Plato's "republic" (one of the worst books in human history) and every justification in that book and every book citing it is trotted out to argue for how bad direct democracy is.
Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war.
Direct democracy is good. One person one vote, on all legislation, actually could work. We haven't even tried at scale in thousands of years.
It's telling that my boy Smedly Butler (ask your US marine friends who he is and they will recite his story perfectly or else their bootcamp will have smoked them for it) advocated for a military draft where the draft eligible are only drawn up from the list of folks who voted yes on the war.
It's impossible for people to know about every topic. That was true in Plato's day and is dramatically more true now. People defer to what someone on TV or Tiktok told them and have no time to look into facts or primary sources.
Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work. That or gridlock where you can't get 50% to agree on anything.
If you ask people "do you want A, B, C, or D" a majority may well say to do each. If you only have budget for one, getting them to come to consensus is impossible at the scale of direct democracy.
People don't bother looking into stuff because they know their opinion, and their vote, doesn't really matter. Treat people like children and they start acting like children.
For some contrast Switzerland has a sort of defacto direct democracy in that citizens that obtain a relatively small number of votes can bring any issue they desire up for vote. And they have indeed brought issues like Basic Income with the suggested proposal of every single Swiss adult getting around $1700/month. That's something that would likely destroy any country that passed it, but it would likely pass by an overwhelming margin in the current state of the United States. But in Switzerland where people actually do have real power, and responsibility, to determine the future of their country, it was rejected by 77%.
Instead, back in the states we can look forward to our true political power of getting to choose between Dumbo and Dingbat for our completely unrepresentative representatives.
> That's something that would likely destroy any country that passed it
What makes you say that?
Work deterrence, inflation, and the tremendous cost would devalue your own currency.
In general most people work jobs solely and exclusively for the $$$. If they didn't need that $$$ they'd have much greater power to negotiate wages. That sounds amazing in theory, but in reality - how much money would it take for you to go scrub toilets when you could otherwise sit and home and live a comfortable life with your family? Probably quite a lot to say the least. Or for a single young guy, how much would you need to pay him to work instead of him being able to play video games and chase tail all day, every day, if he wanted to? And if we're being honest - you can probably remove young as an adjective.
I did add "likely" because I used to be a huge advocate for basic income, but my view shifted on it overtime as I gained a greater appreciation for how economies, and even societies in general, function. Or that the large number of billionaires we have are largely due to accounting and speculation (read: total on-paper capitalization of stock market vastly exceeding the amount of money in existence), rather than them actually just making obscene amounts of money.
> how much money would it take for you to go scrub toilets
If my needs were otherwise met, and there were clear instructions allowing me to do this in confidence that I wasn't inconveniencing any users of the toilet, I'd do it free. (Cleaning a toilet is less messy than changing a baby, and that's not hard either.) Given proper PPE, I'd do even more "disgusting" jobs, if they were jobs that needed doing: I draw my line at cleaning up sharps, but that's only because I'm not trained.
Maintaining communal infrastructure is not a thankless task: you can know that everyone who uses the infrastructure until next maintenance time benefits from your work, which is more than most people can say about their jobs. There are people who take pride in their work, even if you consider that work low-status, and beneath you. Do different work, then!
Do you really think most people would live lives of idleness, if not compelled to behave otherwise? If you saw something that needed doing, and you had the means to do it, would you just… walk by? If I may, that says more about you than it does about anyone else.
Quite the strawman there. Not wanting to work [at times literally] shit jobs without excessive compensation, is not the same as everybody being idle. I can list thousands of things I'd rather do than clean public toilets, and I don't even do thousands of things! Though yes - I do think a huge chunk of the population would be generally idle, if possible, in terms of commercial productivity, and I see nothing wrong with that, besides the fact it would crash any economy where it was possible.
You not wanting to work "shit jobs" (without compensation you would consider excessive) doesn't mean that everybody doesn't want to work them (or even that everybody considers them to be "shit jobs").
I agree with your point about commercial productivity. I don't agree that it would crash the economy: it would crash GDP (by eliminating large classes of exploitative and abusive behaviour which currently prop GDP up), but we already know that GDP is a flawed metric. I don't see how this would interfere with food getting to our tables, buildings being built, or communal infrastructure being maintained, except that monied folk would be less able to demand that things be done "or else", so we might have to reorganise society somewhat (such as by providing better working conditions for "shit jobs").
