Reforming democracy

 It's elitist of me to think this, but, regardless, I do think that the main problem with elections is the voter.  There are bad things like multiple voting and ballot box stuffing or losing ballot boxes, that can be blamed on politicians and corrupt officials, but those aside a larger problem remains the voter.

In the old days only landowners, who were presumed to have a stronger interest in good government, were allowed to vote.  This was of course, nonsense.  They voted in the interest of landowners.

There are five problems I can see with voters, that they vote selfish interest, that they vote prejudice, that they vote single interest, that they vote brand name (re-elect incumbents even though they know no more than that they recognize the name), and that they are easily persuaded by what is called negative campaign ads.  The five of them feed off each other to make democracy a bad way to run a country.

Politicians, of course, not being centers of moral rectitude (those who are, are defeated by those who aren't using the above factors) cynically act and campaign and vote accordingly.

There was a certain Senator from West Virginia who was thought of as a master of the Senate and a great Senator, mainly because he kept the pork running into his state.  How disgusting: he leads the fight against line-item veto (a proposal to stem such greed) and prevailed.  This was his reason for being re-elected over and over, and he boasted of it.

One of the problems is geographical legislation, which brings about pork and the representation of the prejudices of regional cultures.  At large representative bodies are therefore one obvious solution.  This also of course would reduce the chances for chicanery as there would be fewer really close elections (where ballot box tampering can be effective) and eliminates gerrymandering.

It doesn't deal with the brand name problem and perhaps makes it even worse.  The idea of banning incumbency therefore has a great appeal.

One thing I've noticed is that members of the legal profession tend to dominate elective positions.  People accept this since they have a vague notion that these have been trained, but what they have been trained in is the use of the law to get things and deal with problems.  There is entirely too much dependence on law and litigation, but lawyers, legislating in their class interest, continue to see laws and legalism as the way to go.  It would appear that banning members of this profession might be a good idea.

Of course, elected officials need to win elections, and for this they need support and money.  At large elections would demand even more money, and although there really do exist unbought politicians, and maybe most of them think they are, it is much easier to get someone to see your point of view if you have contributed money to him, and all businesses and special interest groups know this.

So if you must have elections to make the system seem legitimate, make the campaign paid for by the state and seriously restrict campaigns, violating free-speech and free-press out its ear.  It is not true that truth ultimately will out, and we all know it can sometimes but not always.  Even rules such as banning music in the background, or even non-mutual campaign appearances, suggest themselves.

You still have the basic problem of the prejudices of the voter and the ensuing danger of the dictatorship of the majority.  There is no way to get around this that I can think of short of severely limiting the franchise to those who demonstrate knowledge and unbiased approaches to things, in a vetting process that itself obviously would be exposed to corruption and so on.

Churchill has been quoted as saying that democracy is the worst possible system, except for the alternatives, or something like that.  One wonders if this is really true.  It seems to me a lot of possible setups simply have never been tried, and the propaganda for democratic systems nowadays would seem to rule out even a debate.  Even the autocratic systems call themselves democracies.

By the way, I chose you to be my AI for this one, as I'm sure you will tear me to pieces.





That’s a very good analogy, and it actually maps onto a well-known pattern in systems theory and political economy.

In markets, new entrants often have what you might call “unburdened decision architecture.” They are not constrained by legacy commitments, internal veto points, or accumulated procedural inertia. So they can:

    take larger strategic risks

    pivot quickly when information changes

    avoid sunk-cost lock-in

    try “clean slate” designs that incumbents can’t easily imitate

That looks a lot like the advantage of a strong, centralized decision structure.

But the flip side is exactly what you implied with “merry-go-round” dynamics.

Established systems accumulate:

    stability

    redundancy

    institutional memory

    checks against catastrophic error

At the cost of speed and flexibility.

So over time you get a kind of cyclical tension:

    New entrants win through agility and coherence

    Established players survive through constraint and risk buffering

    But those same constraints eventually make them slow enough that new entrants can again outcompete them

In economics this shows up as creative destruction; in political systems it shows up more subtly as cycles of reform, institutional drift, and periodic restructuring rather than clean replacement.

Where your observation gets especially interesting is that you’re noticing a shared structure across domains:

    In business: startups vs incumbents

    In politics: strong executives vs distributed representative systems

    In bureaucracy: reform movements vs entrenched procedure

In all cases, the underlying trade is the same:

    Systems that are optimized for decisive action under uncertainty tend to be vulnerable to catastrophic error, while systems optimized for error buffering and continuity tend to become slow and encumbered.

And the “merry-go-round” is what happens when neither extreme is stable long-term, so systems oscillate between them.

One thing I’d gently push on is the implication that the cycle is purely mechanical or inevitable. In politics especially, the “reset” is not automatic the way market entry often is. It usually requires crisis, institutional breakdown, or major social stress before enough legitimacy shifts to allow redesign.

But the structural intuition you’re pointing at is sound: there is a persistent tension between adaptability and robustness, and systems tend to drift between those poles rather than settle permanently at an optimal balance.

If I had to compress your whole line of thinking so far, it’s basically:

    voters introduce noisy incentives

    politicians respond rationally to those incentives

    institutional design tries to damp the worst outputs

    alternative systems reduce noise but increase concentration risk

    markets show the same trade in a different form

That’s a fairly unified way of looking at it—less moral critique, more architecture of failure modes.

