It's a really bad example.

Democracy isn't about people being experts in a profession, it's about people in general being their own judge of what is best for them. People of course make mistakes, but in general people do a better job than anybody else looking after their own interests.

At some level, a meritocratic group -- people with real expertise -- has to step in and exert control
The problem is that if that group maintains control, they will distort the system to enrich and entrench themselves at the expense of every one else.

No, it would not work
The main reason being that people in general are stupid

This is your main reason? With intelligence being controlled by numerous genes and being normally distributed? You have evidence that there is some special intelligence cutoff that we need to move to direct democracy? I doubt you have even bothered to think about it.

In any case, you're argument is absolutely insufficient. You also need to show that:
1) Politicians as a class are less stupid than the general population. Many would agree that politicians don't differ significantly in intelligence from the general population, especially at the local level. (Although Reagen with Alzheimer's or the 2nd Bush weren't the sharpest tools in the shed)
2) This extra benefit of less stupidity leads to better outcomes for society. Do you have any evidence that the intelligence doesn't go more towards giving politicians extra talent in lying, distorting statistics, creative accounting and other problems? I doubt the study has been done.

Finally you need to address the relative strengths of direct democracy. For instance it is much easier to buy off one politician than it is to buy off half the electorate. Do you really think the problem with the current political system is stupidity or corruption? I would bet that most people (in whatever country) would choose the latter.

Also, do you have any evidence that direct democracy leads to harsher treatment of minorities than other forms of government? I think you are just speculating.

Tell that to the Greeks

The Greeks have already indicated they don't want to pay the debt, they can't pay it back even if they wanted to. Lenders are already taking "voluntary" 50% haircuts. Their problem is dragging out the crisis instead of more or less completely defaulting - Iceland handled the situation much better.

Frankly, I doubt that the United States is in a position to win a potential war with its foreign creditors, considering how much of our manufacturing infrastructure has been sent abroad.

1. The US isn't in a position to be defeated by any other country on the planet - it has nukes. The manufacturing base is not relevant to this discussion.

2. Lenders occasionally use proxy (mostly Western) armies to collect, but the target is usually small developing countries who make the mistake of using their resources for their own internal development (nationalism/socialism) instead of debt repayment or facilitating resource extraction.

3. Lenders more or less already own the US government (one of the roots of the problem) - their lobbyists heavily influence or actually write financial legislation. They control the federal reserve which they use to siphon money out, borrow at near 0% and buying T-Bills at 2% on a massive scale to recapitalize themselves. The problem is that what can't be paid back, won't.

Like all financial crises this one will end with the lenders not getting paid, the uncertainty is in how long it is going to last, who is going to pay and how much.

The founders of the labor movement viewed unions as a vehicle to get workers more of the profits they help create.
I not sure which "founders" you are referring to, but I don't think their views (or FDR for that matter) are relevant here. Would you argue against collective bargaining in the old USSR because everybody worked for the government and there were no profits?

Even in private sector strikes, profits and wages aren't always the most important thing. Workplace safety, work rules (bathroom breaks, etc..) and the ability of workers to do the job right with the proper resources are often the major source of conflict. So it's both inaccurate and offensive to throw things out like:
"It's to grab all the tax money they can and influence lawmakers to pass laws to increase their power."

Sure, virtually everybody wants more money and influencing lawmakers is a problem. However it is a general problem, and something business and other interest groups do all the time.

Government collective bargaining means voters do not have the final say on public policy.
Voters don't have the final say anywhere, hell, they hardly have any input at all. Besides even in a dictatorship there are limits to what people can take. If voters decided that all public sector workers should work for free, a refusal to accept this by public sector unions is a bad thing?

Our current representative democracy already works like this, with elected representatives deciding to award and bailout a few closely connected banks in the financial sector at the expensive of everyone else. There are plenty of other examples although they are far more common in a dictatorships (not democracies) where dictators uses state funds as their own personal piggy bank.

