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Representative vs Direct Democracy

What is the best form of democracy?

  • Representative

    Votes: 17 58.6%
  • Direct

    Votes: 4 13.8%
  • Other

    Votes: 4 13.8%
  • It's all good

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • It's all BS

    Votes: 1 3.4%
  • I don't know

    Votes: 1 3.4%
  • There are superior systems than democracy

    Votes: 2 6.9%

  • Total voters
    29
knee jerk reaction is NO, if The People get to vote immediately and whatever they vote is law, their passions are too easily swayed and it becomes a tyranny of the majority.


But possibly one could come up with a mix of representative and direct democracy, leaning more toward the latter, limited by the BoR, that wouldn't be tyrannical....


Perhaps. But there have to be limits on government, and checks and balances to keep power in check no matter WHO wields it.

What Goshin is saying, is that he got mixed up yesterday over Romney winning Florida, and today he snapped out of it, and supports a representative government like the founders intended. :mrgreen:
 
A pure democracy is doomed the instant people realize they can vote themselves money. Our current system guarantees states have a say in the decisions of the Federal government. In a democracy low population states would be steamrolled by states with huge urban populations which happens now to some extent but a democracy would greatly exacerbate the problem
 
There are better systems than any form of Democracy. Autocracy, for example. The issue I have with every form of Democracy/Republic I've seen is that they allow the vote of the imeciles and idiots to carry the same weight as the votes of those who are truly Good and Decent people and those who are actually Intelligent. IF there was a means to ensure (via testing, regulating, etc....) that only the voices of those individuals who have proven themselves to be Educated, Informed, and Moral were heard THEN some form of Democracy or Republic might be worthwhile. Government of the Masses simply allows the feces to float to the top. Nothing more.
Labeling those with whom you disagree in political matters using insults and slurs is not wise, Tigger..
Consider that they may feel the same about you..
The problem is, our people are poorly educated, and then fed a line of propaganda by both the left and right wings..
Thus, they are "turned off".
A much nicer way of saying that our people are ingnorant.....they simply care a little or not at all..
Our system of representative democracy is OK and would be much better if the parties would respect the people and the people were to participate more....JMO.
 
Labeling those with whom you disagree in political matters using insults and slurs is not wise, Tigger..
Consider that they may feel the same about you...

Consider that I don't give a **** what they, or anyone else, thinks of me.

The problem is, our people are poorly educated, and then fed a line of propaganda by both the left and right wings..
Thus, they are "turned off". A much nicer way of saying that our people are ingnorant.....they simply care a little or not at all...

Then they should not be allowed to vote. If you are not capable of or willing to make an informed and correct decision, you shouldn't be allowed to vote. It's that simple.

Our system of representative democracy is OK and would be much better if the parties would respect the people and the people were to participate more....JMO.

It would be much better without the parties at all, and definitely without most of the people.
 
LOL! I won't deny that!


I still think the Electoral College is a relic, though.

Yup, it's insane, rabid mob rule for you. Let's not do anything that doesn't have direct voting for everything down to the brand of toilet paper in the WH.
 
Lol, I find this comment on YouTube (see my previous post in this thread) quite amusing:

We are a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy.
watch?v=Z184mJN8CUI
Democracy is mob rule. (Like gang-rape)
Our founding fathers loathed it.
Do your homework on this and then tell me why "they" call us a democracy.
The word "democracy" is not contained in any of our founding documents.
We are NOT a democracy, nor a "true democracy".

Sorry.
 
As most of us probably know, "Republic" (in the Founder's day) really just meant "a government other than monarchy", and implies that power is spread around a bit rather than overly concentrated.

Representative Democracy is simply one form of Republic, and we are indeed a Representative Democracy in most regards.

Lots of people get hung up on the idea of Democracy and use "Democracy" as if it were interchangeable with "limited government that respects individual liberty".... but the two are NOT synonymous. A Democracy, Representative or Direct, can be just as tyrannical as any Autarchy.

