Quantitavely Easing Elections

John Stepek in MoneyWeek wrote this about QE3:
"this move by the Fed raises some interesting questions about democracy and central banking in general. Bernanke insists the move isn’t political. That’s probably true.

"At the same time, it was quite stupid of the Republicans to tell the one man who has more short-term power over US consumer confidence than anyone else in the country, that they were going to fire him if they won the election. If Barack Obama was ever looking for a poll boost from the Fed, this is the best he could have hoped for."

And so we see another example of the rise in power of the unelected technocrats of the central banks. What of democracy?

Culture and Economics

Deirdre McCloskey argues that a revolution in living standards ultimately stemmed from a change in attitude towards commerce and the pursuit of wealth. “By the new pro-bourgeois talk, the positive-sum game was freed partly from zero-sum politics.”
Cultural barriers had kept innovation hemmed in. When these dissolved, ideas were finally free to proliferate. So the new culture made all the difference between ideas forming slowly and in isolation; or quickly, and together. In return, the merchants made Britain stunningly rich. The newly respectable middle class bought and sold and invented a new type of economy. They built machines and cities and they made Britain the centre of the world.
I advocate that, in a similar way, a change from representative to Interactive Democracy would free-up innovation in the political sphere.

(Quotes taken from this article on the MoneyWeek site).

Effecting Currency

This article, from Money Week, explores the effect of politics and uncertainty on the currency markets. Would Interactive Democracy undermine these markets, and the countries international trading prospects, by begetting uncertainty?

Who knows? But Switzerland has operated Direct Democracy for many, many decades and is renown for its stability and economic success. Is this due to a culture of conservatism (as opposed to radicalism) or is it a function of a political system that balances power between leaders and voters?