I believe equality is an unstable equilibrium.
Throw a bunch of people on an island where everyone starts out equal. Soon, some will have marginally more power than others. Maybe they happen to be stronger, or washed ashore at a point with a few more coconuts and fish, maybe they just get lucky.
What do you use that extra power for? The obvious answer is to use it to force others to give you more power. Let that cycle run for a long time and you get the wildly unequal despotic power structures witnessed through almost all of human history.
The reason democracy "wins" is because bringing the least-powerful people up is a net benefit to everyone, including the most powerful, even if it requires bringing some of the most powerful down. It's a more efficient system -- extracts the most value from the most people -- so the total volume under the equality curve goes up at the expense of the top end going down a little.
For that to work, though, everyone has to buy into the system, even the most powerful. You need a populace that will willingly sacrifice personal power for the betterment of the whole. That requires intense, constant cultural education and community building.
When that breaks down, it's incredibly easy for a society to fall back to the default state of "everyone in it for themselves".
The horrors of WWII were enough to scare people shitless about unchecked power concentrated in the hands of a few. But those horrors are passing out of living memory right now, so it's little surprise that we're going back to authoritarianism and rapacious power hunger.
I'm generally an optimist about the human condition, but the news scares the shit out of me right now. It feels like we're forgetting everything about democracy and won't relearn it until we plunge headlong into WWIII.
IDk if a thought experiment about a desert island conducted inside a mind that is already thinking in terms of economic dynamics is... There are plenty of examples in the real world. It's pretty rare that little societies have dynamics like that.
Small groups of people usually share instead of trading. Power structures usually emerge from violence, religion or someone becoming chief. Power built by the sweat of one's (scottish) brow is something more characteristic of modern, monetary, large scale industrial and post-industrial societies.
Pharaoh wasn't pharaoh because his ancestors were marginally better farmers.
He is not saying that Pharaons were marginally better farmers but that balance in power is intrinsically unstable.
Losing a simple pawn in the beginning of the game makes you lost the game.
Anything which deconcentrates or destroys capital (rapid innovation, war) relatively strengthens democracy.
An age of peace, and lack of political will to prevent innovation-capture by current monopolies, results in democracy weakening relative to commercial interests.
Preface: I'm happy to be corrected, since i'm not very well-versed in this topic.
In the US, is it even a democracy when a new party can't come up and win an election? You can legally lobby for a party which in reality is just a fancy word for a bribe, so how do you expect either of these parties to have a common's person best interest in mind when it comes to making policies?
Compare this to India, where a person went on a strike, and then a group of people formed a party with the said person and he ended up becoming the Chief Minister of Delhi. Now, did he turn out to be good or not is another debate, but my point is, people were fed up with established parties, and it was actually possible for a new person to form a party and make a government out of it. Majority of the population wanted a change, and it was possible for them to get it.
The other question is: How democratic are those parties? - he primaries seem as such ...
I honestly and genuinely don't think that's much of a question.
I encourage you to read Lawrence Lessig's "Republic, Lost"[1] - which talks about how the big money behind campaign financing makes average Joe's feel as if they're choosing a politician based on their will, which turns out to not really be the case. Rather, they're choosing from a select group of politicians already rubber stamped "OK" by deep pocketed donors.
A good quote (not verbatim) from the book is basically how deep pocket donors have a sense of: "Let me choose the potential candidate options, and I don't really care who wins".
So it's the "will of the people" only so far as the people's will aligns with something they have 0 control over - the intentions/ambitions of those with money - which doesn't sound much like free will.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Republic-Lost-Version-Lawrence-Lessig...
But I'd say the 2016 election clearly refutes your assertion.
Republican fundraising as of 6/22/2016 in USD$millions, {total}, {candidate}, {affiliated PAC} [1]: Donald Trump (67.1, 64.6, 2.5), Jeb Bush (162.1, 35.2, 126.9), Ted Cruz (158.0, 92.6, 65.4), Marco Rubio (125.0, 47.3, 61.8)
If one wants to blame the Illuminati for secretly supporting candidates... this is a harder point in history to find support.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/electi...
Now, if the US switched to a radically different voting system today, we probably wouldn't see a flourishing of outside parties tomorrow; it could take a little while. But people sympathetic to outside parties such as the Greens or the Libertarians would be far less reluctant to vote for them if it didn't mean splitting their vote and causing the "lesser of two evils" to lose their local district.
This November, Maine will officially be using ranked choice voting for US House and Senate seats.
There are many who think the net is evolving in a great way and want to limit government interference until their is a real problem. If there's a real problem then pass a law and deal with the problem. Often times these harmless laws have terrible consequences and are difficult to undo.
Yes in a democracy you will frequently deal with votes not going the way you want. Having powerful groups who can get the law changed to benefit them is a different issue and is indicative of a de facto oligarchy
Some days I really think people don't know how to live under a democracy. There just always seems to be this segment of the population that want to be told what to think (and preferably told things are going well)
Some days I think liberty is the only way to live life, but that people mistake that liberty doesn't come at a cost. Most people don't have enough skin in the game to be willing to accept that cost. The original pilgrims, the founding fathers, and the lot did. There are attacks on our liberities that would have started revolutions (Patriot act being the most egregious example).
Don't know what to think anymore. Politics disgust me. I'm told I'm not even old enough to be this cynical.
Per Churchill, "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time..."
This reminds me somewhat of the argument over voting rights during the founding of the Constitution, ultimately being left up to the States. The argument for restriction was that those dependent on the wills of others are not independent or privileged enough to act in a way other than securing their own interests; the argument against this idea is fairly obvious.
From William Blackstone's Commentaries of the law of England is the most concise summary of the pro I'm aware of.
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_2_1s3.h...
http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/library/property-requi...
Don't worry my young friend: if you think, as it seems by your comment, that there was a golden age in the past where people was better, you have a lot of way to go in your cynicism.
See for example how protective the US has been of Monsanto in the past and now that Bayer has swallowed it, lots of lawsuits are suddenly underway and scandals pop up.
This kind of article recalling the war declared between Apple and Google by strong characters (reaching almost royal admiration) like Steve Jobs and showing their alliance now forced by economical benefits, brings to my head an observation I make for some years now.
It feels like the world is more and more returning to a, though different, late Middle Age state where kingdoms, merchants/bankers and religion were in control. It feels like we are close to the end of the powerful democratic state.
Yes, these forces has always existed and played a major role in political affairs, but during thr XXth century, we managed to keep it marginal, at least in the West.
Now there is an inversion, Kingdoms are coming back.
There is a lot of example: formation of alliances over sole benefits of oligarchs, growth of organisations never seen from a long time, customer attachment to a company like it was a dogma, tax and regulation ducking by companies, companies wars often more important than wars between states, states bending to organisations wishes, etc.
Maybe to return to this state is a human reflex. Like were unable to create a stable democratic state.
I don't know what to think about it atm, but I'm pretty sure we are on the edge of a great schism with the modern era.