Yeah, but taxes can pay for all of that.

For prices set by whom? A moneymaking machine, see? Unless libraries are nationalized.

But if you intend to nationalize everything, then there should be a damn good plan at basically building a commonly-owned corporation to maintain nationalized services.

A paid library is fine as a concept, but only if it doesn’t decrease the availability of free libraries.

Yeah, except there's one country where subsidizing paid services with taxes instead of fixing laws has both turned into a moneymaking machine for cronies and didn't make the services more accessible. The country of origin, well, of all those tech companies.

It doesn’t matter how complicated the rules are, if the rules don’t permit money to play into it.

This is self-contradictory. Unless you forbid lawyers to work for money.

But sometimes a more complicated law is required because the situation is more complicated.

The situation always changes, so laws become more and more complex rapidly with a long tail of legacy that doesn't solve its initial goals anymore.

So no, this can be solved with starting anew too. Just start anew every 5-10 years. If life requires something specific and the real world situation changes, I think one can wait that long. And this keeps the process simple enough.

And the most important part is that this doesn't allow malicious parties to carefully build up legal traps over many decades to subvert democracy.

Just clean the house completely once a few years, leaving only the constitutional law. Accumulate political knowledge, not rituals and procedures most people don't understand, with surprises hidden by crooks.

Like mowing the grass.

Quite the opposite. Give too much power into one central authority and that allows power to affect representatives. More distributed power at the local level, with restrictions on the abuse of that power coming from a higher level, is a much more equitable solution.

This is not exactly what I said. "Too many levels" is when representatives of one level elect other representatives, hierarchically. That shouldn't happen (the first level might reminisce the buildup of opinions in the society, the following ones degrade to be comprised of the members of the most uniform plurality, not even the majority). I meant exactly more distributed horizontally as an alternative. Functionality-wise too.

That said, compulsory voting works wonders. We’ve seen it quite clearly here in Australia. Make everyone vote, and surprise surprise, the impact of a loud minority gets drowned out! Combine that with a voting system other than FPTP and you’re well set for a much better democracy.

Agreed.

Politics should not end at the ballot box, however, and getting people more involved in political life in general would be a great thing. Through communicating regularly with representatives. Through joining a union. Through attending protests. Etc. I’m also quite a fan of sortition.

Actually necessary. Ballot box is almost a scam by now, since you are offered a limited choice based on limited information and can't just, say, press "+" and write in your own candidate. Almost the first time I see the word "sortition" used by somebody else on Lemmy.

At some point I thought that it's good that people not interested can avoid participating, but then realized that this is the simplest way to hijack anything.

We’ve seen first-hand how terrible it is when someone who thinks the government is “too much professional bureaucratic entities” comes into power, in the US. This is absolutely terrible anti-intellectual rubbish.

No. One can have constraints on from whom such organs are formed. Just no bureaucratic institution should be allowed to self-reproduce all by itself and have its secrets. Only that.

I don’t much care one way or the other about 3, it’s an insignificant irrelevance.

Couldn't be further from truth. So, your representative is supposed to represent you, right? If they don't do that, what's better, wait another N years until another vote, or, if they failed notably enough already, call a vote with enough signatures and elect someone better immediately?

This also makes lobbying a far less certain thing, since the person paid might be recalled a few days after. Which is good.

Except there should be some practical limitations to prevent what Stalin did in 20s (pressuring the specific small initial constituency of his key opponents to disrupt their groups ; this was in the Soviet system with a hierarchy of councils electing members to upper councils and so on, so - with not as many levels this isn't really a vulnerability even).

7 might be the only genuinely fantastic point.

At some point it was normal in western countries, even more than unions. There's a risk, of course, since, well, customer associations and unions might sometimes press in the opposite directions.

But when actual violence and half-legal pressure are denied by the law and the enforcers, these work just fine.

yes that’s precisely what i implied, because they control it in the first place. companies like amazon are more powerful than nation states, and they exercise that power.

And I'm trying to say that the state helping them was first.

this has been the capitalist state’s modus operandi for more than 100-200 years. and the oligarch’s power precede it, they shaped it that way back then.

Not really. Every month, year, decade is different.

aaron schwartz was literally just a dude, not remotely comparable to oligarchs.

He had the right ideas of how to solve one particular industry which is the spearhead of barbarism. And he somehow committed suicide in jail.