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Why Democracy fails (1 Viewer)

SylviaB

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1. Rational Ignorance. Because you only have one vote and won’t influence an election, it is rational for most people to not spend time researching the issues. Attempts to curb this problem could be to require a poll test, but that is full of obvious problems. Democracy depends on voters being informed on issues that they cannot have an impact on, which is to say democracy depends on voters being irrational.

2. Package deals. When you buy things from a store, you get to be a la carte to a great degree. You don’t have to buy a complete kitchen set, you can buy the refrigerator and the microwave separately. The specificity depends on demand - few care to buy each component of a refrigerator separately, and so that stuff is harder to find.
With democracy, your only choice is between platforms that have a shot at winning, and this is usually only two or three and encompasses too many issues. Maybe you want school spending to be cut, and want unemployment insurance to be cut, but each candidate or party is only willing to cut one or the other, so you don’t get to truly vote your preference.

3. Voting wars. Group A votes itself the resources of group B. Simple enough. Elections aren’t really a competition of ideas, because trying to get group A to vote for not getting free stuff from group B is not a contest, it’s begging a thief. Humans are moral animals, and so theft-rationalization industries develop, which rationalize the theft with marxoid economic theories, appeals to racial identity and collective intergenerational debt, and various other obtuse and roundabout justifications.

One of these rationalizations is to call opponents of democracy social darwinists. They support an evolutionary environment that enables the irresponsible reproduction of their voting blocs at the expense of the responsible reproduction of their opponents, but you are to believe that that is NOT social darwinism, but when you advocate an environment that enables the reverse, that’s social darwinism. So social darwinism = an evolutionary environment that grants no favoritism to irresponsible reproduction of the takers.

There is also the problem of the identity-democrat, and I don’t necessarily mean advocate of the US democrat party, though that correlation high. The identity-democrat fancies himself an advocate of the little guy, and so masochistically votes for wealth redistribution schemes that harm him. The identity-democrats tend to be “progressive” on social issues and white, while the taker-democrats tend to be more conservative and black and brown (they are NOT “liberals”, they are racial national socialists).


4. Concentrated benefits, diffuse costs. When you cut unemployment insurance, you are no longer giving a concentrated group of people the money they need to survive, and many of them will die. This makes them extremely motivated in opposing cuts. Whereas the people paying for unemployment benefits won’t die from paying a little bit more.
The results of democracy are manifest - constant increases in spending, with anti-spending movements being flash-in-the-pan spoiler operations. The Taxed Enough Already (TEA) party has not achieved any of their goals of cutting spending, and they most certainly will not since the incentives of democracy are against it, as are many of the beneficiaries of democracy-enabled theft.
One should place democracy in the same ideological zone as communism, because the underlying assumption of democracy IS communism, because it assumes things are already communally owned and thus can be voted on. If they weren’t communally owned, if an individual really owned what is called “his home” and “his money”, then you couldn’t just vote to take any of it away to give it to people who don’t have value.
(That’s another reason many are militantly pro-democracy: without it, nobody would care what they said or thought. Democracy is 1 person = 1 vote, giving worthless people a level of influence they couldn’t achieve by honest means.)
Democracy is a form of communism. And the US is a representative democracy. My prediction is that democracy will be remembered as a form of communism, and just as we wonder how the USSR lasted as long as it did under the impossible regime of explicit communism, people will marvel at how the USA lasted as long as it did under a regime of implicit communism. This is easy to understand, but difficult for most to swallow.
One last point is that democracy is inconsistent. Man supposedly needs a state because if left to his own devices it’ll be Mad Max, yet this state is to be controlled either through popularity contests (representative democracy) or man’s own judgement on abstract issues which he has no rational incentive to properly research (direct democracy). Man is fallen so needs a state, but this state is to be controlled by man? Monarchy is at least consistent in this regard.


from fringeelements
 
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davidbarnes

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Everyone has a right to have a say. Democracy and communism are far better than dictatorship.
 

davidbarnes

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Majority wins should be two-thirds or three-quarters. Of course it might not work if everyone is a fucking selfish bias bitch.
I'm not making a party now so I don't care yet. I think there should be a solution where people make their own views rather than being highly influenced, e.g. PARTIES.
So what happens when you get a result where 25% vote for party A, 30% for party B, 15% for party C and 30% for party D. The parties are all far apart from each other and cannot work togeterh due to fundamental differences.
 

