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Comment by late2part | Hacker News Reader

Of course it didn't fix itself. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." -Edmund Burke

Too many of us are doing nothing. We need to do more. We should actively demand that our representatives fix this problem, or vote in people who will. I'm doing this. Please join me.

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I can't stress how important it is for Americans to get this right. What you set into law, will be forced upon the rest of us as treaties. We can't influence your politics, but you can.

Because you vote for somebody who says he will fix something doesn't mean he will... they need to be held accountable somehow... Obama is an example of this.

That's precisely why "democracry" as it's being sold currently is utterly broken. You should vote for contracts, not for people, so that they can be enforced once approved.

Okay but what if this contract contradicts itself with another contract on other level?

Your question is about execution and details. That can be figured out, and that should not make the higher level principle (contracts over people) less relevant.

Check out Demoex, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoex, where each bill is voted on by all residents, the party's representatives must vote for the corresponding bill in the same proportion as the votes received for each bill. This is how you can sneak direct democracy into a representative democracy through the front door.

Purely direct democracy does not work. Representative democracy is needed because you can't possibly design a system where everyone has to be bothered to assess every new law proposal. Most of the bills are about subjects people know nothing about. It takes time to research the subject, gather expert opinion and then emit a well grounded vote. That's why you need to assign a group of people full-time to the task of assessing new bills, aka representative democracy.

In direct democracy, you either have populist votes or non-participation. It is inescapable.

The fact that the current system is broken is no excuse to move to one that is flawed from the start. We now have the technological means for an evolution of representative democracy: Liquid Democracy, or delegative democracy. It's representative democracy with "continuous elections". It might work (better).

You could use the same method as demoex to achieve that - take the idea of "proxies" from shareholder votes. Anyone and pick anyone as a proxy. Now all you've got to solve is the problem of cycles.

Well that would be a good thing (in my opinion) but you have to have a system closer to the UK where the PM can effectively click his fingers and get a law passed - in some ways a US president has less power than a junior minister does in the UK.

And the Uk PM or Home Secretary would have sorted out the problems you have with over mighty small town police forces very quickly.

Thanks to Naval Ravikant, we got the JOBS act passed. More importantly, he set a precedent for tech/silicon valley as a real political force.

The first thing is for us to realize the political power we have, at the same gut level that we have realized the technological power/possibilities we have.

"tech/silicon valley" is not a political force. It's the market segment that's in ascendancy. Politics has been, and continues to be about who has money. Why does anyone think that the growing political power of handful of tech brands large enough to rate on politician's radars will do good for the citizenry?

Our interests may occasionally align with those of empowered tech giants, but that's purely coincidental. Even as a business owner/employer you're SOL if the policy that's good for the big guys isn't also good for you. They're not lobbying for you, they're lobbying for themselves.

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