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Democracy Do-Over
05.11.12
In the May issue of Wired, Joshua Davis writes a short piece titled "Fewer Voters, Better Elections," (which as of this writing has not made it to the Internet). In it, Davis takes democracy back to its Athenian roots and points out how, even then, rather than a pure democracy (one person, one vote for everything) they had a system of representative democracy, not unlike most modern democracies.
One of the things that made their system different is that they "randomly select[ed] citizens for office." This seems like a good idea to me. Now, I'm sure it would be occasionally disastrous. However, I'm not sure we can fairly describe our modern system, where citizens are given a choice between two parties composed of professional politicians who differ only slightly, any better.
The best form of government is probably a benevolent dictatorship with a representative counsel of learned advisors, but that is pretty much impossible to put together on purpose. So representative democracy is still the best system we have, for now. The question is, who should represent us?
Read the rest
SAH
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Ignorance is pernicious. submitted by Cory Q
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