Well, I haven't voted for the last three or four years, I think. Maybe even longer. There have been quite a few elections lately, but I just don't believe in democratic processes. It's not just my country. It is failing everywhere.

Now, why do I think it's failing? First of all, how many people actually understand the process? You vote, you pick sides. And that's it? No, it's not just that. But for most people, it's as far as they will go.

Once a candidate wins, it becomes a real mess. The ruling party, with a few others to help them maybe, will do whatever they want completely unchecked most of the time. Why? Because people simply don't give a rat's ass. In most countries, it's also very difficult to get your word through, and in some countries people even think they don't have a say. Well, not too far from truth sometimes.

Just take a look at United States' Medicare system. It's awful. Many people are suffering. But they simply don't feel they need or can say anything to help themselves.

So, how do we work around this? Well, here's how I'd do it.

First of all, people will not pay all the taxes. Yeah, that's right. Not everything. Just the stuff that's of general interest, such as public security, infrastructure... you get the idea. Military research? Some weird campaign like "Save Kosovo (whales, Wales, whatever)". Yeah, that's right, I wouldn't pay for something I don't care, and neither should others. The system doesn't give us much choice right now, but imagine it did: we'd be able to determine if the government is doing what we want it to do, by simply (not) financing stuff we (don't) care about.

Money is by far the best tool for the job, because our system is so dependent on it. Many politicians are there for the money, so if we, the taxpayers, don't like something, they won't do it, because there's not (taxpayer) money in it. Hopefully...

Apart from simply financing 'projects', can this be extended? What else do taxpayers pay for? Politicians' salaries? That's right. We pay them to do the job. So if the payment would be voluntary, we could boot them as well. Wouldn't it be nice if we could boot someone who's been doing his job poorly? I mean, I get booted if I do my job poorly, and who decides if I get booted? The one that pays me – my employer. So if the people have hired politicians to do the job of running the government, they should be entitled to booting the employee.

Of course, the bottom line is, you have to care. You have to be willing to understand what politicians are doing and why, and even if they agree to reporting to people on the progress, we'd still need to understand the reports so we can decide if we care or not. In other words, the people need to become smarter for the system outlined above to work.

Both the money democracy and people getting smarter is, sadly, highly unlikely to become reality in near future. And the less likely it is to become reality in short term, the more unlikely it is to become reality in longer term. But it was still fun thinking about it and writing all this down here. Now let's just forget I ever mentioned any of this, and go back to daily routine of hacking code and making stuff beautiful. :)