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Comment by foo101 | Hacker News Reader

Why is democracy such a popular system for establishing governments?

When a member of our family becomes sick, we don't ask everyone to vote on possible treatments? We go to doctors who are trained to diagnose the cause of sickness and offer appropriate treatment.

When a scientist publishes a new study, we don't ask everyone what they think about the study? We ask other accomplished scientists to do a peer-review and offer their opinion on the study.

No matter what field we look at, we do not rely on laymen to decide the outcome but we rely on qualified experts and professionals.

But in case of establishing a government, which can have a long term impact on millions of livelihood, we ask just about anyone to offer their opinion in the form a vote. Why is this a reasonable system?

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“I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man.

I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.

The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation. . . .

The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.”

― C.S. Lewis

"Why is democracy is such a popular system for establishing governments?"

Here's an answer that I find satisfying but about which I think reasonable people could disagree:

In the US, at least, "democracy" works tremendously well for distributing the narrative that individual rational actors are the main and only political units.

Your example of a family is quite useful in illustrating that there are limitations to that view, regardless of how useful or destructive that view may be.

However, the utility of that view for maintaining the material situation of labor in the US is high.

That is, individualism as an idea is a useful tool for people with money and power to convince large groups of people that the division of wealth in the country is entirely the product of aggregate individual choices rather than the product of a system that is designed for the rich to get richer.

The truth of that proposition aside, I understand that utility to be the underlying historical motivation for people in the US to try and export their brand of democracy.

Everything corrupts over time so it's best if at least the corruption is at the decision of the majority. And if the power is dispersed wide enough, there is a hint of the possibility of a peaceful revolution if things need to be changed.

Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."

Because when government doesn't work, you generally don't have the option to go down the street and pick another government.

Who would the "qualified experts" that are choosing our government be?

I don't have a good answer but I believe that it certainly cannot be everybody.

Perhaps people who are accomplished scholars in political theory and economics and a few other relevant areas?

Economists are famous for repeatedly making predictions that turn out to be hugely wrong, groupthink and massive political biases. Don't think so somehow.

As for scholars in political theory, laughable. What does an ivory tower academic know about what people want or need? Marx spent his entire life reading books and writing political theory and his ideas lead to disaster everywhere.

Nope. Allowing anyone to take part is a great system.

Can you offer specific examples that make you believe that the cumulative opinion of scholars are going to be objectively worse than the cumulative opinion of everyone?

Communism was essentially dictatorship of political theorists. People like Lenin, Marx, Trotsky and even Stalin had all written books on political theory. It led to mass starvation, dystopia and economic collapse.

The USA went with cumulative opinion of everyone (democracies, markets).

Which country is the world's remaining superpower?

Both the US and China are superpowers. One sort of capitalist/representative, one sort of communist/oligarchical.

Maybe it just means that extremes don't really work that well.

I absolutely agree that rule by ideologue is terrible. I'm not sure I agree that universal suffrage democracy is a good method of preventing ideological theocracy. How many of those voters are under the spell of charismatic ideological propagandists?

Ah, but who chooses the experts? Whoever gets to do that has the real power. And I don't trust anybody with that level of power - you've given them the right to control the government, and call it "scientific", so that they can dismiss out of hand any arguments or complaints.

I don't like dictatorships, no matter who the dictator is. Spare us the dictatorship of the whoever chooses the "experts".

Dictatorships/oligarchies work very well when you have a good dictator. They work horrifically bad when you have a bad dictator.

Conversely, "democracies" work pretty ok when the people leading are doing a good job, and they work sort of bad when the people leading are sucky.

The difference being, democracy spreads out decision making to effectively limit risk.

Think of it like an investment. You can put all of your money on one really volatile stock. Maybe it will do really great! But maybe you will lose 95% of your money in an hour. Or, you can put it in a basket of carefullly-chosen stocks that have the collective goal of a slow, steady climb in value while limiting volatility.

Different goals.

That's pretty simple: if you don't pay taxes, your vote should be weighted accordingly.

Does Sales Tax count? What about gasoline taxes?

Of course, they are taxes. Also the weighting need not be linear - it could be a log scale.

I see the point you're getting at, but I think you're missing the civil service in your picture. They are the career professionals who should be taking the actual decisions - our elected representatives should stick to overseeing and representing their constituents.

Just like you have an elected board, who represent shareholders, overseeing the unelected executives at the top of any corporate structure.

The problem is that this setup is regularly decried by populists as being "technocratic" (as if that were a bad thing)

That would be a nice picture, except the federal civil service is nearly completely exempt from firing by any of those elected officials.

I agree with you that rule by bureaucrat is better than mob rule. But since you are in favor of limiting government power to a select few - I would choose to limit it to responsible taxpayers rather than unelected bureaucrats.

I wonder how often you've dealt with actual civil servants. Two problems:

1. Many civil services have unionised to the point where civil servants effectively cannot be fired. Guess how competent the resulting staff are.

2. Even if they could be easily fired, their hiring processes are also frequently a joke.

To give an example, the average age of officials at the British Treasury department is 27. This is not widely known, because officials love to hide behind anonymity, especially when publishing reports that sound superficially clever and authoritative but are later proven to be dead wrong about everything. There's no accountability anywhere.

Just look at how much difficulty civil servants have in even just managing contracts with third party providers. Now imagine how much harder they find it to actually do the work themselves.

What you are describing is a Technocracy. And unfortunately only ever worked in Superman: Red Son haha

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