America has been a banana republic for some time. All republics are. But in the US the mask has been slowly easing. Now we have politicians and appointees bragging that they have side hussles and the wealth to hand out gifts liberally.
Ah, yes. The lottery of 1826 that was approved by the Virginia State legislature to fund Thomas Jefferson out of bankrupcy, who had previously objected to state funded lotteries. It's almost always the ruling class versus everyone else. But a democracy is worse than a republic because the people eventually learn that they can vote to take the property of others.
I've become convinced that direct democracy is better than republics if the logistics of it can be solved. Republics just obfuscate that problem with one meaningless layer. Now people can just vote for someone else to take the property of others or at least someone who will tell them they will. Is the solution a republic is offering to that problem that the politician will predictably lie and say he'll take the property but won't because he'll always be on a take to do something besides represent the expressed interests of the public?
I just don't see how as a system a republic even does anything to address that problem that is labeled as uniquely a direct democracy problem. Maybe I've just been trained to look at how things work and interpret what they do from that rather than accept labels of what things claim to do. It's sort of like how the Fed is labeled as something to stabilize the economy. But it doesn't though. It prints cheap money for bankers. That's what it mechanically does. And a republic doesn't prevent theft by the mob. It presents a system that feels like representation but actually creates a game where compeditive politicians need to simultaneously sell out the public and lie to them. It's simply what the game requires. And maybe that does prevent mob scale theft. But then every other virtue attributed to republics are false via a mutual exclusion.
Intellectually what republics do is create a system complicated enough that its harder to make the same claims, as correct as they are, as concretely or as easily, when a deeper and more involved study of a more complex thing simplifies to the same result. But because political dynamics in a republic are harder to track, its apologists can just say "nugh uh," to any description of it being a different kind of kleptocracy.
A direct democracy has all the same potencials for kleptocracy as a republic, with some chance of actually representing you. Actually the republic multiplies the number of kleptocratic parties to three. The mob, the political class, and the lobbying class. Making mass scale theft a guarentee rather than likely.
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This guy is trashy.
America has been a banana republic for some time. All republics are. But in the US the mask has been slowly easing. Now we have politicians and appointees bragging that they have side hussles and the wealth to hand out gifts liberally.
Ah, yes. The lottery of 1826 that was approved by the Virginia State legislature to fund Thomas Jefferson out of bankrupcy, who had previously objected to state funded lotteries. It's almost always the ruling class versus everyone else. But a democracy is worse than a republic because the people eventually learn that they can vote to take the property of others.
I've become convinced that direct democracy is better than republics if the logistics of it can be solved. Republics just obfuscate that problem with one meaningless layer. Now people can just vote for someone else to take the property of others or at least someone who will tell them they will. Is the solution a republic is offering to that problem that the politician will predictably lie and say he'll take the property but won't because he'll always be on a take to do something besides represent the expressed interests of the public?
I just don't see how as a system a republic even does anything to address that problem that is labeled as uniquely a direct democracy problem. Maybe I've just been trained to look at how things work and interpret what they do from that rather than accept labels of what things claim to do. It's sort of like how the Fed is labeled as something to stabilize the economy. But it doesn't though. It prints cheap money for bankers. That's what it mechanically does. And a republic doesn't prevent theft by the mob. It presents a system that feels like representation but actually creates a game where compeditive politicians need to simultaneously sell out the public and lie to them. It's simply what the game requires. And maybe that does prevent mob scale theft. But then every other virtue attributed to republics are false via a mutual exclusion.
Intellectually what republics do is create a system complicated enough that its harder to make the same claims, as correct as they are, as concretely or as easily, when a deeper and more involved study of a more complex thing simplifies to the same result. But because political dynamics in a republic are harder to track, its apologists can just say "nugh uh," to any description of it being a different kind of kleptocracy.
A direct democracy has all the same potencials for kleptocracy as a republic, with some chance of actually representing you. Actually the republic multiplies the number of kleptocratic parties to three. The mob, the political class, and the lobbying class. Making mass scale theft a guarentee rather than likely.