Cianyx

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Democracy fails because Donal Trump is running for top dog
 

Lentern

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He has got to be better than Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, John McCain or Sarah Palin though.
Donald Trump has got to be better than Ron Paul or John McCain? What the fuck man what the fuck!
 

Lentern

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He has got to be better than Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, John McCain or Sarah Palin though.
Donald Trump has got to be better than Ron Paul or John McCain? What the fuck man what the fuck!
 

funkshen

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wait so is rational or irrational action the fundamental failure in democratic society

maybe the rational choice paradigm makes it rational to perceive or misinterpret problems with democracy

p.s. shadow democracy is a godawful theory.

p.p.s democracy is a misnomer. is democracy the right to consultation? the right to participation in decision making? is it tyranny of the majority? is it representative or direct or participatory? to attack the broad umbrella of 'democracy' is a fallacy and is usually just a manifestation of angst about cumbersome, inept and failing modern democratic governance.

p.p.p.s. Rational choice attacks on democracy almost always fail because they are most often done by people with no comprehension/application of Aristotelian rhetorical method. I can see the inventio but the dispositio is utterly lacking

p.p.p.p.s. just sperging out
 
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SylviaB

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wait so is rational or irrational action the fundamental failure in democratic society
Its not the whole failure, but the problem in the context of the first point is rational action. Democracy depends on people using certain means to attain certain ends, between which they don't establish a causal relationship, which is by definition irrational action.

p.p.s democracy is a misnomer. is democracy the right to consultation? the right to participation in decision making? is it tyranny of the majority? is it representative or direct or participatory? to attack the broad umbrella of 'democracy' is a fallacy and is usually just a manifestation of angst about cumbersome, inept and failing modern democratic governance.
It's referring generally to represetative democracy. If you want to claim that other forms of democracy can work, then okay, cool, but the problems listed above are inherent to representative democracy, not just its current manifestation.
 

Azure

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Barack Obama is a joke who like Kevin Rudd promised the world and delivered nothing.

He should be replaced with Ron Paul ASAP.
 

funkshen

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Its not the whole failure, but the problem in the context of the first point is rational action. Democracy depends on people using certain means to attain certain ends, between which they don't establish a causal relationship, which is by definition irrational action.
Wouldn't a degree of disorder be manifest in any social organisation with rational and irrational constituents with an incredible capacity for cognitive dissonance? What if our current (representative) system is based on incomplete or incorrect notions of rationality? People aren't pure causal relationship-seekers, this much is patently obvious (we are symbolic-seekers as well, semiotics blah blah). Your points are valid but fallacy of third cause (the bane of logical rationality)

It's referring generally to represetative democracy. If you want to claim that other forms of democracy can work, then okay, cool, but the problems listed above are inherent to representative democracy, not just its current manifestation.
Democracy in principle, as in the right for individuals to participate in decision making, tends to improve decision making and outcomes in that it is basically an injection of pluralism into previously unequal power relationships. But representative democracy is really just the marriage of political economies of scale and apathetic but not disinterested group-oriented individuals who have a notion of their right to participate in politics. My point is not that other forms of democracy are better, in fact a mix of democratic forms is probably "best", but what is the alternative?

im tired as shit so if my arguments aren't 100% cogent idk
 
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bored of sc

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Democracy fails just like every other political affiliation does; because humans are egocentric and want power. In principle many political parties have great policies and moral standpoints. But in practice, everything comes down to the greed and/or reputation of a few powerful people. Most people would rather protect their reputation than bring about much needed social change.
 

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