[maerF0x0]

Democracy leads to dumb laws. It's a tyranny of the bottom 51%ile.

I say this a little tongue in cheek, but it's a real problem I've yet to understand -- how can an outlier intelligent person thrive in a system that caters to the masses? The masses have an incentive to drain any marginal value out of the intelligent, and have the political power to do so.

Edit: @majormajor sorry HN wont let me reply. The reason would be because the bottom 51% have something to gain from extraction. The top 51% however are already superior and dont need to rely on extraction to fulfill their wants/needs.

51% might have been too broad a number, but do you get my drift? Those in the lower intelligence brackets have a lot to gain, but those in the upper intelligence brackets do not have a lot to gain

[Geee]

This is true, and that's why there's constitution. Constitution makes sure that government power is limited to issues that don't change power balance from people to government or from minority to majority groups. It makes sure that no matter who runs the country, they can't ruin it.

[claytongulick]

The implication here is that there's a sort of "pareto distribution" of capability when it comes to voting "well". This was an issue that the founders tried to solve (in a bad way) by attempting to limit voting to property owners.

Of course, at the time this almost exclusively meant wealthy white men - which is obviously a terrible way to run a voting system.

The converse of this is the "bread and circuses" problem with Democracy. This was supposed to be mitigated by the "House of Lords" equivalent in the U.S. - The Senate.

The Senate was supposed to have been a buffer that protected against popular vote because they were assigned by the state legislature. They were beholden to the welfare of the state, not to direct-democracy political campaigning and all its ills.

Personally, I think its time to re-evaluate the 17th amendment to see if it had the desired effect, or resulted in massive unintended consequences.

[majormajor]

Why would the bottom 51% have more influence than the top 51% or the middle 25-76% or whatever other random fraction you pull out of your butt?

[trutannus]

>Why would the bottom 51% have more influence than the top 51%

51 + 51 = 102%

The bottom 51% have more influence than the top 49% because one is a majority. There is your answer.

[AlexandrB]

I think you missed the point. By this logic, the top 51% have more influence than the bottom 49% so why isn't GP saying they're the ones driving democracy?

As an aside, if you look at the elected representatives of Australia, I suspect you'll find most of them are highly educated.

[hazza_n_dazza]

or you might not. some of the highest ministers are country bumpkins catering to the lowest common denominator. the country was however founded by very well educated persons.

[tshaddox]

Why must the 50% percentile vote with the bottom half rather than the top half?

[hajile]

Most of the early Federalist papers deal with this problem of democracy in very damning terms. It leads to failures of the state -- usually within a hundred or so years. That is why the US decided to be a Republic instead.

Outside the US, countries after WW1/2 opted for democracies instead of republics with strong foundations. We're witnessing the point of failure due to the exact issues outlined in those papers.

[majormajor]

If there is such a convincing answer, why don't you actually state it, instead of just saying that others have talked about it?

It's very non-obvious to me why there's a natural "coalition of the bottom" versus that just being one possible way for things to shake out.

(It's also worth noting that the original American system already suffered a MASSIVE failure of the state - coincidentally also around the hundred year mark - which makes me think maybe they didn't have things perfectly figured out anyway. It hurts the credibility of the appeal to tradition/authority.)

[hajile]

It took them almost a dozen papers to cover all the points and explain them. Asking me to cover all that in a short post is rather unfair (and your various counterpoints no doubt appear in the anti-federalist papers which are also great reading).

What crisis are you talking about specifically? The closest they came to failure was definitely the civil war. Most people would put that as a crisis of absolutely irreconcilable moral differences rather than of normal politics. No political system ever devised could solve that problem without violence or complete separation.

[majormajor]

Well then why should I believe the set of arguments from the federalist papers over the counterpoints in the anti-federalist ones, then? The reason I ask you to summarize is because you're the one claiming their existence should change my views, and that they show that democracy has to fail.

The civil war sure seems like a bigger failure of a state than anything we've seen in Western Europe since the world wars. The "irreconcilable moral difference" was known when the constitution was being created, so punting on it is a pretty giant red flag to me about the ultimate wisdom of the founders, and about the constitution as something we should revere - we should change it constantly as situations change.