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Actually, I think the Constitution as written originally had the right idea. The problem is that idiots have tinkered with it since. In my view, the downward trend of our government has two basic causes:

1) lack of accountability of representatives to voters
2) social parasites being able to vote themselves free money

Ironically, the Founders built in safeguards against both of these problems - we just removed them after the fact. Originally, federal Senators were elected by the state legislatures to be representatives of the States, to act in the best interest of the State, and to be accountable directly to those state legislatures. Currently, our Senators laugh at their constituents because they are just some vague mob. But a state legislature would be a smaller body and would have very specific demands of a senator. Fail to represent those demands and you're out, and no amount of silly TV ads touting your status as a "fighter for working families" and other such meaningless nonsense would fool them. Meanwhile, we should have fairly stringent requirements regarding residency for state Senators and Representatives, and federal Representatives. Perhaps a 5-year full-time residency requirement to be able to run for any office, so we can avoid Hillary-type carpet-bagging, and all representatives should be required to have an open town-hall type meeting IN PERSON with their voting constituents at least once a year.

The second part is reducing the right to vote to those who would be responsible, who have a real stake in the outcome of elections. The vote has been dumbed down to any warm idiot over the age of eighteen at the same time that public education has been dumbed down to the level of your average Asian kindergarten, only without the respect. You cannot have non-producers voting in your elections, period. The vote should be limited to property-owners and military veterans, and there should be stringent ID checks. Voter eligibility lists should be published by the local governments a full year before any election, so as to allow for any dispute.

I am convinced that the closer our government representatives are to us, the more they will behave, so voting should be as local as possible, and then the power trickles up from there.