For Starbucks politics

Bagehot in the Economist complains about Starbucks politics:

Swelling numbers seem to expect the same sort of service from Westminster as they get from Starbucks—to choose their policies in the same way as they choose the toppings on a cappuccino (a sprinkling of low taxation, please, with a referendum on the side). They demand a kind of personal satisfaction that government, with its conflicting priorities, can't deliver.

This is careless. It's not conflicting priorities that stops government offering Starbucks-type choices, but rather politicians' misplaced arrogance that they, not the people, should have power. There is evidence that where people have more choice in politics, through more direct democracy, they do have higher levels of satisfaction.
Imagine how bad coffee providers would be if the only way we could choose between them was to select every four or five years whether we'd get our coffee from Starbucks or Costa, with the winner setting prices and deciding what we'd get every day.
Why should we have to buy only job lots? Why can't we pick and choose policies through referenda?
The arguments against this are perhaps weaker now than ever before. Maybe there was a time when politicians were better placed than us to decide what's good for us. But that time has passed. They are neither representative of us - being drawn from a narrow cadre of career politicians - nor obviously better informed or more expert. What's more, the narrowness of their backgrounds, allied to the whipping system, means that politicians beliefs are highly correlated, thus depriving us of a key condition for the wisdom of crowds to work.
Bagehot continues, claiming that where direct democracy has been tried, such as in California, "the results have been chaotic."
This too is crude. It ignores evidence (pdf) that direct democracy does work. It also omits to consider whether California's problems aren't instead the result of giving weight to cheap preferences, a problem which could be solved by demand-revealing referenda.
And anyway, give me the people's chaos over politicians' order any time.

Comments

[dearieme]

yup.

[Hawthorne]

Fareed Zakaria address's direct democracy in his book 'Illiberal Democracy' over 80% of California's State budget is pre-allocated due to referenda and cannot be adjusted, removed or increased without another referenda. Hardly optimal governance.

And one of the problems with your concept is adequatly described by John Stuart Mill in his On Liberty, he was taking about something else however his point would be valid in this instance. In a situation where 'the people' decide via refendum it would be

"the will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people - the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority"

Really a referendum on every govermental policy? Only those who cared passionately about a subject would vote, generally those with a vested interest. You would not get government for the people but government for yourself. Imagine how bad the USA government's spending is because nothing ever gets cut, there is still a subsidy to the cotton industry from when the US Army needed cotton to make uniforms, from the 1800's.

Imagine that with policy....