This is a list of things that i believe would make a good government. quite recently I got interested in politics so i came up with a list of things I thinkthat i think would make a good government. Obviously this idea of how to run government may be flawed, so if you look at it and see anything wrong with it, or somewhere something like this has been tried in the past, I would appreciate the feedback.

-Electronic direct democracy using a voting booth placed in every house, hotel room, and on any place you would have time to sit down and look at what you had to vote on,like trains or airplanes.
- no politicians are elected, but the every person votes on every law. if a bill is to be reformed and edited, a committee is formed, revised, and then resubmitted to be voted on again.
- The lawyers are required by law to help the common person right a bill thats to be submited. in order to submit a law you have to get a number of people behind your cause, and there would be a period before the law was past that you can try to say its unconstitutional.
- any individual has the power to decide not to vote on a subject, and once the bill is up for voting then you would have a couple of days. or weeks to decide and vote. however, if you don't vote you cant decide later to vote.
- you get to vote to go to war and to declare war on another country during a war.
- With drafting, you if you should decide that you want a war and vote yes then you are drafted before the people that voted against going to war in the first place. if you arent willing to die for that cause then you wont vote yes.
-Standardized wages. If you do a job that no one wants to do, you would make 10 dollars an hour for example. if you are a painter you only make eight but you get to do something you love. The problem would be that everyone would want to be a garbage man or janitor so you would have a cap on what each government job there would be. no matter how man people wanted the job, for example, only 3 would be allowed.
-No gun control, you may own any weapons short of Armour piercing ( including depleted uranium) and explosive weapons (RPG's, anti tank weapons, grenades, c4, etc.). all guns over 9mm and automatics must be brought to the nearest armory for a routine inspections, E-database of guns and there rifling specifics, no fees for automatics, anything under 9mm must be brought in every three months, and search warrant must be obtained in order to search house unless bullets matching rifling are found. then you must announce your presence before you come in. non-lethal weapons would also be legal (hornets nests, rubber ball launcher). gases, biological weapons, tanks, attack helicopters, or the deployment systems for biological or gas weapons (rockets, missiles, etc.) are illegal.
- treason to report on what the army has developed or is developing, it will be treason to say anything more than "the army is developing a new space based weapons platform" is acceptable, but something like "the army is currently developing a weapon based in space that is designed to use EMP to knock out the enemies anti-aircraft capabilities" is treason.
- you must also tell the government who your sources are if they tell you government secrets, like location of undercover agents, development of weapons or flight plans of government aircraft or routes of government cars. IF the government doesn't ask you aren't required to report them, but IF they do you must.
- If you leak information that results in the deaths of, for example, 20 people, you will be tried as if YOU had killed those 20 people.
- The sale of now illegal substances would become legal, but only by the government. Selling drugs by anyone but the government would still be illegal. the government would make and sell these drugs and the profits would be used to pay the repair people. the government would also put a cap on the drugs. the drugs that are known to destroy your brain, such as hallucinogens would have a very low cap, where as marijuana and less damaging substances would have a higher, but still low cap. When people buy drugs the government would keep tabs on who was buying drugs and how much. if you max out your limit on everything there would be an investigation into whether or not you were dealing drugs to people who had already maxed out on there allotted amount
-the equality act would be reinstated, and news media would have to present both sides and have little or no political bias in what they report on. if the station does only environmental stories they don't have to report on anything else but environmental issues, but must report on those issues from their selected field.
- the driving age would be 16 with a permit at 15, like it is in some states.
-The legal drinking age, age at which you can vote, age when you can be drafted, own a gun, and carry or conceal said gun, would all be set to 18. however the B.A.C. required to get you in trouble with the government would be lowered between the age of 18 and 21, with harsher punishments. tobacco products would be regulated just as stringently as other drugs, incuding being monitered by the government.

The problem with direct democracy is that in order for it to work, people would have to be well-educated AND have the time to become knowledgable not only of issues in general but of virtually every scientific, social scientific, or related discipline... plus they'd need to have a working knowledge of law equivalent to lawyers. People do not have the time or resources to go after all the information necessary for a responsible vote on all issues.
Until the day comes when we perfect education and greatly reduce the workday, if that ever happens, we will have to settle for choosing accountable representatives. If we can't even vote responsibly for representatives... how can we vote responsibly on issues.
Also... issues voted on, if it's as often as it would need to be, would generally only draw in the ideologues- who generally don't see eye to eye with the general population. The general population acts as a buffer to keep one set of ideologues from screwing over the other, but generally doesn't feel strongly enough to intervene if it takes them out of the way.

