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.
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.