The critical difference in the founding of America was not so much that we did not have a king, or that we used Representative Democracy for most positions of power, but that we instituted a LIMITED GOVERNMENT.

That is, a government whose powers were supposed to be limited to a short list and no more, and further constrained and fenced in by the Bill of Rights to specifically define where Gov is definitely never supposed to stick its nose.

The Bicameral legislature, seperate Presidency, and seperate Judiciary, as well as the counterbalance of the several States and their individual and collective power, were supposed to be somewhat adversarial, to place checks and balances on governing power.

Now, in the two centuries intervening, the power of the central government has grown massively while State power has waned, and our system of checks and balances has been watered down a lot. Even so, we still have a government that finds its power a lot more limited than the governments of many of our "fellow democracies" around the world... many of whom lack a document like our Constitution or BoR that fences gov't in so carefully.

Still, the Constitution and BoR are just paper.... they only have power if The People insist government keep to it. We've been falling down on the job on that one, IMO, but even so things are not so bad as some make it out to be.

The thing we need to bear in mind is that the foremost key to good governance is not democracy per se, but LIMITED government... not government whose power is theoretically without limit, without check or balance. Even Autarchy (one person rule) could be a reasonably free country if the Autarch's powers were LIMITED and if there was some organization capable of stopping him from overstepping his authority.
 
The thing we need to bear in mind is that the foremost key to good governance is not democracy per se, but LIMITED government... not government whose power is theoretically without limit, without check or balance. Even Autarchy (one person rule) could be a reasonably free country if the Autarch's powers were LIMITED and if there was some organization capable of stopping him from overstepping his authority.
Very well said, and I totally agree. But I imagine that we share similar values, namely we place a value on liberty. But I believe that a big problem is that there are many who don't value liberty, or at least not liberty for all. They are all to happy to use the power of government to actually trample on the liberty of their neighbor. To them, a government that is limited in its power is useless and weak. They want to use the government to do everything - to solve every problem, right every wrong, manage our daily lives, put bread in our mouths. Everything. You ask them what should government NOT do, and they give you a blank stare.

It's a matter of different value systems. Personally, I continue to expand my list of areas over which I don't believe government ought to exert control. I find it hard to justify government exerting power where I think regular people can do a better job, and the list of things that government screws up continues to grow in my book.
 
Very well said, and I totally agree. But I imagine that we share similar values, namely we place a value on liberty. But I believe that a big problem is that there are many who don't value liberty, or at least not liberty for all. They are all to happy to use the power of government to actually trample on the liberty of their neighbor. To them, a government that is limited in its power is useless and weak. They want to use the government to do everything - to solve every problem, right every wrong, manage our daily lives, put bread in our mouths. Everything. You ask them what should government NOT do, and they give you a blank stare.

It's a matter of different value systems. Personally, I continue to expand my list of areas over which I don't believe government ought to exert control. I find it hard to justify government exerting power where I think regular people can do a better job, and the list of things that government screws up continues to grow in my book.
I tend to agree with both you and Goshin.

In my ideal world, government would be limited to the bare minimum possible.

It's defining precisely what that bare minimum is that's the issue.

And then there’s the question of how you deal with people who have come to depend on one government system or another if/when you DO eliminate said government system…

Just cut them off?

A whole host of other issues crop up.
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But IMO, the one of the main problems we’ve had is that politicians have for decades been reacting to any problem by (relatively) quickly passing a “solution”, so they can tell their constituents “hey look, I’m watching out for you on (insert issue, whether real or manufactured, here).

But those “solutions” cause other issues.
More “solutions”.
More issues.
Etc.
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I recall hearing somewhere that way back, Senators were selected/elected by the state governments – not directly by the people as they are now.

This would seem to prevent the “mob rule by proxy” that sometimes seems to exist, at least in the senate…

But I dunno.
 
Just for you reference...

 
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