The will of the people, or the greater good?

I'll be the first to admit I'm no economist (nor do I accept it's a science)

That's part of the problem; economics was presented as a rational scientific subject and most of us didn't question it. Part of the problem too is that those who have been most vocal in opposing ecomonic policies were espoucing Marxist politics which has never been updated for the modern world.

RichieC wrote: »

I'll be the first to admit I'm no economist (nor do I accept it's a science) but how is pulling money out of the economy going to fix anything?

It makes consumers sheepish about spending. that means less buying..

If we are to do everything as these self describes "scientists" want there will be only money in crazy finance that does nothing for bob or paul down the street.

I don't believe "austerity" works.

Nail on head, it's probably the only thing the left and right wing agree on, taking money out of an economy doesn't work. The tax or austerity bit is where they go all astray!

southsiderosie wrote: »

Some have suggested that since the public is opposed to austerity measures, that legislators should respect that and vote against these policies, regardless of what financial markets will do. Some have even offered that these kinds of decisions be put to a public vote, rather than decided in national legislatures.

For me this raises the issue: what does representation mean then in a liberal democracy? Is it the role of politicians to only do what voters want, damn the consequences? If so, given the popularity of government spending - especially in good economic times - is there any way to prevent governments from spending countries into bankruptcy at the behest of the population? Or, should politicians vote in what they see as 'the national interest', even if this may go against popular opinion?

I am not a fan of direct democracy, or populist governing. While I vote for people who broadly share my political views, I also expect them to sometimes set aside party politics or the 'popular' thing to do the 'right' thing (as amorphous as these principles may be!). In the case of austerity measures, I think it is appropriate that the same legislative bodies who approved past spending now have to approve present austerity measures (or at least negotiate the terms of them). In a representative democracy, I think we need to let the representatives do their jobs - our job as citizens is to hold them accountable for their decisions. Unfortunately, I think in a lot of cases - Ireland in particular - voter failure to do the latter in the past has helped lead to a crisis in the present.

I've come to the conclusion that representative democracy has failed, or at least it has taken us as far as we can go.

I think it can be beefed up to an extent if we implement rigorous campaign finance reforms and do our best to limit the effect of money in politics. We will never be able to eliminate this entirely but the system we have now is far too easily corruptable and manipulable.

I think, ultimately, the next evolution of the democratic process is for a kind of mixture between direct and representative democracy. A lot of people consider direct democracy to be DOA, and that's because I think no one has really given it serious thought or even sat down to TRY and think of how it could be implemented in a workable way.

People keep pointing out how in a direct democracy spending would go out of control. What if you changed that? What if you made it so that people couldn't simply vote for spending in isolation. Rather than having a simple yes/no vote you could have a balanced form. So when you vote you cannot vote for an individual item of a budget. You have to vote for a budget as a whole.

A simplistic example of this would be, that I as a voter will have my unique online voting PIN. I log into my direct democracy website with this and have access to my vote for the 2013 budget. Now I can chose to lower taxes in some area but I have to make it deficit neutral so any spending increases tax cuts must be ofset by cuts elsewhere. Voting has been virtually a binary system up till now, but with the internet and modern technology it need not continue to be so.

So I could decide to allocate the budget as 20% health, 20% education, 20% defence/security, 20% environment, 20% social entitlements. Another person might want 40% on health. So what you end up with when the votes are tallied is an aggregate of the populations spending priorities.

Of course this has its own problems such as how do you decide to raise the deficit in order to borrow. Perhaps rather than a simple majority, raising the deficit should require 70-80% of the voting population to be onboard.

You'd still have representatives, whose primary jobs would be to implement what the public decide. So the health minister would then manage whatever budget we allocated to her. They would also be responsible for introducing new bills/laws.

There would be fixed terms, maybe one month in a year where major laws could be voted on to prevent chaos.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't believe the hurdles to direct democracy are insurmountable and I believe it is something worth pursuing simply because representative democracy places too much power in the hands of too few individuals who are too easily corrupted.

Perhaps a greater challenge than the issue of direct or representative democracy is the diminishing power of national democracies around the world due to globalisation and the growth of powerful multi-national megacorporations.

The idea behind democracy is to stop the ordinary person from being oppressed by a few powerful and wealthy elites. United we stand etc. As well as banding and pooling resources together in order to reduce the cost of goods and services they allow us to have things like fighter jets and expensive research.

But now we have a situation where megacrops can bully smaller and even greater democracies. By threatening to take their business elsewhere where there are lower tax rates. By moving jobs to places where there are no employee protections and they can utilise virtual slave labour. Using off shore accounts like Switzerland and the cayman's to bypass paying taxes entirely. So what we really need is revolution towards a more global democracy. And while the idea of sharing with third world countries might not seem palatable I believe, in the long term, we would all benefit from it. (Edit: Or for example, bullying countries like Ireland into taking on the debts of private institutions by threatening financial armageddon if we don't comply.)

Edit: Right now we have various national interests competing against each other. We are like dogs, fighting for scraps that our corporate masters decide to toss our way, while they feast on the majority of the world's wealth. I say its time to overthrow the status quo.

Of course, we are much more likely to continue down the road we are on now, which is the road to greater corporate despotism, with only the illusion of freedom and democracy. Because people are short-sighted and selfish and because those with vested interests have corrupted every level of society to shape it to their limited agenda.