On Tue, 24 Jul 2018 11:48:27 +1000 Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net> wrote:
Direct democracy is where somehow everyone gets to vote on literally everything, throwing out any and every law not wanted, and also having freedom over when such votes are done - if "leaders" are able to constrain voting by saying something like "you voted this year on the options to reduce or increase taxation by 5%, and you chose to decrease taxation by 5%, and so now you can't vote again for 10 more years" that of course is nothing like direct democracy.
Thought folks round here were clear on the concept.
Well I think there are a few unclear details, but yeah the system may be better than 'repersentative' democracy, either because it will limit state power somewhat, or will cause more chaos...
(which is just another for of statism anyway)
well there you're presupposing it as a negative thing
statism? I'm not presupposing it is a negative thing. I'm looking at the facts.
is there no possible middle ground between statism and anarchy, where people can reasonably make collective "agreements" and say the individual conscientious objector is still respected,
Well, if you don't force dissenters into those agreements then yes you have something that is not ordinary statism and gets closer to anarchy. So let's say some people vote to set taxes to some %, BUT people who don't vote have their taxes set to 0%. Or some people vote to close the borders but people who don't vote can go through the borders freely etc. But I'm not sure that's what direct democracy means.
and the oligarchs don't game/control the system into a state of tyranny
you are not saying much, if anything.
Sweden is quite a poor example - some sort of federated "Democracy" as far as I can tell - "direct" on small irrelevancies like whether flip flops must or must not be worn around the public pool (but I have not research the Swiss system in any depth...)
actually the swiss do vote on some interesting stuff. I think we've covered it before. just one example https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonhartley/2014/11/30/swiss-voters-reject-incre... "78% voted against expanding central bank gold reserves" - i.e. voted even against a partial gold standard....