Democracy and Voting = a choice?

[ninjacob]

I thought I'd share my thoughts on here since this site seems to be quite libertarian friendly.

Does democracy provide real choice because you get to vote every 4 years?

What if you take that concept for anything else, let's say cars. There is only 1 car company in the world, Ford. You get to send Ford your suggestion every 4 years "I want SUV" or "I want fuel efficiency" or "I want a convertible" or "I want a pickup truck". And whatever suggestion was most popular, Ford would do that for the next 4 years.
Do you still call that having a choice?

[1714133721]

1714133721

[1714133721]

1714133721

[1714133721]

1714133721

[1714133721]

1714133721

[1714133721]

1714133721

[1714133721]

1714133721

[kiba]

Does democracy provide real choice because you get to vote every 4 years?

What if you take that concept for anything else, let's say cars. There is only 1 car company in the world, Ford. You get to send Ford your suggestion every 4 years "I want SUV" or "I want fuel efficiency" or "I want a convertible" or "I want a pickup truck". And whatever suggestion was most popular, Ford would do that for the next 4 years.
Do you still call that having a choice?

Yes, it's a choice. The question is: is the choice a good thing? What is the good thing, anyway?

[smellyBobby]

This could be a good thread.

I think you being a bit to generous in your ford analogy. I would replace "I want" with "You can have" .

I think that the current voting system acts more as a blunt accountability measure. Preventing a minority group from pursuing their agenda indefinitely.

[benjamindees]

The choice is whether to vote or not.  All the other bullshit is designed to misdirect your attention from this fact.

[goatpig]

Democracy implies you are forced to be a member of the group. If an action is voluntary, by principle, there is no need to vote about whether taking it or not, only those interested would partake in it while the rest of the audience would move on. Now, some prefer that to a single guy making all the decisions, but to pretend that democracy is somehow legitimate because it is the "will of the people", as opposed to the will of dictator, is a farce. If the dictator is illegitimate because he enforces his decisions on the group, then so is democracy for enforcing its decisions on the minority. As such, unless your choice aligns with the majority, you ain't got bananas. Another case of "you're free as long as you do what I tell you".

[2_Thumbs_Up]

It is certainly a choice, just not a free one. The voting booth is simply a suggestion box for slaves.

[ninjacob]

So no one likes the simplicity and clarity of my analogy?
I've used it on statist and it worked like a charm. Everyone understood exactly that it would be silly to have a business run that way and call it choice. Hence the statist was having a hard time defending his "voting = choice" position.

I just thought I'd share. I'm not sure whether any of you agree with my analogy or not d:

[BitterTea]

To me, democracy is the idea that having a choice between slave owners makes one less of a slave.

[Vitalik Buterin]

To me, democracy is the idea that having a choice between slave owners makes one less of a slave.

But do you have a choice? To me, democracy is a weighted random number generator that decides between slave owners where I have a 1 in 5 million chance of modifying the outcome.

[ribuck]

Democracy is the cows in a field voting on which farmer will raise them and milk them.

[smellyBobby]

I'm gonna try to play devil's advocate.

Of course it is a choice, it is the citizen's obligation to demand that the candidate they elect will create the governance structure that allows the citizen to have additional choice in other aspects of society, not just the election. No one is forcing anyone to be a slave explicitly or implicitly. The citizen has the choice wheather to challenge the status quo or not, and accept the consequences of that choice.

[benjamindees]

The citizen has the choice wheather to challenge the status quo or not, and accept the consequences of that choice.

That's ironic since, by some interpretations, voting is considered "challenging the status quo".

[smellyBobby]

It was directed against the notion that "it is a choice between slave owners". If there are only slave owners standing as candidates, then stand for something other than being a slave owner. Otherwise accept the consequences of your vote.

[kiba]

I'm gonna try to play devil's advocate.

Of course it is a choice, it is the citizen's obligation to demand that the candidate they elect will create the governance structure that allows the citizen to have additional choice in other aspects of society, not just the election. No one is forcing anyone to be a slave explicitly or implicitly. The citizen has the choice wheather to challenge the status quo or not, and accept the consequences of that choice.

The citizens cannot make the informed choice and it is impossible for politicians to be informed.

In our jobs and day-to-day life, we all specialize in some kind of knowledge and field. Beyond that, we are ignorant, so to speak.

I don't know medicine or how to build houses. I just know how to make website.

The knowledge of humanity is distributed. The bigger the population, the more knowledge you can store in our civilization.  However, our civilization becomes far more complex than for any puny human beings to understand.

[smellyBobby]

I'm gonna try to play devil's advocate.

Of course it is a choice, it is the citizen's obligation to demand that the candidate they elect will create the governance structure that allows the citizen to have additional choice in other aspects of society, not just the election. No one is forcing anyone to be a slave explicitly or implicitly. The citizen has the choice wheather to challenge the status quo or not, and accept the consequences of that choice.

