Saturday 17 August 2013

Voters are innocent (and should be respected)

If democracy is good then more democracy is better than some democracy. Since few argue that proportional representation is less democratic than fptp then we can deduce that arguments against reform of the system from fptp to pr are arguments against democracy. Democracy is good because the people are good. If the people are not good then there might be a case for some kind of enlightened authoritarianism but we immediately face the problem of choosing the leaders. We can think of direct democracy as a kind of anarchist democracy because the people represent themselves. If democracy is bad there should be no democracy and no government... if democracy is good then there should be as much of it as possible. We do not need to be concerned that full democracy will reduce the talent of legislators to that of the average person since people are able to deduce skill even if they do not posses that skill themselves. (And there are fewer legislators than voters.) There is no reason to keep fptp since there is no reason to oppose a more democratic government... government derives its legitimacy from the voters and so the voters should always be respected by the government. Voters should be favoured over politicians. Democracy and proportional representation is good for the people and so it is objectively good in the context of government since the government is designed to serve the people alone. The purpose of government is not to punish the people but to liberate them and so we should have pr over fptp.

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