The point with direct democracy for me is that it is much harder to buy off a vast electorate than a small group of powerful individuals who wield power in a society.

I don't find the quote insightful either, no form of government is likely to be permanent. I don't think there is any evidence that democracies are shorter lived than monarchies, theocracies, etc...

In any case, the idea that >50% is going to be so well organized and in agreement to actually screw over the minority is I think a lot less common than you imagine. It does happen with various minority groups, but the routine state of affairs is the tiny minority of the powerful screwing over the majority. That's because they have the power, the influence, the organization and the money to make it happen.

This isn't a reason to be worried about nuclear power. This shows that bad things can happen when political decisions override science engineering or when bad engineers don't do a good job.
How well an energy source performs in a variety of political environments from well funded enlightened governance up to civil war and social breakdown needs to be considered when evaluating an energy source. Blaming politics doesn't cut it, some energy sources are much more sensitive to bad political environments - nuclear power is one of them.

By this metric, nuclear power is one of the safest forms of power out there.
I saw a more recent study (I think it was in Scientific American, maybe somebody else can find the link?) which also considered all the inputs including mining and transportation when calculating the numbers. By this metric nuclear performed considerably worse than wind and solar per energy generated. It was however better than all types of fossil fuel (oil, natural gas and coal). I'm guessing the numbers went down for nuclear relative to wind and solar because of the hazards of uranium mining and transportation problems (accidents happen).

There's been a long-running problem with scientifically ignorant environmentalists who don't understand the difference between fission and fusion
I support research into fusion and I think it will likely prove much better than fission. However I still place its importance between wind, solar and efficiency improvements.

It turns out that "the rich" pay the majority of the taxes.

First you need to define rich and then you need to define tax, but in most terms people think about I suspect this is wrong. Do you have a neutral source?

And let's not restrict it to just US Federal Income Tax, but included all transfers of money from people to government (FICA, sales tax, property tax, various fees whether they are called a tax or not) and I suspect you will be surprised how little "the rich" pay, both absolutely and proportionally.

In any case I think it is wrong to presume that the rich paying large sums in taxes means they are doing something fantastic. Taken to its logical extreme it suggests that a single individual paying 99.99999% of all taxes is a hero to be respected and admired, rather than someone controlling our economic lives with inordinate power over the rest of us.

There have been several times in the history of the USA where the overall tax rate was lowered, and tax revenues went up.

Ahh Reaganomics! Didn't work then and it didn't work with the Bush Tax Cuts either. Actually revenue as a % of GDP is at a 60 year low. Only in unusual circumstances (due more to changes in corruption and tax enforcement) can you hope to see revenue increase when taxes are cut.

There are some people who view the above as a problem; this problem is called "the rich get richer". Even if the poor get richer also, which confuses me.

What's confusing? It's relative worth and there are plenty of psychological experiments to indicate that this is valued by people. Having a flying car isn't a big deal if the rich have spaceships and live to be 1000. I want that too. No one likes to be looked down on.

Historically, the US government has not managed to collect more than 19 or 20 percent of GNP in tax revenue.

That's what you took home from this chart?
http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/revenue_history

Care do show any evidence that you can only pick one?

It's not even clear to me that if you pick both you will "fix" global warming - whatever that means. Perhaps a serious adoption of wind, solar and efforts to improve energy efficiency may be sufficient? Let's see something to back up your statement.

In reality, we are going to "stop using nuclear power" anyways. As I'm sure you know there is a limited supply of economically extractable uranium (I'm assuming you are talking about fission, not fusion here) so we are eventually it must be abandoned.

Furthermore we're talking about Italy here, not the whole world. It may be that Italy with a combination of new renewable energy resources and energy reduction/efficiency can replace the energy currently produced by nuclear power. We need the details of Italy's current energy basket.

Additionally this wasn't a referendum to use coal, which (I suspect I agree with you) - is worse than nuclear power. For your point to be close to correct, you pretty much have to assume that the nuclear base load is replaced by coal power.

