American Nations: An attempt to hack (i.e., fix) American political gridlock
seantevis.com
seantevis.com
In practice, these "nations" appear to be nothing more than special interest groups. Special interest groups already tend to expand well beyond their original goals in the political arena. That doesn't work because the active leadership takes over and speaks for the public; why these would avoid that, I don't know. So, the solution to too many special interest groups is more special interest groups.
Also, I think he uses "Tea Party" like bogeymen. To the extent the movement involves cutting government down, it will actually increase the scope of agreement within the government by cutting down the number of domains in which there is disagreement. In fact, my personal prescription for where we are right now is for a significant return of power to the states. Some things have to be national-scale policy, but the list is much shorter than you think. We don't need a national-scale health care plan. Many of our states are larger than European countries that manage. State plans already exist. We don't need national agreement on any given social issue. If we weren't centralizing all our power, we wouldn't have to spend so much time arguing what the central policy should be.
The other major problem these sort of idealistic ideas have is that it basically promises everybody that it will bring the world closer to their viewpoint, but that can't actually happen. Right now, for better or worse, our government is more liberal than our population, so if your plan is to push our government yet more liberal by empowering the population, err, well, you might want to rethink that plan.
And most importantly the people who are in the Tea Party also use the Internet. Here's the problem with his concept of nations, look at the UN. Look at congress, they are all abstracts of general political distributions. All of the deadlock, ALL the time. Why? Because there's going to always be a pro-coffee and an anti-coffee nation/interest group/campaign. Sean Tevis can't fix human nature with any amount of money.
I think you actually underestimate the complexities here. The problem isn't number of people -- you're correct, many states are as large as European countries. However, the states don't have nearly as much self-governing power (as granted by the Constitution) as European countries. In things like healthcare, this makes a big difference. For example, one of the biggest benefits to the federal government is that it can temporarily run a budget deficit during hard times. There are innumerable times (including now) when that would be necessary for a large swath of public services. It would require a rather huge change in federal law in order to make this work on the state level. Another problem you would get is massive problems with the full-faith-and-credit clause. All in all, it may be worth considering that, accounting for modern high-speed transportation and intercommunication and trade, strong states may be an antiquated idea.
Right now, for better or worse, our government is more liberal than our population
That's difficult to argue. Notably, consider that one person's vote in Wyoming counts 67 times more than a Californian's in the US Senate and 1.264 times a Californian's in the House of Representatives.
Granted the Danish economy is more sound than, say California but still.
Another reason that I like the idea of states and local governments handling more services is that it is politically more difficult to waste money on stupid projects. For Example: a road near my house was recently repaved using money from the stimulus. It was in fine shape before and didn't need work done but most people were not upset because the federal government payed for most, if not all, of it. However if my village said that sales taxes would be raised .25% for 6 mos. to pay for the project most of these same people would have immediately decided that repaving the road wasn't worth the cost.
Yes. I did say "significant return of power to the states", after all.
"All in all, it may be worth considering that, accounting for modern high-speed transportation and intercommunication and trade, strong states may be an antiquated idea."
It is also worth considering the opposite, that in an era of increased administrative efficiency, increased economic efficiency, and increased communication efficiency, that the need for one strong overarching State is diminishing. Everything else is decentralizing as a result of the very forces we cite; why is the State such a special exception?
Your statement suggesting that the government is more liberal than the population is unfounded. Recall, in the last Presidential election Barack Obama won on the currently enacted platform by a significant percentage. Furthermore, if people were actually aware and educated in political issues, it's my opinion that the country would lean more leftward. The only reason why any network or news source can possibly suggest the country is a center-right country is due to the vast perpetual amounts of mis-information and political propaganda.
It's also my opinion that the "Tea Party" are bogeyman. Their entire platform is empty of anything constructive, instead the platform seeks to incite, destroy, and push people apart. One need only look at Tea Party donor records to see who the Tea Party truly represents.
How about a link?
Next time I'll be sure to include a complete list of references.
Most of what he posted was his opinion. How would he substantiated that what he posted is actually his opinion?
You made a readily verifiable claim and got it wrong. In doing so, you actually provided evidence supporting one of his points.
I've done the searches - they don't show what you claimed. I asked because I could have missed something. So let's use your link and see what we find.
http://www.opensecrets.org/usearch/index.php?q=tea+party
shows three organizations, all local, which have raised $150k, $13k, and less than $1k.
