It's a little hard to reconcile "a government should maximize the outcomes for its people" with "government shouldn't listen to what people want", though, unless we say "people are too dumb to know what's good for them".
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Of course, people often are too dumb to know what's good for them, but that also doesn't mean all their preferences are invalid. A moderate position of "listen to what people want but realize they may not know what's good for them" is probably most reasonable.
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We could also say, "screw the people, just do what's best for the elites because in the long term what's best for the elites *is* what's best for the people" (ie "let's just replace the people with the elites, and we'll improve civilization").
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But I'm not sure that actually works out that well either. Probably results in too much conflict.
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I still think democracy is the best system and I find the reasons given by people as to why non-democratic systems are better to be unconvincing. First, it is much easier to remove a bad democratic government. If you think people are too passive to vote their way out of current
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problems, then you should not be creating even more barriers for them to act. Imagine a dictatorship determined to replace its population with Somalis. Second, taking a negative view of human nature makes democracy more and no less attractive. Why would you trust so few humans
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with such power? Decentralization and distribution are the better way to prevent abuses. Third, people continue to say that in an undemocratic system, including one where government is passed as inheritance, elites have more incentive to do better. How? They have no competition.
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Fourth, assuming that there are no perfect moral preferences and that policies are about trade-offs, which are reasonable assumptions, the disfranchisement of some people just means that some people will have their interests and preferences ignored, and not that their optimal
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outcome will be chosen for them. Think of how all the successes of nationalists were only made possible by the working class vote, and if the upper classes had all the political power, no resistance against the disease of our age would have had the slightest hope of being formed.
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Fifth, you can not be confident that your elite will be sane, and while you also can not be confident that your population will be sane, at least in a democracy you get to make the case for sanity. Sixth, elites already possess disproportionate power in a democracy where there is
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plenty of room to shape public opinion. Much of the dissatisfaction with current democratic decisions are complaints against elites. Giving them more power does not seem prudent.
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I think most of the problems of democracy would go away if we limited voting in various ways eg IQ, but that appears to be unstable. As for unlimited democracy vs. other options, I'll just try to avoid picking anything as definitively better.
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Once the political class learned that it could break the game by importing welfare-state ringers, democracy was done as a meaningful political system. Politicians exist as parasites on their national hosts, not the other way around. The Davos Men forgot that.
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Time preference can only go so low. Marginal Utility in the short term of extending suffrage,winning elections, needs to not exceed the marginal long term loss. But that long term is generational, and you can’t achieve that sort of time preference absent aristocratic traditions.
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