Government by Whom?

This post is inspired by a blog post by my friend Dade entitled Plutocracy. The essential point of the post is that government should be run entirely for and by people, rather than special interest groups and corporations. A recent Supreme Court ruling has determined that there are no limits to the spending of corporate and special interest groups in elections in the USA. Clearly this means that corporations and special interest groups will have some influence over elections, and therefore government. Dade puts forward the case for this being a bad move, and my first response to the ruling and the post is one of agreement.

My second response is to think about the various merits of the different people in Government. We generally think that the more pure a democracy we have the better off we will be. People making decisions for people must result in the best circumstances for people, it seems simple. But there is a problem with this, and that problem is that most people are idiots. Most people are astonishingly ignorant of basic things, their focus is personal rather than societal, and the time period over which decisions are made is mind-bogglingly short.

Here are a few examples of how stupid the average person is and an idea of what the consequences of public opinion being directly transferred to government policy would be a nightmare. President George W. Bush was elected with half the votes of the electorate. Within eight months of him being elected he was the least popular president in history with less than 30% approval ratings. A month later he was among the most popular Presidents in history with 80% approval ratings because crazy people had killed lots of Americans. By the end of his second term Bush had essentially understood that all the things he had done had failed and had returned to standard Washington policies, essentially the same basic approach that Obama has used. However, his approval rating had returned to the low 30's. So, within eight months at least one fifth of Americans had changed their mind about what was the right stuff to do, then over half of them completely changed because of something that Bush didn't do, he was most popular when actively failing, and least popular when ineffectual but conventional.

Evolution is a scientifically proven fact. It has been seen to happen. 39% of Americans believe in evolution. So the solid majority of people don't believe something that they were taught in school and is a scientific fact. This is idiocy. As further evidence that this is idiocy, the smarter and more informed you are the more likely you are to believe in evolution. So high school drop outs are the least likely to believe in it while scientists who spend decades studying the subject are the most likely to believe in it. The theory of evolution is the most important explanatory theory in Biology, the area in which the greatest growth in scientific knowledge and technology is expected to happen in the next few decades.

Americans will not elect people if they are not Christians or Jews, and will not let them run a country if they have sex with people they are not married to. This is idiocy, as if Muslims or Atheists cannot make good decisions about how to run a country, or people who sleep around can't make good decisions about government.

So the will of the people is ignorant, reactionary, short sighted and has little connection to what actually works. Having a government that accurately reflected the wishes of the people would be an absolute nightmare. Which is why government in most places is a representative government. People who are less stupid and ignorant are elected to run things for the people. While it is easy to despise politicians, compared with the average person they are educated, articulate, with wider perspective.

Corporations and special interest groups get zero votes. But corporations are the most important institutions in the lives of most Americans. Special interest groups are the organizations of groups o people who are most interested in the actions of the government. In a good system of government shouldn't the most important institution in people's lives have some influence on that system of government? Shouldn't those most interested in the running of the government have some influence in the running of the government? At the moment the only influence these institutions have is in trying to persuade people to do what they want. Now, they have lots of money, and money can be very persuasive.

So, to answer the original question, government by whom? I answer that government should be by people who agree with me, for people in general, but that isn't practical. My weak and rather disappointing compromise position is that government should be by people who represent the various forces in society, in balance, subject to removal if they go too far in any direction. So Congress should just write a law that means corporations and people spend the relative amount of money trying to influence elections that produces the best result for the USA.

The best government is messy, confrontational, slow to act, and removed somewhat from the people because people are stupid and can't be trusted and must be played off against each other in a balance that promotes the welfare of the country.