I am not interested in going to dinner with a great many people, and don’t feel the need to come to compromise with them on where I eat.

Had I been going by myself, I may have chosen Quiznos; had she, Thai Express may have been the destination. Instead, we discussed the issue until we agreed: Steak ‘n Shake.

What I’ve described is the essence of democracy: That a group of people discuss (whether explicitly or procedurally) issues and come to either consensus or compromise.

That doesn’t sound like our system, though. Take the current debates over health-care reform. Have a multitude of Americans been complaining about health-care costs for decades? Sure. And is our ratio of spending to results totally out of whack? Probably. But what’s going on in the halls of Congress isn’t limited to those questions… in fact, it may well be irrelevant to them.

We have these people, supposed “representatives,” whom we elect primarily based on factors like this: Moral philosophy // Speaking skills // Ability to procure funds for my district // Use of catchphrases and code words … the whole thing is slightly absurd, especially when you consider that the “representative” speaks with fewer than 1/100th of a percent of his/her constituents (except, perhaps, in Rhode Island).

These people are not representatives. They’re rulers, plain and simple, over whom we happen to have occasional hiring/firing power and a few other minimal checks. What’s more, they MAKE LAWS — an entirely separate topic, but suffice it to say that “law” once meant a moral code that most reasonable people understood and accepted, and was never meant to be invented and reinvented with each election cycle.

And what will it reap, in the instance I’m using? A host of health-care changes that confuse and confound and complicate, but which hardly any of us will be completely happy with — that is to say, individually, we would make different choices it it were simply up to us. You may say that this sounds just like the dining illustration I used above, except for this: I am not interested in going to dinner with a great many people, and don’t feel the need to come to compromise with them on where I eat. Yet my health care will be shared with all, my payments going not toward what I want but what “we want,” which really means “what few of us want.”

I’m afraid I’m being confusing, and possibly infuriating? But bear with me for a few more paragraphs. “Majority rules” is something we’re raised to see as reasonable, and rarely do we consider what a poor system this is. But take a presidential election, for example. Practically speaking, in the year 2000, 51 people voted for George W. Bush for every 49 who voted for Al Gore. (I’m simplifying the numbers a bit and avoiding discussion of the high court’s intervention in the election. Deal with it.) So the majority got its way — but what of the 49? They effectively got the same result as if they’d been zero.

That’s the two-party system to a tee: There is no compromise… just a whole lot of people forced to eat at a restaurant they didn’t choose, many of whom would have preferred to stay home and cook for themselves.