Delta4Embassy
Gold Member
- Dec 12, 2013
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Skimmed this the other day and didn't think much about it thereafter, but it settled into the back of my mind and came to me again just now.
Effects of Overpopulation on the Environment and Society HowMany.org
"Democracy? We tend to think that Democracy offers us freedom of choice, but in the last 40 years, we have had little effective input into most of the political decisions that affect our lives.
Do we have a truly Democratic system when most of us never even meet our Representatives at the various levels of Government? Even our State and City representatives probably don't know us and our views about the laws and regulations they pass. The only people most of them see on a regular basis are the lobbyists, who consequently have a disproportionately large influence on those laws and regulations.
Democracy and Optimum Population Size: 2500 years ago, Aristotle considered the best size for a city and concluded that a large increase in population would bring, "certain poverty on the citizenry, and poverty is the cause of sedition and evil." He considered that a city of over 100,000 people would exclude most citizens from a voice in government.
To get an idea of what the founders of the United States had in mind for our representative Democracy, at the low end, the Constitution says (Article 1, Section 2) that a Representative to the House should represent a minimum of 30,000 people. When the Constitution was written, the United States had a total population of around 2.5 million, and the Constitution allocated 65 Representatives to the 13 states. So each Representative of "the People's House" had about 38,500 constituents. Currently each Representative has 712,650 constituents. It's really a form of irony today to call it "the People's House" when only wealthy donors and paid lobbyists really have the ear of your "representatives." What we have now is not Democracy in the sense intended by the country's founders. "
Effects of Overpopulation on the Environment and Society HowMany.org
"Democracy? We tend to think that Democracy offers us freedom of choice, but in the last 40 years, we have had little effective input into most of the political decisions that affect our lives.
Do we have a truly Democratic system when most of us never even meet our Representatives at the various levels of Government? Even our State and City representatives probably don't know us and our views about the laws and regulations they pass. The only people most of them see on a regular basis are the lobbyists, who consequently have a disproportionately large influence on those laws and regulations.
Democracy and Optimum Population Size: 2500 years ago, Aristotle considered the best size for a city and concluded that a large increase in population would bring, "certain poverty on the citizenry, and poverty is the cause of sedition and evil." He considered that a city of over 100,000 people would exclude most citizens from a voice in government.
To get an idea of what the founders of the United States had in mind for our representative Democracy, at the low end, the Constitution says (Article 1, Section 2) that a Representative to the House should represent a minimum of 30,000 people. When the Constitution was written, the United States had a total population of around 2.5 million, and the Constitution allocated 65 Representatives to the 13 states. So each Representative of "the People's House" had about 38,500 constituents. Currently each Representative has 712,650 constituents. It's really a form of irony today to call it "the People's House" when only wealthy donors and paid lobbyists really have the ear of your "representatives." What we have now is not Democracy in the sense intended by the country's founders. "
