On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Divya Manian<[email protected]> wrote: >> Old people want to restrict the vote to "more mature" voters. >> Rich people want to restrict the vote to "self sufficient" or >> "propertied" voters. Technical people want to restrict the vote to >> "educated" voters. Incumbents want to restrict the vote to "generous" >> voters. > > Isn't this what exactly brahmins were doing in Indian Bureaucracy till about > 20 years ago (or probably are still doing in some areas)?
Of course. Lukhman's proposal would simply substitute a different set of scoundrels. There is no evidence that limiting the vote to "educated" voters will be any improvement, and some evidence that it would actually make things worse. It seems clear you can't "fix" democracy by limiting the franchise to some especially "good" subset of the populace, that tack has been repeatedly tried with different attempts at defining "good" and has uniformly failed. Not only that, the failures have been depressing in their similarity. Evidence that the approach itself is fundamentally flawed rather than just needing to keep trying till we find the "right" set of voters. -- Charles
