Direct Democracy

[Alex]

The so-called "financial crisis" and Snowdengate have convinced me that while representative democracy is still better than outright tyranny, albeit more hypocritical, the time has come for the people to have more of the good stuff, namely democracy.

 

Why is the will of the people somehow not democratic enough, whereas the opinion of a few hundred bankster-sponsored kleptocrats under the surveillance of NSA Pinkerton "security" contractors is law?

[Tyranicus]

If every issue were put to a national vote, the government would get even less done than it does now.

[keira]

As an American, I think direct diplomany is a horrible idea. Then we'd just have government run by Fox News, which doesn't sound like fun for anyone who isn't a rich cis-male straight white protestant.

[Randomizer]

Look at how bad a job the people do when they vote for a president. A large number never vote and a majority seem to hate what they get.

 

Direct democracy works best with small groups and where they can get almost everyone to vote.

[Alex]

If every issue were put to a national vote, the government would get even less done than it does now.

Depends on the technical implementation, I suppose. Millions of people have a keen interest in politics. Also, much of current politics is such that it wouldn't be missed.

As an American, I think direct diplomany is a horrible idea. Then we'd just have government run by Fox News, which doesn't sound like fun for anyone who isn't a rich cis-male straight white protestant.

Corporations are not citizens, why should they be allowed to spew political propaganda? On a related note, the City of London still allows corporations to vote in their local elections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London#Elections

 

The "free" news corporations are owned by the same elite that owns the politicians. That includes both the left-hand sock puppet, who screams that straight white protestants are the problem, as well the right-hand sock puppet, who screams that [insert scapegoat here] is the problem. It's all a smokescreen - divide and conquer.

[Student of Trinity]

Currently, in the United States of America, nothing stops anyone from running for high office. Nothing stops anyone from voting for anyone. Apparently, however, a bunch of crooked toadies for rich corporate interests can get re-elected season after season, because a plurality of voters can be had by throwing money at TV.

 

So the American ship of state is one whose landlubber passengers choose their crew by vote, and they keep choosing bozos who ply them with rum. The proposal for direct democracy is to fix this, by inviting those same inept passengers to vote on each turn of the wheel, each reef of the sails.

 

But if they can't even choose a captain, why do you think they can steer?

[Alex]

The bad guys can afford to bribe the captain, but they can hardly afford to bribe all the passengers.

 

Also, the system has inertia - few people would vote for an unknown single-issue protest party even if they agreed with it on that single issue. And those who benefit from the current system are those who finance and report on electoral campaigns.

[Student of Trinity]

The bad guys can afford to bribe the captain, but they can hardly afford to bribe all the passengers.

The bad guys don't need to bribe all the passengers with gold. They can just dazzle them with glitter. After all, that's what the captains do with the gold they get from the bad guys. The bad guys could just do it themselves, directly.

 

The voters can evidently be swayed by the glitziest TV ad campaign. After all, that's what all the bribery in US politics is about. Congresspeople aren't taking cash to buy themselves speedboats and whiskey. They're taking campaign contributions, which go to buy TV ads, which are worth buying because they work. If they didn't work, there wouldn't be a corruption problem in US politics. Since they do work, direct democracy won't help.

[Upon Mars.]

I do not and cannot not pretend to know what would happen if such a thing such as a "direct democracy" should function; Alex you need to define it first, before we get mixed up with such individual representations which are at their core myths, conjured up from thin air and fantasy.

[Student of Trinity]

The really big problem with direct democracy, however, has nothing to do with voter stupidity or laziness. It's an inherent mathematical problem with democracy, called the Discursive Dilemma. The classic example of the Discursive Dilemma serves to illustrate the very general point:

 

Suppose a third of the electorate wants to raise taxes, maintain services, and balance the budget. Another third (roughly) wants to cut taxes, cut services, and balance the budget. The remaining near third of the people wants to cut taxes, maintain services, and borrow money.

 

Each of those three roughly equal policy platforms is at least self-consistent. Each of them could in principle be carried out. There's at least some kind of case to be made for all three of them. And every voter is both rational and honest. They set their priorities, and are willing pay for them.

 

But look at the majority vote:

Raise or lower taxes? Lower them, by a whopping majority.

Cut or maintain services? Maintain them, by a whopping majority.

Balance the budget, or borrow? Balance the budget, by yet another whopping majority.

 

The clear majority of the people is in favor of a flagrant impossibility: cut taxes, maintain services, and yet balance the budget.

 

The majority vote by direct democracy is idiotic, even when all the individual voters are rational and honest. The problem is that there is no 'the' majority. There are three different majorities, on each of the three different issues. And there is nothing that forces these different majorities to thresh out a compromise platform that, as a whole, is at least possible.

 

Representative democracy, and more than that, party politics, is necessary to prevent democracy from deteriorating into irresponsible wishing for the impossible. Direct democracy is logically disastrous.

[Alex]

The bad guys don't need to bribe all the passengers with gold. They can just dazzle them with glitter. After all, that's what the captains do with the gold they get from the bad guys. The bad guys could just do it themselves, directly.

 

The voters can evidently be swayed by the glitziest TV ad campaign. After all, that's what all the bribery in US politics is about. Congresspeople aren't taking cash to buy themselves speedboats and whiskey. They're taking campaign contributions, which go to buy TV ads, which are worth buying because they work. If they didn't work, there wouldn't be a corruption problem in US politics. Since they do work, direct democracy won't help.

There are already many issues on which the politicians and the majority of their voters have different opinions, that's a fact we do not need to speculate about. Is that just because the bad guys can't be bothered to make enough propaganda? If an ad tells you to vote for one stranger rather than another stranger, you might not care all that much. Maybe the politicians are not all terrible people, but the system corrupts them.

 

Let me turn the question around: What advantages does handing over legislative power to someone else have? If someone offered you to become a minor and have a legal guardian, would you accept if you could elect a new guardian after four years?

