Too Much of a Good Thing Why we need less democracy.(Former Obama Director)

The New Republic ^ | 09/27/11 | Peter Orszag

[barmag25]

In an 1814 letter to John Taylor, John Adams wrote that “there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” That may read today like an overstatement, but it is certainly true that our democracy finds itself facing a deep challenge: During my recent stint in the Obama administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget, it was clear to me that the country’s political polarization was growing worse—harming Washington’s ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing. If you need confirmation of this, look no further than the recent debt-limit debacle, which clearly showed that we are becoming two nations governed by a single Congress—and that paralyzing gridlock is the result.

So what to do? To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.

[GOPJ]

Stunning .... thanks for the link.

[RedMonqey]

Nothing more than a prescription for tyranny.

It reminds me of the days of the Wiemar Republic. when people like this Orszag fellow also thought they needed less democracy.

They no longer believed in the old imperial upper classes system and capitalism, yet were deadly afraid of the Bolshevism.

From the labour movement they elected an moderate working class union man, one who firmly believed in less democracy and unrestrained by outdated "bourgeois" morality. The man and his party (largely by fiat) carry out his party's big government policy projects and revive the economy, utilizing the crippled private sector at the point of a gun. And at the expense of millions of lives and a second world war.

This man of action of course, was Adolph Hitler and the group was the National Socialist Workers Party or the Nazis.

[mewzilla]

Orszag is on CNBC as we type.....