FBXL Social

I've contemplated the strengths of democracy (including republics where representatives are voted in, so consider parliamentary democracies or democratic republics in my use of the term and not just direct democracy), and it seems pretty clear to me today.

Democracy has 2 major benefits over other forms of government:

First and foremost, when leaders get particularly bad, the process inherently allows leaders to be replaced without spending overwhelming resources on civil war or just being stuck with them until they die. When societies are in good shape, this can be an overwhelming advantage because civil war is a massive waste of resources -- men who die in war are dead for good, productive capacity used to produce gunpowder is effectively wasted, and in modern conflicts stuff like battleships have a huge amount of resources put into their creation that can end up on the ocean floor completely wasted. Therefore, the overhead of maintaining government is reduced.

Second, because individuals get a say under democracy, there is much higher buy-in over other forms of government. I recall recently hearing the argument made that taxes can be much higher under a democracy for example because people feel they're paying for something they have a stake in. This can also lead to overwhelming social cohesiveness since while people might not agree with every specific policy, they participated in a small way in the government that rules them.

So there's obviously 4 major downsides as well:

The lack of any sort of real leadership required to win an election compared to the leadership required to win a civil war means that people in charge of democracies don't necessarily need to be good leaders. Steel sharpens steel, but many successful representatives are instead of good leaders good at fundraising and good at toeing the party line.

The lack of a sort of revolutionary civil wars mean that leaders of democracies are often trying to make smaller reforms to systems with overwhelming ontological inertia. Simply winning an election won't be enough for either party to get rid of the administrative state or entitlements that are going to absolutely crush the next several generations who are going to be working to pay for money being handed to their grandparents.

The above downside as well as the second benefit combine to mean that democracies often grow out of control. People accept much higher taxes, and they accept much more government interference in their lives, because they feel like the growing mass of elites sucking like a lamprey off the side of the common man are at least "our" lamprey. Witness the overwhelming increases in government debt in many democracies over the past 20 years. Canada has nearly tripled its federal debt under Trudeau, and the US has increased its federal debt nearly 10 times since 2001. Moreover, government as % of GDP is gargantuan, making up at times in recent history over 50%, meaning there's more government than productive economy.

The final downside is related to the first, that steel sharpens steel, and while the people who choose the government in civil wars must be competent at making war, the people who choose the government under universal suffrage don't even need to be able to be basically competent as human beings. In the US, one major fight is over voter ID -- the idea being that a large chunk of voters are so incompetent that they can't possibly get ID, and it's important that such incompetent people have a voice.

Arguably, some of the above downsides are part of the reason why many implementations of democracy required a level of merit in order to earn the right to vote. Of course the past being the past sometimes that "merit" included things that arguably didn't really represent merit like being the right sex or race, but other things such as being a land owner do require someone to at least be able to obtain a parcel of property prior to trying to tell others how to run the government.

I've been throwing an idea around in my head lately of a merit-based system where net tax producers have the vote, and net tax consumers do not. This would mean of course that if you're living off of welfare you have no vote, but it would also mean that many people working for massive industries such as defense would have no vote by default because most of their pay would actually be coming from taxpayers. For someone working somewhere like Boeing, perhaps you could earn the vote by paying very high taxes, effectively paying back the part of your income that comes from taxpayers and only keeping the part of your earnings actually earned in the free market. Under such a system, there would not be a huge incentive to "buy votes", since once one used government to do so those people would no loner have votes. Many CEOs and the like would also lose their right to vote, since their companies rely so heavily on government to be profitable.

If segments of the population aren't contributing, why *should* they get a say? This is the core of both Aristotle and Plato's criticisms of democracy, that the masses want to be given something and they greedily eye the wealthy to give it.

Some might cry about unfairness, but I don't know that this form of "fairness" is necessarily a virtue. If you have 1000 welfare bums and 1 guy who works for a living, according to one vote per person it's fair to have 99.9% of the vote say they should suck the working guy dry, but is it really fair to the only guy doing any work in my hypothetical?

That's also why originally the senate in the US wasn't democratically elected -- they already had a democratically elected house of representatives, they wanted the senate to be a sober second look that was appointed by the states rather than just a second elected house. In Canada, the senate is appointed by the prime minister (which obviously has issues of its own). That's also part of the point of the electoral college in selecting the President under the US system, making sure that the leader isn't just the person who promises the most to the biggest population centers. When a winning presidential candidate isn't the one who won the popular vote, that's the system working as intended to protect against the tyranny of the majority.