[Alex]

The really big problem with direct democracy, however, has nothing to do with voter stupidity or laziness. It's an inherent mathematical problem with democracy, called the Discursive Dilemma. The classic example of the Discursive Dilemma serves to illustrate the very general point:

 

Suppose a third of the electorate wants to raise taxes, maintain services, and balance the budget. Another third (roughly) wants to cut taxes, cut services, and balance the budget. The remaining near third of the people wants to cut taxes, maintain services, and borrow money.

 

Each of those three roughly equal policy platforms is at least self-consistent. Each of them could in principle be carried out. There's at least some kind of case to be made for all three of them. And every voter is both rational and honest. They set their priorities, and are willing pay for them.

 

But look at the majority vote:

Raise or lower taxes? Lower them, by a whopping majority.

Cut or maintain services? Maintain them, by a whopping majority.

Balance the budget, or borrow? Balance the budget, by yet another whopping majority.

 

The clear majority of the people is in favor of a flagrant impossibility: cut taxes, maintain services, and yet balance the budget.

 

The majority vote by direct democracy is idiotic, even when all the individual voters are rational and honest. The problem is that there is no 'the' majority. There are three different majorities, on each of the three different issues. And there is nothing that forces these different majorities to thresh out a compromise platform that, as a whole, is at least possible.

 

Representative democracy, and more than that, party politics, is necessary to prevent democracy from deteriorating into irresponsible wishing for the impossible. Direct democracy is logically disastrous.

If you replace "voters" by "legislators", you would have the same problem. Of course, a budget is not made that way.

 

The US government shutdown shows that politicians are not necessarily responsible either.

[Upon Mars.]

I have a question. Does a "direct" democracy necessarily needs a balanced budget in order to function? Does it even need a budget?

[Alorael at Large]

But you cannot vote for a legislator who himself promises to do impossible things. You can have multiple legislators who gridlock, but not a quorum of legislators bound to operate on what amounts to mythology.

 

Oh wait. Yes you can. That's exactly what the US is doing. Moving on...

 

I think a bigger problem with direct democracy, one tied to but not actually the same as the discursive dilemma, is that politics are hard. Writing legislation is hard. Diplomacy is hard. There's a reason we have a professional class of politicians and a professional class of experts and analysts who buzz around them. Without the politicians to report to the experts are just so many talking heads, and money seems to talk louder than sense. Without the experts and analysts politicians, including a would-be political public, is reduced to blind, deaf stupidity.

 

We hire surgeons because we think they perform surgery well. We go to restaurants where we anticipate getting the most delicious food, Ideally at reasonable prices and in a pleasant ambience. We should choose politicians based on their professional qualifications as politicians, not just for ideological purity. I'd rather have my officials vote against how I'd vote, but then give a good explanation, than act as my direct democracy mouthpiece. Because honestly I don't have the time to understand, draft, amend, or vote on legislation. It's a full-time job.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't think direct democracy requires anything except a system for people to vote on matters of important directly rather than by proxy. But in order to produce a functioning society it needs to be able to produce real budgets, as that's an essential function of government. Not balanced in the non-deficit sense, but balanced in that the money coming in and money going out have to be equal somehow or there will be major problems.

[Lilith]

I have a question. Does a "direct" democracy necessarily needs a balanced budget in order to function? Does it even need a budget?

 

Well, traditionally in order to actually implement the policies that have been voted for, you have to pay people to carry them out. If the people want more teachers in schools or better roads or whatever, the resources for that have to come from somewhere.

[Lilith]

If you replace "voters" by "legislators", you would have the same problem. Of course, a budget is not made that way.

 

The US government shutdown shows that politicians are not necessarily responsible either.

 

Which is why, in the past, SoT's spoken out in favour of a strict two-party system with strong internal party discipline. That way, you never have more than two policy platforms to decide between, so the kind of three-way gridlock he describes can't happen. Well, that's the theory, anyway -- in practice, the leader of a party can still support an incoherent position as a compromise between internal party factions, and if both parties do that then the people aren't left with anyone sane to vote for.

[Alorael at Large]

Again, Lilith sums up part of the American problem. America has a long and strong history of two-party systems, but if the two parties aren't willing to cooperate they're stuck. And, at risk of raising partisan hackles, there's no actual incentive to offer realism in policy until actual implementation. It's a lot easier to run against real policy than create it.

 

—Alorael, who has the additional fear that a lot of seemingly good and reasonable policies are entirely unworkable in practice for complex reasons. But complexity is bad for accruing votes. Democracy by soundbite is terrifying.

[Edgwyn]

The bad guys can afford to bribe the captain, but they can hardly afford to bribe all the passengers.

 

Unfortunately our politicians of both parties do in fact bribe the passengers. It started out with big city machine politicians purchasing alcohol for semi-disenfranchised emigrants on/right before election night in exchange for votes and has moved into full out bread and circus mode. The democratic party's new push for "income equality" is open pandering for votes by making promises that will drive our country further into economic collapse. Unfortunately, the Republican party's record on funding for various special interests is not much better, they just pretend to be ashamed about it while executing most of the same destructive policies as the Democrats.

 

The people of the United States have found that they can vote themselves unending bread, circuses and benefits and ignore the fact that a bill will come due in the future. The vast majority of the political class (of both parties), the media and college professors would rather be enablers than be unpopular. Direct democracy would just make this worse. We have been unable to find/vote into federal office 535 legislators whose sense of responsibility to the country is higher than their desire to be re-elected, there is no way we can find 50%+1 of nearly 300M voters with a sense of responsibility. I personally think direct election of senators is possibly the worst amendment to our constitution. And would support term limits of 3 terms in the House and two terms in the Senate.