That pretty much disproves your claim.
Look at the PAC donations to these people. Look at the sort of people who contribute. You do a poor search and then conclude that I'm wrong based on your poor research ability.
Umm, the federal govt already runs a couple of massive health care systems. They don't do what single payer advocates promise, so why do you think that obamacare will?
I think that we should have given obama free reign wrt the healthcare of folks who currently get their healthcare from govt. Yes, military, state, local, and federal employees, Indian Health Service, Medicare, Medicaid, and so on.
We give him 2 years at the current budget then we cut 5% per covered person in the next four years. That's just over 20% which should be trivial given the promises of 30% savings.
If the covered population is better off at the end of that time, we can talk about expanding it.
What are you talking about? Members of VA, Medicare and Medicaid love their programs. You'd be hard pressed to find someone willing to give up their Medicare or VA benefits.
Medicare would do what a single payer advocates, if only we didn't include sweetheart deals. For example, Medicare Advantage, signed into law by Bush, and lobbied heavily for by the Insurance industry, did nothing but funnel money into private companies for the same benefits Medicare was already offering.
These programs would do what they're suppose to, if they weren't manipulated by corporate lobbyists or gutted by party partisans. So it's not surprising that when a program is legislated into the ground, those most responsible for those changes are the first ones to advocate the program's end. Interesting how that works.
Unfortunately, I'm not a member of the armed forces, don't qualify for Medicare, and not impoverished enough for Medicaid. If it wasn't for the recently passed health reform legislation my only option would be to crawl in some corner and die.
Thankfully my President helped to change that, and for the first time in over a year I'll finally be able to see my Neurologist and get that MRI I desperately need.
I think you mean, "unfortunately, I don't have insurance."
Getting sick without insurance is a bummer, but if you're trying to get "insurance" after you get sick, that's not "insurance", it's "charity." Not that I know your circumstances or would necessarily mind chipping in my part to your getting the medical help you need.
I had insurance, since my father worked for the city. However, once I turned 24, that was all over. I'm a co-founder of a startup, as such it would be cost prohibitive to insure me, and incur undue charges on every other member and employee. As we grow, I'm sure we'll have enough employees at some point to offset my genetics, until then the recently passed health reform law is my only salvo.
Anyway, apologies if I sound bitter. I'm really not :)
You're overstating their satisfaction. However, since they're not paying, of course they won't give it up.
And, if you have a dispute, you're more likely to have it resolved in your favor if it's with a private company.
Medicare et al are pretty efficient at cutting a check. However, the low estimates of fraud are $50B/year.
> Medicare would do what a single payer advocates, if only we didn't include sweetheart deals.
And what makes you think that any new govt program will be any different? (Obamacare is full of such deals, so that's not a Republican thing.) You don't get to assume unicorns and puppies when the experience is very different.
That's why I wanted to give Obama free rein - to see if he could do better. However, Obamacare as passed ....
> Thankfully my President helped to change that, and for the first time in over a year I'll finally be able to see my Neurologist and get that MRI I desperately need.
Not to be rude, but "my president" isn't paying - I am.
based on your later comments, it sounds like you do actually have another option besides dying, which would be to stop trying to run your own business, and go work someplace large (10+ people most states?) enough that the insurance companies can't refuse you.
What economies of scale kick in at a hundred million that you don't have at ten million?
Economies of scale have diminishing returns and those diminishing returns kick in long before the size of an American state, let alone at the national scale. The very real costs of having no competition will utterly dominate your economies of scale anyhow. And by dominate, I mean, utterly dominate.
You just blipped over my point and did nothing to address it. Economies of scale aren't magical. They have diminishing returns. What economy of scale do you get at 100 million that you don't get at 10 million? That's a real question. If you can't answer it, or you answer it with something that just boils down to "Uh, something", you haven't countered my point.
But you know, even that's beside the point. People have completely lost the ability to understand freedom nowadays, which is why we're going to lose it. The alternative isn't "Federal plan or nothing", it's not even "Federal plan or 50 state plans", it's "Federal plan or States acting on their own". Believe it or not, and I realize this may be a cognitive shock which I recommend you actually think on for a moment, if poor little Rhode Island doesn't want to strike out on its own, it can actually form a partnership with, say, Delaware. Or nowadays for all geography matters, with California. If that doesn't work out, it can leave, it isn't stuck. Or it can choose to go on its own. Or it can leave it up to its counties. Or it can say "stuff it" and stick with a regulated private system. If the economies of scale are so all-important, than you shouldn't need to force people to take advantage of them at the point of a gun, they should choose it on their own!
