Maybe increase the number? That would make bribing effort a little harder since it would require spreading the money to more people. Wasn't the house of representative supposed to be sized in proportion with the population of the US?

That's how it works now. The size of Congress is a function of the population, while the Senate is a fixed 2 per state. You're correct though that a larger legislature (in terms of number of representatives) would make bribes (including political favors often used to pass unpopular legislation) more difficult, because the marginal return on each bribe is diminished.

No, the size of the House is fixed at 435 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929).

The apportionment of the seats to the various states is based on population, but the overall size is not.

You are correct. I should have said "the proportion of Congressional representation is a function of local population densities." I knew that the representative to population ratio had been shrinking, but I didn't know they had since set a fixed limit.

How about we increase the size of congress to 1 member per voter? What kind of problems would have then?

I can't tell if you're joking or seriously advocating a pure democracy. A pure democracy is nice in theory, but it's effectively mob/majority rule. It is also a considerable burden to write, read, and vote on every piece of legislation. A representative democracy mitigates those issues by appointing a single person to represent the wishes of his or her constituents. This also slows down the progress of democracy by forcing voters to wait until they can elect a new representative. But is that a bad thing? The waiting is effectively what prevents the mob rule syndrome.

Then again, it would be difficult to bribe >50% of the population to pass a bill.

Wasn't really joking or advocating it. Just a thought experiment on the thread we were on. I suppose the answer would have to wait a few hundred years after we initiated the experiment to see where it goes off the rails.

Another variable, you mention, is term of office. If voters only "remember 6 months back" then would having elections every 6 months instead of 2 years help?

I wonder if future forms of government will even require congressmen to vote on legislation on our behalf, since the Internet would make it feasible for citizens to represent themselves.

This essentially eliminates the votes of anyone who doesn't care enough. This is bad because it massively empowers the fanatic fringes.

What would anyone who doesn't care enough do? If they don't vote, they increase the power of other voters. If they vote randomly, their votes would cancel each other out on average, making it as if they hadn't voted. If they vote based on what somebody or an organisation says, that person/group is empowered based on the number of followers.

This is the main issue with FPTP voting. If you wish to disempower fringes, require majority approval.

The idea of representative democracy is that the people who don't care about important issues vote for someone they trust to take care of it for them.

You largely vote not on the issues the candidate says he supports, but on how trustworthy they seem and how well their interests align with yours.

At it's best, this means that even people who are quite apathetic get properly represented.

It only empowers the fringes if the rest of the general public does nothing. One would assume that people would start caring when the fanatic fringes start influencing public policy. If they still don't care, then they forfeit any right to complain.

You can start caring all you want, but if you have to have an informed opinion on every vote, you are going to run out of time, even if you do not have to spend time to do such things as bringing in the money to live from.

Also, who would propose the votes, check legislation for consistency and loopholes, etc? If you crowd-source that, chances are 100% that there will be some decisions with unwelcome consequences. If you appoint people for doing that, how is that different from letting those people make the decisions, too?

There would still be legislatures who's job is to propose and write laws, but the voting and passing of those laws could easily be shifted to the people instead of the same people that are writing the laws. This would further balance the power, and prevent the extreme amount of lobbying and special interest groups from controlling our laws.

I don't expect anybody to vote on all laws. It makes more sense for people to vote on the laws that are relevant/important to them. If I don't know anything about a certain issue, I shouldn't be voting on it anyway. This way, people would vote on issues relevant to them, and for people who don't care, then well, they don't care...