 

The dysfunction of the American people is so evident when Congress has a single digit approval rating yet each member has a 90% re-election rate. Obviously the majority of the people who actually vote have allowed themselves to be convinced that the 3 federal legislators that they vote for are the only good ones, despite frequent and compelling evidence to the contrary.

 

That said, I do not have an answer for fixing the system. Increasing the requirements for eligibility to vote is problematic for both the question of "what should the requirements be" and for the fact that making voting hard seems un-American to many of us.

[Callie]

That said, I do not have an answer for fixing the system. Increasing the requirements for eligibility to vote is problematic for both the question of "what should the requirements be" and for the fact that making voting hard seems un-American to many of us.

 

Restricting voter eligibility would ultimately just serve as a tool for politically disenfranchising one's opponents.

[Alex]

Because honestly I don't have the time to understand, draft, amend, or vote on legislation. It's a full-time job.

This is indeed something that could plausibly be a problem. It's a bit like open-source software versus commercial software by professionals who work full-time on it, with the additional twist of millions of enthusiasts versus hundreds of professionals.

 

Then again, what did people know about the long-term consequences of the abolition of slavery, just to take an example?

[Edgwyn]

The people didn't have a direct vote or even mush of an indirect vote on the abolition of slavery, though I would love to believe that it would not have mattered (that is not necessarily the same thing as saying that I believe that it would not have mattered). The 13th amendment was approved by both houses of congress and the state legislatures. It went through so quickly (less than a year) that there was not an election cycle for voters to give their opinions of candidates who were for or against until after it was ratified.

[Goldengirl]

Bypassing all of this argumentation about whether direct democracy is or isn't a good idea, why is it that a financial crisis and the NSA leaks are signs that the United States is a failed government? Even granted the recent budget crisis and (very) recent dismal Congressional approval ratings, I see no reason to conclude that representative forms of government have utterly collapsed.

 

I'm still befuddled by this belief that bankers are actually running the government. I have no idea what this talk of "bread and circuses" is about - debt rhetoric? Debt is an effective and useful tool for fiscal policymaking, and I'm not convinced by the latest apocalyptic rhetoric about federal debt levels being too high, which has been deployed as a veiled attack on small programs like Planned Parenthood. Moreover, who even are these "bad guys" that keep getting referenced?

[Randomizer]

Government debt isn't a serious problem as long as it is part of a sound fiscal policy. In the past when the economy went into recession/depression, the government would spend money to prop up the economy. Then in good economic times, the government cuts back spending to reduce debt.

 

During the go go years under Reagan/Bush I the government didn't cut the debt and the deficit didn't decrease until Clinton. However then came Bush II and the Republicans spent money without increasing revenue to keep up with the increased costs of a war. The Republicans financed the war outside the budget as a supplemental expense in order to make the deficit seem smaller as the debt skyrocketed. Then the economy collapsed and instead of spending money to build up the country with a program to repair and build new transportation systems, we got the Highway to Nowhere and other special interest plans.

 

While the bank bailout probably kept us from a run on banks like in the Great Depression or even the Savings and Loan runs of the 1980s, Republicans still use the increased debt as an excuse to fund what they want and cut Democratic favored programs.

[*i]

I used to believe in direct democracy when I was younger. Then I went to school and became a scientist/engineer and gained the appreciation for how much science and technology is involved in modern society. It took nearly a decade of training just to become expert enough to offer well informed policy advice in my area of expertise: nuclear technology for energy and defense. There's no way I can offer anything forming an intelligent opinion on issues of economics, biotechnology, medicine, climate change, etc. I'd be little better than the randomly chosen person off the street. The best I could do is trust in the scientific consensus, but it would hardly be my own opinion, and very tenuous on controversial and unresolved issues. In other words, much of the time, I'd be voting blind and most likely for suboptimal things out of ignorance.

 

By unleashing the torrent of direct democracy, it would basically hand over control of policy to whoever has the ability to advertise the most effectively. Whoever can hire the best advertising firms and buy enough time and placement. There's no way we can have truly informed debates on complex issues, especially those involving science and technology, when the winner will go to whomever can come up with the pithiest slogan and plop down a bucket of cash to buy television slots, billboards, etc. See "clean natural gas" plastered everywhere? No coincidence that's been the main build in the US in the last decade. Truth is its not so clean (except when compared with coal), causes dozens of deaths from explosions each year, and enriches entrenched oil business interests. That's one of many examples.

 

The current system is certainly subject to this as well, but it would only make the problem more acute. We all like to think of ourselves as free thinking minds in the enlightenment tradition, but even the best of us is subject to the lure of effective advertising campaigns. We're also quite busy and therefore time limited. Even if I didn't have to work and sleep there is no way I could learn enough to make informed decisions on every issue that I would need to vote on. I don't like it, but that's reality.

 

As bad as the current system is, at least it allows (in theory) representatives to solicit the advice of experts to help in making informed decisions. Perhaps we can come up with a better meritocratic/technocratic system that allows people who know the most about their fields to guide the policy process while still having accountability to the governed. Either way, I don't think direct democracy will solve anything and may even do more harm than good.

[Student of Trinity]

I'm not sure you necessarily need a two-party system, but few-party systems are crucial for democracy, because they enforce consistency of collective opinions. A possibly divergent bunch of people hammer out a compromise that is logically consistent across the board, on all the issues, as a total package. Then, with strong party discipline, votes are contests among such blocs. It would still technically be possible to have a discursive dilemma with as few as three parties, but I think it would be easier to see that it was happening, and easier to resolve. In practice there are more issues to debate than just the three issues involved in the dilemma, and how the three parties felt about the other issues would tend to drive coalitions to resolve the dilemma over the three problematic ones.

