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The 1st thing to change is the "Electoral College"
The most un-democratic thing I've ever seen in my life. (FYI, they can vote for whoever they want)
The electoral college serves a specific function. It serves democracy by helping to ensure that voters in less populated areas have an opportunity to voice their concerns to Presidential nominees.
And how electors are chosen as well as the restrictions on how they vote are determined on the STATE level, not the federal level.
ALL gov systems are servants of corruption and abuse. Human nature can not be avoided. Might as well leave it in the hands of the people as much as possible. We need a middle road.
All I'm saying is it's too far out of the hands of the people today when it shouldn't be. Technology allows for the people to be more involved in their Gov as they want to be but our current system does not allow for them to be. Elected officials should not have ALL the power. More checks and balances CAN be put in place while making the system more productive than destructive as it is today.
The ballot initiative process exists in my state and others. This is about as close to direct democracy as you're going to get.
Looks to me like we are WELL overdue for that revolution you speak of... The Gov we have today (and for quite a while) is not the best outcome when it concerns the individual !
Well, Jefferson said:
Quote:
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,
it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure.
Some people are indeed too stupid - I work with a woman who can't answer 1 x 10 (she said "five?")
The biggest problem is time. The average person doesn't have time to research the issues. Political junkies, like us here at CD, are not representative of the average person.
It should be the job of the public elected official to provide information for issues down the ladder so to speak to the people in plain English electronically. Not too hard of a task what so ever ! Like I said earlier, everyone gets thousands of emails a year most of which are junk. We waist countless hours reading crap. Replace a few of those junk emails with info on issues that affect you directly and the right to vote on them.
The elected officials vote should account for only a portion of the jurisdiction, not all of it as it is today. There needs to be a "veto" by the people built into the system.
We would end up with a much more "for the people" gov out of the deal that's for sure...
ALL gov systems are servants of corruption and abuse. Human nature can not be avoided. Might as well leave it in the hands of the people as much as possible. We need a middle road.
All I'm saying is it's too far out of the hands of the people today when it shouldn't be. Technology allows for the people to be more involved in their Gov as they want to be but our current system does not allow for them to be. Elected officials should not have ALL the power. More checks and balances CAN be put in place while making the system more productive than destructive as it is today.
Read the federalist no. 10 I linked, Madison pointed out the problems with it and why representation is better. I could go over it all, but he says it much better than I.
As for the last, it is in the hands of the people. They have the power to effect change. They just don't take interest and they surely do not educate themselves on the issues. Our system is bureaucratic for a reason. It is supposed to be slow, over argued and discussed in order to avoid the knee jerk self interest reaction of the mob majority.
People complain about masses being mislead, riled up and suckered by media figures and you want to run around and essentially place weapons in these peoples hands to let them loose on the public?
California has 3 forms of Pure democracy. It has worked in some, but failed in others. People vote on issues ignorantly and emotionally. Representation puts thinking period in, allows an individual to hear the people and then argue for the peoples "rational" needs. If that representative does not end up serving the people, then the people vote them out of office. When that ability is no longer possible due to corruption, the people revolt. Pure democracies will only serve to change the master from one corrupt system to another. A pure democracy would result in a very quick and violent demise to the country, that isn't a guess, but a fact.
It should be the job of the public elected official to provide information for issues down the ladder so to speak to the people in plain English electronically. Not too hard of a task what so ever ! Like I said earlier, everyone gets thousands of emails a year most of which are junk. We waist countless hours reading crap. Replace a few of those junk emails with info on issues that affect you directly and the right to vote on them.
The elected officials vote should account for only a portion of the jurisdiction, not all of it as it is today. There needs to be a "veto" by the people built into the system.
We would end up with a much more "for the people" gov out of the deal that's for sure...
I'm on my feet all day at work; sometimes ten hours a day, sometimes six and seven days a week. I'm 51 years old. I bust my ass at work. The last thing I wan't to do after a long hard day is worry about voting on issues. I'm sure many people feel the same way. It's my guess that very few people would participate in a direct democracy; even less than now participate in general elections.
I'm on my feet all day at work; sometimes ten hours a day, sometimes six and seven days a week. I'm 51 years old. I bust my ass at work. The last thing I wan't to do after a long hard day is worry about voting on issues. I'm sure many people feel the same way. It's my guess that very few people would participate in a direct democracy; even less than now participate in general elections.
