They do sometimes manage to just ignore parts that they don't like sometimes, at least temporarily, as the recent and continuing mess in the DPR-US illustrates.
You need a means for citizens to hold the powers that be accountable. Unfortunately, the EU is largely designed without such a mechanism, as its initial scope and ambition was much smaller than the superstate it is growing into it wasn't deemed necessary.
Every branch except for the European Parliament risks consequences only if they fuck up so badly that the majority of EU citizens in their home countries (or in some cases, the majority of member states) deem their actions so reprehensible that they consider punishing the EU more important than electing their own national government, since it's effectively the same vote.
This is technically still a means of accountability, but it's not really a threat in practice.
TLDR: Billionaires hold political power.
He was being straightforward, direct, matter of fact, technical, and an asshole.
You gotta lube up the plebes, or they get butthurt, and that is what is causing the issue.
I'm not sure it can be solved without everybody writing down their vote, but this would be one way that would make pushing through unpopular policies, whether because of changing opinions, mismatches where politicians misrepresent their plans or corruption, much more difficult.
Of course initially we would have to learn, that changing our minds too often will lead to things not getting done at all. And it is doubtful, that a lot of people are even capable of becoming informed and reflecting beings, not to be swayed by a hip populist radical, and thus causing shit to happen. Also the sheer number of issues and policies would be so many, that most people couldn't make up their mind on everything. But that's OK, since people can raise awareness and simply vote later, when they became aware. Another issue would be what the choices are that people have on the platform. How to give all relevant opinions as choices? How to know what is relevant? Or can voters apply for adding a new opinion? But then who grants the right to add a choice? How to prevent spam?
So there certainly are huge issues with the idea. But maybe, over time, we would develop into politically reasonable societies and politicians would have to fear the opinion of the people, because one scandal uncovered, and they could end up kicked out tomorrow. Maybe it could also better designed, so that there is some minimum time between being able to change ones stance about something. Or some maximum of policies one can have an opinion about per day.
Even initially to have such a platform without real political consequences of voting, would be super interesting, because you could lookup what the current opinions of the people are.
I think that would empower ill-conceived (and/or ill-willed) populist & short term movements, with everyone in constant fear of being "un-vote bombed" by armies of easily led, and likely make the lobbying problem worse.
To use the recent US shutdown as an example. Passing a budget is like one of the basic requirements of governing. If the current government cannot accomplish that, it should immediately dissolve and elections be held. Every single position in power at the time, gone, the whole thing gets re-elected because they have proven that the current group cannot adequately govern.
The ability to recall needs to work similarly. Vote should be able to be initiated by the people at anytime, and a successful vote means the government dissolves and new elections are held.
We could also have a "cooling off" period after a piece of legislation (like chat control) fails. It failed the first time, it should not be able to be immediately reintroduced whether in the same or a different form. There should be some sort of cooling off period where that piece of legislation (or its goals) cannot be reintroduced for x number of years.
The cooling off period also has problems, because sometimes a piece of legislation is a good idea, but has a major flaw that causes people to vote against it. What happens when people want a law passed, but not in the form it's presented in?
It's important to note that this is a basic principle, almost the basic principle, of English-style parliamentary democracy. You have a monarch who makes decisions (through their chosen government, ever since the English cut off a few heads), and the rest of the Parliament (a bunch of nobles, clergy, and eventually representatives of commoners) is there to withdraw financing from that government when they disapprove.
> We could also have a "cooling off" period after a piece of legislation (like chat control) fails.
We usually do, it is called a "session." The problem is the inability to pass negative legislation (which also has a pretty long history) i.e. we will not do a thing. Deliberative assemblies explicitly frown on negative legislation, and instead say that purpose is served simply by not doing the thing.
The problem is that individual rights are provided by negative legislation against the government: think the US Bill of Rights. Instead, we have systems where exclusively positive legislation is passed by majorities, and repealing that legislation takes supermajorities. The only pragmatic way to create new rights becomes to challenge legislation in courts, and get a decision by opinionated, appointed judges that X piece of legislation is superseded by Y piece of legislation for unconvincing reason Z, and this new "right" is about as stable as the current lineup of the sitting justices.
