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Comment by Merrill | Hacker News Reader

So long as the electorate is asked to vote on policies, democracy will fail because for large nations the policy issues are too complex for the electorate to deal with.

The original idea in the US was for the electorate to elect representatives on the basis of their character and intellect. The representatives would then study the issues and create appropriate policy responses.

In fact, there was even a second level of indirection to isolate the Senate from current passions and fads of the electorate by having the Senators elected by State legislators for 6 year staggered terms.

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I’ve often thought that it would be easier for people to make votes on moral questions rather than policy questions.

I really don’t know why this is being downvoted, because that is what the research shows...

Because nobody but you has any idea what you’re talking about. What constitutes a “moral question”? If it’s not attached to some policy, then what, exactly, are we voting on? Seems like a poorly developed half-thought.

Of course you're getting grayed down for stating the obvious because you CANNOT be telling HN readers that policy issues are too complex for them to understand.

You can tell me that some policy issues are too complex for me to understand, not because I'm feeble-minded, but because I'm not neck deep in the details all day, every day.

I think both that policy issues are often less complicated than you make them out to be, and also that the people in charge are unfit to deal with them. The problem isn't complexity, it's judgement. If I had to pick my pet peeve, look at public or private education and its policies. The questions are simple, the answers are crazy.

I'm not going to disagree with anything you've said. I would just maintain that connecting policy initiatives to the real world does tend to be rather complex in terms of budgeting, administration, staffing and oversight.

Now this is completely independent from the politicking that often deforms what should be common sense solutions like what you mention in your example above.

I'd say that part of the problem too is that the people in charge are willing to ignore the conclusions of good judgement in favor of graft.

Im one of the few who would not mind for the Senate to go back to being elected by state legislators. We have to balance responsiveness to the electorate and responsiveness to the mob.

The original system was genius... basically, the voters pick the person they know in real life (30,000 people) who they trust. Those people make all of the upstream decisions. Sadly various idiots between 1789 and now introduced concepts like direct election of Senators, bound elactors, and — retch — primary elections, all of which will combine in their effect to produce the eventual death blow.

The original system was awful because wealthy landowners could do whatever they wanted. Appointed senators were awful because it boiled down to who could bribe enough legislators, and the electoral college system basically ensures that rural interests will always dominate the political system in the long-term.

.. wait are you saying it's not like this now?

I'm saying it was always messy, and it wasn't better before. It worked great in the US in the 30s and beyond because there was a large consensus around the New Deal, the government created a middle class that favored moderate policies because they had a stake in the system, and the Democratic party largely controlled the legislature for 60 years, which restrained the policies that could be enacted by the executive, and again...consensus around pro-social policies that contributed to widespread economic prosperity.

The shift to populist politics just mirrors pre-WWI politics.

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