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Comment by breakfastduck | Hacker News Reader

It's also incredibly successful in destroying social mobility, causing people to be stuck in ever-increasing levels of poverty - which is pretty destructive to peoples welfare too.

Not to mention it prevents political violence at the expense of causing extreme violence in foreign nations. As long as its not us, right?

I would say with this that unfortunately democracy = capitalism in the world we live in. And its really capitalism that causes those things, rather than democracy itself. I dont want to give the impression I hate democracy as an idea, just how we've implemented it.

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The idea that there are "ever-increasing levels of poverty" in western democracies is transparently false. Would you like to try to provide some evidence for that?

> "ever-increasing levels of poverty"

people who say this are actually not saying the literal meaning of that sentence. I believe they mean that they observe ever increasing levels of wealth amongst some people, but not themselves or their friends/peers. Therefore, they equate the fact that they are not at the same relative level of wealth as some wealthy people, and thus, conclude that it must be that poverty is increasing.

And people who say this in response think that just because overall quality of life is increasing on average the people on the lower end of the spectrum cant be in relative poverty

> It's also incredibly successful in destroying social mobility.

I find it difficult to agree with this sentiment. Social mobility might have decreased in the last four decades. But in the longer perspective there has never been a more egalitarian and meritocratic social structure than in our time. And that structure exists mainly in the democratic states of the world.

OP was talking about representative democracy specifically, not democracy in general. There are other ways to go about it. In fact, there are ways to go about representative democracy that are drastically different from the status quo, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegate_model_of_representati....

And there are democracies out there today that aren't capitalist, in the true meaning of that word:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Zapatista_Autonomous_Mun...

https://pdfhost.io/v/Hrr2IgtuS_SocialContractoftheDemocratic...

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