I am a citizen not a consumer
From:
James Gilmour
Date:
Jul 29 11:31 UTC
Short link
> > Pete Thomson wrote:
> > Because governments have to take some decisions that some people
> > disagree with, they need to aggregate assent over multiple decisions
> > to maintain legitimacy. They'll obviously want to include some
> > decisions that would command broad consensus, to gain some degree of
> > assent from everyone, so they won't want to let go even of those
> > decisions that could be handled by a consensus mechanism.
> Michael Allan wrote:
> So there's a bigger picture... I'm thinking now that the
> missing piece is an understanding of how consensus might be
> built within a power structure. I've never understood that
> part, but now it's becoming clearer.
Quite apart from having to make the decisions with which significant numbers of
electors will disagree, there is another expectation
of government, namely that it will pursue a coherent set of policies and
actions across the whole of the political sphere. (Of
course, governments often fail in this - for a variety of very different
reasons - but that does not affect the expectation.) As
individuals, not subject to the practical constraints of having to make and
implement the decisions, we may well support policies
that are mutually incompatible - though we would probably not campaign for both
at the same time! So the extra-governmental
discussion framework needs to be able to draw in the wider considerations, many
of which will not have occurred to the single-issue
campaigners or will have been deliberately ignored by them.
James Gilmour
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