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Re:Google's CEO: 'The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists' by kiba on Saturday October 02, 2010 @02:59PM (#1751085)
I am not sure why people wants to burden the voters with the hard decisions in life.

Nobody in the world knows how to make all parts of the pencil. The graphite have to be mined. Somebody have to make coffee for the miners. Somebody have to truck the graphite to pencil making factory. Somebody have to chop down the wood.

Even programmers specialized. There's somebody who work on deploy tools, and there are some who are trying to make ruby faster.

Voters now have to decide between a wide range of policy stance that they probably don't know anything about. There are foreign policies, economic problems, etc. All of which are subjects that probably required lot of studying to get right. Than, those politicians, as generalist probably don't know these issue as well as they need to, or they are compromised by their own interests.

Programmers, doctors, etc are busy with their own profession trying to keep themselves competitive on the market and make decisions for their own lives. Sometime, they got it wrong.

If a lot of people can't make the right decisions for themselves, why do they expect them to make decisions concerning the leadership of a nation?

Re:Google's CEO: 'The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists' by SkyMarshal on Saturday October 02, 2010 @03:44PM (#1751186)
Better to have ignorant voters trying to make the decisions in the interests of the country, than a small group of rent-seeking special interests making decisions that benefit themselves to the detriment of the country.

When you're deciding about wars, financial crisies, decimation of the middle class, increasingly extreme wealth distribution, etc., the former probably is the lesser of two evils.

Re:Google's CEO: 'The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists' by narag on Saturday October 02, 2010 @04:52PM (#1751313)
I believe that the main function of voting isn't putting politics in the government, but kicking them from it. "Candidates" is derived from "clean" in Latin. Time will make them dirty, people will end perceiving it and choosing the lesser evil.

The rules that prevent a president from too many reelections are similarly befeficial, and a lot cheaper even if not enough.

Re:Google's CEO: 'The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists' by genieyclo on Sunday October 03, 2010 @03:15PM (#1753382)
Actually, it's meant as "brilliant" or "brilliantly white", since candidates during the elections to public offices in Rome walked around with their different levels of entourage wearing togas that had been whitened to the extreme with chalk.