 

Direct democracy is a fantasy of simplicity. It only works when there's only one issue to decide. What horrifies DD advocates — people's real opinions on an issue getting overridden by back-room compromises related to other issues — is exactly what democracy needs, to cope with the many complex and inter-related issues of the modern world. Without the compromises needed to mount a coherent party platform, direct democracy is just one massive discursive dilemma, with no feasible policy enacted at all.

 

What we need is not just representative democracy rather than direct. It's democracy with strong parties — and not single-issue parties, but major parties that offer across-the-board platforms which address all issues. One could conceivably have parties without representatives, functioning as enormous civic clubs. But once there is party discipline, there's no reason to have everyone vote independently, when a party's members have already compacted to vote for the party line. The obviously intelligent practical measure is for the party-club to appoint a few executives to investigate cases, frame motions, and cast the collective vote. So, given parties, representatives are a simple step.

 

As I've argued on other threads about this stuff (and these are not my original ideas, just stuff I've read somewhere), a large modern party is itself an electorate. It frames its coherent platform as a compromise between several blocs and wings within its membership, just as the actual legislature will eventually hammer out legislation as a compromise among parties. Intra-party blocs and wings are informal sub-parties. And in big enough groups, the blocs and wings will have internal blocs and wings. And so on, if need be.

 

The ultimate principle seems to be one of hierarchy. Form many nested levels of parties/blocs, and reach consensus locally at each level. This keeps everything consistent much better than direct votes by a huge electorate on a complex battery of issues.

[Student of Trinity]

[W]hy is it that a financial crisis and the NSA leaks are signs that the United States is a failed government? ... I see no reason to conclude that representative forms of government have utterly collapsed.

 

The American system of government isn't the same as representative democracy in general. The American system is representative democracy 0.8, a good initial stab at the problem that has been cast in stone for over 200 years of radical change. No other countries now operate anything much like the gridlock-prone American system of checks and balances, which has turned out to be an overly cumbersome defense against forms of tyranny that just aren't really as threatening as they used to seem in the 18th century. As a modern form of democracy, the American system has severe flaws that will be hard to fix.

[Kelandon]

The state with the most elaborate system of direct democracy is California. It has not done us much, if any, good. I can elaborate why if necessary, but direct democracy on a mass scale (i.e. a state or a country) is full of basically unfixable problems, except in very limited circumstances.

 

The problem that the U.S. is seeing right now is increased polarization (people with widely differing opinions and worldviews) and partisanship (Democrats and Republicans don't get along — this is not the same as polarization) together with divided government and slim majorities. The American system of divided (and competing) powers struggles a fair bit in these circumstances, because there are so many veto points in the legislative process. The other two branches can do some stuff on their own, but our system is predicated on having a functioning Congress that passes bills into law from time to time, and we don't really have that right now.

 

California did much better when it changed the electoral incentives of its elected officials. The changes included ending gerrymandering, using a top-two election system, enacting "no budget, no pay," and a few other procedural reforms (removing some supermajority requirements, among other things). This had a fairly enormous impact fairly immediately, even though we still have the same underlying challenges as the United States as a whole does, which suggests to me that we could do the same thing everywhere and Congress would shape up pretty quickly. (It's also true that California elected a supermajority of Dems, but I don't think this mattered much for what I'm talking about.)

 

The next thing to try to solve after that is the huge sums of money driving political outcomes, but that's another can of worms altogether. Shy of a new Supreme Court or a constitutional amendment, I'm not sure what we can do, frankly.

[Student of Trinity]

If someone offered you to become a minor and have a legal guardian, would you accept if you could elect a new guardian after four years?

The analogy between a legal guardian and elected officials is a poor one, and it's poor in an important way.

 

A legal guardian would only affect me, and would deprive me of the individual citizen's rights that I still do hold under representative democracy. Elected officials govern everyone. The laws affecting everyone, which are currently enacted and executed by elected officials, would still have to exist under direct democracy.

 

Direct democracy would thus not make me any freer. Laws would still be passed, which I would have to obey, along with everyone else. To imagine that I would be freer, just because I had cast my vote on each measure as it came up, is merely to indulge in the fantasy that everyone else would always agree with me. In reality, this would not be the case.

[Edgwyn]

While it has been 20 years since I have been a true resident of California, I agree with Kelandon that California is the state that is the closest to a direct democracy, due to the initiative system as laid out in the state constitution that makes it very easy for voters to put items on the statewide election ballot. This has contributed to my lack of faith in direct democracy as it has turned CA into a place that is almost ungovernable. The voters of California consistently put bond measures to fund police, fire, colleges, social services, infrastructure projects, etc on the ballot, they get approved and are now must pay bills leaving the Governor and Legislature with almost zero control of state spending. While I support many of the fixes listed in Kelandon's post, you cannot govern/manage an entity if you have no control over the budget. It does not matter if it is a country, state or company, if you do not control the purse strings, you do not control the entity.

 

The reference to "Bread and Circuses" is to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Basic human nature is that we all want, or at least are willing to take, something for nothing. Among the issues that led to the fall of the Roman empire were an expectation that the government would provide for the basic needs of the people without the people needing to contribute to the government (Bread). There were many signs of problems (wars, public corruption, etc), but public spectacles or "Circuses" (killing slaves/beasts, chariot races, and mock naval battles in the Colosseum) successfully distracted the population from worrying about and therefore doing something about the problems. There was a huge decline in social responsibility, or a citizens duty to support the body politic.

 

if politician X tells the voters that the government should provide you a middle class standard of living while you sit on your couch and watch the Kardashians all day long, while politician Y tells you that America is the land of opportunity and hard work is the way to get ahead, the majority of the voters will vote for politician X. They will also develop a culture of entitlement (a strong belief that they should get something for nothing) and a lack of social responsibility (the body politic owes me, I do not owe the body politic anything). There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, but politicians of both parties will continue to promise it and voters will continue to believe it.

