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MBlume comments on Mechanics without wrenches - Less Wrong
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Comments (75)
But we have a representative democracy for a reason. The voters can ensure that the politicians advance their values while still deferring to those politicians the responsibility of obtaining the expert knowledge necessary to do so.
ETA: I'm speaking of ideals here, not of execution.
I really like this -- gender neutral without sounding strained.
I've often heard the slightly less respectful version, "Congresscritter".
That's the common serious libertarian term. Some of the more extreme libertarians have downgraded them even more, now refering to them as "Congressthings".
Illuminati University simply replaces "man" with "thing" in general, i.e., Congressthing, freshthing, postthing, policething, etc.
Oy, so distracting. (Congressional) representative, 1st year (student), mail carrier/postal worker, police officer, chair, fire fighter, business executive, council member.
I've often used "congresscritter" :)
I'm not sure whether to vote you up for making a true statement about the declared intent of representative democracy, or vote you down for seeming to imply that representative democracy actually achieves anything of the sort.
I was speaking entirely of ideals -- we fail hard at the execution.
There are 2 basic theories of representative democracy. One is what MBlume described. The other is that representatives should do whatever their constituents tell them to do. Most representatives in the US follow the latter, I think.