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Comment by CyberDildonics | Hacker News Reader

The structure of the US Government was born out of a centralization of power and thus was meant to be a decentralization of power.

It seems this fundamental aspect is lost on people and everyone gets caught up in a flurry of arguing over who to trust. The entire point in decentralization of power is trusting any one entity (or group with aligned incentives) as little as possible.

The simple, easy, and wrong answer is to try to optimize certain groups of people with aligned incentives by removing barriers to what they want. Those barriers, if at the service of the rest of the system are the very reason the system works.

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Distribution of power is a very, very difficult concept for people to grasp. I feel like if there was a better way to educate people about the consequences of misplaced power in our society, we wouldn't be facing many of the problems we have today.

Most Americans don't remember all the various other break off republics that Americans and American leadership wanted to spawn. The whole concept of a singular law via treaties, or large nations comprising of hundreds of millions of people is flawed. Nation States should be very small, a few million people and sovereign and independent and directly democratic. That way you can actually get some representation in how you want to live. As it is, you get virtually no representation.

I'm not the one who downvoted you, but I assume it's because you're advocating direct democracy, because everything else is spot on.

The problem with direct democracy is that people end up voting on things that don't affect them, which they don't have enough time or incentive to fully consider, but that severely harm other people.

Representative democracy (in sufficiently small communities) works because a representative can then afford to take the time to hear members of the community out before making a decision. And when the communities are small, individuals actually have the capacity to make their grievances heard and can potentially personally sway enough other voters to change an election outcome.

Switzerland is an example of direct democracy that works just fine. There is also the idea of an Athenian democracy which I also support.

At the end of the day the representative democracy has similar problems, where the representatives represent those people funding them. Don't even bother reading the legislation they are passing. and so on.

There is direct democracy and then there is the ability to have a referendum. Switzerland has a legislature. And about 20% of the population of California, where referendums have been nothing but trouble.

The place where direct democracy works great is to give the public the ability to repeal laws.

I think the big problem with the initiative system in California is that an initiative constitutional amendment needs only a bare majority to pass. While I believe the people should be able to amend the constitution, I think it should require a supermajority of at least 60%.

That would mean the vast majority of initiatives would be statutes, which could in principle be subsequently amended or overridden by the legislature. Of course, the legislature would presumably be reluctant to modify a popular initiative without a very good reason, as there would be a political cost to doing so, but at least it would be possible.

> That would mean the vast majority of initiatives would be statutes, which could in principle be subsequently amended or overridden by the legislature.

No, they couldn't. The power of the legislature to legislate is a delegated power from the citizenry, and, based on that principle, initiative statutes cannot be repealed or modified by the legislature (the legislature can send a measure to the voters amending them), unless the initiative statue itself expressly waives this protection.

Okay, but as long as we're talking about changing the initiative system, that could be changed too (in principle, of course -- I understand well how unlikely these proposals are to fly politically).

Doesn't help that the House of Representatives hasn't scaled with the population for a long time now.

When I read the Constitution and other things from that time period, it seems to me that the founders' primary concern was making sure that rich white men maintained power over government rather than a king.

Indeed. But why bring facts into the discussion?

I'm not upset. Americans have very averse reactions to accusations about the fundamentals of the American government. I went through public school in America so I am not at all surprised. A significant portion of public school here is dedicated to very explicitly outlining how amazing and enlightened the founding fathers were.

As one does, history being written by the victors and such.

You haven't given an examples of what you are talking about so I'm not sure you should switch on the self righteousness just yet.

Glamorizing historical figures is ridiculous and if you look at the replies, no one thinks the current system is perfect or even close. Even so, the amount of decentralization and the relative success of that structure in government was an enormous leap from the state of governments at the time.

I made a fairly simple claim which had nothing to do with your claims about the relative success of the US government or the enormity of the leap from the state of governments at the time.

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