> Direct democracy pretends that you just have this whole bunch of unrelated decisions, and so it lets you vote "Yes, everybody should get $10" and "No, nobody should pay for that extra $10" and then be _outraged_ that the result is economically incoherent even though that's _your_ incoherent policy at work.
Representative democracy does that too, as is evident from watching. Congress.
And non-democratic systems tend to end up with the ruling class deciding “We should get $x, And everybody else should be taxed to pay for it”, which while more fiscally coherent, isn't actually better from the perspective of anyone outside the ruling class.
> For example an autocracy can work well with just one wise person, so long as they're the autocrat.
And as long as they are not only wise, but unusually deficient in drive to serve their own self-interest. Unfortunately, it turns out that it's fairly hard to find people with the latter quality a d assure they become the autocrat; democracies, rather than relying on electors avoiding serving their self interest, rely on them actively striving to, which turns out is much more common.
Representative democracy does that too, as is evident from watching. Congress.
And non-democratic systems tend to end up with the ruling class deciding “We should get $x, And everybody else should be taxed to pay for it”, which while more fiscally coherent, isn't actually better from the perspective of anyone outside the ruling class.
> For example an autocracy can work well with just one wise person, so long as they're the autocrat.
And as long as they are not only wise, but unusually deficient in drive to serve their own self-interest. Unfortunately, it turns out that it's fairly hard to find people with the latter quality a d assure they become the autocrat; democracies, rather than relying on electors avoiding serving their self interest, rely on them actively striving to, which turns out is much more common.