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No you’re not guaranteed good ministers, but you can change ministers more regularly than you can monarchs who tend to rule for life.
Which goes both ways. If you get a good one they're gone just as quick and you're back to the usual babykissing sellouts.
Ha, I kind of like that about Rome though. People back then were least honest about their rampant corruption and lust for power.
In general, when people are honest about corruption it's because there's no consequences. We're already seeing that happening in the west.
But you can’t deny life for the people in the empire era was greatly impacted by the quality of monarch they had. Life under Augustus was incomparable with life under Caligula for the man on the street. And again, if Caligula had just been consul rather than emperor they’d have only had to suffer him for one year. But then they’d only have gotten to enjoy Augustus for a year too, so positives and negatives.
Technically only half a year, plus there were a bunch of limitations governing consuls. The real meat of the republic though was that the average citizen was actively involved in politics and personally responsible for defending the state. That wasn't the case in the empire, people took what they got and what they got was typically hyperinflation and exorbitant taxes.
There are certainly problems with democracy, but to go back to the sweet shop owner and doctor parable the problem seems to be with the demos side of things rather than the kratos side. Letting every 18 year old, or every dole sponging moron have a say in how a country is governed probably isn’t a great idea. I don’t think even Plato thought we’d be letting children vote when he used the sweet shop owner to make his point!
Yeah, it's pretty bad. Although I think back then 18 year olds were allowed to vote provided they were eligable for military service.
Although I think back then 18 year olds were allowed to vote provided they were eligable for military service.
But Plato wouldn’t have agreed with that. His whole thing was that only the learned should vote. But that leads to the issue of who classifies as learned, and who decides that classification and thus who decides who is learned.
I think a simple enough solution would be that only those who are net contributors to the state get to vote, but it’s still one man one vote if you’re a contributor. Then if those with a vote keep voting to reduce their contributions they will keep expanding the voting pool cos more people will fall out of the net beneficiary class, but when they win the vote they’ll be more likely to vote for their gibs back so you’ll get some sort of balance.
I’m sure there’s problems with the above, but something needs to be done about parasites voting for candidates who promise them more of my money. Begging is still begging even when it’s politicised.
I don't think democracy can be fixed by restricting the vote. Even if you restrict the vote to educated, intelligent men with skin in the game, they're still going to be spending most of their time voting on issues they don't really understand.
Voluntaryism works better in my view: Political association is organised through contracts, and only applies to the property of the contractor. That way courts and legislatures are put in mutual competition and if one becomes corrupt people can switch to another. Same way we'd cancel our netflix subscription.
I must confess I just had to look up voluntaryism. It appears to just be British Chicago school yeah? That’s definitely the side of the economic argument that needs more volume these days, but I can tell you in Ireland it just isn’t welcome. I studied an economics related course in smurfit and everything was about why the Chicago school were wrong. It was comical in a way, without anybody even proposing Chicago theories the lecturers posed these absurd caricature of their theories and then showed why they were wrong. It was just the enemy argument, like communism was in years past.
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