| > I'm not sure what else we'd call a system where elected officials have zero incentive to do anything other than look good for their re-election campaign in a few years. We call it a side effect.
Democracy certainly wasn't designed with short sightedness in mind. That's a side effect of the far more important design goals around preventing abuse of power. Democracy may be short-sighted, but not by design, rather as a side effect of the design. Assuming we buy the idea that democracy is indeed short sighted. Every considered that as long as democracy avoids establishment of dictators/kings, repression and the unavoidable civil wars that follow, then given time free market forces will produce good results. One could reasonable argue democracy is just very very long sighted. > Generally it seems you wind up with oligarchs/corporations effectively owning politicians This isn't new, and yet we have built infrastructure before. Fought world wars. Irradiated deceases. Walked on the moon. On the scales of history large corporations tend to slide into irrelevance over time. The tech giants of today, will be rubber barons of tomorrow. Sure we might seem them around in the future. But a hundred years from now they might not seem so big. |