I thought of an amusing joke, regarding the US political system compared to China.
In China, State insiders pick one candidate, and you get to decide who you want to vote for.
In the USA, State insiders pick two candidates, and you get to decide who you want to vote for.
Viewed this way, there's no substantial difference between the US political system and China. In both systems, insiders have firm control.
The "advantage" of the US-style system is that there's an illusion of choice. In effect, voters are asked "Do you prefer lie A or lie B?" This gives insiders some feedback on how to tune their propaganda.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
The Illusion of Choice
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2 comments:
In the United Kingdom, all 3 main parties failed to win a majority.
40% of the population did not vote.
This means only 1 in 5 people voted for the party the Prime Minister belongs to.
So we are governed by a government elected by only 1 in 5 people in a coalition with the 3rd place party.
This is hardly democracy.
We have a crap system which isn't even rule by mob
= democracy
= 2 wolves and 1 sheep deciding who to have for dinner
The coalition is a nice excuse for both parties to drop policies they promised.
David Cameron reportedly told his negotiators to drop whatever policies necessary to get a deal with the LibDem party.
So much about principles!
With high taxes, the government can effectively steal property from you and they don't even have 50% of the population voting for them!!!!
Given 40% didn't vote, even both the Conservatives and LibDems don't even have 50% of the population supporting them.
As these clowns broke their promises and obviously don't have any strong principles and don't know how a true free market should work, the only thing people can do is
a) Not vote
b) Or vote for minority parties such as UKIP or Green or Independent candidates
Minority parties and independent candidates won't contain people so wealthy they don't know what the real problems are or have been bought and paid for by big business.
Just a word on how the current UK voting system is not fair, because it is not proportional representation.
If one party gets 49% of the vote in a constituency and another party gets 51% of the vote in the same constituency, then the latter party gets 1 seat in Parliament and the other party none.
If this picture is repeated around the country, the first party gets 0 out of 600 seats, but the latter party gets 600 seats.
Really the former party should get 49% of the seats in Parliament.
The UK Independence Party (UKIP) got about 3 - 5% of the vote. By this proportion they should have got 18 seats out of 600. But they got 0.
Like the Conservative Party, UKIP had a policy of lower inheritance tax.
UKIP is supposed to be a libertarian party, but by virtue of their name looks very much like a single issue party - namely with the issue being to stop growth of big European Union centralized, unelected government.
The Conservative Party did not win outright and so had to go into coalition with the Liberal-Democrats which are pro-Europe. Their leader Nick Clegg used to be on the EU gravy train.
Ironically if the Conservative Party lost because of votes going to the anti-EU UKIP party instead of to them, the outcome is that the Liberal-Democrats got into shared power.
The Liberal-Democrats came third in the election.
This shows how potty our voting system is.
The more people voted against further European integration, the more votes the Conservative party lost and so brought the pro-Europe Liberal-Democrat party into shared power.
How is this democratic?
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