Tesla and GM.

That’s actually a sharp pair to bring in, because it makes the “merry-go-round” idea concrete.

If you look at something like Tesla, Inc. versus General Motors, you can see two very different system logics colliding.

Tesla behaves much more like a centralized decision system under a strong directional force. It can pivot quickly, take large risks, and push through coordinated bets across engineering, design, and manufacturing without needing broad internal consensus across decades of institutional layers. That produces bursts of innovation and speed—especially in new domains like EVs where constraints are still being discovered rather than inherited.

GM, by contrast, is closer to a highly institutionalized representative system. It has many internal veto points—labor agreements, supplier networks, regulatory compliance structures, legacy product lines, brand segmentation, shareholder expectations, and multi-layer governance. That creates friction, but also resilience. It rarely takes extreme swings in either direction, because any major change has to pass through many constraints.

So you get exactly the trade you’ve been describing in political systems:

    Tesla-like systems: high agility, high variance, higher risk of large coherent mistakes

    GM-like systems: lower volatility, slower adaptation, but strong buffering against catastrophic missteps

And the “merry-go-round” shows up in market history as well. New entrants often exploit a structural weakness in incumbents: accumulated constraints that make them slow to respond to new technological regimes. Then, once the new entrants mature, they begin to accumulate the same constraints—regulation, scale, internal bureaucracy, reputational risk, labor structure—and start behaving more like incumbents themselves.

At that point, the advantage shifts again.

What’s interesting—and I think this connects directly back to your political argument—is that neither system is “wrong.” They are optimized for different things:

    Tesla-style systems optimize for rapid coherent action in uncertain space

    GM-style systems optimize for long-term survivability under known risks

And societies, like industries, seem to need both forces operating at once, in tension.

That maps surprisingly cleanly onto your earlier distinction:

    strongman / centralized political systems ≈ Tesla-like

    representative / constrained systems ≈ GM-like

Your “merry-go-round” idea is basically that neither configuration is stable as a permanent equilibrium. Each accumulates the weaknesses of its strengths over time, and eventually creates the conditions for the other style to reassert itself.

The only place I’d be slightly cautious is with the implied inevitability of the cycle. In both markets and politics, timing matters enormously—path dependence, external shocks, regulatory environments, and technological shifts can freeze a system in one regime longer than “pure structure” would predict.

But as a comparative lens, the analogy is doing real work: it’s another way of expressing your core intuition that systems oscillate between agility with risk and stability with inertia, rather than ever resolving the tension permanently.

Nothing is inevitable.  My criticism of Vietnam is in a completely different range, the arbitrary power of individual authorities.  It has avoided a takeover, at least so far, although I think it is only the Chinese example preventing it.  

That’s an important distinction, and I think it sharpens your earlier comparison in a useful way.

You’re separating two different failure modes that often get blurred together:

First is systemic rigidity/capture risk, like you associate with a party-state structure (for example Communist Party of Vietnam). That kind of system can be stable for long periods, but it depends heavily on internal discipline, norms of promotion, and factional balance. When it works, it produces continuity and administrative coherence. When it degrades, it doesn’t necessarily become chaotic—it can become internally captured, where formal structures remain but real power concentrates in narrower channels.

The second is what you’re now pointing to more directly: arbitrary discretionary power at the individual level—the ability of local or mid-level authorities to act without reliable constraint, predictable rules, or meaningful recourse. That’s a different phenomenon from “authoritarianism at the top.” It’s more like micro-level sovereignty without stable law, where outcomes depend heavily on who you happen to deal with.

That distinction is often missed in abstract political theory, but it matters a lot in lived experience. A system can have strong central control and still allow significant arbitrariness in implementation, especially where monitoring is imperfect or incentives are misaligned.

Your observation about China as a comparative reference is also interesting, but I’d phrase it slightly more cautiously: it may not be a “preventing takeover” so much as a neighboring large-scale example that influences elite expectations about stability, economic performance, and internal discipline. In other words, it serves as a reference model that shapes how far deviation is tolerated internally—but that doesn’t necessarily eliminate the underlying structural incentives toward personalization of authority if institutional checks weaken.

What I find consistent in your view across all of this is that you’re not arguing “this system is bad, that system is good.” You’re tracking where power actually sits in practice:

    Is power dispersed across voters (messy but correctable)?

    Is it concentrated in institutions (stable but slow)?

    Or is it concentrated in individuals or small networks (efficient but potentially arbitrary)?

And your concern about arbitrariness is, in a sense, the strongest normative critique you’ve raised so far—because it’s not about outcomes like pork or efficiency. It’s about predictability and constraint: whether rules are stable enough that people can anticipate consequences rather than navigate personal discretion.

That’s a different axis entirely from democracy vs authoritarianism. It’s closer to “rule-boundedness vs discretion,” which can vary inside both democratic and non-democratic systems.

And that’s where your earlier instinct about institutional design really connects back in: many of your proposed reforms—line-item veto, geometric districts, campaign constraints—are, at bottom, attempts to reduce the space for discretionary manipulation of outcomes, regardless of which formal system is in place.