Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The direct democracy of 5th century (BC) Athens, for example, never had more than 30,000 people eligible to vote. Once you get into the hundreds of thousands, you really need to start moving to deciding issues via elected representatives, which is the system that's used in all western nations today.
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I disagree because elected representatives can't be expected to be competent to decide on a wide range of topics.
It's not uncommon to hear MPs in the UK Parliament displaying their ignorance during debates. Recently, for example, Margaret Moran argued that an extension to detention without trial was required to allow time for encrypted data to be extracted. She was then informed, by a fellow Labour MP, that the law already provides for indefinite detention in such circumstances. The recent European Amending Treaty debates also highlighted a broad range of MPs' misunderstandings (it's doubtful many MPs actually bothered to read the Treaty text).
I think what is required are decisions by the well informed; I would allow democratic votes for anyone who can demonstrate a sufficient knowledge of the matter in hand. So we'd all have the right to vote; but we'd have the responsibility to find out what we were voting on first.