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Let’s Kill Our Representatives
Figuratively, at least…
Taxation, but why representation?
Have you ever stopped to wonder why we elect people to “represent” us in the political arena? It really has nothing to do with democracy. After all, Athens had a vibrant democracy more than two thousand five hundred years ago and they had no representatives. Instead, every enfranchised Athenian could represent themselves without recourse to intermediaries.
The problem for direct democracy used to be scale. Once we go beyond the confines of a small city-state, the tyranny of distance makes it infeasible for the enfranchised to gather regularly in one place. As states grew, so arose the notion of electing representatives from each district to carry forth to a central gathering place the needs, interests, and demands of each district.
Unfortunately, this was a useless idea.
Let’s have a party!
Three or four hundred individuals gathered together can achieve nothing. Everyone is talking, no one is listening, so achieving consensus on anything of importance is impossible. What happened was that some representatives quickly realized that if they formed groups, they could agitate for items of common interest. This meant that groups got their way while the remaining…
