The implication that there's a "wrong" outcome from representative democracy, other than voting to give it up completely (and even then you have to give at least grudging respect to a decision freely reached). It seems an illogical proposition to think that you can predict the outcome if people are given broad freedom; wouldn't you think that just the opposite would occur, that maximum freedom means minimum predictability?

It may be that I misinterpreted your use of "representative democracy." If so, let me know.

Given recent history, I'm surprised you make this statement. It's become excruciatingly clear that democracy, in and of itself, is not much good unless it's also built on a tradition of freedom, both policital, cultural, and otherwise.

Hamas won their election. Does that make them good for the Palestinians? It's evident that simply plugging elections into places like Afghanistan and Iraq are just the bare beginning of the battle, something we're learning the hard way. It's also evident that if you simply plugged elections into a lot of other nations, the first thing they'd do is vote in people who have no intention of caring about freedom, or getting voted out again. Tyranny seems to be humanity's ground state, and it sucks.

The United States was founded on the principle that there are some things you're not allowed to vote on by simple majority rule, or even more in some cases. There's a reason Constitutional Amendments have to jump stratospheric bars to get passed, and thank God! You can get the willies looking through legislation the past few years and see what freakish amendments have been proposed, by both parties.

Any government, including a world government, should barely be able to move without hitting the end of its chain, and 51 percent of people voting should have no more power either.

The reason elections have become life or death in this country is that over the years we've given our central government almost infinite power over our lives and fortunes, to a level that would have probably killed the Founders in their tracks if they could see it. It used to be more important who your Mayor was than the President of the U.S. Not any more. There's a list of presidents who can share the blame for this, including Lincoln, FDR, and others. Both parties.

Somehow, the obvious solution of reducing the government's power to the point where we're no longer voting for gods never seems to come into the picture, and I'm not hopeful that either party is going to accomplish that any more. Maybe step one would be to go back to having state legislatures pick Senators again. Did things start to go to hell in 1912?