 

I agree with Randomizer's first paragraph completely, but have issues with the second paragraph. In my opinion, the issue goes back to the great depression. The government took on a lot of debt to spend our way out of the crisis. This was almost definitely necessary, but a lot of temporary programs that were created to deal with the economic crisis became permanent while everyone was distracted with WW II. This was not an immediate problem due to the unique post WW II economic situation that we found ourselves in, but set us up for long term problems. The next major crisis was during Vietnam where the decision was to have both "guns and butter" with an emergency increase in debt due to war combined with a non-emergency increase in debt to fund social programs. The Reagan administration took on more debt to win the Cold War, which allowed the Clinton administration to actually reduce the budget deficit via the "peace dividend". The Clinton administration's deficit reduction was achieved by both parties reducing one segment of government spending to historically low levels while allowing other areas of government spending to remain at historically high levels. Under Bush II, it was obvious that this historically low spending in that one segment of the government was a bad idea, so both parties took advantage of the crisis to fund the people paying for their re-election and other special interests and between that and poor strategic decisions a lot of money was completely wasted. Of course emergency deficit spending needs to be effective in order to ease the current economic crisis while not creating a future economic crisis, and it is debatable as to how effective the emergency deficit spending was during the Bush/Obama transition period and during the early Obama administration.

 

One final thought on the subject of the economy. As an individual, deficit spending to live a lifestyle you cannot afford is a poor policy that leads to personal financial ruin. The same thing is true for a government. As an individual, you are advised to spend no more than X% of you income on housing, Y% on luxury goods (computers, TVs, netflix, high speed internet and smart phones are all examples of luxury goods), Z% on a car, etc. As a government, the same basic principles apply. Over the last 50 years, the % of our budget spent on entitlements (social programs) and debt service has increased while everything else has fallen. You cannot run a family budget on deficit spending forever and the only way to financial independence is to get out of debt. The only way to do that is to cut your spending so that you can pay down your debt. When you do this, the amount you are spending on servicing your debt drops and the process accelerates and you eventually become financially healthy. You cannot cut your families spending by labeling the largest segment of that spending non-discretionary. A social safety net is necessary, government entitlements as a way of life is not sustainable.

[Edgwyn]

The last post was way long, and I wanted to address Goldenking's first paragraph and did not, so here goes.

 

The NSA leaks and the budget crisis/congressional approval ratings are separate problems. The issue with the NSA is that it is an executive branch agency that has become too effective. We all want a government (which basically means executive branch) that efficiently uses our tax dollars, but we do not want it to be so efficient that it takes away our freedoms. The legislative branch and judicial branch are supposed to provide the checks and balances that prevents the executive branch from becoming too powerful. Unfortunately, the legislative branch has given up more and more authority to the executive branch since at least the 1970s and executive branch regulations do not receive the public oversight that legislative branch laws receive.

 

The problem with congress is that it is getting less and less effective at doing its constitutional and traditional job. Much of its responsibilities under Article I Section 8 have been turned over to the executive branch. This transfer of authority was mitigated by congress controlling the purse strings and passing each year approximately a dozen budget bills and a dozen appropriation acts providing detailed direction on the spending of public monies by the executive branch agencies. While this level of oversight was not necessarily as much as intended, it worked pretty well and was probably as much oversight as was practical. The constitution forbids the spending of federal money without a congressional appropriation. There are very few details in the constitution so legislation has been passed setting the US government's fiscal year to be 1 Oct to 30 Sep. Therefore, budgets and appropriations need to be passed prior to 1 Oct of each year.

 

For the majority of the last 20 years, this has not happened. The bills have passed late. The last few years have been worse with omnibus bills that fund the government as a whole without the detailed oversight that used to be provided. If you go with the position that the members of congress are employed by the people of the United States to govern the country in accordance with the laws and constitution, then we have a set of employees who have been late to work for 15 or so out of the last 20 years and have not performed basic elements of their jobs in an adequate manner for the last four years. Normally, that would result in firing. Instead we have well deserved dismal approval ratings and completely undeserved re-elections of the vast majority.

 

As congress gave up control to the executive branch it kept its checks and balances role on the executive branch by controlling high level executive branch appointments and the budget. Over the last 20 years, congress has reduced its oversight of the budget and in the last year, congress has reduced the hurdle to executive branch appointments. It makes me wonder what useful function these people and their staffs who exempt themselves from laws that effect the rest of us are currently performing.

[Lilith]

One final thought on the subject of the economy. As an individual, deficit spending to live a lifestyle you cannot afford is a poor policy that leads to personal financial ruin.

 

i dunno, it seems to be working out pretty well for donald trump

[Student of Trinity]

It's not so clear how bad deficit spending is for industrialized nation states. There's not enough history to tell, because things are always different this time.

 

I think the main issue is that major economies are so rich that they always could pay off their debts pretty quickly if they really had to, and because of that, nobody really minds keeping the debt open and just collecting interest payments. I mean, if the USA suddenly gave me the trillion dollars it owed me, what would I do with it? That's too much cash to do anything with, right away. I'd look around for a safe place to invest it. Hey, how about US Treasury bills?

[*i]

National debt is not the same as the debt you or I would owe. Trying to equate the two is a fallacy. In large industrialized nations like the US, the debt is mostly owned by domestic interests and the actual value of assets owned by a country are unfathomable when you consider all mineral reserves, intellectual capital, etc. Nations incur debt by printing money, and this leads to inflation. How much depends on both the amount of debt and the economic conditions at the time.

 

Some inflation is actually a good thing, as it encourages people to invest money or incur debt to buy homes, go to college, etc. because the value of the principal decreases with time. Taken too far, hyperinflation is certainly a very bad thing, but that rarely ever occurs in the modern era and almost invariable in places with large political instability.

