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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I mean, wow. I'm impressed. These idiots in government really only care about their bribes. And the idiots who are bribing them only care about making money. Everyone else can just fuck off and die.

But hey. The Reagan era was horrible too. I mean, eight fucking years! Plus four more of Bush I. And then, all too soon, another eight years of Bush II. ...

Actually, I was going for optimism. But I just can't get it up. Clinton and Obama were cool and all, for their two-term runs, but they were mostly bullshit. The political center of the US has shifted so far that, in many ways, Nixon (for all of his drunken paranoia) was more of a liberal than either.

Edit: So hey, I went off the rails there. But seriously, this is insane. I mean, look at the mesothelioma epidemic. So what's next? Taking the pressure off tobacco marketing to children?

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It's not just "the system", it's the people populating it, and they're there.

You can't believe that a government stacked with people whose stated missions are to destroy the only formalized, enforceable bodies of standards and accountability in this nation so that only "the market" can judge them would be trying their best to make things work. It'd be like locusts helping farmers choose better pesticides.

And they're so good at understanding the population and controlling the narrative (which isn't that hard I guess if you own the newspapers and brodcast networks) that people have been led to believe in an incredible act of cognitive dissonance that it would jeopardize everything they stand for to get the things they want and need, like the universal healthcare or some higher labor standards.

It's easy to laugh in the faces of people you're making fools of when they bend over backwards to help you do it.

> You can't believe that a government stacked with people whose stated missions are to destroy the only formalized, enforceable bodies of standards and accountability in this nation so that only "the market" can judge them would be trying their best to make things work. It'd be like locusts helping farmers choose better pesticides.

What put those people into government?

Yes, it was the voters, but how did people representing the agenda end up on the ballot?

That is why this is the system's fault.

> What put those people into government?

There's a fairly large criminal investigation with numerous charges already filed about that...

Please.

The Scary, Scary Russians spending $100,000 on Facebook ads and having a couple of meetings with people in the Trump campaign is illegal, but not the reason for why 48% of the country voted for that clown, or why he even made the ballot, or why Hillary Clinton made the ballot, or why Congress isn't doing a damned thing to reign in this[1] insanity.

There's a much simpler explanation - the system, by design, serves the oligrachs. And if they can make half a dollar selling you asbestos, by god, they will find a way to sell you asbestos.

[1] By which, I mean, an administration that is, quite literally, poisoning us.

Yeah, I gotta agree. Many nations are just kleptocracies. That is, owned and controlled by criminal oligarchs. The US, China and Russia, for sure. Each peddles its own style of bullshit to maintain popular support. But fundamentally they're all kleptocracies.

Nixon created the EPA...

Not only that, but (according to a former senior adviser, who I got to know in the 90s) he was very close to supporting something like national minimum income. To replace welfare. As I recall, it used the income tax system. Below some minimum income, the tax rate became negative, increasingly so as income dropped.

> he was very close to

Then he resigned, or was he always just 'very close to' it but never committed?

That, I don't know. But we do know that he got preoccupied with the Vietnam War, and paranoid about those who opposed it. Also, he was quite the racist. And toward the end, he had more or less gone off the rails.

So anyway, I'm guessing that it was early in his first term.

American politics was very centerist in the past. The toxic partisan nature of it, which both sides are currently doubling down on, is largely a modern invention.

The unending increase in size and scope of government has been largely separate from this, and was a feature of both parties despite rhetoric for much of the last century. Not just in the US but in every western country.

Saying that government has been stripped of power by x party simply doesn't hold up to facts. If anything the power has consistently increased, or at most occasionally plateaued or massively increased in other areas. But most importantly only a few well connected individuals and companies are getting exceptions to that rule, in special circumstances.

Which is exactly what this law change is about: it explicitly says it will only be done in special circumstances. Their power to regulate asbestos has not been diminished at all, they've merely further solidified cronyism and legislation-by-special-favour into law.

> American politics was very centerist in the past.

Not for most of its history it wasn't. Between the New Deal and the early 1990s, though, there was a long shift in party alignment that had both major parties being ideologically incoherent big tents in transition between the past (ideological and more so geographic) party alignment and a new ideological, national alignment. This produced something that looked like more centrist politics, but it wasn't really fundamentally so, and in any case it was a manifestation of a transitory, inherently unstable, state.

> The toxic partisan nature of it, which both sides are currently doubling down on, is largely a modern invention.

No, it's not. See, the 1860s for a fairly vivid counterexample.

s/past/recent past

I'm not debating 19860s politics, I'm talking about the growth of the modern state, largely post WW2. Which has rarely been partisan.

> I'm talking about the growth of the modern state, largely post WW2. Which has rarely been partisan.

It's been intensely partisan and intensely sharply ideologically-divided, just as today. What was different during the long realignment from the New Deal through approximately the Contract With America (though definitely progressively weakening during the last couple decades of that period) is that the ideological and partisan divides were not in sync, because of the lack of coherence due to the ongoing partisan realignment.

Because political power players had to manage both conflicts, the tension between their interest in one vs. the other often served to moderate conflict.

It was also fundamentally different. What we call the Democratic and Republican parties are not at all the same as the parties in the 20th century that used those names. Democrats were the party of old wealth, but also philanthropy, and favored foreign intervention. Republicans were the party of new wealth, and quite isolationist.

Milton Friedman was a big proponent of the negative income tax:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/negative-income-ta...

It has some very interesting properties when you combine it with a removal of the minimum wage, such as getting rid of the welfare trap and allowing jobs to stay on-shore that would have, otherwise, gone off-shore. You do have to be careful or you end up subsidizing low-wage employers in a wholesale manner, but I would argue that we're already doing that now, just in a more targeted manner. I'm sure that someone with more economic clout than myself could weigh in with some other possible issues that may arise.

We have the EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit) in the US, but it suffers from not being universal and having too many conditions. Without those conditions, it would be pretty close to a UBI (Universal Basic Income). But, as Milton Friedman pointed out many times, you need to get rid of all of the other welfare programs in order to realize the efficiency gains and tax savings from any negative income tax scheme.

From what I’ve read Nixon was not bad, but just got caught doing what would hardly be news by today’s standards.

Nixon _reluctantly_ created the EPA as a response to one of the only periods of sustained popular environmentalism in American history.

I'm unsure why this gets bandied about as a feather in Nixon's cap. Just as a factual matter, as soon as he was politically safe from environmentalist pressure (post-1972), he retreated completely on environmental issues, vetoing the EPA's budget, ordering the EPA to spend less than was apportioned to the agency.

It's an example of the potential for citizen activism, and an example of Nixon's inclination to consolidate power in the executive branch. Certainly not an example of "the post-WWII modern Republican party at one time wanted to expand environmental protections beyond the minimum required to quell citizen activism."

"All politics is a fad. Your fad is going right now. Get what you can, and here's what I can get you." - Nixon, to the Sierra Club, 1970

Obamacare has bit of legacy with Nixoncare, which flopped because Henry Kaiser got to him and Ted Kennedy's Senate didn't want to give him a topper to LBJ's Great Society. Wonder what that alt-future would look like today.

I tell younger people we're living in Reagan's world. Fear is saying that in another 20 years might actually be... optimistic?

Yeah, Reagan's world, for sure.

Funny story. I was in Moscow when Reagan's joke was leaked:

> My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.

Most people understood that he was joking. But still, it was frightening. I mean, Soviet Central Television broadcast the audio, with a translation.

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