Re:Google's CEO: 'The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists'
by mindslight on Saturday October 02, 2010 @01:07PM
(#1750825)
> Caplan, however, emphasizes that democratic failure does exist and places the blame for it squarely on the general public. He makes special emphasis that politicians are often caught between a rock and a hard place: thanks to advisors, they know what policies would be generally beneficial, but they also know that those policies are not what people want
These three sources of failure (voters, politicians, lobbyists) don't have to be mutually exclusive. I'd say they're all broken, with the real problem resting in the idea that government is upwardly scalable. The inability of most people to understand actions and motivations other than their own (a requisite for computer security) leads them to thinking that affecting larger groups somehow solves more people's problems (while in fact the opposite is true).
These three sources of failure (voters, politicians, lobbyists) don't have to be mutually exclusive. I'd say they're all broken, with the real problem resting in the idea that government is upwardly scalable. The inability of most people to understand actions and motivations other than their own (a requisite for computer security) leads them to thinking that affecting larger groups somehow solves more people's problems (while in fact the opposite is true).