horse of george

"... the feeling is that democracy is failing, in decline... the great thing about democracy is still there, the idea that freedom maximizes value within a community... but the weak link in the system has always been the need for these free citizens to cast votes for a putative leader... of course this act of voting has always been vulnerable to error, but the assumption was that the dynamic of constant change compensates for the mistakes, in other words, the voters will of course err but we can always fix that in the next election... and regardless of that, change in and of itself is a very valuable thing... but what I'm fearing is that the model is broken, that the problems we face as democracies are so big and complex that there's little room left for mistakes... that people have and need the right to vote too often ends up meaning only that they retain the right to make mistakes... and politicians are still thusly rewarded for promising foolish or ill advised things simply to get elected... in keeping with this feeling I read recently a libertarian essay on why only intelligent, well informed people should vote and that the less informed and less intelligent should want this to be the case, should feel ethically motivated to sanction such a thing for the betterment of all... but of course that is a very short step away from disenfranchising a large portion of the electorate as a matter of law... or should that be royal decree?..."