points of present population levels (vs zoned for 10x present population levels pre 1970) is the actual source of that sucking sound from the chest.
But really what people mean is "prevent paid political advertisement of all kinds", which seems about as hard as "get rid of all kinds of advertisement" - at some point, you're back to power, communication, attention.
Hard problems. Probably there's a reason all ancient democracies did not survive.