I think it’s clear that democracy and capitalism don’t work together. Capitalists always wind up buying the government, and the only solution is a Great Depression sized catastrophe to reset the wealth of capitalists. But then, over time, they will capture the government again.
This isn’t to say much good may not be done at various times. Usually after things get bad enough, a generation winds up in power who is determined to make government work “for the people” because they’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t. War, revolution, poverty, depression and so on. The second generation staggers on. They don’t really understand in their bones that government must be made to work for the people, and they compromise, but they keep it more or less going. Then the third generation says “hey, if we ran the government for us and the people who can afford to pay us the most, well, we could live very very well, and who cares about the “people?”
Often the third generation needs to lie to themselves. They believe some intellectual charlatans: Milton Friedman and Laffer and later on Fukuyama of the “we’ve won, it’s all over, it’s the end of history!” The fourth generation doesn’t even pretend. It’s their government, and you peons can suck it up. (Everyone from Bush Jr. on. Bush Sr. thought that neoliberalism was garbage, even as he implemented some of it. Billy Clinton appears to have been a true believer and made it work on sheer brilliance and micromanagement.)
But there’s another problem with representative government: much like police, most people who want the power of government are the sort of people who shouldn’t have it.
What happens, one way or the other, is that government is run by people who run it for themselves, not for the people. It’s “the government”, nor “our government.”
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I’ve come down on the side of sortition. Just pick leaders based on a lottery. Then run some medical tests on the ones chosen, to make sure they aren’t chronically sick or mentally disabled. Give them 10 year terms so they are in long enough to have some institutional knowledge and have elections every two years for one-fifth of the number.
Anyone who serves gets a full pension of three times median income for the rest of their lives, and is disallowed from any other income. If you aren’t willing to do that, you can decline office.
I’m quite positive that random people who know that they’re going back to being almost regular citizens whose income is dependent on how society performs in the future will do a better job than normal politicians.
Oh, there are plenty of details to sort out, to be sure, but this is far more likely to produce “our government” than the current regime.
The next article on this subject will be on the next important change: how we do taxation—how people contribute to “our government” and “society”. Taxing money is not the right way.