Thread:Comments:Gun background checks a no-go in US Senate/greed feeding off and fueling fear and self-delusion/reply (3)

I'd suggest it's a more subtle phenomenon than simple corruption.

Representative democracy has the general population choose a few people to specialize in deciding how to conduct the government. True democracy, where the entire population votes on everything, has a different set of problems, notably being too volatile to keep things on an even keel. The representative phase slows down feedback from the public, which does provide more stability, and at best allows legislators to dedicate more of their time to legislating than most people in society could afford, but there are all sorts of things that can go wrong. Legislators may end up spending so much of their time trying to stay in office that they don't dedicate as much time to legislating as you wanted them to, nor as much as they wanted to. Because of deliberate or even random anomalies of the voting system, their reelection may depend disproportionately on a small atypical segment of the population. They may do unpopular things and figure people will be worrying about something else by the next election. And, a favorite of mine, both lobbyists and government bureaucracy can present legislators with stuff so complicated that no single human being can understand it all no matter how much of their time they devote to the task &mdash; is it really likely that anyone in the US Congress could have read and understood the entire US Tax Code?