Universal suffrage a good thing?

[Gunny Highway]

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You work for a large corporation. Every four years you and your coworkers get to pick your own boss by a vote. The only thing is, there are only two candidates and the owner of the company gets to choose them.

Would you call this a democracy?

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No. I would call this a really stupid way to run a business.

[Gunny Highway]

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You actually want me to argue why poor and uneducated people are capable of determining their own interests?

If that is the case, no amount of arguing will do the trick.

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They know their own interests...food, shelter, etc. What they obviously don't know is how to get those thing for themselves, or they wouldn't be poor. So since they are unable to acquire those things for themselves, we should allow them a voice in deciding how the rest of us should provide those things for them?

[mrmazoo]

Agreed, but the point is that even though people vote, there is still no democracy.

[mrmazoo]

Never claimed it was smart.

My original point was that voting is neither sufficient nor necessary for a democracy.

My example shows that voting is clearly not sufficient for a democracy.

Here's my argument for why voting is not necessary, either:

Five work buddies go to lunch together every day. They can never agree on where to go for lunch on any particular day. They decide to assign each of them a particular day of the week and each person decides where everyone will eat on their respective day.

No voting. Yet this system is perfectly democratic. That is, power is equally divided among "the people."

So, you see, voting is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a democracy.

So there. :-P

[tylerdurden]

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one should not have a voice in the decisions made for everyone else.

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Why did you take this perfectly reasonable statement and muddy it up with all that stuff you put in front of it?

[tylerdurden]

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Five work buddies go to lunch together every day. They can never agree on where to go for lunch on any particular day. They decide to assign each of them a particular day of the week and each person decides where everyone will eat on their respective day.

No voting. Yet this system is perfectly democratic. That is, power is equally divided among "the people."

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How did they decide to implement this system?

[mrmazoo]

Does it really make a difference?

Are you trying to imply that if they did not decide by vote, then the system is undemocratic?

Or are you saying that if one person said "Hey! I have an idea." and everyone agreed, then that is the same as taking a vote?

Sure, we could say that the situation above is equivalent to the situation where everyone votes for the place to eat but they agree beforehand to always vote in favor of Joe on Mondays, Pete on Tuesdays, Mary on Wednesdays, and so on.

Of course it is POSSIBLE to have a democracy that involves voting. My point was that it is neither sufficient nor necessary, and I believe I have made my case.

I would furthermore submit that the situation in the US is more like my first analogy (where the owner of a company chooses two candidates, either of which the employees can vote to be their boss for the next four years) than my second analogy above.

[tylerdurden]

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Does it really make a difference?

Are you trying to imply that if they did not decide by vote, then the system is undemocratic?

Or are you saying that if one person said "Hey! I have an idea." and everyone agreed, then that is the same as taking a vote?

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Is it not the same? Everyone agreeing is a type of vote. It doesn't require fancy ballot boxes, but it's still a vote.

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Sure, we could say that the situation above is equivalent to the situation where everyone votes for the place to eat but they agree beforehand to always vote in favor of Joe on Mondays, Pete on Tuesdays, Mary on Wednesdays, and so on.

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I don't really care what level of granularity is used - at some point the participants are polled.

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I would furthermore submit that the situation in the US is more like my first analogy (where the owner of a company chooses two candidates, either of which the employees can vote to be their boss for the next four years) than my second analogy above.

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That's neither here nor there.

[mrmazoo]

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Does it really make a difference?

Are you trying to imply that if they did not decide by vote, then the system is undemocratic?

Or are you saying that if one person said "Hey! I have an idea." and everyone agreed, then that is the same as taking a vote?

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Is it not the same? Everyone agreeing is a type of vote. It doesn't require fancy ballot boxes, but it's still a vote.


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Ok. What if (and I realize the analogy is starting to get silly) the boss decided for the five buddies that each would have a day and each could choose where to go to lunch on "their" day? Whether they agree it was a good idea or not, there was no vote, and the situation is still democratic because the five people still have equal say on where they eat lunch, and the boss doesn't have any interest in the situation at all.

It's really not important.

Most people would agree that, for example, deciding government appointees by lot would not be the same as voting, but if you want to insist that if they all agreed beforehand to decide by lot, then its the same as voting, I won't quibble with you.

You say that the comparison of the US system to my two analogies is "neither here nor there" but actually it is the heart of the situation, isn't it?

I mean, isn't the question of whether or not the US system is democratic important? If we find that the US system is more like the first analogy, isn't that more worth discussing than whether or not voting is necessary for a democracy?

This is the politics board, not the philosophy board, after all.

[hmkpoker]

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Excellent topic ^_^

I assume we're ignoring issues related to the constitution, and implementing a new voting structure, ab initio, in a theoretical vacuum.

I feel that different people should have different voting weights, depending on how knowledgable they are regarding the issues relative to the vote. A high school dropout who's done nothing with his life or education should not have the same voting power as someone with a PhD in political science and economics. Perhaps the doctor's vote should count as ten votes, or something like that. How exactly this voting weight should be determined, I don't know. It would take years of expert research.

What's your opinion, vultures?

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I don't know what vultures' opinion is, but I think yours and other peoples' idea of limiting the voting rights of "uneducated" and "less qualified" people smacks of gross elitism and stems from the mistaken idea that poor and uneducated people are incapable of determining what their own interests are and that therefore smarter, more educated individuals ought to make certain choices for them.

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It's not that they are incapable of determining their own interests, it's that they may not understand the repurcussions of what they are voting on.

For example, raising minimum wage has been a topic here and in the SMP forum. While it seems intuitive that more money for the poor = good, the inflationary reaction nullifies it. It could ultimately prove detrimental.

I'll admit that I'm still not very good with economics; I'm going with what other people who seem to have a better understanding of it have said. I don't really think I'd be a very good person to help with this major economic decision, and I doubt that most of the poor and uneducated are.

This is just one example, and the same could be said of the implementation of various social institutions. I'm not trying to be elitist, I'm just trying to say that decisions on certain matters should be made by those qualified to make the decisions.