 

As for the current economic climate, the recession is in effect demand driven. In other words, we have a problem because money and the ability to make it is perceived to be scarce, and therefore people who would otherwise invest are holding on to it in safe investments like *drumroll* US treasury bonds, which have essentially a zero rate of return. In other words, the US has an effective national interest rate of zero. The interest rate would be negative if it could, but is limited by zero because you always have the option of holding on to cash. Therefore, until demand picks back up, there is literally no harm of the US printing (borrowing) money.

[Randomizer]

i dunno, it seems to be working out pretty well for donald trump

Trump finances his lifestyle with if it's a success he gets rich and if it's a failure he still gets paid with no suffering with the debt.

 

Former Arizona governor Fife Symington built a real estate empire with him guaranteeing the loans with his personal wealth. His real wealth was a few thousand dollars and the rest was in his wife's name and locked in trusts that wouldn't repay his debts. He also used two sets of books with inflated values to get loans and real values when the debts were called in.

[RainbowDashRadical]

I choose not to involve myself with the nation's politics, and therefore choose to let congress do whatever the heck they want. Politics is stupid imo, and only causes pointless debates and controversies. One of the many reasons I will never vote in my life.

 

~RainbowDashRadical

[springacres]

Restricting voter eligibility would ultimately just serve as a tool for politically disenfranchising one's opponents.

 

Or the people most likely to vote for your opponents... which amounts to the same thing in the end.

Which is why, in the past, SoT's spoken out in favour of a strict two-party system with strong internal party discipline. That way, you never have more than two policy platforms to decide between, so the kind of three-way gridlock he describes can't happen. Well, that's the theory, anyway -- in practice, the leader of a party can still support an incoherent position as a compromise between internal party factions, and if both parties do that then the people aren't left with anyone sane to vote for.

 

This has another problem as well. It risks creating blocs of voters who don't fully support either party platform and who therefore, justifiably or not, feel disenfranchised because their elected representatives aren't listening to them 100% of the time.

 

Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what we here in the US have now, except only one party seems to have effective internal discipline...

[Khoth]

Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what we here in the US have now, except only one party seems to have effective internal discipline...

Which one? I assume you mean the one you like the least?

[springacres]

I prefer to think of it as the one I dislike most, but come to think of it, "which one?" is a good question. Such discipline as exists within either party is mostly tied to outside sources of funding, after all, so perhaps it's not truly internal discipline.

[Callie]

There's a lot of hype concerning the U.S. being the world's largest debtor, but that's misleading. U.S. debt is about 73.6% of the GDP; in those terms Israel, Germany, Canada, Egypt, Spain, the UK, France, Belgium, Singapore, Portugal, Greece, Japan, etc., etc., etc all have more debt. Japan's debt is a whopping 214.3% of the GDP and the country has not fallen into financial ruin (and they recently made changes to their long-standing monetary policy).

[Alorael at Large]

What *i said. Analogies to personal finance fall apart when you're looking at the economics of countries because countries aren't very much like people. This is a non-obvious economic truth, and I am not enough of an economist to understand all the ramifications, but just the fact that the government can always literally create money from nothing via the mint makes its debt weird. And that's not even really something that has any impact, because countries don't generally go about inviting in hyperinflation.

 

I choose not to involve myself with the nation's politics, and therefore choose to let congress do whatever the heck they want. Politics is stupid imo, and only causes pointless debates and controversies. One of the many reasons I will never vote in my life.

That always strikes me as a sad and deluded attitude. Politics is all about debates and controversies, but they aren't pointless. They're very pointed, and they determine the laws that we live by. Those laws can be literal matters of life and death, and certainly very often livelihood. Choosing not to engage is just one vote—but lots of just one votes make up all the votes that determine what happens.

 

—Alorael, who notes that with America's abysmal voter turnouts a third party could actually drive the two major parties entirely out of power if it could actually motivate the apathetic 50-60% of Americans to get out and vote for it.

[Goldengirl]

re:Edgwyn

 

I feel like the bulk of your argument has already been adequately addressed, so I'll just touch on the main points that are relevant to my scholar expertise.

 

Your "bread and circuses" argument doesn't match my perception of reality on either side of the metaphor. In Rome, the "bread and circuses" practices occurred over a long period of time, and are more closely localized to the fall of the Republic. (Which wasn't really a fall for most of the subjects of Rome, as they remained equally divorced from the political process). I've never heard bread and circuses being a cause for the fall of the Republic, however, and while Roman history isn't my focus I've still done a far bit of studying there. The more prominent cause was the underlying class struggles between plebeian/patrician and Roman/non-Roman that spurred sporadic civil war from Marius and Sulla until the assent of Caesar Augustus. This class conflict was exacerbated by the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the owners of large plantations called latifundia, which itself was mostly a result of massive population displacement during Hannibal's Italy campaign in the Punic Wars.

 

As for the collapse of the Roman Empire, it wasn't really a result of bad welfare policy either. Rather, in the east Roman Empire, they were unable to mobilize what had traditionally been a very diverse population against a series of determined religious offensives from the rest of Christendom in the Crusades or the Ottoman migrations pushed by the Persian Empire. The west Roman Empire likewise saw a collapse of its citizenry-military complex as it was unable to keep its military machine operating in the face of massive German migrations from central Europe. In both cases, the issues were exogenous to the actual political states of both societies.

 

On the other side of your "bread and circuses" rhetoric, I don't see how this analysis, even were it true, could apply to the United States. I don't know what politicians are advocating that the population can do whatever it wants and just get handouts; moreover, I don't know any major elected official that's advocated that. FDR, often hailed as the father of the American welfare state, used mostly work-based programs. The 1995 Welfare Reforms, hailed by both Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton as a major victory, tied welfare payouts to seeking (and gaining) work. Working has been pretty commonly held as a virtue and necessity in American culture (what with ideas of the "workaholic" or the Protestant work ethic, etc.). The only major American historical figure I can think of who comes close to advocating these sorts of views was Charles Coughlin, and he was always merely an outside voice in the political process.