(The real problem is that there almost certainly aren't any hidden economies of scale left. Where would they be hiding? Big Medicine is pretty Big already. "Economies of scale" is just an argument people make and hope you don't think about the argument too hard.)
It's never a choice between "the Feds do it" or "we sit on our hands", unless you've become so helpless that that really is your only choice. (And "you have to do everything on your own" isn't the other choice either. There's a ton of other options.)
And then we can find out what really works, because no plan survives contact with the enemy. Not even Federal plans.
Now that I'm done defining what scaling means... I think it would be great if the states could actually get it done, but the lower the office the less scrutiny is placed on an elected official and the more influence insurance companies can exert on them.
>The alternative isn't "Federal plan or nothing"
I'm well aware that federal action is not the only possibility, but I and many other people think it is the best one which is why we support it.
>you shouldn't need to force people to take advantage of them at the point of a gun
Who is advocating this? I would support single payer despite being in the class with incredibly low health care costs, but I know thats not going to happen any time soon so I advocate a public option. As the name implies, it is an option, not mandatory (as opposed to the boondoggle that actually got passed which I'm only okay with because it does have redeeming qualities that make up for the corporate handout). I believe state governments simply don't have the resources to set a system like this up.
Other arguments for federal action on this issue:
- it is a fundamental human right that must be protected at the highest levels. States protecting free speech doesn't mean federal doesn't need to.
- a uniform minimal baseline is desirable, on top of which the states can build how they choose.
>Big Medicine is pretty Big already.
Its objective is not to provide health care. Its objective is to generate profit. It is extremely good at generating profit, but not as good at providing quality health care for anyone who needs it.
>It's never a choice between "the Feds do it" or "we sit on our hands"
Who has ever said that it was? It may be the best choice we can get done.
Which "tipping point" is more interesting: the one where Internet cartoon guy gets $67,000 and a long list of names on a web page, or the one where several hundred people from Hacker News end up on school boards?
As I get older, I find myself making friends with more and more people who have gotten off their asses and actually done this. I promise, it's easier than starting a company, and it's a drastically lower time commitment.
My point is, forget about a national political movement. Engage with local politics, for local reasons. "Move" towards real engagement, not the feel-good merit-badge engagement that this article alludes to, where by giving a buck and signalling your support you might help create some sort of "tipping point" that will fix national politics.
Anybody who's telling you that you can fix dysfunctional national politics by giving up your credit card number online is, obviously, selling you something. I bet a lot of people on HN could easily get themselves onto township planning committees, where they can actually make a real difference.
This, unfortunately, will depend on where you live. Urban cores plagued with massive municipal debt (like where I live) tend to see their local representation rendered quite ineffective by corruption and cronyism.
In my city, it's actually considered easier to run for office in the state legislature than to navigate the local political scene, since latter has decayed into rampant trading of favors. Unfortunately, the time commitment for the state legislature makes it such that few people can muster the time and resources to campaign and then serve office.
Mancur Olson suggested offering generic benefits to attract people to his large groups.
The difficulty in that is where do these benefits come from? Small groups don't have the resources to put that together. So we came up with First Nation - something large and stable enough to put together core packages of benefits for any other Nation to offer to their members.
Then there's the problem of what groups should be able to get them? A group of 10 people? 1000? 10,000? First nation would have to set some kind of criteria.
It's a non-profit. There are a dozen ways you can set it up to avoid it becoming a king-maker.
We realized we could also use First Nation as a Watchdog group. They're not necessary for this part of the system to work, but it could be effective.
Congress voted on a financial overhaul bill last week, for example. First Nation would have polled the other Nations to see how they felt about what needs to be done, what they'd like to see.
The financial industry had lots of lobbyists involved in the bill, but there were few, if any, representatives from consumer protection groups or similar. In this scenario, I'm pretty sure at least one or two Nations would propose some new ideas or have some comment on what was passed.
They'd try to convince other Nations to lend support. This "encompassing coalition" of Nations could sway the direction of financial overhaul to something that's beneficial to the larger public rather than the bank lobby.
SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS
These aren't special interest groups.
I'd join a Science Nation, for example. What's their agenda in financial regulation? None. But I bet some of the people there might have some interesting and good perspective on what should be done. These are "general interest groups". If the bill being discussed were about funding a supercollider, on the other hand, then I think you could say they're biased. And the other Nations would know it.
GRIDLOCK
That's a terrible argument. If your car can only go 10 mph, then it might help you avoid fatal crashes, but it also makes it difficult to go anywhere. Take Immigration Reform. The system has been broken for 20 years. Did you see the bit in the comic about why negative campaigning works in a winner-take-all system? Immigration hasn't been fixed because right now all a politician needs to do is discredit an idea instead of proposing a new one. There is no "win" for anyone who proposes an idea.
WHAT'S THE 67,000 FOR?
Fair question. I'm running for office and using the campaign to pitch an idea that might help fix the system a little bit. Even if you don't buy Olson's ideas, the worst that happens is that you end up with groups that offer benefits similar to AARPs. I do need to fund my campaign. I didn't think asking for a dollar was so onerous that it would raise suspicion of impropriety.
TEA PARTY
Well, they really are bogeymen. :-)
I don't think there is one. The idea is to get far more people to join something similar and get them engaged (which I see as the biggest problem. Shallow engagement requiring no effort is easy, getting people to actually vote is apparently incredibly difficult).
So, if we want to dis-empower special interests, we need to empower the general people, specifically by affecting this equation: by decreasing the cost of advocacy, and/or increasing the expected benefit of advocacy.
You seem to be attempting to increase the benefits by tying nations to group benefits, and decreasing the cost by redefining advocacy as joining a 'nation.' The challenge here is that for the advocacy to influence the existing system, it needs to result in election results as well, and I don't see that connection quite so clearly. Could you elaborate?
I do think there's something here - with a little help on the advocacy cost/benefit side, voter power could definitely put a damper on special interests in general. That's the thrust of my own effort in this area, focused on the voter side: http://votereports.org/
P.S. Great to see Duverger's law mentioned
Yes, I apologize for summarizing your point a little over-hard. But... it's over-summarized only a little.
Look, just replace "Nation" with "Special Interest Group" and the whole thing reads just fine. I normally hate this semantic trick, but in this case it works because it's what you're really saying.
I can replace "Republican" with "Baby-eater" in a description of the GOP platform and it reads just fine too, that doesn't make it any more true.
Well, I'd say that says more about you than Republicans. It does change the semantic content of the text, whereas my replacement doesn't. That's my point. Special interests bribe people too, or haven't your read the AARP literature?
Well, you probably haven't, but somehow someone with a vaguely similar name got crossed with mine and I started receiving solicitations from them. (I keep the fake solicitation membership card in my wallet. Fun gag to pull out at parties. At least while I'm still young enough to obviously not be a member.) Believe me, they don't really spend a lot of time laying out their political platform in that literature, a lot of which is rather more liberal than their base would really appreciate. They lay out all the benefits you get.
This is what I mean. Finding an actual difference in behavior between the "nations" and "special interest groups" is pretty hard. "Group of people of political interest where the group is kept together by benefits and collective action is taken on political matters both in and not in their direct charter"... if you rubbed out the word "nation" and asked me to fill in the blank, I'd write in "special interest group".
Taking this into the context of the proposed nations. Some people care about a single issue enough to be single issue voters and join a special interest nation. The majority of people could find a community that shares their views on a wide swath of issues of varying priority to them.
I don't really think this idea would actually get the desired effect of having general interest groups be effective in counteracting special interest groups if they aren't already passionately concerned with the issue, but effectiveness is not an argument for/against underlying motives.
edit: oh, and I have seen AARP literature trying to inform members about political issues, as well as informing them of benefits of being a member. AARP shouldn't be trying to sell its members on any view, AARP is supposed to find out what its members care about and what can benefit them and lobby the government for those things.
Facebook groups have no power because they're full of people who waste their time on social networks playing farmville.
I'm all for getting people to engage in the political process somehow, but I fear the people who would take this seriously and use it to motivate their voting are already voting. Injecting ideas only works if you have a credible (or at least powerful) voice.
