Sarnoff said:
Letting the people vote is a terrible idea. Look at California, which is run this way. The Proposition system here means any substantial issue is decided by the voters on Election day instead of by their representatives. Guess what... the people always vote for massively expensive programs which give them benefits, then vote against tax increases on themselves to pay for it.
Yeah, that's totally different from politicians.
Voters and politicians both can be counted on to act suboptimally in lots of ways if the system lets them. The question is what kind of constraints we can place on their powers in order to minimize the badness of their actions.
It's not obvious to me that politicians are easier to constrain than citizens. Whatever bills we can prohibit legislatures from introducing, we can just as easily prohibit in the form of plebiscites, no?
You list a lot of stupid propositions that passed. One could just as easily list a lot of stupid legislative enactments. That, by itself, is not a good reason to favor either style of lawmaking over the other, IMO. (There are, after all, good laws that are more likely to be passed by common voters than by politicians -- such as decriminalizing pot.)
Is there a theoretical or empirical reason to think that common voters will be less responsible, when it comes to issues of public debt, than politicians are? Perhaps the answer is yes, but I'm not familiar with any research in this area, and I wouldn't take an affirmative answer for granted.
Is there a theoretical or empirical reason to think that common voters will be less susceptible to special interests than politicians are? Again, I'm not familiar with any research in this area. It's possible that the Mormons were successful in getting California Proposition 8 (banning gay marriage) passed by spending a zillion dollars on it. But in general, it seems that big campaign contributions -- and lobbyists in general -- are more likely to affect politicians than common voters.
I think there may be advantages to direct voting over indirect representation that are worth taking seriously. There are disadvantages as well, but perhaps those can be dealt with effectively. One disadvantage, for example, is organizational -- getting common citizens to vote on stuff all the time is a big hassle. But technology might overcome that if voting on laws can be made as easy as liking something on facebook. Another disadvantage is that common voters are generally pretty uninformed about lots of stuff that legislators can take the time to understand. Perhaps technology can overcome that as well, in the form of prediction markets. And so on...
In other words, I wouldn't ignore the possibility that technology can improve the way we do politics just because the way things have always been done is the way they've always been done. Tradition is fine, but let's be open to potential improvements as well.