I wouldn't want to clean public toilets if I didn't need to do so. You'd be willing to do it for free. I think one of our views runs rather closer to the overwhelming majority of people, like 99.999%, than the other. This issue is really not the one you want to argue. But I understand that you have to argue it, because if you simply accepted this point then you must accept the fundamental problem. When everybody starts demanding substantial amounts of money for any labor they don't want to do, you're not only going to crash your gdp but see hyperinflation as well.
Now not only is the basic income pointless because it's no longer enough to afford anything (and increasing it further just sends you closer to Zimbabwe), but you'd also completely crash your currency meaning you'd also no longer be able to afford any imports (though exporters would be getting filthy rich - see: why China intentionally devalues their own currency). The country would be obligated to rapidly transition, formally or informally, to another currency as the default unit of trade for anything of value, further nullifying the basic income.
You're getting way too strung up on the specific example of cleaning toilets. You know what job vastly more people will want to do? Installing and maintaining a self-cleaning toilet. Bang, massive benefit to the local community. Focus on profitability creates a blind spot.
I don't see why you think inflation would suddenly happen. You haven't justified that claim.
Also, anality drives me to at least mention the most straight forward way inflation will increase. You'd dramatically increase monetary velocity, which is what drives inflation, all other things being equal. Of course all other things would not be equal in this scenario - they'd also be changing in ways likely to drive inflation so you'd get a compounding effect.
Have you been in a public bathroom, in the US, in basically any urban area? Self cleaning doesn't cut it. People cause damage to bathrooms for no apparent reason, piss everywhere within a 10' radius, and on occasion feces isn't far behind. Oddly enough even women's bathrooms, at least on occasion, can be just as bad if not worse - as you can add blood to the entire disgusting mix, people flushing pads, and so on. Cleaning public bathrooms is an unimaginably awful job that nobody, in a million years, would do if they had any other remotely reasonable way to get money, let alone getting handed it for free.
Inflation happens because increasing labor costs will inevitably get handed right back onto the customer, especially on the scale we're talking about. And the customer isn't just the final customer, but every business operation from the raw goods all the way down to the final product, so it'd lead to rather dramatic inflation.
It doesn't matter whether the overwhelming majority of people would be willing to clean toilets for however much money: what matters is whether enough people would that the toilets get cleaned. From what I can tell, the answer to that is "yes".
Given instructions, and absent other immediate obligations, I would do so much helping out, wherever I happened to be at the time. (The only reason I don't now is because I don't understand most jobs – my meddling could do more harm than good –, and they won't let me do jobs in my area of expertise.) I'm not unusual in this regard: perhaps I'm unusual in that I'll do this unprompted, but if it's a societal expectation that people clean up after themselves, and leave things in a slightly better state than they found them, people generally do it.
The problem is not a lack of workers. The problem is not a lack of things that need doing. The problem is a lack of "jobs". UBI (with the necessary patches to, e.g., prevent bad actors from redirecting all the money) is essentially employing everybody to do what they believe needs doing.
So the question becomes: do you believe direct democracy works at small scales? Your answer appears to be "no".
I have no idea what you're basing "from what I can tell" on. In America there are literally millions of janitorial and cleaning staff. The overwhelming majority of those people would much prefer to e.g. spend time with their family than engage in menial labor to make ends meet. And the marginal utility of money decreases dramatically, at least for most people, once you have enough to comfortably survive and provide for your family indefinitely.
I'm a white-collar knowledge worker. There is no downside to me getting my hands dirty with real work during my thinking time – that's time I can't spend with my family if I want to get anything done, because unstructured social interaction takes up the same space in my brain as the knowledge work does.
And the marginal utility of having cleaner toilet facilities increases dramatically when they tip over the boundary between "clean" and "not-clean". Given an apron and long gloves, I'd happily (most days, at least) clean shit off the wall, or pull pads out the U-bend, if it increased the chance the room was clean when I had to use it.
