[Bruxelles, 2012] ©António Lucas Soares
Democracy is supposed to provide a mechanism for making collective decisions that serve the best interests of the community. It is meant to achieve the same objective for collective decision making as the market mechanism does for individual decision making. Citizens elect representatives who gather in assemblies to make collective decisions by voting. This is the principle of representative democracy. It presupposes a certain kind of relationship between the citizens and their representatives. The candidates stand up and tell the citizens what they stand for, and the citizens then choose the person whose ideas are the closest to their own.
That is the sort of representative Thomas Jefferson was in the good old days, except that he stayed at home during the campaign. The process is based on the assumption of honesty in the same way as the concept of perfect competition is based on the assumption of perfect knowledge. The assumption is of course unrealistic. Candidates discovered a long time ago that they have a better chance of getting elected if they tell the electorate what it wants to hear rather than what they really think. The flaw is not fatal because the system has allowed for it. If candidates fail to live up to their promises, they can be thrown out of office. In this case, conditions remain near equilibrium. The voters do not always get the representatives they desire, but they can correct their mistakes in the next round of elections.
The Crisis of Global Capitalism
by George Soros
Public Affairs, 1998, hardcover
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