The citizens cannot make the informed choice and it is impossible for politicians to be informed.

In our jobs and day-to-day life, we all specialize in some kind of knowledge and field. Beyond that, we are ignorant, so to speak.

I don't know medicine or how to build houses. I just know how to make website.

The knowledge of humanity is distributed. The bigger the population, the more knowledge you can store in our civilization.  However, our civilization becomes far more complex than for any puny human beings to understand.

[rant]
I was talking about this with a friend recently. We basically said for a society to survive it must be able to deal with information about the environment, relating to problems that threaten that societies existence.

As the problems become more complex and varied, requiring individuals to become more specialized and orientated to specific problems, then the ability to transfer information between sectors of the society will become less. Now this by itself is not an issue, it becomes an issue when information about an external problem can not be disseminated to those who face danger from the threat. So far this is only relevant to external problems, not political.

We postulated that one reason political threats occur, threats that arise from agents within the society, is because there is not something that links the welfare of all agents within society to each other, we defined "link" as what is felt by me is felt by you and vice versa. This is apparent in all ideologies;

capitalism -> basically a free for all, theres no link between those with capital and those without.
communism -> theres no link between the people who do something for the collective and those who don't.

It is just a fact of human nature, a fundamental deficiency of human intelligence. At this point in the discussion we think; "Given the way the world is, how do you link the welfare of all agents in a society?" So we said how should a internal political threat be dealt with?
Using the logic outlined above this meant that all agents within a society would need to have a understanding about relevant political threats. Now this becomes impossible if the information related to these threats can not be distributed and processed by all agents. This is where I put your statement.

Now what about external-political threats? Lets imagine that there is an external threat of some sought. This threat is so complex that it requires a small group of individuals to develop amazing capabilities to handle and understand this threat. These methods are beyond the reach of any individual outside of this small group. This threat is going to destroy a significant part of society, including these individuals, but this threat is a conscious entity, a god of some sort, and if the small group co-operates with this god, they will survive but a larger part of society will be destroyed. Now what would happen if the welfare of all agents within the society were "linked"?  Or what would happen in a society with agents that could transfer and process more information, thereby spreading information about the "god threat" and "political threat"?

To me this demonstrates two ways to mitigate this risk: an increased welfare linkage between individuals or/and agents transfer and process more information. Simply more empathy and greater education, by force/mandatory.

[/end rant]


So the premise of your argument is that there are so many problems faced by civilization, that it is impossible for politicians to make the right decision and consequently citizens?
Why do politicians need to know about all problems? We don't need some pseudo-oracles, we only need to gauge the intentions of other agents as humans generally lack empathy. Once you gauge the intention of agents that problems are delegated to, then you need to gauge the skill. And then you need an ongoing structure to manage both, i.e transparency and accountability.

[caveden]

I wonder if anybody has ever calculated the chances of a vote making any difference in elections. I bet the chances are compared with those of winning a lottery, if not worse. You probably have much more chances of dying in your way to the voting center than of having your vote making any difference.

[speeder]

There are some math people that proved that Democracy actually do not work perfectly ever.

For example, we have candidates, A, B and C.

If they get: 45, 35, 20 percent respectively, the 45 percent guy wins.

But then, you will notice, that 55% of the population still do not want that guy.

In Brazil for example, in the last elections, we had Dilma Rouseff (ex-terrorist, communist), José Serra (socialist with right leanings), and Marina Silva (green party, european style of green party...)

Most of the people you asked, clearly did not wanted Dilma, and preferred Marina, but knowing roughly how crap math work, a good amount voted for José Serra, believing he had more chance of winning than Marina

In the end, Dilma got less than 50%, Serra second place, and Marina a close third. Dilma won, and is our current president, but if you ask people around, they regretted voting for Serra instead of Marina (that still surprised with the amount of votes she got, people were expecting much lower, considering how irrelevant her party is).


So you ask around: Do you voted for Dilma? Do you like Dilma?

People usually, will say no. But Dilma still won, because she had the most solid voting base (thanks for her vice-president being of the most powerful party, and her party being popular too). The anti-Dilma people could not organize to vote on a single person.

[Bazil]

I wonder if anybody has ever calculated the chances of a vote making any difference in elections. I bet the chances are compared with those of winning a lottery, if not worse. You probably have much more chances of dying in your way to the voting center than of having your vote making any difference.

In the Bush-Gore election of 2000 I think it came down to a thousand votes or so. That's a pretty tiny number considering all the people who voted.

[Findeton]

There's no real democracy in the states. I mean, democrats or republicans, are you joking? what kind of option to choose is that joke???

In other countries, they at least have smaller parties with seats in congress.

[oginiimaoyani]

voting is actually a choice but in today's politics individuals are not allow to make there choices.