Continuous referendums... mind blown. Anyone working on this?
We would also like that the "consent of the governed" be unanimous. Or at least very high.
Just because %60 of the population, for instance, wants to ban gay marriage, they should't be able to. IT should take %95 or something like that.
We no longer have the multi-week latency between our hometown and washington. Votes can be instantaneous-- and in the 1990s MIT made software that would allow anyone to audit an election and prove it was legitimate, and prove that their vote was counted, electronically. Everyone could do a recount in a few minutes. Things like the blockchain might even be a better way to do the same thing.
So we no longer need "representatives" that don't even represent us-- because they are picked by the two party heads in a system that keeps any other party out, structurally with "election rules"-- not even getting into the shenanigans that keep them out of debates, and off the ballots in many cases.
Frankly, I think our election system is deeply compromised (whoever controls the software controls the outcome) and representational government is no longer necessary.
How about to pass a budget?
In a direct democracy, who writes the bills?
Should people be taking 10 hours out of their week to read and vote on all of the items that would be put before them?
I don't think you can say that. Libertarians are not a single group with a single dogma or something.
I've seen some libertarians making a good case for a Monarch-like figure as well. Instead of having elected representatives who basically have no responsibility since they change every 5-10 years, having someone for life embodying the State may be something more reliable for the Country in the longer term, and who would have to listen to the people since they would not be going anywhere a few years later.
I can't say I really agree with the idea, but I can't really condone democracy as it is right now, where people who have no education, who can't reason with logic, and don't care about anything except their own situation have as much voting power as people who are trying to make reasonable, structured decisions based on principles or a good understanding of the country's situation. "Democracy" as we call it is not perfect indeed, and it actually sounds like the worst compromise of all options we have out there. That's the lowest denominator, and we can see how it keeps failing us over and over again no matter how we hope it can work.
Your democracy can only be as good as your people, and that says a lot about the quality of what we have right now.
If you want no decisions to be made, then setting thresholds like that is the best way for statu-quo. Or you know, you can actually have a constitution for things to be prevented to change in the first place.
IMHO, continuous referendums are a mindblowing idea... mindblowingly bad. Politics, like any other skilled job, requires commitment and expertise. The "wisdom of crowds" is not a substitute: while it may aggregate information successfully, it cannot create information. For example, figuring out Putin's intentions, or doing a cost-benefit analysis of TTIP, is difficult and time-consuming. If nobody has the incentives and responsibility to do that, it will not get done: political expertise will be a public good, and will be undersupplied for the standard reasons. Representative democracy leads to candidates and parties who have reasonably strong incentives to demonstrate their competence. Direct democracy does not.
There was much party-internal warfare about it.
One faction saw Liquid Democracy as the solution to all problems.
The other faction insisted on "Datenschutz" (privacy extreme), which to them evidently meant that having your real identity tied to any election is unacceptable. They would rather have people vote twice or three hundred times on the same ballot than introduce any kind of identifier.
It's a great demonstration of why the German Pirate Party doesn't even get enough votes anymore to have the listed by name in TV when election results come in.
Having said that, should I copyright the term? just in case ;)