mary misanthrope Posted:

Althea —

I’m with you that it’s frustrating that people don’t pay more attention to local and state politics, especially since they’re the people who really make decisions on your behalf. It’s baffling to me that people pay so much attention to the person who has limited power and no ability to create legislative acts (and limited ability to scrap them), and not to the people actually writing and voting on them.

I disagree that democracy works in theory only, though. The bare-bones definition of democracy is a government that is based on the consent of the people and holds regular and “fair” elections; fair at least in the sense that there are specific rules governing them and the rules are enforced.

You can’t really say that democracy guarantees that the people will make “good” or informed choices on who represents them, only that they have the opportunity to help make the choice.

That reminded me of another system that works in theory. Karl Marx’s version of Communism. The government controls the wealth, and the people control the government, in short. Each working person is bumigned a job according to his ability, and everyone is given the necessities of life, as well as a few luxuries, according to their need. Unfortunately, Marx didn’t take into account 2 fatal flaws about people:

1. Power corrupts. Looking at the Communist leaders of the past, they did not allow the people to decide what they did. They just did it. This ruined the fallback system of Communism, and the government leaders were free to take as much of the wealth of the people as they liked.

2. People are lazy. Each working adult is bumigned their job, and received their food, clothing, housing, healthcare, etc, regardless of whether or not they decided to go to work. Without any real rewards for working, or penalties for slacking, the working man isn’t. This causes an economic collapse, and everyone loses.

If the government never got too powerful or too many ideas, and the working man stayed working, or was rewarded/penalized for his performance and attendance, then we would not be the Capitalist pig-dogs we are in the world’s most powerful countries.