The difference the likes of Friedman should be concerned with is between a corrupt two party system such as ours, and a dynamic multi-party system, where each political party stands for a set of specific ideas and principles, and not as our two parties (or more precisely one and a half) for goodness and mom’s apple pie.
“a dynamic multi-party system, where each political party stands for a set of specific ideas and principles”
I don’t know about that. Didn’t work for the Weimar Republic.
> and a dynamic multi-party system, where each political party stands for a set of specific ideas and principles, and not as our two parties (or more precisely one and a half) for goodness and mom’s apple pie.
That’s a fairly good description of the MMP system that the Allies put in place in post-war West Germany, and has been in place in New Zealand since the mid-1990’s.
It tends to encourage reasonably-stable coalition governments, and affords the minor parties an amount of power disproportionate to their size, as they tend to be kingmakers.
Accordingly, thinking voters tend to give their Party Vote to the minority party whose specific niche platforms they like, and their Electorate Vote to the local representative of the Party they want to see as forming the Government.
I actually like it: it grows on you after a few elections.