All valid points on democracy and political governance, but my conclusion would be that we expect far too much if we expect elected representatives to “manage” the enterprise. It makes more sense to move toward the libertarian approach that centralized govt has a fairly limited scope of necessary powers. Democracy doesn’t need perfectly informed citizens or experts to guide them — what it does require is a decentralization of power so that conflicts are driven toward compromise. Ignorance cancels out unless there is systemic bias in information. This is the media quandary today.

BC can teach us a bit here. BC is essentially coordination of decentralized applications, eliminating much of the need for agency intermediation. That’s kind of what a central govt should do — coordinate, not manage or run — thereby eliminating much of the need for agency. Complexity has caused our governments to expand and outgrow their usefulness.