Im reflecting from the pov of a parents role re: the kids. If you give the kids what they want, its going to be soda and candy every day of their lives. Some deciaions are tough, e.g. delayed gratification, and holding ones ground, but do voters even care about stuff like that?
Can we even hope on common sense, when the population is concerned?
Yeah, sometimes what the people want isn’t what is best for them. But having the people in power decide what is best for other people can sometimes be dangerous. I’ve had people in power make decisions for me that they said was in my best interest and I don’t think it was. There is no answer that fits every situation. It’s a real big grey area deciding when it is and isn’t okay for someone to have someone else make their decisions for them.
Anakin: we need a system where the politicians decide what’s in the best interest of all the people and then do it
Padme: that’s exactly what we do; the trouble is people don’t always agree
Anakin: then they should be made to
Padme: sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship
Good for the country.
Most people are assholes. The government shouldn’t enact racist policies just because the people want to.
In theory, the will of the people should be the common good/best practices. The reality though is there are a certain portion of any given population with entirely selfish or hateful wishes. Those type of people tend to seek power in whatever fashion they can get and use those positions to amplify their voices trying to convince others to support them.
The answer to both questions in your compound question is yes.
Now, good luck defining each of those.
Well who is any one individual - or even a small group of outside individuals - to decide what’s “best” for the country? That’s why we have “for the people”.
The role of the government is to thread the needle of identifying who has power (including your common labor) and creating a consensus among them that prevents a civil war. It however usually becomes captured and ossified and is unable to identify when certain power blocks have reached their red lines that will topple the whole damn thing until a new government forms. Mandate of heaven essentially. Paternalistic or will of the people are legitimacy building frames but the reality is always material.
That feels like a false dilemma to me. The country and government, ideally, are the people.
The role of a government is to collect taxes, then use those taxes to provide the most good to the greatest number of people.
In general, voters will have many ideas as to what that implementation should look like, which is why we elect representatives.
It depends on how that government is chartered.
In democracies, it’s to enact the will of the people (within the bounds set by human rights, because any government that does not respect human rights is illegitimate).
In representational forms of government, the balance shifts towards the good of the people but is still informed by their will.
In completely non-democratic forms of government, it should be informed entirely by the good of the people but historically has been informed instead by the will and desires of the rulers, typically without even the necessary respect for human rights.
Comparing it to parenting is not a good analogy, because parents normally love their children and are better informed and wiser than them, whereas governments have little reason to love their citizens, and are only rarely better informed or wiser.
I don’t trust democracy, but it’s a good sight better than autocracy. Representative governments do something to curb the worst excesses of both, in my opinion.
Representative governments are generally oligarchic and blinded by previous power balances. True democracy like sortition lets the deliberative body hear from a member of a minority that they will revolt or become non participatory if you do a certain action. Then the greater body can decide if that’s worth paying attention to. It’s a level of agility that is frankly only available in true democracies and very rare in both autocracies and oligarchies. Where sortition is poor isn’t tyranny of the majority. It’s poor in identifying power structures that are completely unrelated to popular power. Most of those power structures, however, are illegitimate.
According to the US, the role of government is to protect to the opulent minority from the will of the majority. That’s what Madison argued for in the Federalist Papers. He then proceeded to explain how to achieve this with the design of the Senate. And then that is exactly how the Senate got designed in the Constitution.
The role of government, essentially forever regardless of system and country, is to manage power struggles between all the possible sources of power.
What’s right for the people.
NOT the will of the people, because that’s just mob rule.
My mother always did the former and despite pretty much ignoring the “will” was reelected for decades.
One major problem is that people don’t agree on what’s right for the country. Some want a police state, and others want a nanny state. They both compromise freedom for security / safety. Meanwhile, if you’re in the middle, you’re seen as colluding with the “other” side.
It is to extract wealth from its residents to provide a steady steam of transfer towards the rich.
All we can do is try our best to follow the middle path between the two. A dictator is bad but a benevolent dictator might guide us with a firm hand that benefits most while negatively affecting the least. Of course, based on human nature, all power eventually corrupts so who knows? I’m surprised we made it this far.
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