This sentence is really amusing to me, because our democratically elected government, at least at the congressional level, is nearly all wealthy millionaires. So either way, important causes are decided by the wealthy.

You also have to take into account that the average age of Congress is almost 60. I.e. they have been working and accumulating assets for decades. Adjusted for age, the net worth of the median Congressman is at the 80th percentile: http://www.census.gov/people/wealth/files/Wealth%20distribut.... Is 80th percentile "wealthy"? It's within one standard deviation of the median. I'd call that upper middle class.

Fun fact: the median doctor is worth over $1 million by age 50, and about $2 million by age 65: http://www.medicalpracticeinsider.com/news/which-doctors-sta....

Which, again, fine, but I can't be the only one who thinks we'd be better off if we had more doctors in Congress.

Heck, I'm in Alberta where we've had a government returning taxes when we had budget surplus... just before the election.

It would slow the pace of government doing stuff down and if someone got bribed, it would be me.

And even if we did wrong, at least we'd truly be responsible. And screwing things up is kind of our birthright.

They way you describe it is not how it works in the real world, unfortunately.

Yeah yeah yeah, being cynical about democracy is cool, blah blah blah.

I suppose you should, what, just burn the motherf*cker down and be done with it, then?

You know, in 50 years the GOP will be able to look back and point to one of their most brilliant victories of all time: actively sabotaging the activities of government, and then using the results of their very own actions to convince the electorate that government doesn't work and cannot represent them, despite the fact that they got themselves elected into the very system they claim to despise.

It's utterly brilliant. "Starve-the-beast" neocon tactics taken to a whole new level.

I'm not sure you know what a "neocon" is. Neocons derived from Trotskyism and are found in both major U.S. political parties. Neoconservatism has done more to expand government than perhaps any other ideology present in American politics.

>actively sabotaging the activities of government, and then using the results of their very own actions to convince the electorate that government doesn't work and cannot represent them, despite the fact that they got themselves elected into the very system they claim to despise.

Ironically that strategy sounds a lot like a strategy that's been deployed by progressives. If you look at some of the most heavily regulated sectors of the economy--healthcare, banking, housing, wall street, etc--those are the same areas which progressives hold up as free market failures.

Varies considerably between things which get lumped together as representative democracies, from very poorly in systems like the US's which feature a strong duopoly, to very well in many modern multiparty systems. (More detail in, among other places, Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.)

What about Bill Gates or Charles Koch, do you think they have about $8k worth of influence?

But a change coming through the electorate process should have a more lasting effect as simply boycotting Facebook would merely shift the wealth and influence to another person instead of Zuckerberg.

How is that any different from the comment you're replying to? If the government is running something, it's a government ("public") program rather than a private one.

What he says is bad is shifting the decision to the wealthy instead of the public.

Now, if the public is deciding by choosing where to put their own funding, in the form of donations, that makes more sense. But in that sense, the millionaires and billionaires creating or donating to charitable foundations are doing the same thing: deciding where to put their own funding.

It's his money, so it's his choice where it goes. Beyond that, this is just an argument for higher taxes to take that choice away. If you want to argue against allowing people to have and direct the wealth they've created, then make that argument, rather than assuming it as a premise. Once you've assumed that as a premise, then it starts to sound obvious to deemphasize charity and emphasize government programs; that step isn't the interesting part of the argument. As it turns out, we have multiple countries in the world, with different sensibilities about the relative value and efficacy of public and private work, among many things. The US model, evaluated by European sensibilities, is broken in many ways; the European model, evaluated by US sensibilities, is broken in many ways. Neither of those is as interesting or relevant for evaluating potential changes as a country's evaluation of its own models by its own sensibilities.

Personally, I'd be thrilled to have significantly less of my income directed by government to the causes they care about; I currently donate a significant fraction of my annual income to charity, and if I had the money back that currently goes to a pile of things I mostly don't care about, I'd love to donate even more to charity. I know for a fact that it'd do more good. Changing that would require changing what government is spending the money on, and I'm far more confident that I can change the course of a charitable organization (or choose a better one) than change the course of government.

As it stands right now, I think I could do more good with a pile of cash by setting it on fire than by giving it to government; additional money in government hands has negative utility, and may be used to hurt me and people I care about.

As a random thought experiment, I've often wondered how it would work if charitable donations produced a deduction directly from your tax burden, rather than from your taxable income. In other words, every dollar you donate comes straight off your taxes. That would produce some interesting results.