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Comment by Istof | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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