Trope-a-Day: Democracy Is Bad

Democracy Is Bad: This is the Imperial consensus view.  Partly for the fairly obvious reason that in democracies like ours, where just about everything or everything minus a small list is up for grabs by vote, it’s just a tyranny with more tyrants.  (See, thus, the Drowning of the People.)

Even for what they consider the legitimate purposes of government, they’d claim that democracy is an idiot’s way to run things.  If you’re building a bridge, or operating a power grid, or developing software, or performing orbital maneuvers, or whatever, you use experts to solve problems.  You don’t leave the decisions in the hands of a straw poll of whatever unqualified randoms are around at the time, unless your plan actually is to waste untold amounts of money and kill a whole bunch of people.

And it doesn’t magically become a better plan when you apply it to, say, managing the commons, administering the infrastructure, or controlling the currency.  Sorry, no.

These are technical problems with technical solutions, and that means they’re the province of technicians.  Or technarchs, rather.