Making Votes Count

[savoxis]

I'll make this short and sweet.

Can anyone think of a good reason why the general population inside the US does not get to vote directly on any foreign policy issues?

Be it war, providing aid, trade sanctions and so on, it seems to be that we get absolutely no say in what our government does. IMHO we should have national polls on matters involving global politics

 

[ElasticNinja]

If you give the US public control over trade I suspect 3rd world countries would get even more screwed over

 

[savoxis]

If you give the US public control over trade I suspect 3rd world countries would get even more screwed over

Not necessarily trade, but trade sanctions, I may have worded it poorly. But an example would be the embargo on Cuba

 

[copestag]

hmmm the most obvious answer that comes to my mind.......... if we all had to take time to vote on every single issue .......... who would pay for the govt to do it? .... we wouldnt be able to hold a job and vote as well

Im not from that populated of an area...... but Ive gone in before hand had to fill out 6 pages of votes with different initiatives etc on the ballots..........

if we had to vote on everything govt does.......... you could spend 8-10 hours in the voting booth and never get halfway through the ballot

its almost like thats the very reason we elect representatives.... to vote for our best interests (note I said almost... since very few politicians care about any interests other than their own)

 

[savoxis]

I just seems to me like we are using our Representatives to hide behind. Like if we can elect people to make all of the hard decisions for us, then we wont have to make them ourselves and can blame the problems on someone else. Our system of government was designed at a time when long distance communication was impossible, so it was necessary to elect individuals to represent entire communities.

In this day in age where communicating to someone across the world is easy and accessible to most of our population, are we not ready and able to make these decisions for ourselves?

 

[copestag]

its not a matter of how to communicate your choice/opinion to the govt.......... sure we could all phonecall/textmsg/email/whatever other method to the govt in regards to every decision made........

with 100s of policy decisions made every single day........ I personally dont have that kind of time.......

our system was also designed at a time when there were very few policy decisions to be made....... so poor communication wasnt a problem

if you think of all the thousands of govt offices ...... all doing their own thing....... all making hundreds of decisions every year.... each of these decisions would have to be ran past every voter.........

not sure exactly how to get the point across........ you wouldnt have time to do anything..... no dinner..... no sleep...... NOTHING...... you would have to sit and answer questions 24/7 365 for the rest of your life....... just to voice your opinion on every decision made by the govt

as for me....... I'll just vote for someone who represents my values and hope they vote in the way that I would........ this is the way our system was designed and has nothing to do with artificial barriers like communication....... as I said already..... it doesnt work out that way in the end........ but individual consent on every issue is certainly not a reasonable answer