Should People be Allowed to Vote?
I am starting to have my doubts about voting, and not in the fundamental sense. Of course I know that, fundamentally, voting is an initiation of force, and we would better be off as individualists.
OVERVIEW
But of course we can't live alone, the planet is too small, we need to interact with eachother, and for that we need to make decisions. For that we need to agree, sometimes an entire group needs to agree, and eventually we will have to perform this activity called "voting", in one way or another. Not necessarily in the voting booth sense, but in the sense to reach a consensus.
Whether we are talking about a community of neighbors agreeing on something, or a blockchain having a hardfork, voting will have to be applied eventually. I would love if individuality would be respected 100%,but then we wouldn't need a blockchain, but since it isn't, and people will initiate force against one another, then a voting process is still more preferable than chaos or violence.
BLOCKCHAINS
The fact of the matter is that voting is imperative for blockchains, you have to have a consensus mechanism, to be able to update, evolve a cryptocurrency.
Just look at the human DNA, it's similar to a blockchain, in fact it is a blockchain. The DNA is the source code, and the cells that make up your body are the blocks. When a change happens in the DNA, that is either evolution or cancer. For example either your offspring's eyesight improves by 5%, or they get eye cancer, depending on how it's executed.
Therefore if a blockchain is incorrectly updated, the opposition remains the legitimate chain, while the changed one becomes a cancer, for example look at: Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic.
SOCIETY
In society, in order to introduce change, the status quo must be broken, and that is the hardest because people don't like change and would fight to preserve their current systems.
How can we introduce change in a society, that we can prove to be beneficial, but also being executed in a way that doesn't disturb the "old order", and makes the transition smooth?
The current political system, especially in a republic is setup in a way to prevent extremists taking over, but as a disadvantage, it also prevents legitimate movements from changing a corrupt, rotten system.
- If we have direct democracy and let the people decide, how can we prevent Nazis from taking over again? They have already fooled half of Europe in the past, should we just trust the ability of the people to not fall for populist demagogue and outright hateful ideologies again?
- If we have absolute monarchy, how can we ensure that the monarch is not an inbred mentally ill person like Caligula was, and starts to do evil things, driven mad by his powers?
These are the challenges that we are facing, it can be essentially boiled down to this:
STUPIDITY vs EVIL!
You either have the stupidity of the masses giving power to mad people like Hitler, or you just have a mad person in power by default, and hope that the hereditor of the throne will be better.
What can we do? How can we practically organize society to not fall in this trap?
Upvote, ReSteem & 
Interestingly put. The Founders feared mob rule, hence no direct democracy. I would characterize the problem like this: STUPIDITY IS EVIL! The problem as I see it is that nobody pays attention until it's too late. The educational system is so broken that even when they pay attention, they don't know what to do. How do we fix it? Not sure we can without armed insurrection. People do not give up power voluntarily. There are many facets to the myriad of problems we face. I only identifies two. There is multiplicity of interest, imperfect mobilization. How do you get a large number of people to act at once when their interests are spread all over the place. You've posed a most complex question but like the old bumper sticker says: If your vote meant anything, voting would be illegal!
last sentence= nails it lol
Politically, absolutely not! we should only have the right to vote on our own lives, or when other people ask us to weigh in on theirs. Political voting mainly involves casting a vote to who gets the power to rule others, delegating authority we don't have to delegate.
Everything is political.
Suppose in a libertarian community, neighbors would have to choose a fire department for themselves. And they have to force everyone to agree otherwise it can't work.
If 1 guy doesn't agree to it, and he won't pay the monthly fees, then if his house is in flames:
So where do you draw the line?
i'm more a fan of experimenting in the direction of more freedom than proclaiming a priori that we know exactly how society ought to be organized (or left to self organize). I'm biased towards freedom, so my suggestion is to start scaling back government where it's easily feasible. There aren't too many true "public goods" or life-or-death externalities, so for things like fire services, police, military, courts, whatever's tough to envision being fully free market...leave those things alone for now and we have a ton of other things to start scaling down.
Yes but you can take the same argument as I told above, and apply it to every government sector:
... ETC
So it doesnt matter what sector of the government you try to scale down, you will always hit the status quo forces, that will argue that doing nothing is better than stirring situations up that could cause huge problems.
The fact is that the government is so tied into society, like a life support system for a coma patient. If you take it away, it will all collapse.
And you can't take it away "slowly".
ha, why can't i say take it away slowly?
"The fact is that the government is so tied into society, like a life support system for a coma patient. If you take it away, it will all collapse."
<--sad but true, at least on the level of integration. i argue we don't know what taking it away would do, that's speculation and i'd prefer to be positive. Deregulating nationalized industries across the world had similar dynamics...entrenched stakeholders, assumptions of catastrophe if unraveled, but the results were extremely positive...the world didn't end and newly competitive industries thrived.
I also think our society is whiny as hell, but so many things government does are not necessary to be performed by a monopolist...some people just like it that way. i don't.
Any small deregulation could cause a butterfly effect and crash everything.
But it's inevitable anyway, the problem is that the status quo forces are not just the local population, but also the international forces, like how the EU didn't let Greece default and intervened in their internal affairs.
But eventually it will all collapse because the debt is unsustainable, and people will realize that they should have stopped the endless spending when they had a chance, now it will come down the hard way unfortunately.
Democracy fails when people don't fully appreciate what they are really voting for? Nazi Germany was the classic example. Has there been any other examples you can think of more recently???
Having to achieve consensus is time consuming, slow and takes a lot of will power. If elected politicians are in it for the right reasons they can achieve great things. Either through charismatic leaders or via persuasive debate and deal making. Democracy has proven time and again to be a great model a fair model.
Politics should be a vocation rather than what it has become in many countries, The US, the UK, Ireland as just a few examples where the politicians are paid extraordinary amounts of money, and when political life ends they use their connections to get lucrative private sector jobs. The incentives are just not calibrated right. But it is the best and fairest model we have.
That will never happen. Politics is a business like any other, and it's a pretty immoral one, to say that mildly. However the "service" that it offers, has questionable usefulness, and it's certainly inefficient and corrupt.
Well the opposite, which is what we have In Ireland, doesn't work. The politicians make a lucrative career out of it. Its a very well paying job and all that matters is keeping that job and getting the big pension.
I am to the point over the years after waking up and seeing nothing but sociopaths in gov't and police statism running us all into the ground while they all profit and the money flows straight up to the globalists that everyone stop voting, stop paying taxes, stop everything govt's related --- and we all have a sit in as humanity and watch the whole broken system crumble they designed broken and rigged, and watch them all panic.
It would be a great month of global civil disobedience that could make massive corrections in EVERYTHING - everywhere. It would take some pain for a month!
-- but without that, - there really is no fixing most things the way it all is now
This post has been ranked within the top 80 most undervalued posts in the first half of Dec 12. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $7.93 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
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