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Comment by digitaltrees | Hacker News Reader

Checks and balances were supposed to do that. Federalism was supposed to do that. Republicans have played a 60 year strategic game really well and blocked the checks and balances. Here we are. With no way back quite frankly

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Madison talked about this problem during the Virginia ratifying convention. There is no government structure that can survive bad actors. His solution was that informed voters would punish bad actors. -- We're in short supply of informed voters and accountability isn't a thing anymore.

Punishing bad actors depends on informed voters, but in a larger population democracy it also depends on the informed voter : uninformed voter ratio staying above some value.

The lower the ratio sinks, the less weight informed voters have, and the less intelligent the outcome gets.

The modern party duopoly exacerbated the issue (parties mobilize uninformed voters and often actively work against informing them), but voter enfranchisement also seriously impacted.

Universal suffrage is amazing from a human rights and ensuring everyone has political power standpoint, but troublesome when you have poor levels of universal education and ability for voters to inform themselves.

In modern times, with modern populations (US or larger), it feels like indirect democracy might be a better answer.

Allow voters to directly elect non-partisan voting representatives (many, so elections are hyper-local and candidates individually canvas), then pay those representatives a stipend for a few months (like jury duty) which they spend educating themselves on issues. Then have those representatives vote.

Sorry. This is utopian. If those, let's call them electors, "educated themselves" with sources from RAND or worse, Fox/Breitbart types. Or to be non-ideologically biased about the point, communistUSA. Then they too would act as bad actors when they voted.

At the end of the day, when all the BS gets boiled away and we are left with raw/brutal reality. -- Any group of people attempting to govern themselves will end up with the government their collective will and (i'll use the loaded term) virtue deserves. The only caveat is time.

In what way would checks and balances do that at all? The only branch that has any sort of leeway to pass unpopular policies is the Supreme Court, and setting budgetary constraints is far outside their purview.

In a world where the president wasn’t politically associated with Congress (the US system It’s different from most in that the executive is not elected from the legislature), the President could theoretically demand Congress send them a balanced budget to sign, otherwise they would be responsible for the cuts.

Unfortunately the U.S. constitution was written with the, in hindsight, naive assumption that political parties could be avoided.

This just led to a system that has political parties but doesn’t really acknowledge their existence and therefore makes it difficult to regulate their behavior.

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