I actually had a similar discussion the other day on facebook about democracy. A person commented something to the effect of that if America elects bad leaders, then that's good because the people wanted it. I said in response that democracy for democracy's sake is pointless because the whole point of democracy is to have the most intelligent decisions possible made, and the assumption is that most of the time, the people know what's best for them. But sometimes they don't, and that's why the most ideal (imo) governments are those governments designed to limit bad decisions from being made. It should be hard to get something bad done, at the expense of the ease at which good things could be done. That's why democracy and separation/division of power is a good concept, because the process of making a influential decision is much more difficult. So what you said struck a chord and reminded me of my own thoughts:
Here's an interesting question: is Congress's ideal job to make intelligent laws that might not jive with the people necessarily, or to make dumb laws that do jive with the people?So to me it looks like governments are always stupid. Best you can do is to limit their power, so they have less possibilities to be stupid.
To me it seems simple that congress should make intelligent laws. The real problem is how to elect such congress? Who would decide what's intelligent if not voters? To have intelligent voters you have to educate them somehow and that sound quite like nationwide brainwash. Western democracies already apply education to pretty much everybody, and that's another weird problem. If people at 1800 elected stupid dudes who made stupid curriculum, then we are in a rut of stupidity educating stupidity, electing stupidity educating..... You get the point? Only fair thing to do is to limit voting for those who are actually interested in it. So no compulsive voting thank you. Then we get into meta-politics, could we somehow by the means of day to day politics inject some-kind of functions to our political systems that would make them inevitably better. It's too difficult thing for me, I'm just to become product designer. I don't need to design foolproof... ;) There are usually some already. Similar thing as congress in our country has to have 5/6 votes to pass a new constitution, and the next elected congress has to approve it with 2/3 or something. Would you know any kind community discussing meta-politics?
Yeah, you're right about education. Even if people are asked on election day which candidate is more intelligent, instead of which is "better", maybe that would help, but it seems to me that voters would just assume that they know what's best for themselves and choose an ignorant person anyway. Or maybe they already do that...it's impossible to tell unless we poll voters after elections why they voted as they did...but I'm pretty sure that's illegal, right? I agree with what you're saying about compulsory voting. I've been thinking of a web service (if you've seen me around hubski, you know that I'm a programmer) where users would basically set up the government of their choosing collectively, and they could attempt to make the best government possible. It'd be interesting to see, as a simulation, what people would come up with. They could make a constitution, or have anarchy, or whatever it may be. What do you think? I worry it might get out of hand, but it'd be interesting to watch. Since it's over the web, events could happen far quicker than in real life, I feel, so it'd make it easier to examine the broader trends that affect humanity.Would you know any kind community discussing meta-politics?
God, I wish I knew of one! I guess there could be a #meta-politics tag, or just use the #sociology tag, I suppose. I've been searching for a way to find how society ticks a la psychohistory (you know Asimov's foundation) so that it'd be possible to envision a system that works more perfectly.