[fsloth]

"this is basically the point of representative democracy"

Democracy is not a system to promote meritocracy. It's a system to avoid autocracy, and all other things are exernalities rising from this core purpose.

The point of democracy is to have a constant churn within a large enough powerpool to discourage formation of ruling cliques and oligarchies. It's nice if the chosen representatives are efficient and skillfull, but that's not the point of the system.

[shkkmo]

I've always thought that one the the biggest benefits of democracy was to provide a mechanism of power transfer / competition between groups of elites that uses the votes of the masses rather than the blood of the masses as a medium.