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Comment by ThrustVectoring | Hacker News Reader

Pure majoritarianism isn't necessarily best either, it just always takes the majority's side in disputes where a strongly-held minority opinion comes in conflict with a weakly-held majority one. Like, it's obvious that you should take the side of the majority when it's "we'd rather not be slightly inconvenienced by paying for rent-seekers" regardless of how intensely the minority of rent-seekers want to rent-seek, but it's much less obvious that we should have zero handouts to narrow interests when it's "please spend $10000 per life saved via rare-disease research and treatment, I don't care how little the general public is aware of and cares about it and would generally prefer lower taxes"

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> but it's much less obvious that we should have zero handouts to narrow interests when it's "please spend $10000 per life saved via rare-disease research and treatment, I don't care how little the general public is aware of and cares about it and would generally prefer lower taxes"

In reality, this turns into we should have billion dollar handouts to narrow interests because rather than use taxpayer funds to R&D cures into the public domain using the existing world class university system, the narrow interests would prefer being able to benefit from patented medicines:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/drug-prices-reach-new-highin-th...

> Since August, U.S. or European health regulators have approved four new products intended as one-time treatments for rare genetic diseases that carry list prices of at least $2 million a patient, including two from Bluebird Bio Inc.

Okay, make the hypothetical be malaria nets or insulin then. The exact specifics don't matter all that much, it's just an illustration that you can't use issue-by-issue majoritarianism to generate a coalition that can pass a broadly popular group of policies that lacks individual plank-by-plank popularity. There's no enforcement mechanism to coordinate a "you vote for my pet issue and I'll vote for yours".

> it's "please spend $10000 per life saved via rare-disease research and treatment

That's an extreme extrapolation. Sure, the majority would maybe not care at all for such a minority treatment if it came to pass. But then again, the practical reality is that in a system that allows minority to override the majority, everything else goes wrong even if that one goes right.

There is an example. The US was explicitly crafted as a format that would allow the minority to override the majority to prevent 'the tyranny of the majority'. This was explicitly expressed by various founding fathers of the US, especially by de facto architect of its constutition, John Adams. And that's the reason why there is FPTP, the Senate, the supreme court, with the latter two easily able to override whatever majority vote is.

They did this because they feared the majority demanding land redistribution and passing it with their vote. The British aristocrats' lands were confiscated and redistributed after the revolution, that was ok. But the founding fathers feared that it would give ideas to the people about the lands of the now-American-but-ex-British elite like themselves.

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