Reddit mentions of Democracy and Its Critics

> Is maximizing democracy always a benefit? If it were, a democracy of one would be ideal. Yet generally people recognize that there are problems that can't be solved without covenants of responsibilities enforced by an organization with the ability to override an individual's preference when it serves to ameliorate those problems.

A complicated question. There are tons of problems associated with democracy. In a democracy, with the right to vote, we are all capable of making binding decisions. In other words, I can force you to follow a law if I got a majority supporting me.

That is a pretty big deal. At the very least, you and me should demand that every person with the right to vote must be a competent person that knows to a reasonable extent what they are voting on. But that is not the case.

Then there is deliberation. In a mega democracy, debates and media play a vital role. They give us the information of which we make our choices. But the media does not give every opinion a balanced chance.

You point out that progress is a result of humans solving problems in groups, that would be impossible to solve alone. Therefor, most have recognized that individual preferences must be overridden by a system of law. The common answer to democracy relies mostly of the assumption that humans have an intrensic value, and from there we can gather what rights and values protect the intrensic worth of a human, and then see that a system which protect all rights and values of a human is likely a democracy. At least that is roughly what we gather from Robert Dahl. (From here, here and here, if you have access to any of them I can help finding relevant chapters/pages)

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I recognize that democracy is a functional system to drive human progress, we cannot all have our way and democracy given that the system strives to follow the 5 democratic criteria of Dahl seems to do a good job of sharing burdens and boons among its members. The problem comes when you mix dictatorship and democracy. Let us say for instance, that the position of minister of health was auctioned off every fourth year instead of voted on. Who would be in charge? I'd wager it would be tobacco interests every period. I claim that a system where you auction off positions of power in a democracy would taint it and make the democracy dysfunctional. That is a problem today, because some of the most powerful positions are not within the government, but rather in the private sector. And there are no democracy in the private sector. We are all blinded by the fact that the government can issue laws over the private sector. In practicality, it hardly can. This mix of two worlds, one where power is given by capital and another where power is given by convincing large masses of people to vote on you (which often costs capital) gives us the tainted modern mega democracies where the tobacco industry is one of the largest lobbyists in the EU and two persons from the upper class ran to be the representative of the people.

But there is a reason not to include democracy in the workplace, or at least a reason for the wealthiest to resist it. Democracy will over time eventually lead to socialism (worker ownership, the proper definition of socialism, not the 'the more a state does, the socialester it is definition) which is why our system must not be fully democratic.