Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

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> "Improve stuff" is extremely subjective

well breathing clean air and not cooking the planet is about as non-subjective as it gets. We're not really talking about sophisticated moral quandaries here, the bar for improvement in our societies is actually surprisingly low.

Not having everyone of the billions of people living in our cities carry around two tons of steel wherever they go ought to appeal to anyone who can do a bit of napkin math about energy consumption.

Elected officials doing whatever people tell them like a sort of walking strawpoll is a nice fiction but at the end of the day letting the inmates run the asylum is a bad idea. If we want to make necessary improvements it's going to come at the cost of going against the often short-sighted interests of citizens.

Ah yes the old "the majority of people are wrong, MY ideas are correct, why doesn't the government just implement all of MY ideas as they're obviously correct" argument.

in some cases the majority of people are wrong, and it is trivial to show why they are wrong. In case of environmental issues or degrading of the commons in general the issue is that externalities are not priced in as economists would say, and if they are tried to be priced in like in France, the democratic process or even street violence is used to prevent that from happening.

Again I think it's important to state that this isn't the case for all issues. On many fronts majority opinion may be useful, but on some issues it's glaringly obvious that people are unwilling to bear the costs for their lifestyle, and ignore the long-term harm they cause.

In fact there's another democratic majority that is completely ignored by this appeal to the people, and that is future citizens. As Chesteron once said about the dead

“Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death."

I think more importantly than the dead are the countless of people who have to live with the mess we've left for them and in which they didn't have a say.

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