>There are several problem with direct democracy: (1) Most people are not expert at things like foreign policy, economics and so on. (2) Many people can be heavily influenced to vote either way by creating powerful PR campaigns. (3) Most people have no time or capacity to digest tons of dense information to get the background. (4) Some information needed to make decision must remain classified.
In addition to 1-4, I think there is another problem: (5) Individuals with a higher stake in the outcome have no way to express their greater interest (an individual might have a higher stake in gay marriage being legalized, but his vote counts the same as someone mildly opposed).
Systems like Quadratic Voting (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956) solve (5) by allowing voters to pay N*N dollars for N votes (25$ for 5 votes, 1,000,000$ for 1000 votes) and redistributing the funds collected per-capita to each voter after the vote is finished.
I wonder if you could meld Delegative Democracy with Quadratic Voting? What if individuals can buy N votes (expressing their interests appropriately) AND delegate their votes to another (allocating their interests to those most capable of making decisions)?
Delegative democracy seems to solve 1, 3, and 4. Quadratic voting seems to solve 5.
Why use money instead of equally allocated vote-points? You get 1000 vote-points a year, use them as you wish. Vote for 1000 different things, or 1 thing 1000^.5 times, etc.
How is Quadratic Voting any different than a free market? In a free market system, people vote every day with their dollars. The only difference is with a free market, there are lots of mini-governments (companies) competing for your votes (dollars), while with Quadratic Voting, you only vote within one government?
QV only really captures preferences if people start out equally rich, or at least, where a given number of votes must be bought with an equal amount of "pain" which might be an expense scaled according to assets.
FM allows a vanishingly tiny minority to sweep up such a huge money-pile that their most casual whim carries more weight than millions of third world people's urgent desperation.
There is nothing inherit to free markets that leads to the phenomena that you describe. It is artificial distortions of the market that lead to inequality through exclusive political connections to public spending projects, favoritism via regulatory capture, elitism via occupational licensing, and other acts of market interference that inject privilege into the system.
Also as a side note, if you're going to carry on with this narrative you may wish to confine it to an intra-national context where wealth inequalities are indeed measurable, as opposed to bringing the 'millions of third world people' (actually billions) into the picture who have experienced unprecedented increases in standards of living due to the expansion of market economies over the past century. Wealth inequality is increasing within countries, it is decreasing between countries.
I don't agree that there's nothing in a free market that creates inequality. Thought experiment. Random walk dollars among a population of anonymous nodes representing people, starting from an exactly equal allocation. You will get a distribution curve of poor, average, and rich. Now add a "the rich get richer" bias factor where the dollar walk is no longer random, but has a probability proportional to the existing heap. Now you get inequality. More people are poor, but the richest of the rich hold nearly all the dollars. Add redistributive tax and you can pull the inequality down, but the jitter in the system always creates some of it.
I don't believe that the entirely of "the rich get richer" can be considered a distortion. It includes lawful things like improved access to investment. I also don't think that the "distortion" can be wished away; money is power over the use of resources, and thereby power over people. This includes the power to rig the law, assert monopolies, and control the machinery of the state, and always has done.
In addition to 1-4, I think there is another problem: (5) Individuals with a higher stake in the outcome have no way to express their greater interest (an individual might have a higher stake in gay marriage being legalized, but his vote counts the same as someone mildly opposed).
Systems like Quadratic Voting (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2343956) solve (5) by allowing voters to pay N*N dollars for N votes (25$ for 5 votes, 1,000,000$ for 1000 votes) and redistributing the funds collected per-capita to each voter after the vote is finished.
I wonder if you could meld Delegative Democracy with Quadratic Voting? What if individuals can buy N votes (expressing their interests appropriately) AND delegate their votes to another (allocating their interests to those most capable of making decisions)?
Delegative democracy seems to solve 1, 3, and 4. Quadratic voting seems to solve 5.