What we need is to pretend like "democracy" is a meaningful word rather than an empty chant, or more often simply a euphemism for the US, Anglosphere, Western and Central Europe, and whoever they currently approve of. Democracy is rule by the ruled, and the exact processes by which the decisions are made define the degree of democracy. Somehow, elites have decided that process is the least important part of democracy, and the most important part is that elites get their preferred outcomes. Anything else is "populism."*
Decisionmaking processes in "democracies" need to be examined, justified, and codified. The EU needs either to cede a lot more leverage to its individual members (and make that stupid currency a European bancor, rather than a German weapon) OR become more directly responsive to European individuals. If you're not serving the individual states, and you're not serving the individual citizens, you're exclusively serving elites.
* A term made into meaningless invective by elites who hated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populist_Party_(United_States), a party who believed in things that were good.
What's plan B? Lower the threshold to a million dollars?
Is this true? Lots of countries with high living standards have high taxes. It doesn't need to solve every problem but it does help solve the problem of one unelected person holding too much power and influence.
> What's plan B? Lower the threshold to a million dollars?
1B = 1000M. I think thats high enough. Don't see why you need to make it 1000x smaller to try and make a point.
It does? Really?
What are they teaching kids in school these days? According to the books I studied, nominally-egalitarian leaders racked up an eight-digit body count in the 20th century alone.
Yep.
> nominally-egalitarian leaders racked up an eight-digit body count in the 20th century alone
You don't believe in democracy and equal rights? Anyway billionaires love their 10 digits not 8.
Not if it gets us a Trump, twice. What has democracy done for us lately?
It appears that democracy just devolves into mindless yet profitable populism, given enough time and technology. Stupid voters are easier for ill-intentioned people to herd, using the modern tools we've built to do just that. Social media has made it possible for the first time to exploit a fatal bug in democracy that we always knew was there. AI will slam the coffin lid shut.
I don't see a way back, personally, but confiscatory taxation of everybody that you think has too much money isn't a way forward. The people being taxed will demand a return on their investment, and now they know how to get it.
The problem isn't the money, the problem is the power.
I agree that wealth inequality is horrible and taxes on the wealthy should be much higher. But if someone owns 10% of a trillion dollar company, that's $100B in shares. They can sell off 900M$ worth of shares and "not be a billionaire" in terms of income and money (and thus taxation). So what do you do?
- Seize control of their shares and thus their control over private industry
- Or, accept that billionaires exist
This is basically the core fight between capitalism (private ownership of the means of production) and communism (government control of the means of production).
Most people hate the idea of billionaires, but people generally also hate a centrally planned government where the government owns a controlling stake in all businesses preventing any insider from having any real control.
We should be discussing strategies to tackle this. Not just go "oh lets just accept it".
Just how many people have 100B+? Do you see them trying to interfere in governance and elections? Maybe we can have annual wealth taxes. Just like property taxes. There are many ways to tackle this. That's what we should be discussing. Not just giving up. Absurd wealth inequality will cause societal collapse.
> This is basically the core fight between capitalism (private ownership of the means of production) and communism (government control of the means of production).
No it isn't. It's taxation. Does the presence of property taxes and inheritance taxes make the west a communist region? Communism is the govt "owning" a company. Some rich guy selling his shares on the stock market to pay his taxes doesn't mean the govt owns the company.
The sad reality is that the world has a nonzero percentage of power-hungry narcissists. We need governments that are more democratic and robust. We all know that the current government processes are broken and corrupted.
as in: not possible
the EU parliament can't legislate to remove it, at least not without permission from the two organs (commission, council) that keep pushing this
EU parliament is the only legislature in the world that needs permission to legislate
The reason that EU Parliament can't pass bills is because constituent governments don't want to lose power to parliament.
It makes sense, because EU law is mostly technical stuff that commission has to draft and all the national governments have to agree to.
With the commission being elected by the parliament itself and vote of no confidence being a thing, it's not like the parliament doesn't have power -- the power is intentionally nerfed to not overreach where national governments don't want it to.
you only need 50%+1 to appoint the commission, but 66% to vote them out
so practically impossible
Swiss style democracy with public referendums?
People are not able to be experts in everything they are asked to vote on, thats why we delegate it, just like people delegate their healthcare, plumbing, flying to a holiday destination, growing food, etc.
People en-mass are just as easy to manipulate as elected members, if not easier.