I guess everyones right... Americans are too stupid, lazy, tired and/or just don't want to be bothered with what their Gov is doing or how it's run. We deserve what we get.
I can't understand why everyone criticizes the Gov the way they do either when they really don't want more involved
Heaven forbid we all get truly involved in how we are governed.
How does it do that? By ignoring the will of the majority of the people?
Maybe fewer pieces of legislation is the answer.
Nothing is stopping people from getting involved in their government now.
The will of the majority of the people isn't always a good thing. The Bill of Rights are meant to protect individuals from the will of the majority. Mob rule?
If the will of the majority were determining laws, and how money was being spent, do you think we would have a national highway system? Or even a national rail system? Would people in rural areas have electricity or phones?
Eventually, all the money would be flowing to the cities, with no money going to rural areas. Which would lead to a breakdown in our ability to distribute the products and services we all depend upon.
When the laws are passed, who enforces those laws? With increasingly meager budgets rural law enforcement becomes overwhelmed, so that cities become islands of law and order, in a sea of lawlessness and chaos.
Moreover, democracies are unwieldy when you have large numbers voting. That's why the House of Representatives is restricted in size, even though the country has grown. When you are passing laws voted on by the masses of people, you open yourself to far more corruption of the voting process. No matter what system you opt for. Electronic voting, email voting, snail-mail voting. Lobbyists spend millions trying to influence votes now. Won't they spend even more to corrupt the voting process of millions of Americans? Won't millions of Americans be bombarded with spam and literature "informing" them on the laws they'd be voting for?
And when the votes are counted, how long will it take to figure out whether a law passed or not? Minnesota has been without a Senator for months, with recounts and challenges to the voting process. That's one state. How long would it take to do a recount for a new law on abortion on the federal level? How long would it take to pass a budget?
The representative democracy system we have wasn't put in place just because our Founding Fathers feared mob rule. There were plenty of controls in place to offset that, not the least of which was how restrictive the voting privilege actually was. While states set voting qualifications, generally only men who owned property or whose assets gave them certain tax qualifications were allowed to vote. A true democracy is terribly inefficient. Democracies don't respond well to rules of order, debates drag on and on, government is essentially stopped in its tracks.
While you may think this is a good idea, and that all legislation should be enforced on a local level, you might bear in mind that we tried this strategy between 1776 and 1787. A weak federal government brought a host of problems and was ultimately an unworkable form of government. States bickered amongst themselves, threatening to undermine commerce and trade between the states. That could become even more problematic today then it was in the late eighteenth century. What if California chose to jam television signals so that only their state could receive transmissions of programs that originated in that state? What if there were a pandemic flu, and some states that had flu medicine closed their borders and refused to share that medicine because the majority of voters in that state were afraid to share? What if the majority of voters in Louisiana and Texas decided to keep the refined oil for their use, causing a nationwide shortage of oil?
Democracy is more than just the idea that we are all equals. It is a system of self-rule, but it's been shown over and over again that when you try it with large numbers of people, the system breaks down. Democracy requires a tremendous amount of responsibility. It's a commitment to read a law in its entirety, to engage in discussions about the ramifications and consequences of a law, to decide on how to enforce the law and how to prosecute law-breakers. If you have a nation as large as the United States engaged in democratically legislating, and those same people are also engaged in the same process on a state level, in order to effectively rule, those people would no longer be able to work full-time, or to participate with their families, because the time and energy demanded in reading, researching, and understanding the laws would be all-encompassing. That's why we elect people to do it for us.
If majority ruled we would still have slavery and the civil rights movement probably never would have happened. The vast majority of people thought oppression of minorities and woman was acceptable.
What would be the role of the media? Being that the media outlets are owned by a few huge companies, do you think they would sway public opinion to serve their interests? Wouldn't it be terrifying to know that if the CEO's of GE decided they wanted "insert something bad here", all they had to do is convince the American people it's in their best interest. Now what if GE, Disney, and Viacom decided they wanted "insert something really bad that benefits these huge companies"? The influence of the media could influence our new system of majority rule to do things that may not be in the interest of the American people.
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