[Kelandon]

There are three graphs I like to keep in mind when we talk about the national debt.

 

Here's a graph of the budget deficit for the years between WWII and 1980:

 

Looks pretty bad, right? We have deficits in nearly every year, and the net is definitely deficit. The debt is growing larger! Right?

 

Well, not exactly. The economy is growing faster than the debt during these years, so the debt-to-GDP ratio is actually going down.

 

 

Check out that decline from 1945 to 1980. We ran a deficit basically that entire time, but it was small and manageable, and the debt became smaller in proportion to our economy. First lesson: we can run a deficit forever. As long as it's small, and as long as it grows slower than the economy, we're in fine shape.

 

But right now it's going back up again! That's a problem, right?

 

Well, no, not exactly. The percent of our budget actually going to service the debt is pretty low, by historical standards. It looks like this:

 

 

(You can't see the details very well in this image. The real image is here.)

 

It turns out that debt payments are only a tiny part of our budget, smaller than they've been since the 1970s. Part of the reason for that is that our budget has grown in the last decade (it jumped about a third when automatic stabilizers kicked in during 2008 and 2009, and they haven't gone away), but that's only part of the story. The other part is that we're still borrowing at near-zero interest rates (and sometimes below-zero real interest rates, taking inflation into account).

 

In the long term, it would probably make sense to take some steps to reduce the deficit as the economy rights itself. But right now, there's no short-term debt problem. We're in no trouble at all, really.

 

EDIT: One other fact I like to point out that illustrates how federal debt is different from pretty much any other kind of debt you may be used to is that between 30 and 40 percent of federal debt is owed by the federal government to... the federal government. Most people can't do that kind of thing, but it's the ordinary business of monetary policy for a government.

[Student of Trinity]

It might be easier to understand how national economies differ from households by thinking about how the extremely rich are different from working stiffs. A working family may have just one bank account and one mortgage or credit card or car loan, but once you get very wealthy, you start to talk about 'net worth', because you're likely to have a lot of your wealth tied up in a broad range of different assets. You may owe many millions on various outstanding obligations, yet have many more millions of equity elsewhere.

 

Sometimes very rich people wind up with negative net worth (and stop being rich), but often the huge debts are a winning strategy that lets the rich get richer, by giving them leverage: If you invest at 10% return with 90% borrowed funds, your return on your own capital is 100% instead of 10%. Anyway, it may be quite sensible for very rich people to run deficits, in terms of cash income and debt: if they have assets that are increasing in value, their net worth may well be rising.

 

If Donald Trump buys a building, the value of the building is counted as part of his net worth, along with the debt he incurs to buy the building. But if the US government builds a highway, and pays its workers, who educate their children, the usual kind of accounting doesn't keep track of the national assets gained in the process. The money might as well have been burnt, as far as the ledger is concerned; but that's not really true. So in some ways the government has it easier than working families — it can print money — but in other ways it is evaluated less fairly.

[*i]

Agreed. It's tough to measure the return on investment for many government expenditures. For example, one cannot easily evaluate the value of having a military deter an attack from an aggressive neighbor. The value of educating citizens is also difficult to calculate. We know that these are necessities for a modern society, but there's no good way to quantify how much they're worth. Often times we're left with looking at measures like gross domestic product (GDP). So long as a nation's GDP is growing faster than its debt in the long run measured by several years to a few decades, there really is no problem. The US incurred very large debts fighting the Second World War. These were never really paid off as the GPD grew rapidly over the next twenty years and rendered them insignificant.

[Goldengirl]

There are actually some governments that do measure national assets like that, although they're understandably few. I recall that the United Kingdom has done that in the past, and I believe New Zealand was the other case study we looked at in my public finance class.

 

The value of educating citizens actually isn't hard to calculate. An educated citizen tends to make a higher wage rate, which can be averaged and calculated. The private sector does a good job of doing this already through the labor market. However, Stareye's other example, the military, is the classic example of a public good. Public goods are goods that by definition are not consumed in use (one cannot "consume" national defense - it merely is) and cannot be restricted (if you live in a defended area, there's no way to prevent you from being defended). Any private market that tried to sell national defense would quickly fail; people would take advantage of it without paying, meaning that any private defense contractor for a country would quickly go out of business. That's why defense is in the public sphere. The government has the ability to force people to pay by taxation in order to prevent free riding.

 

Since public goods by definition can't have a market, it's very hard to actually measure their economic worth (which is different than accounting cost). The way governments get around this is through two main means, both of which are problematic. The first is simply asking people through surveys and extrapolating from there, which gives people who have preferences that very from the status quo a strong incentive to lie in the extreme and skew results. For instance, if they want a small increase in military spending, but know that there are people who want the opposite, they'll lie and say they want a large increase in order to try and increase the average amount of spending. The other method is through revealed preferences, seeing how people's behavior reflects their preferences. This can work well for determining whether to build a road, which is also a public good, but I don't know of any means for evaluating revealed preferences for military defense. The result is that governments use a process that is guaranteed to be ineffective, but gets at the closest measure. If we do not have a private market for missiles or soldiers, we can do the next best thing and measure the opportunity costs (which are the economic costs) of the components. What else could the component parts of a military-grade rocket be used for, and how much do private markets value those? The reason that this is guaranteed to be an inaccurate measure is that a jet fighter is worth more to us than the metals, electronics, etc. that go into making it, but this method at least gets us a relatively close estimation. The issues only get more complicated when we realize that many of the markets for component markets are not, in themselves, efficient in most cases since there isn't perfect competition between firms to drive the costs down to the point where marginal cost is equal to demand.

 

And that doesn't even touch the issues raised by externatlities, defined as costs that aren't included in the market price.. Without getting into any of the details of that, I'll just say that Stareye is basically right in saying that it's hard for governments to determine how much their stuff is worth.

