Comment by rexgallorum2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rexgallorum2 | Hacker News Reader

One of the more important yet most overlooked and misunderstood features of American government and governance is the fact that a vast amount of power resides at the very bottom, and local officials often have discretionary powers that would be vested in higher level officials in other countries. This is a good thing in many respects, but the other side of the coin is that you have totally incompetent yokels wielding the power of petty kings.

The case in question is an absolute disgrace and an excellent example of the failings of the American system of government in its present state of (dys)function. I would argue that it should be much, much harder to evict people for any reason, and that seizing private property for trivial reasons should be near impossible. Many here would agree, but in this specific case it is purely a local matter.

Sub/exurban Detroit cannot be compared to Singapore. And the problem has little to do with global population or overpopulation, but it is curiously linked to population density. Jürgen Habermas and others have written extensively about the phenomenon of 'Verrechtlichung' or 'juridification', i.e. the process by which an ever increasing amount of human interaction and social and economic life is subjected to legal regulation and codification, corresponding roughly to increases in population density that came with urbanisation, industrialisation, and the advent of urban modernity from the late 19th century on. But that is really not directly related to the given issue exept in a rather abstract way.

So what can Americans do differently?

1. Coalesce power to the top assuming that those people are more intelligent and deserving of control?

No. That's how authoritarianism starts.

2. Remove the power to seize private property?

No. Because that's seen as an effective deterrent against crime. You can't have drug dealers putting their cash into untouchable multi million dollar homes.

3. More checks and balances on local governments to not abuse their power?

Yes. This is how it's always been done, and will continue to be done in the future. There's the state and federal court systems which can provide relief. There's also state and federal legislators. There's also the free press which can illuminate these issues. Lastly there's elections. If you don't like the way someone has run government, you can vote them out.

1. Not exactly, no. The opposite of a federal state is a unitary state (like France or Ireland), not an authoritarian state (like Saudi Arabia). Interestingly, what you described (moving power upward) has been another major feature of American governance since the early post-war era.

2. I generally disagree with regards to the seizure of property. You say that the seizure of criminal assets is seen as an effective crime deterrent. Who sees it as such? Is there any evidence that it works? Are you familiar with the debates surrounding 'civil forfeiture'? If not, it is worth looking into. There are jurisdictions in the US(primarily at the municipal and county level) that derive a large part of their total operating budgets from the seizure of 'criminal' assets without any sort of due process. The example of drug kingpins parking their money in real estate is a particularly lurid and unrepresentative example--there might indeed be a place for criminal asset forfeiture in the fight against organized crime--but at the very least the threshold should be rather high and not include petty infractions or minor unpaid debts.

3. I see your point here, and you are correct on checks and balances, but I think you are naive with regards to the role of the press and the efficacy of simply voting out incumbent officials. Having said that, I will concede that the strategy actually works best at the lowest possible tier of government, but of course that requires adequate civic engagement in local politics.

More on the free press issue. Here's a story for you. In the early 1970s, my dad worked for a couple of local newspapers in the southern US. They would send him to cover city council meetings. He commented that the reporters from the big papers would show up for about 10 minutes and leave, and then write reports as if they had been present the entire time. And that was yearly 50 years ago, when the American newspaper landscape looked very different from today. Today most of those local papers are gone altogether and the press in general has undergone a total transformation. Beyond the occasional outrage story, I wouldn't automatically assume that the press is going to do its job.

Please don't take offense at my comments and fire back an angry rebuttal. This is not meant as criticism of you or your positions. Just thoughts and debate, nothing more.

1. What you're saying is true. But in the US, the term "Imperial Presidency" is used to describe the scenario when checks and balances fail between the three branches, thus the power primarily resides in the executive branch to make decisions, and with little oversight from the other branches.

Once there is no more legislative or judicial oversight, and the president can choose to make every action classified, then it might as well be an authoritarian system.

2. > Who sees it as such?

The US's political establishment and law enforcement agencies.

Let's be clear about what I am for and what I am not.

There's two types of property seizure in the US:

A: Property seized directly as the result of a crime (cars used to transport drugs, houses used to store or manufacture drugs, bank accounts used to store proceed from drug transactions, etc.)

B: Property seized merely as being suspect to being involved in a crime. So called civil forfeiture. These are the weird cases like "US vs. $5000".

I'm all for A, but against B. And if you say you can no longer seize bank accounts or houses of convicted drug dealers, then that's a non-starter in the US.

3. The framers of the constitution never put an article describing the role of the free press. Nor was the free press an original guarantee of the constitution. That came later with the first amendment. It was the final check on government corruption and overreach.

There's lots of national coverage on the Russia-Gate stories, but the local news doesn't have the resources to cover city-council coverup for a 1500 person town anymore. It's a shame, I agree because the people in the 1500 person town deserve just as strong a protection as those that live in NYC. But if you have a political party that attacks the media as being "partisan", people are going to stop subscribing to the local newspapers, because they're "partisan-by-default".

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