Quote from: theymos on August 30, 2018, 12:51:38 AM

Democracy sucks. Very few people are knowledgeable about important issues because:
1. A ton of people are just overall stupid to begin with.
2. Even smart people don't have much incentive to become knowledgeable about issues because they know that their vote is almost meaningless.

This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that referenda on raising the minimum wage almost always pass overwhelmingly, despite the fact that virtually every economist says that minimum wage laws are counter-productive.

Usually what you get in the end is a big mess of special-interest-backed laws which don't make any sense, hurt liberty, and drag down the economy. Example: A sugar company will gain $1 million per year from a sugar tariff. Every citizen will lose $0.01 per year due to slightly increased prices from that same tariff, for a total country-wide loss of $3 million per year. Most people won't know that this issue even exists because they are not sufficiently knowledgeable and don't have any incentive to become knowledgeable. For people who do know, it's still usually not rational to spend time and money trying to defeat this measure when you're only going to lose $0.01 per year. Whereas it is rational for the sugar company to spend money trying to get the tariff enacted. (The same sort of thing applies to niche ideological positions, too, not just money.) So these special-interest-backed initiatives often pass (there is in fact a sugar tariff in the US), and they accumulate over time.

The US founding fathers tried to set up the government such that it was more-or-less ruled by an elite set of intellectuals with democracy as only a distant check on possible tyranny, but it clearly didn't work, and nowadays democracy mostly prevails. I suspect that any mixed system of this sort will eventually fail. (Also see my post here.)

I've gone back and forth, but at the moment I tend toward thinking that monarchy would be better than democracy, even though monarchy is clearly also very flawed. At least the monarch can have some sort of guiding vision rather than the total schizophrenia we often see in democracies, and they have more personal skin in the game, since the state's success is their success, for their entire lifetime and extending through the lifetimes of their heirs. But I've never lived in an absolute monarchy, and maybe I'd think differently if I did.

In any case, it'd be better to:
- Limit government involvement in everything. A government with little power can't do as much harm, even if it constantly makes poor decisions.
- Have many smaller states rather than a few big ones. If there were 10,000 states and a worldwide culture of allowing freedom of movement, then you wouldn't have to worry so much about your state falling to tyranny or mob rule, since at least one of the other ones should still be OK.
- Not brainwash people into thinking that democracy or absolutism is by definition good. I've met a lot of people who think that if a majority agrees to something, then that's the end of discussion: the thing agreed to is absolutely moral and correct. This is very stupid.
- Not treat the law as your god, using it a comfortable shortcut for moral and/or utilitarian thinking.

I'd say you're cotnradicting yourself a bit theymos... Monarchy is a system that gives way too much power into hands of one person, which is a danger in itself. As we know, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Then you say limiting the government is good, but a monarch would be able to rebuild the control with much more ease than democratically chosen government.

Democracy is great, but it works way better in educated societies, such where not much power is in hands of the federal govt but instead in hands of the smaller, and much more reliable states.
A great example of this is how decentralized and well-rounded the Swiss system is, they have frequent referendums, their states compete for people etc. It's all working great, and i think that's how a government should be ran - as close to the citizens as possible. Federal govt can't rule well, considering the size and differences in the country - which brings us back to a monarch, who would be obviously much worse than that.
Decentralization is the name of the game.