I don’t know that I understand the “under capitalism” distinction here.
Like, I get that the point is that capital is influential, skewing the vote in favor of those who have it.
I just think that even in non-capitalistic systems there will invariably be some other proxy token for power that will be equally influential.
I don’t think the problem outlined is one that is fixed under any system.
Bingo. This is the issue the “enlightened thinkers” here fail to grasp. There is always going to be some form of power, which can lead to corruption, big or small. You want to deal with it in capitalism? Ban lobbying and donations over X amount, and then enforce it harshly. Not some white collar wrist slapping. That will take a big chunk of it. Insider trading ban on elected officials is the other big step.
While I hear you I think it’s also important to note that not all forms of economic organization have been explored. This goes doubly so for governmental systems. It’s not hard to argue that certain combinations and ways of organizing this way will inherently be more resistant to curruption than others. Power doesn’t inherently currupt, but it does reveal flaws
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say power does corrupt. For almost all of history, any sort of power eventually comes with corruption. Its kinda the human condition. That being said, I do think there are ways of minimizing that corruption and defending against it.
I would recommend looking into Robert Caro’s work. He’s quite literally the world’s leading journalist on curruption and power. His book The Power Broker in particular is a really good exploration of this in the real world . He’s famously quoted as arguing that power has no influence on curruption, other than that it simply reveals existing curruption in individuals. In particular his arguments hinge on the idea that when you can finally do anything you want, you do
I guess I’d agree. I’m just quite pessimistic and view that almost all people are quite corrupted and checks and balances of a sort reign it in.
It’s easy to over generalize but I think it’s important that we focus on developing systems that account for power enabling currupt individuald. We’ve seen attempts at this throughout history. It doesn’t mean those attempts have failed but rather that curruption (and it source) evolves just as much as anything. Currupt people will always find their way into places of power because it’s what they inherently want. It’s our job as citizens to constly come up with new ways to out smart them
I like this comment. I’m getting so tired of the “my team good, your team bad” posts I’m seeing all over here. It’s like both sides refuse to see issue in their way of living and get off on hating on the group that has been designated as “them”.
Making uppity remarks so that their echo chambers can go “LOL TRU” doesn’t aid the discussion or allow them to learn from other view points.
Pretty much all communist regimes have been dictatorships. What’s your point?
Money can be a dictator too.
Money is always the dictator. If you take it out of the equation, it just gets replaced by power. Not that those two are mutually exclusive…
Pretty much all command economies**
There are ways to organize a system of labor that have not been explored or are in the infancy of being considered in the world. Many countries are engaging with more and more socialist ideals every day and they are doing so under current forms of democracy. The world is not binary, everything is a sliding scale with tradeoffs
Because capitalism and communism are the only 2 options…
It doesn’t matter what option you choose as long as humans are involved in any form.
Any government that claims to be something in between really just wants you to think it’s something in between.
Hey guys, I found it! I found the dumbest take!
You think existing government can’t manipulate you into thinking we are in a democracy?
There is no such thing as a true democracy. Humans are far too easily corruptible for that.
Which is what the extremist propagenda taught you to think. Good for them.
So is this the whataboutism I’ve been hearing so much about? Meme didn’t even mention communism.
Anarchism!
You’ll never get anything accomplished then once everyone needs to agree.
That’s unanimous consensus, not democracy.
Talking about anarchy.
Yes. I mean it as in the Wikipedia definition, not chaos.
Source: Western propaganda
I didn’t know reality was western propaganda, those pesky Americans!
The truth is somewhere inbetween… not “reality” like you claim it is.
I’m not sure what in-between there is for “a lot of communist and socialist countries are just as if not more authoritarian than their capitalist counterparts”
The point being made is that the criticism being made doesn’t apply to capitalism in any way that it wouldn’t also apply to other economic systems.
Nope, the truth is in the left and not the center 😎
The fact is that you were so brainwashed by the Red Scare that you don’t realize that the reality you were told is all lies.
🆗 😎
I fucking hate that capitalism is bad. No one is a selfless saint. There has to be some sort of profit motive. Otherwise everyone would just go to subsistence farming. I know you are going to hate this but you need to be specific, capitalism alone isn’t bad, what you hate is the pooling of wealth which I hate to say happened in communism to.
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What about sortition, aka random selection of representatives?
- Not democracy
- People will still find a way to manipulate that
Easy, have me build the algorithm. I’ll make sure that you “randomly” show up in the list that is “randomly” searched :p
That’s not democracy then, if I understand what you’re saying
It is if everyone gets selected from time to time. Selected citizens only participate to one issue at a time, they are not here to stay. It is the best and only non-digital direct-democracy system
That’s not representation of the people. That’s representation of one individual (or one small group of individuals) in each instance. May be different individuals, but one instance might be dealing with an act of war, the other might be local infrastructure.
The size of the group required for good representation can be calculated, and it’s not a lot
There are 331.9 million people in the US. How many people need to be randomly selected for each issue? Okay I did look this up, approx 385 would do, with 5% margin of error. Which actually seems like a lot. Bump that to 97% confidence and it jumps to 1309. Idk seems like a lot of people to randomly select for each issue or even for each short term whatever we deem that to be. Plus then they need to vote, are we just looking for a standard majority?
This USA have states, maybe we can use that
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“Democracy is bad, but it’s the best system we ever had” ~ a man whoms Name i forgot
(Well I still disagree we had Anarchy for short periods of time, except you want to see it as very advanced democracy but anyway the quit is good OK)
Don’t you mean? :
“Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” - Churchill (allegedly)
Because the quote you gave doesn’t seem to come from any known source.
The reason why any “pure democracy” is trash is because it’s susceptible to the ”democratic fallacy”; whereby a majority opinion is misconstrued to represent some kind of “truth” and minority opinions are somehow “wrong” often leading to a form of potentially dangerous mob rule.
Yeah maybe I roughly translated it from my native language.
