I think that the claim that it is now practical to have a direct democracy needs some support. Can you point to a smaller group which is governed in this manner? To a working prototype of transitive voting code? I am prepared to be persuaded, but the practicality seems far from obvious.

Is it possible now to instantly poll all citizens, at any moment, on a question of law? Absolutely. Indeed we've had that technology for decades -- since the 50s at least with tabulators and telephones.

The point I am making, and which I was originally being downvoted for making, is that technology is not the point. Social dynamics are the point.

Ancient Athenians lived in a geographically small area, such that the several thousand citizens could all participate in any matter of public policy, lawmaking and justice if they so chose to. Many did so.

Periodically, a particularly charismatic leader would arise and obtain of great power. The Athenians, acting entirely within the limits of their constitution, eventually came undone. In the process they killed Socrates for asking annoying questions and wracked the Peloponnesian peninsula in war for many years, which is how they came undone.

The Romans established a Republic as a reaction to the demise of a monarchy. It was riddled with inconsistencies, but contained many of the features we now recognise as common. For example, there was one lawmaking body elected from a limited franchise (the Senate) and another from a broader franchise (the Tribunes). They tussled frequently, but each jealously guarded its privilege. Rome, an obscure city whose only natural advantage was in being found athwart a salt trade route, came to dominate much of the world while still exercising representative democracy.

In practical terms, what does a direct democracy with proxies buy us? The main advantage is, in theory, to assign power, through proxies, on topics to experts. That is, it's meant to be a meritocratic-democratic fusion.

Fine, except:

* How do you define a proxy's limits? I say "Bruce Schneier has my proxy on matters of cryptography". What does that cover? Simply voting on NIST competitions? Mandating the use of SSL in banking? Some say in the operation of the NSA? Here come thousands of nasty court cases to settle the boundaries.

* What about conflicts of proxy? If I give Bob my proxy on "the internet" and Jill my proxy on "fibre optics", whose proxy prevails when the question is about regulating Google's purchase of dark fibre?

* What about generality? We can assumably assign proxies to any level of generality or specification. Say that Ashton Kutcher, who holds 3 million proxies good for any subject, weighs in against Bruce Schneier over crypto, only holding 500,000 proxies on crypto alone. Is that the outcome you want?

* Demagogues! Bob, who has 500,000 proxies on education policy after a lifetime of careful study, experience and rumination, is suddenly exposed as being gay. Fox News hints he's in league with the devil. Overnight Glenn Beck cries a bit and acquires 2 million education proxies.

* Transferable proxies / sub-proxies. Beck's proxies cause Bob to be outvoted. Beck's viewers, who have now tuned into World's Greatest Unicycle Crashes III, forget that they ever assigned that proxy. 6 months later Beck sub-proxies the 2 million he still holds to the CEO of EvilCo. Hilarity ensues.

I just don't see it scaling.

I'm saying: eliminate Congress. Allow people to vote directly on all bills. They can read various opinions online (no advertising allowed).

> It's my understanding that the reason it was created is because technically it was too difficult to allow everyone to vote on every law.

It was created that way to prevent the tyranny of the majority.

"A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

- Federalist No. 10.

Think of it as defence in depth. Do you pin all your security hopes in file permissions? Of course not: you demand randomised address layout, auditing tools and so on and so forth.

In short, you want defence in depth. Representative democracy is a defence against majoritarianism.

> I'm saying: eliminate Congress. Allow people to vote directly on all bills.

Who will write these bills? How will they be proposed? Is there a minimum number of sponsors required, if so, how many? How do bills lapse? How are they amended during discussion?

Who will write the bills? Tim Eyman, Industry Groups, Costco, and other Lobbying Groups.

Who will get sponsors? Probably the same. They'll probably pay for it. The same forces that pay for lobbyists will pour into the direct democracy process, like they've taken the initiatives.

What will we get from it? A bunch of bills, all looking for no taxes, no gay marriage, and a pony. Meanwhile, the important stuff will quietly get looted by People With Lawyers who now have no more oversight.

That said, I down-voted you. Don't reduce this argument to name calling. People are voting up my arguments; you seem to be in the minority in not finding the alternative I'm suggesting to be better. That's fine. I wouldn't belittle you for it.

So I don't need to explain myself to you. I don't need to go into details. I don't need to get your permission. None of us do. You had decades; your turn is up.

The future will see open government and direct democracy via the internet as the obvious, logical next step of politics. The internet has transformed nearly every industry -- and now it's simply time to consider transforming politics. And those students, radicals and "juveniles" who are launching it, won't care what you think. You had your chance. You fucked up. Now it's our turn, whether you like it or not.

Of course you don't need my permission, why would I care, I don't even know you. I just thought that you were debating on content, and was annoyed that the one person who was providing sound reasoning was being downvoted for it.

Anyway, good luck with your revolution, be sure to post back when you're done.

What I'm saying is there are 13,000 full-time employees of rich clients, each representing a bus-load of money, whose job it is to stop what people want if it conflicts with what their wealthy sponsors want. That system cannot stand. It is rotten to the core.

