Comment by pj_mukh
2 hours ago
If the whole voting population came together and said we’d like to pay ourselves $100,000 in straight cash today by borrowing it from future generations. Should they be able to do it in the name of direct democracy? Blocking all future growth due to aesthetic reasons is 10x worse, atleast the $100,000 could be meaningfully spent now.
Who decides things if not the entire voting population? There's nothing inherently wrong with that, if it's what everyone wants. We've been doing it for a century, see the debt. But people like their kids, so we restrain it. People don't want a society full of desperation, so we restrain it. Probably not optimally, but it's literally how the system has been working and not some crazy hypothetical.