Generally speaking, people are stupid. Really REALLY f-cking stupid. Giving the average Joe this kind of unmoderated power in a modern world that almost entirely eludes his understanding is no different from handing him a loaded gun; eventually, someone will get hurt real bad. As someone living in Switzerland, the main reason things are as stable as they are is because:
* Changing anything significant requires a referendum, which is a huge pain in the ass. So politicians just kinda avoid important changes that require referenda, finding other ways to enrich themselves and leaving society stagnating. This means that actually important changes come about very slowly or not at all. Read up on how long it took for women's suffrage to become universal – and the outright threats of internal military action the federal government resorted to...
* Whether the Swiss like it or not, Switzerland is mostly a loud, spoilt economic annex of the EU. It will remain stable for as long as the EU is, and well off for as long as the EU wants to be seen as a peaceful and magnanimous partner in international relations. After all, "bullying" tiny and surrounded Switzerland into agreeing to anything – which the Swiss will cry about at any opportunity you give them – is a bad look.
So yeah, Swiss direct democracy is not all it's made out to be, and really not all that great up close. Admirers remind me a lot of Weaboos, strangely shortsighted in their admiration of a system they know little about.
42 homicides year 2021, so an extremely safe country too.
Calling people too dumb to handle democracy sounds a tad facist. They are literally in top 10.
I can tell you our politicians where usually picked up from high school, never been to college, and had worse grades than the general public.
So direct democracy might be like capitalism… the worst system besides all the others.
> Calling people too dumb to handle democracy sounds a tad facist.
Well, it's good thing I did not do that. I said the average person cannot begin to comprehend every facet of the modern world they live in. Your limited reading comprehension is not making a very compelling counterpoint here.
In my many years of living here, I have never seen a Swiss person treat their own illnesses, design their own trains, hunt their own meat, and do their own plumbing all at once – they delegate tasks they understand themselves to be incompetent in to specialists. Yet somehow, at the ballot box, their otherwise healthy and productive understanding of their own limited competence makes way for a strange form of celebratory group hubris, landing them in a constitutional crisis like a drunk driver in a ditch.
Maybe instead of trying make decisions they have no hope of truly understanding in an incredibly slow and inefficient process, they can just elect people they trust to be specialists in narrow fields to make these decisions for them for a fixed time span? Wow, exciting, we just fixed a flaw in democracy the Greeks knew about 3000 years ago by resorting to the same god damn system everyone else already uses: representative democracy. Which also sucks in its own, different ways, but at least it is much less likely to set the entire f-cking country on fire over night. That's kinda neat.
I’m sure there are other examples of such legal abuse of different political biases - I’m just using this as an example because there is such a long history of it. Eventually, legislators will pass whatever they want anyways. And then your recourse to regain rights is to go through an expensive years-long legal battle that ultimately requires the Supreme Court to take the case. This type of “attack” is a serious flaw in many modern democracies.
I think the fix is to have personal consequences for legislators, judges, etc that make bad decisions that violate the constitutional rights or fundamental rights of citizens. The idea that people are immune from consequence just because they’re serving in an official capacity is insane. This shouldn’t be the case for anyone serving in political office or other public roles - as in, you shouldn’t get immunity whether you are a lawmaker or policeman or teacher or whatever else.
A lot of society wants this. A lot of parents are asking for this.
When it's so cheap to enact mass propaganda, selective omission and manufactured intent, it becomes impossible to just say, "well, the people want it." Their decision making process is compromised by the same people pushing these policies through.
Democracy is indeed broken, and we have to take that seriously if we're going to fix it.
Trying to build support for mass surveillance by misrepresenting it as targeted tool with checks and balances is exactly the kind of bad faith discourse I'm talking about.
I remember a few years ago, being shocked to see that over 50% of applicants for a software engineering role applied directly from their smartphones. So it's not even just normies who see their phone as "the computer".
> How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process? It is a dynamic that is repeated in many areas.
Relating our experience in the US, we planned for exactly this, it went okay for a while, until it didn't. The answer to parent is "do this but a little better" :-)
By choosing "people-vs-individual-politician" fight over "people-vs-government-system". Like, literally, make politicians personally responsible for this bs.
Other than hoping for a large meteorite or the second coming to end this misery, or stirring up the bloodbath a la Nepal - then, by recognizing the power of large numbers of people doing little things, like sabotaging the system at the personal level. But that implies unity, and unity and mutual support have been deliberately annihilated in this society for too long. Thus, this outcome is even less probable than the first two.
And once in place repealing it will be tremendously difficult.
How does society resolve this kind of abuse of the democratic process? It is a dynamic that is repeated in many areas.