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Comment by Camillo | Hacker News Reader

I'll never understand how the American system of government is meant to work. You've got a legislature that typically fails to legislate, an executive that sometimes does the legislature's job, and a judiciary that can randomly step in and write both laws and decrees as long as someone brings the case before them.

I hasten to note that many of everyone's favorite decisions came out of this process, so it seems to work. But from a civil law background, it just looks bizarre. Why would anyone design a system like this?

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The Federalist Papers give a really good overview.

Note that they spent many years analyzing the failure modes of previous republics, and attempting to design a system resistant to those failure modes.

I mean, we're still on our first republic (at least at the moment), while France is on its fifth, so obviously they did something right.

Second. Articles of Confederation were the first.

Third if you count the Civil War and Reconstruction.

I might grant the Articles of Confederation for the sake of argument.

The Civil War failed, so that one doesn't count. The post-Civl War United States continued to operate under the same Constitution. There were some new amendments, certainly, but it wasn't scrapped and rewritten from scratch, and the overall form of the government of the United States remained the same.

A key thing to keep in mind is that the US is one of the oldest among modern democracies, and the Constitution and the way the government was structured was entirely novel at the time. Other countries then had the mistakes of the US to learn from when implementing their own democratic systems.

We also have to note that the current implementation in not the way it was designed.

Quite a lot of that also comes down to bad timing: the system was designed for a mostly-agrarian population with a relatively small urban class and inherent logistical limitations on maximum population density, and then the Industrial Revolution came along and upended literally everyone's expectations about how population centers, the economy, wealth distribution, etc would continue to work for the foreseeable future.

It's seems that just about any system of government has issues with citizen/subject contentment or efficiency once becomes large and diverse.

I agree that representation is lacking. I can't get an intelligent response from my reps, if I even get a response at all.

You may be interested to hear that those limits in the House of Representatives are actually entirely artificial because of a measure passed in 1929 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_Rule), and that there's an ongoing effort to increase the number so that each more closely reflects their constituents (https://twitter.com/uncapthehouse).

Yeah, I was aware of that. As the representation goes up (number of voting members) the efficiency/effectiveness tends to go down. Seems like a lose-lose scenario. I think a better scenario is to follow the original intent of the 10th ammendment and leave the states to provide most of the laws (smaller populations should result in better representation). Sadly it seems that just about anything can be shoehorned into the federal perview with the right judge. For example, growing your own wheat, on your own land, for you own consumption can be restricted by the federal government because the fact that you no longer have to buy your wheat impacts the interstate commerce of the wheat market.

The American system boils down to this: Never give anyone power that someone else cannot block. The point wasn't efficiency; the point was preventing authoritarianism.

Now, you can look at a case like this, and say that what the judge did is pretty authoritarian. But there's an appeals court above this court, and LA has already appealed. If this judge overstepped, the ruling can be overturned.

It isn't designed like this. The people in power have steadily granted themselves more power over time. None of the people in the system want to call out the fundamental issues in the system today because they all take advantage of them.

Where do you live?

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