Oh what's that? It's delegated and politicians don't have to know how many doses the country needs? Imagine my shock.
XD
The health secretary will be the one who ensures a consistent supply, ensures the supply chains/routes are functional. It's their job.
We've literally just established that politicians don't order resources directly, so that's bullshit.
See above. Fucking obviously they're not on the phone to Frankfurt themselves.
But the health secretary does actually have to keep on top of supply levels, yes.
If nobody has any greater authority than anybody else, then
nobody has any authority to delegate. Unless the entire country does, through an... election. In which case, you're just electing
suppliers instead of representatives.
Which aint representative democracy, but it sure as shit aint direct democracy, either. It's just placing the control over our resources and supply chains directly into the hands of businesses, without even the pretence of someone between us acting on our behalf.
Yet your actual arguments have said the opposite. You can deny it all you like, but you've been saying the equivalent of "I'm not racist, but"
You just have a shoddy grasp of what I'm arguing, and it makes it an easier job to boil it down to extremes. If I were to do the same, I'd keep repeating ad nauseum that you believe people can do no wrong, yadayada. But I know that's a ridiculous simplification of your position, so I don't.
Elected bodies carry a semi-random cross-section of the population they're elected from, by definition. They are equally as rational as the people they're drawn from. If you're saying politicians are statistically rational, then you have to admit the population they're drawn from are statistically rational. If you're saying the population is statistically irrational, you have to say politicians drawn from them will be statistically irrational.
Elected bodies are absolutely
not representative of the wider population in every respect. Since it's part of their job to be invested/ knowledgeable about governance, there will be a higher rate of that than in the wider population. It is absolutely not "random".
They are expected to be representative in certain respects-- demographically, geographically, and in terms of interests. And they
should broadly be so in those respects, though they usually fail to be.
They'd be allowed to vote, as they do now. But they would have to actually win on policy votes instead of personality ones. The actual race between Trump and Biden was close enough that they nearly won four more years of policy that would have been unpopular, with no way for the people to stop the policies, even the ones his voters hated. If you outsource your decision making, you don't get to complain when the person decides poorly.
Yet from what we can see, the population didn't really care much about the "unpopular" policy that was enacted under Trump. Or, in fact, beforehand.
And direct democracy often acts to
prevent the people from being able to stop unpopular policies. Take Brexit, where it became
politically toxic to even suggest that we have another referendum on the terms of the deal. The original referendum was, officially, only "advisory", and yet the very act of passing the direct-democratic vote meant that it became a sacred cow. To the point where even asking the electorate again, even on detail, became toxic.
It's ironic that the actual source of accountability in your system is direct democracy. Seeing how they voted is no source of accountability, neither is voting them out at the next election.
Voting them out is no source of accountability...? OK then. You have some strange definitions for things, Phoenix.
You mean what people do now in representative democracy, making this problem not at all unique?
Yes! Only with nobody at all to take responsibility. The buck stops nowhere.
Yes and yes. Generally we're going to be talking about more than a single household with an idea, and there's generally a more formalized setting for discussing ideas (like biweekly meetings or something, depending), but it is largely that straightforward. If you're picking someone to express your ideas to another body, you don't need a bunch of campaign promises and shrewd dealing, you need a guy to go over to the next town with a list. It doesn't need some big set of promises or formalized election, "Hey Bob, can you take this list we made to the next town?" is perfectly viable.
Sounds viable for getting a local lake maintaned, or repairing a road. Not quite so viable for national directions & policies.
A few of them have disgusting ties to governments, but theoretically they aren't appointed by governments and while they can receive government commissions, they are supposed to be self-standing.
They almost always have some kind of privileged position in public life.
If you want to reduce them to the status of businesses, be my guest, but that's a recipe for a corporatist nightmare.
And this doesn't work in direct democracy, because...?
You want to limit the number of referenda there can be every so-often? Or the number that an individual can put forward?
Who's the judge here, what're the criteria? What's to stop the ones about actual important shit like healthcare and taxes getting onto that docket, rather than the frivolous bullshit?
I never said that. I explicitly said you don't have to have elections to have democracy.
This is true. But if you're deciding on somebody to do a specific job, by popular vote, then yes, that's an election.