But then over time, the "First Nation" would start to think that every Nation should provide some obvious basic benefits. Obviously if a Nation doesn't provide healthcare benefits that's a pretty crappy Nation, right?
So First Nation would decide that all Nations have to provide healthcare benefits. Then there would be a big fight between the First Nationers and the Nations-rights-ers.
Then someone would come up with some crazy idea to end disagreement between the Nation's once and for all and ask everyone to donate a dollar.
Gridlock is a feature not a defect. Gridlock is what keeps politicians from running roughshod over the public. Have you really considered how much damage a government unhampered by gridlock could do? I mean yes, they might slip something good in there once in a while but really...
ask not what your country can do for you
nor ask what can you do for your country
ask instead what can you do to keep your country from "doing" to you.
vote gridlock!
I heard someone else say, the best relationship you can have with government is one where their attention is not focused on you.
The second one I like to an extent. Its true if you have a government whose objective is to protect its citizens and nothing else. Democrats want a government that actively helps people. If implemented correctly I'd want that government's attention. As with most things, ideas are easy, good implementation is hard.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War#States.27_ri...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
In fact, it bears more than a little resemblance to the current period: what was pretty close to an effective super-majority due to LBJ's political skills that resulted in the enactment of vast swathes of the liberal agenda ("The Great Society"), the first since the time of FDR, and a fierce counter-revolution that started inside the Republican party that resulted in Goldwater, Nixon and finally Reagan (who as I recall did his first big thing on the national political scene in an item he did for Goldwater's campaign).
(Not very parallel to today, but also a sign of a serious lack of "common ground" was the foundering of the great Democratic Party crusade to "contain" Communism, which led to the party's smashup in 1968 and its eventual radicalization on many fronts.)
This would be an inferior implementation of a concept of 'leave everyone the fuck alone' aka libertarianism/minarchism/what have you.
The political system in the UK is somewhat different in that its tending towards three major parties who are converging on the political centre (complicated and fragmented further by the popular regional parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). Not sure it works the same when it's a straight fight between the red corner and the blue corner.
If I had a magic political wand, I'd make it so the top two people win with everyone getting to vote for two different people-- double sized districts represented by two people and the Senator races are for both at once. Make primaries be all party inclusive with the top four moving on to battle it out for the two winning spots.
More political hubub at once would compel voters to pay more attention. Extremists on both sides would look ugly in comparison to the sensible ones. And third party people with a mix of ideas might actually have a shot of getting a word in because voting for one doesn't mean risking a complete loss to your party of choice.
Now where did I put that magic political wand again?
If I can join more than one group, does that impact the democratic principle [1] of one person - one vote? And what's to stop this becoming like the 'Like' feature on Facebook, where everyone has 100 pages they clicked to like but never think about again?
[1] It's a principle, though it's tough to create a level playing field in practice. For instance, in Presidential elections small states have a minimum of 3 electoral college votes, so a vote in Wyoming is worth more than a vote in Texas or New York.
And how big should these nations be? Should each be able to keep modern society running on its own, which according to some numbers cites here recently would put a lower bound of 100 million on them http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541795 .
non-geographical based governance doesn't work unless respect for property rights is uniform...in which case the motivation to do this will be nonexistant since that is the biggest issue.
Seems likely to me that a lot of political parties might tend to come closer together over time, because they will always have the support of the extremes (ie. if the Republicans move a bit closer to centre, the hard-right conservatives might grumble a bit but won't ditch them and vote Democrat) but by shifting to more centrist policies they can potentially pick up more middle-of-the-road voters. What is happening in the US that makes the reverse true, that the parties are becoming more polarised?
(not commenting on the merit of that, just trying to figure out what he's talking about.)
At least, that's his argument. I'm not sure that it would work out that way; as it stands right now, tea party rallies can get media coverage even when they're much smaller than some other kinds of rallies that can't, for a whole bundle of reasons that are mostly not very rational.
EDIT to make clearer where I'm restating his argument and where I'm arguing with it.
If so, he's too clueless to be allowed to vote. If not, he's another con man.
"No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session." - Gideon J. Tucker
The Bulldawg Nation.
The No Kill Nation (human treatment of pets)
Drunk Nation
LGBTQ Nation
Netroorts Nation
Outdoor Nation
A Woman's Nation
Elevation Nation
Basically Sean has created Facebook, but you give him money for his political campaign fund first.
That said, at least he's trying something.