If I were able to choose whether or not to clean the toilets, and someone kept leaving them in a right state, then after the second-to-fourth time, I'd set aside some time to identify the culprits, and then I'd take measures to ensure they stopped, starting with confronting them over it: first in private (if possible), and subsequently in front of people whose opinions I'd expect them to care about. I might escalate further if it continued without good reason. This is not an option available to cleaning staff on the poverty line, who rarely have the time in their schedule to do this, and might be sacked if they used their breaktime to pull an insubordinate stunt like that. (I would not be capable of working in those conditions, and I expect I'd develop new and fascinating mental health problems if subjected to them.)
There is a major difference between volunteering to do something, and having your ability to live in your home contingent upon you doing it, as regards people's willingness to do various tasks.
I don't see why having to pay significantly more to people cleaning the toilets is a downside. It's a shit job, the pay should reflect that. Of course when people are forced into the treadmill just to get fed, they will take it for pennies, but that doesn't mean that it's the right way to do things.
Ideally I absolutely agree with you - I think everybody would. The problem is reality. Companies that make/sell real things, and not software, have almost shockingly low profit margins, with labor costs generally being their greatest expense by far. WalMart's net profit margin, for instance, is less than 3%. And as they have an absolutely massive number of employees (they're the third largest employer in the world in fact), their profit per employee is quite low - somewhere around $7,000.
Software and tech companies don't treat their employees better because they care more about their employees, but because they're drowning in money owing to ridiculous profit margins. Apple's net profit margin is > 24% with a greater than $2 million profit per employee!! [1] They could buy every single employee a new Ferrari every single year and still have [literally] more money than they know what to do with.
So you have this imbalance in the economy that employees working jobs that pay stupidly high wages are the ones where the companies could generally afford to pay them even more, dramatically more, but instead just hoard all the money. Whereas low wage jobs are the ones where companies themselves are also just 'barely getting by', but at a large enough scale - that can translate to billions of dollars, even if it's not much per employee.
[1] - https://appleworld.today/2024/10/apple-generates-2-3-million...
> Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work.
We have those now.
Direct democracy would replace politicians being vaguely influenced by social media driven trends with government policies decided directly by the social media outrage cycle. I've got no end of complaints about the current system but that doesn't incline me to go for a swim in a manure pit.
Representative systems vest political power into concentrated points of influence. The reps are often as uninformed as the citizens. The US just had some infamous legislation pass that representatives didn't even read, and publicly stated so.
The system also makes reps uniquely vulnerable to targeted lobbying, corruption, regulatory capture, and threats. I find much to be faulty with opaque dealings with a few key individuals.
Direct democracy mitigates these issues. Influence must be exerted through broad, public persuasion. This forces special interests to operate in the open, creating a higher and more transparent barrier to subverting the public will.
>Direct democracy mitigates these issues. Influence must be exerted through broad, public persuasion. This forces special interests to operate in the open, creating a higher and more transparent barrier to subverting the public will.
Have you paid attention to any US or global election since 2016? The special interests stay hidden and their influence works wonders.
If direct democracy could have ever worked, that opportunity died the moment social media became popular.
You are correct that mass manipulation is a critical issue. However, this vulnerability is shared by any system reliant on voters, including the representative one. It is not a unique flaw of direct democracy.
So there are three issues we're talking about in this context:
1. Reps are also uninformed.
2. Social media manipulation of the populace (or, generally, propaganda).
3. Concentrated influence on a handful of legislators.
Direct democracy eliminates the third vector.
Furthermore, the stakes and incentives for corruption are vastly different. A lobbyist gains far more from corrupting one senator who decides for millions than from swaying individual voters. The return on investment for corrupting concentrated power is orders of magnitude higher.
Even if propaganda shapes opinion, the resulting decisions still represent the people's will at that moment. Representatives can betray even that will for personal gain, adding another layer of distortion between what people want and what they get.
How does direct democracy mitigate the issue that the representative is uninformed and not even reading what they voted for?
I think my argument was written in a way that could allow this misinterpretation, sorry. I wasn't claiming direct democracy makes people more informed, but I was saying it removes the additional corruption layer.
Direct democracy doesn't cure ignorance, but it eliminates the corrupted/coerced middleman. An uninformed public voting directly is still more aligned with public interest than uninformed representatives voting for whoever influenced them most.