Also I feel that biased media is a lesser evil than media that pretend not to be biased. A law demanding such would be difficult. It would imply "BOTH" sides rather than all sides, alienating any other sides... plus it would allow media to put forth two sides and be considered fair just for doing so- it would be hard to mandate exactly what is truly balanced.
My thought is if people want "both" sides, they'll find them. If they don't... it's not going to make a difference if they see it or not.

__________________
"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside

Yeah, I don't know about the "direct democracy" part.

That piece, seems to me, is a little dangerous.

I mean, all you have to do is look at the wild swings in the polls, to see where that'll take you.

Our Founding Fathers, seems to me, were aware of the "public perception" and how it works, and they put specific checks and balances into our Constitution, to protect against the daily whims of the voters.

For instance, this is why we only have elections "periodically", and it's also why it's incredibly difficult to impeach the President or remove him from office.

Me personally, I really detest GWB, and I think he's a blight upon our great country. However, we can't remove him from office (much as I'd like to). The Constitution specifically states that the only way to get him out is either a) if he's committed a very serious crime, or b) if he's incapable of performing his duties.

I think GWB means well, I just think he's somewhat misguided. But the reality here, is that he can't be removed from office unless he's a total basket case - and GWB is not a basket case, he's just a little wrong-headed (IMO).

The other piece that's of interest, is the "internal" checks and balances that work within our political institutions, and even within parties. For instance, "Duke" Cunningham - and even Tom Delay - and perhaps even Jefferson - were removed by their own parties, to prevent the ethical cloud from spreading any farther than it did.

Those kinds of things, are good. It seems to me, that our entire system (when it's working well), is based on "checks and balances" - the whole idea is that you never give any one person enough power to take over. People are fallible, that's a God-given truth, and our Founding Fathers recognized that and institutionalized it.

And that, works both ways. Our elected officials are fallible, and our voters are also fallible. The latter, are too easily swayed by the media-du-jour and so on - so I don't think a real-time "voting" ("polling"?) mechanism would be a good thing. I'd rather place my trust in the wisdom of our Founding Fathers, and retain the periodicity of our current voting mechanism.

I do have some problems with "electronic voting", but that's a whole different story. You see what I'm saying though, right?

It seems to me it is ripe for corruption.

Write a bill called save the children and include anything you want in it. Or less scroupulous - have the bill pay your newly formed company to provide self esteem to kids at 1 mil per month.

IMHO the American people are too dumb and/or ignorant to vote on actual bills. Not that the French people or any others are smart enough to do that. So in summary the people of earth are too dumb to vote on actual legislation.

If you love American vote for proposition 180!

Ixtellor

Thats why i posted it. its a work in progress and i hope to better it through constructive criticism. so could you specify whats bad and then ill look at what you say and try to perfect it. this is by no means a finished product.

but if everyone on earth is to dumb for legislation, why are the politicians going to succeed?

The problem with direct democracy is a problem in mass psychology as seen in economics. We'd like to think supply and demand is based on some real utility and to a subjective extent it is. But the truth, more and more, is that advertising is the ultimate manipulator. And once we get used to something, we don't like change. Look at the QWERTY keyboard. It was designed to be inefficient to keep old keyboards from jamming... Now people are used to them and a whole industry built on teaching its use. It's here to stay.
When a new product comes out, the more mass marketed wins, not the superior. Why is the PC market based on Windows rather than Linux?

Problem is that marketing works all the better in politics.
That's a much more important problem to solve than the representative sstem- which would work if we just voted responsibly (more efficiently than direct democracy due to specialization- but today politicians are specialized as model/marketer/actors rather than policy experts; it's what the market demands of them).

Getting rid of term limits would be a better place to start. At least in presidential races that would cut a lot of the crap... though it doesn't explain why other offices are so bad- that seems to be more a product of lack of interest but feeling of duty.

__________________
"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside

Qoute:
But if you remove the term limits then two things might happen:

A) The model/marketer/actor presidents would still get into office they would just hold it for longer.

or B) The President would build up a web of people loyal to him or owed him favors and he could overthrow the goverment through a military method or sway how senators and congressman vote on things and slowly become a tyrant, then change the entire system of government.