QUESTIONING DEMOCRACY

Bourgeois democracy has a single flaw: it is not a democracy at all, but an oligarchy.

Direct democracy is by no means perfect, because it is limited in size by, like, a dozen people.

I grown up in village of maybe 200 people, not electing a mayor would be pretty catastrophic, most people don't want to solve various problems of every day life, I want only stuff to work. I can't really imagine how it would work if our village had also some efficient centralized organized production without people like this. Give people VETO power in referendum and you have very comfy "commune" democracy.

The inherent flaw in democracy via an example country with 100 000 000 citizens

A small group of 100 people trying to get legislature enacted that will have the effect of transferring 1 money from everybody to them will have an incentive structure where a general citizen stands to loose 1 money and a group-member stands to gain 1 000 000 moneys

the citizen will not fight very hard to prevent the loss of 1 money, the group-member will fight like hell to get 1 000 000 moneys.

If this scenario repeats itself over and over you kill democracy by 1000 cuts. The larger a democracy the worse this problem becomes, because defense becomes logistically harder, and the incentives for offense increases.

In general this means there is a threshold below which the interest representation and rights of the masses can be eroded away, without much resistance.

You can however potentially have institutional processes, that serves perpetual de-concentration, basically that contently looks for shallow but broad grab concentration attempts, and puts in legislature that inverts the process.

Liquid democracy is ideal. Everyone reserves the right of directly voting, but may choose to pick some delegate instead. If you don't want to involve yourself, you simply pick someone knowledgeable that you trust to represent your beliefs.

I'm not worried about minorities getting fucked. That line is usually taken by right-wing libertarians, to implicitly protect the "rights" of the property-owning class. Minorities being genuinely disadvantaged is a problem that (in the long term) must be dealt with by changing people's attitudes, not by taking power away from them.

The ancient Athenians tried to faze out politics and elections from their democracy and ended up choosing many office holders at random from a pool of qualified citizens.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy

*politicking

How is this a problem specific to democracy? Democracy, to me, seems like a streamlined process for the majority in a society to alter the social contract to their desires. Without democracy they still have this power, but it requires them to directly organize and engage in violent revolution. Thus, it seems to me, democracy is exactly the mechanism that would resolve your thought experiment. It is the project to lower the "opportunity costs" for altering society for the average citizen. Am I wrong in this?
Your thought-experiment can be dealt with by setting a moral code within the democracy. Enrichment schemes like yours aren't accepted because of the precedent they set. Visitors aren't allowed to take stones from a historical site, and we strictly enforce this rule even though the individual damage isn't very great. Why? Because if everyone did it, there would be no stones left. This is a simple application of the categorical imperative. Act according to principles that you'd wish see generalized in society. If you don't do this you are acting immorally. The rest of society ought to ostracize you for that.

the majority is not always right

Actually there is democracy under capitalism but it's only for the bourgeoisie

Democracy will always exist but for what class? that is the most important question for us to ask.

it's a problem with all open systems, but democracy is particularly vulnerable because of mass organizational logistics

are not going to stop this, because some people just don't care

You falsely assume people will notice, care or not fall for scape-goats. If they do clear those hurdles, it's still being filthy rich in exchange for being ostracized. Some people will take that deal.

In a more general sense you seem to accept that democracy is at least to a degree puts citizens in a defensive position to maintain it, by spending effort for vigilance or punishment like ostracizing people.

To me this conception of democracy is refuted, but a version that will maintain it's democratic nature even if the electorate is somewhat apathetic, still seems possible. I'm picturing here a institution that scrubs the enrichment schemes.

I think the essence of democracy is when people vote on what to do with the surpluses that are produced.

That is why people would legislate labour vouchers tied to the work hours actually worked. Again, for every possible abuse of democracy, the absolute majority can and will vote for measures preventing this particular abuse.

The particular case that is described in >2574847 already happens in representative democracies, and people are generally outraged by it. So it needs to be veiled with something that distract from this appaling transfer of wealth.

In direct democracy or proletarian democracy, people will actually have the power to prevent this. Now they only have to sit by and merely watch as policies that go against their material interests get voted on by people who are foreign to them and their lifestyles.

no.

usa has no democracy because money equals power though

Representative democracy is inherently flawed if you want actual will of the people. Its great if you want power to the rich though.

People should vote on the policies they want directly, to vote on the budget directly, instead of voting on a pre-set package that they only agree on a part of and then hope they even do what they promised.

red pill: democracy is leftist market fundamentalism

we have too little data to know, only Switzerland has direct democracy, and does pretty well in the global rankings, and has relatively low govt spending
but if our criteria are average rankings (lifespan, happiness, unemployment, etc) singapore tops most of them
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_rankings#General