I’ve been thinking about the concept of democracy a lot lately.  Or at least, I’ve been gnawing on it in the back of my brain anyway.  I’ve come to the conclusion that democracy doesn’t work.  And I don’t just mean this flawed two-party democracy that we live in, but democracy as a whole.

For the record, I’m a libertarian in theory.  I think that people should be free seek happiness as they please, so long as it doesn’t encroach on other people’s ability to do the same.

That having been said, people at large are idiots, and don’t know what’s good for them in the long run.   Or put another way, people are inherently selfish, and are fine with taking from society at whole if it means more for them individually.  Some people expect that the government should pay for all of their health care.  Some people see no problem in getting permanent disability pay, when they don’t actually have a disability that prevents them from working.  What ever happened to, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”?

I like the idea of democracy in general — having one person make the final decision on things for an entire population seems awfully silly.  But I think voting should be both a privilege and a duty, but not a right granted to everyone.

Ideally, I would say we should do away with Congress, and a much larger number of qualified individuals (i.e. both intelligent, and know the issues at hand) should vote to enact laws and policies.  These people wouldn’t be elected by the masses, because the masses don’t know what’s good for them.   There would be some sort of unbiased procedure for determining who “qualifies” to vote on what.  And those that qualify, would be duty-bound to vote.

I know this could never work, because inevitably the process of choosing these “enlightened citizens” would become biased.  So like all other such ideas, not so great in practice.  But I feel like some day, that’s what it will come to through some combination of technology and social evolution.