Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtmurphy | Hacker News Reader

I agree with wyager.

A political system should be a strong constitution that defines the rights of individuals. Something like DemocracyOS should be used to engage the population into ensuring that political actions are in fact constitutional and just.

View on HN

I think what we really need is ConstitutionalRepublicOS which would be a bit more complicated. But by defining strong constitutional invariants with regard to individual rights perhaps we could pre-strikedown unconstitutional laws before they are enacted. That would require a more precise legal language that let's you run some kind of static analysis against against the laws however.

maybe we could think about a two-tier system were we delegate only decisions that should be taken our of the hands of majority and to the citizens the huge number of decisions that we can make that affect our every-day lives. I think the only way for citizens to be responsible for the decisions we make is by start making them. We've outsourced decision-making for a far too long time.

I do think some of the divisive issues that are taken up often end up cloaking other matters that should be focused upon. Perhaps with strong enough invariants and a pre enactment filter it would much harder to use divisive social issues politically. Maybe we could replace polls with votes on some things and have better recall mechanics too. I think a lot of the dysfunction is due to the fact we can and have passed radically unconstitutional laws in the past to great detriment to the entire population.

If you think about how much carnage has been caused by the fact that we can in fact pass unconstitutional laws and then it takes decades of work to strike them down due to the bottleneck we have in our court system (supreme court). Would be much better to not pass the obviously unconstitutional laws and let the courts handle complicated exceptions that were not caught.

America is an extremely bad example of how a democracy should work. Its main claim to fame is that it's old, not that it's exemplary.

It's not a democracy at all, purposefully so.

I really don't understand why people like you insist on this completely useless semantic argument. It's almost as pointless as debating the merits of parliamentarianism versus presidentalism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com