What bothers me by your post is the implication that we need to use nuclear power to fix global warming. That I suspect is probably not true (especially if we throw an energy usage reduction into the equation) but what really gets my goat is the notion that nuclear fission is a desirable energy source. It is expensive, polluting, centralized and a target for terrorism.

That's not a fix, because they are NOT pyramid schemes. Look up the definition.

Something like SSI can go on indefinitely with a constant number of people in the system, whereas pyramid schemes requiring a growing number of people to be recruited to the system. All Social Security does it take a percentage of current wages from workers and give them to retired workers (who used to contribute themselves). It has nothing to do with pyramid schemes.

Violating a contract may be a civil matter not a criminal matter, but that is hardly the point.

Polygamy has a number of negative repercussions on society and I certainly wouldn't compare it with smoking marijuana while at home. Polygamous societies (by which I mean polygyny not polyandry which is extremely rare) are generally characterized by a small number of powerful men monopolizing a large number of wives. Women in these societies are married at young ages, into marriages often arranged for and in the interests of the male elite that dominates that society. Additionally, men on the bottom of the socioeconomic scale have limited options for marriage, trying googling "Lost Boys" and "Mormon" to see how well it works out for young men in those societies.

I have no problem limiting the "freedom" of the powerful elite to have multiple wives if it means that majority have better options for marriage and personal development. People aren't "free" to own slaves anymore (even if the slaves are "willing") so I guess the powerful lost some freedom but I think the rest of us are better off for it.

I for one judge technology on basis of merit, not ideology.

Unqualified aphorisms like that one are ripe for the picking.

Are you saying you that you judge a gadget purely on its specs? Isn't someone's morality dependent on their ideological position?

Would you purchase the best piece of technology from Nazi Germany in 1940? 1943? You don't care if child labor was involved in making it? Slave labor? I suspect your more honest answer is that you simply disagree with the ideological perspective of the Free Software Foundation and friends.

Yeah, the thing about the bank bailouts is that pretty much everyone who understands the issue agrees that they were more or less necessary.
I think there is a lot of disagreement on the issue, actually outright nationalization of the banks is probably the more common solution globally to the problem.
If you don't understand why, here's the deal (just a simplified overview as I understand it): Many banks were apparently not solvent. If the government did nothing and your bank went under, you may have essentially showed up at your bank one day to find your checking and savings accounts no longer existed. To this, many people respond, "But my money is FDIC insured!" However, the whole "FDIC insured" thing means that if the bank goes under, the government will take control of the bank, effectively socializing it completely, bail it out, and then sell it off. That's not really any better.
It's much better. Small people (deposit holders) keep their money up to FDIC limits and investors and counter-parties are wiped out, as they should be for their stupid investment decisions thus avoiding moral hazard. Even better, bankruptcy cleans the slate so that losses are recognized immediately instead of put off indefinitely, like Japan did after its crash. There would be no need for changes in accounting rules (mark to fantasy) and quantitative easing. In any case, the bailout hasn't worked. Obama explicitly stated he was giving money to banks because they could use the multiplier effect to generate more money than they were given. However banks aren't making those loans, they are hoarding money to absorb future loses and because they can't find enough credit worthy people to loan to. So even though the money supply is going up, credit is going down which is why we are not seeing inflation. If Obama wants to stimulate the economy, he is better off spending the money on science R&D (to lay the ground for future industries) than in saving big banks.
The only price to be paid for this approach is the loss of some large banks and a nastier (but shorter) crash. However Obama (like his predecessor) is tied tightly to big Wall Street banks and won't do what is required, preferring to take bank lobbyist money and to surround himself with former members of Goldman Sachs.
The problem is going to get worse once the stimulus money runs out and banks are forced to deal with losses, particularly since government on all levels is now so hugely indebted. The only plus is that it exposed to a lot of people who the government takes care of first.