[*i]

Goldenking, I think you have to assume that changes in investment in education or defense spending lead to a predictable perturbation in value added to society. The problem with both education and military spending is their effects can be disruptive to the entire market, and therefore very difficult to predict.

 

You can certainly calculate wage differentials, but I would claim it almost impossible to calculate the value added to society by investing in education. How much a person makes and how much they contribute to society are certainly correlated to a point, but not perfectly. For example, a university professor can apply her education to publish new ideas (funded by government grants usually) that spur innovation in the private sector elsewhere. Since she was not the one who brought it to market, she does not directly see any income. Consider that Jon Von Neumann, the father of computing and founder of many disciplines, was not incredibly wealthy, but you can certainly argue that his theories led to entire industries being formed and incredible amounts of wealth generated with quality of life improved for everyone. Just looking at his salary and comparing it to someone without education does very little to capture the value added for him having had access to education. In this case, as happens now and again, a single educated individual can create a large disruption to the economy.

 

The same alternate universe experiment applies to military spending as well. Again, the economic methods you suggest sound like they would work if spending an additional (or lesser) amount on the military leads to a small perturbation in the overall wealth of society. Unfortunately, for defense spending either too little or too much can lead to very large effects that a market cannot perceive. Spend too little and you may risk outright invasion and the loss of the entire nation. Spend too much and you can bankrupt the economy and cause an internal collapse from the resulting political instability. Both cases result in a near total loss of value in a society, and I am unaware of economic models sophisticated enough to predict such large disruptions.

 

The only way one could truly measure the value of either is to run an experiment in two alternate universes. One where the government invests in education (or military spending) and another where it does none. After a 2-3 generations, you would then take the difference in GDP of each copy of the nation, if it even exists. The next best thing is to compare different countries and try to correlate with education or military investment, but even this is sketchy because of the lack of a good control and the fact that these things may be highly non-linear.

 

EDIT: I suspect this is also why economics has had such a hard time assessing the impact of income inequality. The national GDP can be doing great right up to the moment when the poor decides they've had enough of their governing elite who is so far removed from their concerns, and storm the metaphorical Bastille. Consider that while the pressures were building for decades, the Arab Spring began with the self-immolation of a street vendor, leading to massive unrest in the region. Such a moment may be inevitable, but exactly when it occurs is inherently unpredictable.

[Edgwyn]

Modeling education is even more complicated, because while there is indeed a wage differential, there is also a point of diminishing returns. When the market gets saturated with a particular skill set, the value for that skill set (just like for any other commodity) goes down. However, it is often years after the investment before anyone can make a case for the supply exceeding the demand and noticing that the wages are dropping compared to historical norms.

 

I read a quote once (I can't attribute it though) that the most expensive military is the second most powerful. There is of course no non-destructive way to measure. There is not a liter or meter of national defense. Too much spending can put the nation's economy at risk, too little can also hurt our country's and the world's economies (that whole Pax-Americana thing). Of course for the debate on how much is too much, you have to compare apples with apples and pick your favorite yard stick to match your desired outcome: Defense outlays in constant dollars, defense outlays as a % of the discretionary Federal Budget, defense outlays as a % of the total Federal Budget or defense outlays as a % of GDP. Generally the folks that want to cut defense spending will use straight dollar figures and ignore everything else that has changed in the economy and the folks that want to sustain or increase defense spending will use the % of GDP figures ignoring everything else that has changed in the economy. Since there is not an easy way to measure output, nobody talks about capability, only money.

[Student of Trinity]

The issue of planning and accounting for enormous incalculable events, which *i mentions, may affect democracy at an even deeper level: it's not clear that democracy is even trying to be efficient at allocating resources. The theory that follows Hannah Arendt would say, I think, that democracy is mainly about resisting the emergence of totalitarianism. So it deliberately accepts crummy government, with lots of waste and inefficiency, in order to make downright evil government as unlikely as possible. Technocratic oligarchies might be much more efficient in good times, this theory goes, but would succumb much more easily to totalitarian perversion; so one is better to muddle along with democratic politics.

 

It's still possible that this point of view will still someday vindicate the cumbersome American system of checks and balances between different branches of government. Maybe other countries with more modern systems will all get taken over by evil robots, and the US will survive as a bastion of liberty thanks to congressional gridlock. That scenario does seem to demand an awful lot of prescience from an 18th century constitution, though. I think it's probably a fantasy.

[Kelandon]

It's still possible that this point of view will still someday vindicate the cumbersome American system of checks and balances between different branches of government. Maybe other countries with more modern systems will all get taken over by evil robots, and the US will survive as a bastion of liberty thanks to congressional gridlock. That scenario does seem to demand an awful lot of prescience from an 18th century constitution, though. I think it's probably a fantasy.

It has been claimed (though not necessarily by me) that the 20th century already vindicated the system. The U.S. didn't end up taken over by fascism or communism, unlike most of Europe and much of Asia. There have been no military dictatorships, unlike in much of Africa and South America.

 

Now, of course, the largely unitary, unicameral U.K. didn't have any of that, either. In fact, neither did pretty much any of the English-speaking world, regardless of political system. It probably had more to do with geography, economics, culture, and luck than it did with political systems.

 

Still, most of the rest of the world had a catastrophic government failure in the 20th century, and, whatever you may think about American history in that century, we didn't have Stalinist/Maoist purges or the Holocaust.

[Jerakeen]

Still, most of the rest of the world had a catastrophic government failure in the 20th century ...

If this is true (I haven't done the math), it probably had less to do with systems of government than the other factors you mentioned, as well as outside influences like invasion and colonialism.

 

That said, nations that try to adopt democracy with a strong executive do seem to have a spectacularly high failure rate, if we're judging success by honest elections and peaceful transfer of power.