Some things are fundamentally broken, not just in need of a patch.

"Simply fix the government" is useless advice.

Didn't you learn anything from the Mozilla rewrite of 1997. Never start from scratch, always patch, patch, patch until its working. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Here are some starting patches...

First we have to make political donations anonymous and capped. Also, no money from companies, only people.

Then we need to fix the fake news problem. Make sure nobody is living in a bubble and we are all living in the same reality. (The fix is to make news the forth estate officially)

Then we need to fix the size and shape of our electorates. Much smaller. No Gerrymandering.

Also need to ditch the two party system and allow our elected representatives to vote as desired by the electorate they represent.

Also push as much power as we can down to state and city level governments. Allow states and cities to be more different to one another so that we can all learn from the successes and failures of the choices of other states. Move power closer to the people.

I don't think you're wrong in general principle, but...

> The fix is to make news the forth estate officially

It's difficult for me to see how formally establishing the main-stream media as a branch of government would do anything to improve the credibility of the news.

If we can do it for the law and order I think we can do it for information.

I'm not saying we can't do it, I'm saying I don't see what it improves.

And just to mention, we also have problems in our society with the centralization and expanding powers of law and order in our government. Maybe that isn't the best example of "we centralized that, and now everything is OK!".

I also suggested pushing more power down to the local state and and city councils. Less concentration.

I didn't have it in my list above, but one thing capitalism did get right is that humans are self interested and motivated by competition. We need some of that competition in our public services so that the individuals who run them can be rewarded for doing a god job (whatever that might mean.)

Not any less useless than "customers simply need to make better/more principled choices"

I'm not sure how you arrive at that conclusion. An individual choosing between two products on the shelf is much simpler than an individual changing government.

For instance if I think scrapping the department of energy would make things work better, how can I get that done?

I can't. It's impossible. If HP doesn't make a laptop I like however, I can buy a Dell.

Besides the obviously classist implications of voting with your wallet (i.e. people with bigger wallets get more votes, vimes' boot theory, etc) we also already have evidence that it just doesn't work in this specific type of product. Go ahead and try going to Best Buy and getting a non-smart TV. You can't, because once one manufacturer comes up with a dark pattern, they all copy it. "Consumer choice" is an illusion for almost everything these days.

Searching "Dumb TV" on the best buy site brings up plenty of models. I went into the reviews of the first few to verify they were in fact non smart models.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?st=Dumb+tv&_dync...

Presumably you'd liek to repeal all consumer protection and environmental protection laws. Sheesh.