[psychoslave]

You can't find that because any concentration of power means the corruption forces have only very limited surface to pressure, and all the more that surface is actually easy to swap with one molded for even more corruption convenience.

People ever rule through direct decisions or are enslaved into alien agendas on which they have no agency.

[nicoburns]

In countries like the US and UK with FPTP voting systems, proportional representation would help a lot. As it would make it a lot more viable for candidates outside of the main two parties to stand (and actually have a chance of winning).

(although in a UK context, it's looking highly likely that we'll have a "changing of the guard" in the next election with both Reform and Green party making significant inroads at the expense of the more established Conservative and Labour parties)

[kypro]

FPTP will just guarantee that nothing meaningful can be done. Too much compromise in decision making is bad.

Personally I think ideal set up is a system which grants quite a of power to a small handful of people, but makes it very easy for those people to be removed. This is typically the model that works best in business and other cooperative pursuits anyway.

Throwing more people in the room with different opinions will ensure significant decisions can almost never made. Any policy too far to the right or too far to left will be watered down. The result is that you'll be led by centrists who can't really change anything and anything they do change will be disliked by everyone.

[sally_glance]

Great idea, except that I don't think it's easy to make sure we don't grant too much power. Basically this idea is the core of representative democracy. Problem is, the people who have been granted a lot of power are very good at finding loopholes to avoid or remove the safeguards we put in place...

[kypro]

There is a trade-off here for sure... I don't agree so much that the goal is to limit power though, but to ensure any power given to leaders is conditional.

I think ideally you want a CEO type leader of a country who has a lot of executive power, but that leader has a board who provides oversight, then ultimately the public are all shareholders who collectively hold the company and it's leaders to account.

I'd argue generally speaking we want to grant more power to our leaders than we do today, but make them much easier to remove and have a well design constitution so certain things are legally impossible in the same way a CEO can't just decide they now have 100% voting rights and no longer need to listen to share holders.

The solution to a bad CEO isn't to have 10 CEOs. The solution is for the shareholders to boot them for a better CEO.

[sally_glance]

Yeah, for companies this works because there are external (government) entities providing and enforcing a framework. For countries, there is nothing like that. The traditional solution is separation of powers inside of the country I guess, but this requires limiting individual power. Also it's quite complicated in practice and requires a complex legal framework which is sadly often weak to "workarounds" again.

[krupan]

Government is doing stuff that's awful and whenever people propose solutions to this someone always complains that government "won't be able to get anything done." That's the point! What are you worried about?

[watwut]

> FPTP will just guarantee that nothing meaningful can be done.

Because congress and senate in America are soooo active ...

[drdaeman]

It’s easy to solve concentration of power, just distribute it more. Nowadays we can have quite large distributed systems.

It’s nigh impossible to invent a system that truly formalizes collective will with the goal of optimizing for everyone’s best long-term interests, minimizing unhappiness.

[rapind]

100% agree, and I think that's sort of what was intended with a lot of democratic government setups. What we fail to realize though (or maybe just remember) is that these systems will ALWAYS be under attack by those who want more power always looking for attack surfaces. (We seem to be under attack by almost all, if not all, current billionaires!)

For example in the US, the executive order is a massive problem. Citizens united as well. And for all democracies the natural appeal of strongman politics is a huge problem.

Every attempt at government overreach really needs to be questioned. I don't say rejected, just questioned. How will it be used by future powers? Is the tradeoff worth it? Can it be temporary? Do we even have a way to claw it back if it turns out to be detrimental? Is it too subtle and nuanced that the majority will miss seeing it? etc.

[ranger_danger]

> these systems will ALWAYS be under attack by those who want more power

I think this is an inherent human problem that prevents us from overcoming it... history has proven that the more equal everyone is, and the less individual ownership they have, the lazier and more bored they get.

Look at the previous attempts at socialism... people stop caring when there's no goal to work towards, they can't all be doing the same thing and just be happy, because humans are naturally competitive. We desire things other people don't have, like possessions, money, or power.

[Ray20]

> the lazier and more bored they get

People don't become "lazy". They're lazy from the beginning. Laziness is something they overcome for personal gain. And if the system promises fewer personal gains for overcoming laziness, then why bother?

[ranger_danger]

There can be other valid perspectives than your own

[psychoslave]

Well we can look at attempts at socialism and see that some failed, some were successful: https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/successful-sociali...

But of course success is relative to some cultural values. We could just as well wonder about success and failure in implementation of any political system.

The most remarkable trait of humans is cognitive plasticity, so determining any natural tendency that would be more inate than acquired is just a game of pretending there are hypothetical humans living out of any cultural influence that would still exhibit predominent behavioral traits.

Competition is a social construct. There are people out there whose biggest concern is keeping focus on enjoying what they are, freeing their attention from the illusion of possession, avoiding any financial/material bounds they can and staying away of contingent hierarchical servitudes.

They are also many people who holds desires for both of these perspectives, or any interpolation/extrapolation that they can suggest.

[drdaeman]

We aren’t inherently competitive, we just want nice things. It takes a very special mindset to want others to have less, and society should actively discourage such lines of thought by countering them with examples of how things never end well.

This said, I wasn’t suggesting socialism or equality or anything like that - only minimizing long-term unhappiness. That’s the only thing that I could not think an argument against - like why would anyone rational ever want others to be long-term unhappy?

[rapind]

Is there a way to accept but also limit greed that is reliable and durable?

Like a pragmatic meritocracy. We accept that there will be cheaters, and we won't catch or stop them all, but we have some hard limits. Do we care if you stop working so hard once you hit $1b? Maybe we'd even prefer that you did stop working (against societies interest!)?

This wouldn't even remotely resemble the communism bugaboo. It's basically saying, yes greed can be good, but at some point it gets ridiculous.

[quantummagic]

Except it's very easy to "sell" government overreach. Whenever a plane flies into a tower, or flu season is extra scary, people will clamor for strict government authority. With every such event, the government gains capabilities and tendencies that always end up with a few people having outsized power over the masses.

[rapind]

Yes, but I don't think it's so straightforward. I think there are bad actors marketing this overreach. Like the surveillance industry for the Patriot Act (tech, defence, telcom, maybe compliance vendors?). I don't think their goal is to create a distopia, but we should always be looking at incentives for large government programs.

[quantummagic]

It is straightforward, and very predictable. Bad actors, aren't an anomaly.

[9dev]

Which is exactly why we need a strong federation, and broad participation in democratic process across the bank. Many people can't even be bothered to vote, much less participate in their local, municipal governments. That must change.

[psychoslave]

Voting is meaningless if it's not for a program with people charged to implement it being on revokable mandat if they go out of the rails of the planned destination.

Instead general elections are theaters were all that is voted is which clown is going to have a blank check.

[riddlemethat]

In capitalism, the rich get powerful; in socialism, the powerful get rich.

[direwolf20]

In enlightenment, you realise rich and powerful are synonyms.