Comment by Seattle3503
9 hours ago
Democracy is the only thing that can save us. But it isn't a given. In resource rich countries democracy struggles to take hold because human labor is minimally necessary and elites can mostly thrive without it. Many democracies survive, because without the people, everyone suffers. AI threatens to make all countries into petro-dicatorships.
I think government should be small enough that it fears the people. It should never have the power to prevent the people having their way. If the majority of people in a country are suffering, they should be able to vote for change, and the government should not be powerful enough to stop that.
I suppose the future you envision is that the government is a) very powerful, b) capable of physically suppressing the majority of 350M people, c) willing to do it, and d) somehow captured by an elite class. It's not impossible, but a lot of things have to go wrong to get there.
I fully agree that we should have incentives and systems in place that the government works for the people.
> government should be small enough that it fears the people
How would that work when the government controls the military? Would that mean that a country's military has to remain small?
>> government should be small enough that it fears the people
> How would that work when the government controls the military? Would that mean that a country's military has to remain small?
I think what you need is a serious citizen militia that controls its own equipment. IIRC, that's what allowed the American Revolution to work.
If you only have a military of professional soldiers answering to the government, the government will have much less fear of its people.
But I think focusing on government power is far too narrow, because it might so weak the elites (like the wealthy) won't the government either. The government should be small enough that it fears the people, and the wealthy should be poor enough that they fear the people, too.
I hope for a "shackled leviathan" as articulated by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson in The Narrow Corridor.