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by pbhjpbhj 1219 days ago
I doubt think that's true at all. In most representative democracies (UK here) we just don't have the ability to vote on such fine-grained legislation. If you asked the person in the street "should companies be held to absolutely strict truth in advertising for quantitative claims", once you explained what it meant (!), I'd warrant the vast majority would agree, yes they should.

It's anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist to allow misinformation on products. Markets can't optimise if you allow misinformation.
2 comments
gruez 1219 days ago
>If you asked the person in the street "should companies be held to absolutely strict truth in advertising for quantitative claims", once you explained what it meant (!), I'd warrant the vast majority would agree, yes they should.

This overestimates support because you're vague on what the policy actually is, so everyone thinks that it's going to be their preferred variant being implemented. See: the brexit vote which got a majority vote for "yes", but in reality the none of the individual proposals got majority approval.

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Retric 1219 days ago
If hypothetically 10% of the population said A but you slice up B into specific enough buckets then A wins even if the overwhelming majority dislike A.

Brexit was only a policy question if you combined two different questions. “Should we stay in the EU?” and “What kind of foreign policy should we have?” People answering Yes to the first question also had plenty of diversity in how they wanted to answer the second question.

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niconii 1219 days ago
> If hypothetically 10% of the population said A but you slice up B into specific enough buckets then A wins even if the overwhelming majority dislike A.

Yes, if you're only allowed to vote for a single option. If you're allowed to vote yes/no for each option, or rank them from best to worst, then this problem doesn't happen.

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Retric 1219 days ago
It’s very hard to make multiple choices representative. Yes/No is fine, the most popular option from 20 yes’s and 20 No’s isn’t meaningful.
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unpopular42 1219 days ago
> we just don't have the ability to vote

Well, you can ask your representative to represent you, right?

I live in a place with direct democracy and it's much less regulated than the UK. Therefore the link between having the ability and actually regulating more is not obvious to me.

> anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist to allow misinformation on products

Is it though? I mean, it might be bad, but I don't see how it's necessarily anti-democratic, as it has little to do with the governance model.

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