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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

> Maybe we should vote for people who are financially literate, can think long term, and can "conserve" rather than politicians who promise endlessly?

Who could you vote for, in any democracy, that would fit this?

Also, how many voters would have the wherewithal to identify such a person?

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I think democracy is perhaps a fundamentally unstable system. It requires constant corrective force, and a lot of it, from a lot of people. When the members of that democracy start to get a little too comfortable it fails.

Humans are designed to operate in smallish clans with benevolent dictators whose right to rule is based on social currency with people they personally know. Anything else is a house of cards on unstable foundation.

I'm not sure how you fix that, but democracy so far has maybe been the least bad patch.

> ... the least bad patch.

That was Churchill's view, as he said during a speech in the House of Commons in 1947:

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time . . ."

The American founders predicted all these problems, which is why they formed a representative democracy. However over the years we have chipped away at that aspect and ended up with an election systems that encourage populism.

Some green parties. Their primary goals might seem unrelated, but turns out caring for the environment and climate change is correlated with long-term thinking.

Note I said "some", before rushing to mention all the examples of green parties engaging in misguided policies. Those also exist

In the anglosphere it's more difficult because first-past-the-post voting makes such parties unlikely to succeed or be relevant

I believe voters are unfortunately useless.

In my country people voted in a party as majority that, not once left their terms peacefully in the past. AFTER our genZ ousted the other party, that came to power as a majority 17 years ago, changed constituency and controlled the parliament using majority, and turned into an autocracy

Now this party is shaping everything up using their majority for their favor (no surprise), ignoring all the agreements agreed upon by all the parties before election, under the interim government.

All those blood, deaths, injuries are wasted.

conservatives?

Is that a joke? Seriously. I don't see any conservative remaining, and it's been a while.

It had to be a joke. Conservative policies have made things much worse. It’s hard to believe they have a party that gets 60 million people to vote for them.

Never underestimate the power of the fourth estate

Response to sister comment: conservatism, and the groups that claim to support it, are separate. Same with liberals, and socialists, and the Democrat Party.

So name one. These politicans have names, do they not?

We do have the name of one politician who balanced the New York City budget though. Its probably not going to please a lot of people to hear that guy's name though. But that's what people want, right? Balanced budgets?

But no. That's not what people want and we all know it.

One aspect of that balanced budget that should be noted is that it does rely on a sizable funding increase from the state government.

Now, that state is legally required to have a balanced budget itself, so perhaps this is a small side note rather than a major change in perspective. I just think it’s not spoken about enough when discussing how that budget process went.

NYC had a deficit of $12 Billion before the current mayor.

So what is he? A Democrat, and what else? Parties are groups of people, ideologies are pure ideals. They are distinct, with overlaps in their demographics.

If that were true, the streets would be punctuated by shrill screams in reaction to the past decade of Republican spending.

At least in the US, conservatives have done more to increase the debt than liberals for the last 40 years at least.

Turns out, that was just a lie that some people told fiscally conservative people to get them to vote against their interests, just like other "wedge" issues like abortion or trans people.

Trump, sitting on top of a Republican government, is responsible for 10Trn of the debt, about a quarter.

Conservatives gave up on principles long ago and have settled for simply lying about everything, including what's happening and who's responsible for it.

The words are so overloaded. Republican is just generic right wing. I think the "conservative" the parent is talking about is the neoliberalism like what Milton Friedman would propose. He would have wanted half of the government gone, next to no market intervention (he even argued against seatbelts in one lecture). That would actually be the "conservative" someone you stereotypically imagine like Ron Swanson would adopt, who describes the perfect government as just a person in a tiny white room. The Republicans are a joke, just like the Democrats. They're both there for themselves, and have no actual agenda, manifesto, ideals, or values. They've got all the junk identity politics, religion, abortion, immigration crap mixed in such that you're either picking crap or crap. There's nothing "liberal" about the Democrats and nothing "conservative" about the Republicans. The Republicans were even the ones who freed the slaves! Make of that what you will.

Oh, you want "libertarianism" then. Not the original kind, the Ayn Rand kind

That always works out well. Until the bears come [1]

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...

He didn't say what he "wanted". We're so blinded by partisan stupidity we can't even be bothered to read, understand, and think anymore.

"This is the thing I think of when X"

"Oh, so what you're describing is Y, actually"

"HE NEVER SAID HE WANTED Y! STUPID PARTISANS!"

Okay buddy

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