alt Hacker NewsThere's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should not have it comes to have it. This is what every system so far has succumbed to. We need a truly equal system where all concentration of power is avoided unless absolutely necessary for the functioning of society to avoid an eventual collapse of the system.
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What if a true democracy is not a worthy goal? What if some people should have more or less say in something.
Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing?
Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair?
If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinces enough people that for very large values of 2, the answer is five, democracy says the answer is 5. How do you protect against this outcome in a pure democracy?
Nothing has been as effective at dispersing and diffusing power than Liberal democracy.
This is nonsense. Most/all democracies have laws that only certified doctors can practice medicine. This makes doctors unequal from other people. Is this incompatible with democracy?
Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal". In a democracy, the people have the power to decide and anyone has the power to elect, be elected and to voice his opinion freely.
>There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible.
Only if by that you mean equal opportunities for everyone.
But if you mean equal outcomes, then you're guaranteed to get USSR/Cuba/Venezuela poverty, famines and shortages, and even there that didn't fix the issue of the elites being super wealthy, it just made everyone else equally poor.
People will never end up equal no matter how many thumbs the government puts on the scale, that actually makes it so much worse.
The basic mechanism you’re describing is essentially accurate, however:
> As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship.
This doesn’t logically follow. The existence of a power differential doesn’t necessitate the differential being exploited to increase the differential. If we assume individuals are maximally selfish, this might hold, but that isn’t the case; people do altruistic things all the time, and there’s good reason to think most people are hardwired for it. The problem of liberal democracy is how you design a system to address those who are hardwired towards malicious selfishness; it isn’t clear that you truly can.