I'm telling you that it's not about us or the people on HN. Politics have been gamed and the people know it, and they will change it. The internet has revamped industry after industry; politics is next. You can call it revolution. You may think I'm crazy and extreme. But I (and others) see something disastrously broken and are willing to use modern technology to fix it.

Instead, attach the voter's name to the bill, as either yay, nay, or abstain. When their position is proven wrong, fine them to cover the damages their mistaken choice cost.

As is, voting is unjust. It leads to abominations like the draft.

Technologically it's already possible.

Do you think this sort of thing makes you clever? In every idea there are implementation details. What's your point?

Unless you're saying that these things will somehow be radically harder under the proposed system, and if so say how, it doesn't need saying.

> Representative democracy is a defence against majoritarianism.

No, representative democracy is often proposed as a defense for such.

We can routinely see our politicians playing to the masses so obviously if it works it's only in a round-about fashion.

You could do the same with direct representation. Have a constitution, wich can only be modified by a 2/3rds majority. Require a 2/3rds majority to execute philosophers, start wars, and murder the male population of subject states.

And Socrates was not just a kindly old Zen master, preaching peace and understanding. He was a bright guy, but as he developed philosophy he also preached against democracy in favor of some kind of military dictatorship run by philosopher kings. Some of his students led bloody revolts, overthrew the democracy, and executed hundreds of democrats before they were eventually toppled. He wasn't quite the Osama Bin Ladin of Athens, but he was responsible (in a sense) for a lot of deaths. But he couldn't be executed for that, because there was an amnesty; so they got him on some trumped up charge related to his religious skepticism.

Of course, his more philosophical (and less political) followers (i.e. Plato) painted his execution as a great miscarriage of justice.

It seems like you're attributing the ideas in The Republic to Socrates. Of the Socratic dialogues written by Plato, some of them were fairly faithful representations of conversations Socrates actually had and others used Socrates as a fictional character to argue for Plato's ideas. The Republic falls firmly in the latter category.

The higher legislative branch gives more weight to states as individual entities for very precisely balanced reasons. In a very real sense it is not representatives that act, but states themselves.

This has been incredibly important, because it further decouples the population from the decision. Sparsely populated states have traditionally had different concerns than urban states: the Popularist Party of the late 19th century was sharply divided along these lines.

In other words, the popular vote is disregarded because different 'types' of people shouldn't have too much power: the density of cities should not grant that population dominion over the agrarian folk.

People complained about the popular vote being for Gore without realizing that the system was still functioning as intended: the states vote for the president, their votes being determined by the population within. Those foolish states that split their electoral votes make themselves irrelevant!

In practice, the system grants sparse populations dominion over the majority. There's no well-thought-out philosophical reason for this, by the way, this was just a compromise states like Virginia had to make to get states like Rhode Island to agree to the Constitution.

Philosophically, people are people. Why should they be effectively disenfranchised for choosing to live in cities rather than in the mountains?

Not so! Populism _failed_, but it wouldn't have even had a chance to represent the interests of the agrarian states if statehood were not more important than sheer weight of numbers.

>There's no well-thought-out philosophical reason for this, by the way, this was just a compromise states like Virginia had to make to get states like Rhode Island to agree to the Constitution.

How is that not a well-thought-out philosophical reason? Balancing the needs of states is what enabled the Union. You act as if the compromise was not based in real, valid needs on behalf of the states. Rhode Island needed incentive to join. Virginia needed incentive to join. A two-senator Senate and a two-representative plus population-based-count representative HoR is the result: an _elaborate_ philosophical compromise, balancing power on several axes.

You're looking at it the wrong way: cities have much, much more by way of population. The most populous states would _steamroll_ everyone else if weighted solely by headcount, assuming they acted in unison--which has historically been the rule and not the exception.

In the United States, states are largely a historical accident stemming from the way North America was colonized. No one actually decided to establish a federal democracy in North America and divide it into states, different people from entirely different countries just happened to colonize different parts of the continent without ever intending that New Amsterdam and Jamestown would ever fall under the same American government. The Constitution was a political compromise based on the fact that thirteen of those colonies broke away from the mother country and needed a federal government. The Founding Fathers weren't gods, they were the same breed of hypocritical, self-serving politicians you see in any era, a scarce few wiser than the others for sure, but the same ugly sausage-making all the same.

Believe me, I ain't putting no fathers on a pedestal. But you seem to like putting them in a cesspit.

Is simply not true. Why did we (and by we I mean land owning white men) vote for congressmen directly but not senators or the president? Obviously the mechanism for voting was in place, but they did not use it for 2 of the 3 federal offices. They were specifically trying to distance the choice of president and senators from the poeple. It was only later that the voting base was expanded, people started voting directly for senators and the president (and technically, it's still a little indirect to the president).

Only if you ignore that pesky anonymous voting problem. I want my bank to know exactly what transactions I made when, and keep detailed logs of those transactions. I don't want some government body have detailed logs of exactly how I voted.

But I can imagine it being put into place and then being abused.