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While I agree that some people who enjoyed absolute power were actually rather decent, I doubt that the modern world is conducive to producing more of them. The degree to which power corrupts a person depends a lot on external variables, and the variables that have been at play in the last 60 years or so have produced a lot more malevolent dictators than benevolent ones. Guido van Rossum is the only person that I can think of who actually lives up to the BDFL title in today's world, and that's probably because his realm does not physically exist ;) I also wonder if the possibility of getting another King Sejong is important enough to risk getting another Vlad the Impaler, even if the chances were as good as 50/50. Even if power only corrupts 50% of the time, or even 10% of the time, maximin still says that you should choose the safer option. I'm not saying that the current form of American democracy is the safest option. Every day it seems to move further away from the maximin solution. But if so, that's only a reason to find and implement the maximin solution, not a reason to move even further away from it. If all the power actually rests in the hands of 10000 unaccountable bureaucrats, the solution is not to give more powers to Obama and thereby end up with 10001 unaccountable people. The solution is to make those 10000 bureaucrats fully accountable, in addition to Obama, so that we have 10001 fully accountable people. > The thing is any kind of true democracy is going to be full of exciting politics. As long as my life, limbs, and human rights are not at the mercy of some megalomaniac (or any particular interest group), I'm sure I'll get used to whatever excitement "true democracy" brings. I'm assuming, of course, that this "true democracy" includes strong constitutional protections of my rights so that nothing that happens in ordinary politics can violate them. Democracy doesn't mean everything gets decided democratically, there are certain things that even a majority shouldn't be able to do. > Your ideal of a system where the vectors balance out is ... quite close to the current system. There are too few vectors in the current system. We need way more vectors to cancel out supersized incumbents like the military-industrial complex, the oil industry, Monsanto, the MAFIAA, etc. Putting together a short list of interested parties and deciding all matters among them is just corporatism. We need something more open and flexible, where EFF (for example) has a realistic chance of outcompeting Sony in the marketplace of ideas. > it also makes it unable to make difficult-but-necessary decisions. Big decisions usually shouldn't be made in a hurry. So as long as it's not 100% impossible for the government to make decisions, I think it's OK for there to be lots of checks and balances in the way. (This would be a different situation from what we currently have, where unaccountable bureaucracies are responsible for a lot of inertia.) I also don't think it's right to move in the direction of facilitating the production of massive decisions on a national scale. In my picture of "true democracy", decision-making responsibilities would be decentralized unless the federal government absolutely needs to get involved, and most local decisions would follow an agile and rapid-iteration model. Take health care reform for example. Did we really need such a protracted, ideologically charged, misinformation-filled, national debate about it? Vermont actually wanted to implement their own single-payer system, and a few other states had similar but slightly different ideas. Why couldn't we let those states implement their own health care systems first, compare results after a couple of years, make changes along the way, and get other states on board over the next decade or two with plenty of opportunities for A/B testing between them? Answer: Ego. Obama and Hillary wanted to finish the job themselves, get it exactly right the first time, and take credit for it. A very large proportion of the stalemates that make Washington ineffective could be eliminated if people refrained from saying "But there's this teeny tiny provision here that I don't completely agree with..." and just agreed to reiterate every year. Can't agree on the debt ceiling right now? Release the current version now and release the .1 version by the end of the year. You ask how the government can make massive decisions. I ask why such massive decisions are needed in the first place. Of course this won't work all the time (wars, for example, can't be easily canceled once begun), but the thing about necessary evils is that you don't want to make them appear any more necessary than they strictly are. |