I'm not at all convinced of the existence of this corruption (other than small scale one offs). I just think the voters want stupid and impossible things and vote for the politicians who promise them.
The average person (and more if younger) is illiterate these days and unfit to hold any position of significant power. Source: I work with them.
I completely agree about the excellence of Direct Democracy (DD). One of the most common arguments against DD is that: "people aren't smart enough or knowledgeable enough to make important decisions". My reply to this is: and current politicians are? Politicians obviously aren't smarter or more knowledgeable than the average citizen, they are more inclined to act in their own best interest rather than the public's best interest though. We get rid of the middlemen and we get rid of: corruption and the abuse of power. The Swiss are doing excellent with DD!
If you think the republic is one of the worst books in human history I would ask what makes a good book? When there are plenty of implementation issues for direct democracy it feels strange to blame Plato... Particularly when the world has benefited from the republic in so many ways.
I say only the patriarchal heads of households should get votes. Isn't that pretty much how Athens did it? No votes for slaves, women, anybody with mixed non-Athenian ancestry, no poors allowed to hold a political office...
Anyway, I'm all for putting the sons of politicians on the front line, but don't think that will stop wars. The British Empire was infamous for putting nobleborn men directly in harms way, they would proudly stand up right in the thick of combat making themselves tempting targets and were routinely cut down. In a society with a strong martial tradition this doesn't turn people into peaceniks, if anything it gets people even more excited for wars.
The Brits had this as a custom back when it was viable on the battlefield. They tried to stick to it during WW1 with quite disastrous consequences, which is why they stopped. Well, some brave souls still tried it occasionally in WW2, but any British officer who'd try to do that kind of thing today would be considered an idiot endangering his unit.
Strong martial tradition or not, whether combat is seen as desirable depends a lot on the level of personal risk for those involved. Which, by the by, is why feudal nobility was much more enthusiastic about warfare than the peasants - having good armor significantly reduced risks, and chances were good you'd get ransomed if captured.
When applied to modern warfare, it pretty much depends on whom you're fighting. If it's a modern army (in the sense of military doctrine first and foremost) against premodern one, whether the latter is guerrilla or state, and you're in the modern army, your chances of survival are pretty good - look at casualty figures for Battle of Mogadishu or Desert Storm. But if you're on the other side, the casualty rate is so high that people need some other motivation to keep fighting (ideology, religion etc); very few would fight for loot or glory under such conditions.
And judging by how things are going in Ukraine, two modern armies going at each other isn't much better. Again, hard to be excited about being blown to pieces by an FPV drone the moment you poke your head out of the camo netting.
Have you ever read the (full) text of any bill that has been passed during the last couple of decades? How about reading all of them?
So are you proposing people vote on them without reading them? Or that we write very short bills aimed at a non-lawyer audience, effectively leaving most decisions up to the interpretation by courts? Or something else?
>advocated for a military draft where the draft eligible are only drawn up from the list of folks who voted yes on the war.
I really like this position from an ethical point of view.
But in reality you will be conquered by a neighboring country with different principles in about 3 days.
Voting yes on a war implies you're the one invading.
So you can just say that the war is defensive - and send those who voted against it to fight anyway? Or how does that work in your head?
In a defensive war - there is no vote whether or not to go to war. You are immediately at war because you have been invaded.
No, that's not how invasions work. Or rather, the defense against invasions does not work that way, unless you plan to lose in about three days.
Yes it's exactly how it works. You're just looking at things from an American perspective where, owing to geography, we have a negligible chance of having to fight a defensive war. When we do get attacked eventually it's just going to be getting nuked en masse. So instead all we have is 'defensive' rhetoric for the naive. Notable the Department of 'Defense' was literally called the Department of War in more honest times.
War, real war - and not just bombing random countries with little to no anti-air defense and then huddling up in microscopic and ultra-defended zones while waving a 'victory' banner while having undisputed control over near 0% of the country, is a slow grueling, and bloody thing. This is how you end up with things like both the USSR and USA losing to Afghanistan, Russia losing to Chechnya, USA losing to Vietnam, and so on endlessly.