
Ask HN: What is the mechanism of ensuring best policy in democracy? - teher_shark
I have this argument with my friends the other day, where we are debating on the methodology of creating affordable housing, providing adequate healthcare, solving income inequality.<p>Although our discussions are quite interesting, we end up realizing that some of our propose solution would never work in a democracy. And this is simply because people vote for their own interest, regardless if the interest is short term or long term.<p>Take the following two example<p>Net neutrality and increase tax to upgrade or maintain infrastructure.<p>Net neutrality has popular support and is suppose to have long term positive impact on society, while increasing tax to maintain infrastructure arguably will have no popular support even though it will provide long term positive impact on society.<p>So how do we reconcile policies that have long term positive impact on society yet are unpopluar?<p>The obvious answer is scientific method. If the policy maker would record, monitor and perform control experiments on policy to observe the impact and choose a policy that would guide the country in a long term positive way then our problem would be solved.<p>However how do we make the voters aware that these policy are the best given that the voter might not have the training and judgement to understand that the policies are best for the society? And how do we avoid voters to feel compelled to vote against policies that have short term negative effect but maybe overwhelming long term positive effect?
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PaulHoule
See [https://www.amazon.com/Legitimation-Crisis-Juergen-
Habermas/...](https://www.amazon.com/Legitimation-Crisis-Juergen-
Habermas/dp/0807015210)

