Your Definition of Non-Violent Protests

[Philly]

[exploited]

Haha what. You think seniors are going to go on the internet and write/vote for bills more than youth? Are you crazy? This would be one of the greatest achievements in modern history because it would actually involve youth. We are lazy as f**k but more than willing to talk about stuff on the internet.

[Philly]

[exploited]

To answer your first question, absolutely. For one, budget making is fairly simplistic. It isn't a Herculean task that requires huge expertise... That it is so utterly complicated now is because of the retards doing it, not because spreadsheets and accounting software requires genius to operate. For two, direct democracy doesn't mean we can't delegate tasks to experts... In fact, we would be more likely to delegate them to people who know what the f**k they are doing, rather than uneducated political hacks who got a committee seat because they spent enough time sucking off the party infrastructure.

Policy making isn't simple. Of course I see no indication that representatives, or committees composed of representatives, are actually good at it. The political system is a train wreck and the quality of legislation sits at around a grade 10 level. Half the time our reps don't even read the bills they pass. They don't even write them - that is for their unpaid intern.

The way we would make decisions is the same - majority vote. How does the efficacy of the system change just because the number of votes does? That makes no sense Philly. You are just trying to rationalize a juvenile sense of elitism, in which our representatives are actually quality people with lots of expertise even though that quite obviously isn't the case.

[Professor]

Here's a question - how many of these internet youth read PPACAin its entirety?

[Philly]

A government budget is far more complicated than a personal or even business budget. I'm in the upper tier of private citizens when it comes to understanding public policy and I couldn't write a budget. And the way they get written now is that legislative leadership and the executive branch each proposes a budget and then they negotiate the differences. If we took away leadership, how do you wade through the million budgets that will get introduced.

You're also wrong about legislation being drafted by interns. They're usually drafted by lawlyers and MPA's. You know, experienced, expert professionals. You haven't proposed a coherent system for policy to be created and brought to a vote.

[exploited]

[exploited]

[Philly]

I'm mobile right now but I'll post a recent federal budget and you can compare to how you allot money for groceries, utilities, etc in your personal budget.

How would these lawyers be delegated to take on a task? How do you choose which lawyer does what? The people who we have elected to vote on bills and budgets are not experts but they are at least written by experts. You don't seem to have any system in place to stop us from just having a cesspool of millions of bills and budgets, perhaps some written by experts, but just as many by people who have no idea what they're doing, with no one in charge to decide what we're going to vote on and when.

[exploited]

Collaborative e-democracy or super-democracy is a democratic conception that combines key features of direct democracy, representative democracy, and e-democracy (i.e. the use of ICTs for democratic processes). The concept was first published at two international academic conferences in 2009 (see below).

Collaborative e-democracy refers to a political system in which governmental stakeholders (politicians/parties, ministers, parliamentarians etc.) and non-governmental stakeholders (NGOs, political lobbies, local communities, individual citizens, etc.) collaborate on the development of public laws and policies. This collaborative policymaking process is conducted on a governmental social networking site in which all citizens are members (collaborative e-policy-making).

While directly elected government officials (i.e. ‘proxy representatives’) would conduct the vast majority of law and policy-making processes (representative democracy), the citizens would retain their final voting power on each issue (direct democracy). Additionally each citizen would be empowered to propose their own policies to the electorate and thus initiate new policy processes where applicable (initiative). Collaboratively generated policies would consider the opinion of a larger proportion of the citizenry; therefore they may be more just, more sustainable, and thus easier to implement.

...

Collaborative e-democracy involves following theory components:

‘Collaborative democracy’, a “political framework where electors and the elected actively collaborate to attain the best possible solution to any situation using collaborative enabling technologies to facilitate wide scale citizen participation in government”.[1][2]

‘Collaborative e-policymaking’ (or CPM) is a software facilitated five phase policy process in which every citizen participates directly or indirectly (i.e. via proxy representatives). The process is conducted on a governmental social networking site in which all citizens are members. Each citizen can suggest issues, rank and evaluate the suggestions of others, and vote on the laws and policies that will affect them. [At a general level, CPM is a universal process that would facilitate every organisation (e.g. business, government) or self-selected group (e.g. union, online community) to co-create their own regulations (e.g. laws, code of conduct) and strategies (e.g. government actions, business strategies) by involving all stakeholders in the corresponding decision-processes.] [3][4][5]

Proxy voting: Direct democracy would require each citizen to vote on each policy issue each time. As this would overburden most people, the citizens in a collaborative e-democracy select trusted representatives (or proxies) to vote on their behalf on all those issues and/or domains where they lack of time, experience, or interest for direct participation. Although the proxy votes on the principals behalf, the principal retains the final voting power on each issue. Thus proxy representation combines the best features of direct democracy and representative democracy on the social networking site.[6]

This is an example that is currently being researched quite a bit by social scientists, technophiles and economists.