I understand the difficulties of implementing direct democracy nowadays. That's why I said that I wish that there was something similar. I'll be the first to admit I don't know how to do it. The problem is not "picking someone you trust". The problem is that, when you're voting, you're accepting (and rejecting) a whole set of proposals that may or may not come true. You can't really change anything. Either you accept it "as is" or you reject it completely. What if you don't agree with any of the parties? The Portuguese party I find myself agreeing with most of the time is Bloco de Esquerda (trotskist). I do agree with most of their social reforms (legalising light drugs, abortion, etc.; free universities; better shelter laws for unemployed and old people; etc, etc). Do I agree with their politic programme? Would I want them running the country? NO! I do not want a communist state. (No danger in that, though, since they only have 3 MP's)avij wrote:You should also realize that the world population has grown from about 100 million to the current 6400 million since then, so it's no longer practical to ask everyone's opinion on all things. Instead, you should pick someone you trust to take care of things you deem important. If it turns out that the person you voted didn't fulfill your expectations, you can always pick some better person the next time there's an election.
I'm not saying the system of checks and balances doesn't work. It does work. The fact that a government can't do anything illegal doesn't mean they won't do anything contrary to what they promised in the first place (the current Portuguese government did just that) or anything bad for the country, though.avij wrote:There's always the constitution, so even those who are in the power can't do everything they want. They can't, for example, suddenly decide to kill everyone whose name starts with a "B".
The socialist government resigned because it wanted to. OK, the fact that they suffered a massive defeat in county elections was the main event which lead to that, but they didn't have to resign if they didn't want to, since popular vote validated their stay in power for four years. It wasn't the people who removed them from office. They had 115 (exactly half) out of 230 MP's. Do you really believe that, if they had one more, they still would have resigned?avij wrote:There was a national election in Portugal in 2002, two years ahead of the schedule. I'd say that's a good example that if some politician screws up too much, they can be removed from power.
