While capital can respond to government decisions every second, withdrawing its approval with catastrophic consequences if it doesn't like them, citizens are stuck with a voting system that allows us to make just one, incredibly crude decision every 5 years.

There's a massive imbalance of power here. The voting power of capital, with modern trading technologies, has advanced by leaps and bounds, while electoral power is trapped in an antiquated model, developed when the fastest information technology was the quill pen.

Capital's consent is given or withdrawn every moment of the day.
Our consent is PRESUMED, for five years at a time, regardless of what we might actually think about government policy.
We don't accept the principle of presumed consent in sex. Why should we accept it in politics?

There is a host of technologies that would allow our representative system to be tempered by participatory, deliberative decision making. Some of them have been used to great effect elsewhere: Taiwan, Iceland, Madrid, Porto Alegre etc. But we are stuck in the 18th Century.

Both big parties in the UK favour a highly centralised, top-down, presumptive system. They insist on analogue politics in the digital era. This allows them to say, in effect, "you voted us, therefore we can do whatever we want for the next five years".

This is democracy only in the weakest and crudest sense. If you want a richer, more meaningful system of democratic decision making, please RT this thread. Thank you.