And what does “equitable” mean here? Are gas stations wanting or planning on giving gas away for free? How can they even remotely control what a business gives away as incentives? Can they ban free mints at restaurants too?
Edit: To everyone mentioning Democrats, note that I did not.
Do you believe the Republican Party in North Carolina is being hypocritical in this instance?
So then what is it the democrats want?
There are some Democratic Socialists in the Democratic Party but they don’t have enough power to push their agenda through. Since 1992 the the power structure of the Democratic Party has endorsed slow, incremental changes provided those changes don’t disrupt the corporatist polity that we have.
And even this idea of the words socialism and communism being bad is a mislabeling they’ve been successful in deploying. It’s as if public school, libraries, roads, etc. are somehow bad.
Soviet union, Mao's socialist China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia. All of these were as horrible to live through as Nazi Germany. Empirically, we as humans have tried socialism in every sort of country and it's always a disaster of extreme poverty for regular people and corruption among rulers.
Government run services isn't socialism. Maybe this is like defining "racism" where different people are using wildly different definitions.
Free market capitalism provides the bounty of productivity and wealth creation which can then be skimmed off of to provide safety nets, infrastructure, etc. We should be looking to places like Singapore and Switzerland as models of governance.
I'm not saying this to minimize the examples you gave — just to show that things are not neatly binary like that.
Systems are made up of people. Look around the world and throughout history, and you'll see people abusing their power in all sorts of ways. There's no magic system that can prevent that. It's just us in here.
When the asshole is in "your team": "They're all equally crooked anyway!"
There are individual politicians who try their darndest to be clean, but heck, if a little bending of principles gets your constituents that funding, it's probably easier to do so rather than fight hard for that funding "the right way" and get nothing at the end. Are lobbyists that evil that they offer money for politicians' noble causes? There's already the "we'll open an office in your constituency" that actually helps people with jobs...
Campaigning isn't cheap and if you don't pay them, the lobbyist will (or will get them replaced).
Complaining about money in politics is like complaining about the rain being wet. So might as well buy an umbrella like every other dry person did.
I would love to give more but I simply cannot abide any organization that has zero respect for privacy as politicians do. I've given to a handful of charities but only when they have a clear privacy policy that is explicit about not sharing or selling information and has explicit opt-in for marketing materials
I actually don't get hassled much by charities aside from some occasional junk mail, which I think is fine. They don't seem to pass my info around as aggressively as political causes.
Are we going to ban public comment? Are we going to leave politicians to make decisions entirely on their own without any expert advisors?
Because the current settled law is that throwing money at politicians and them then spending it is speech that’s protected under the 1st amendment.
> the current settled law is that throwing money at politicians and them then spending it is speech
It's about independent expenditures groups that do not coordinate with candidate campaigns (which have, after the fact, gotten the name “SuperPACs”; normal PACs can legally coordinate with and donate to campaigns, but cannot receive unlimited donations.)
So, yes, you can buy an ad, or host a rally, or a fundraiser for a city-council candidate, to persuade the city council to raise the speed limit, or make parking free or whatever caused you to get a ticket. You can even schedule a direct meeting, or maybe even take out a representative for a meal to express your concern. The later case might involve some kind of disclosure, but you can probably do it.
Isn’t it a two way street? Politicians(or lobbyists) invest in campaigning because they hope the investment will pay off if the get elected.
If you make being in office unprofitable then campaigning will get cheaper as there won’t be any competition.
Considering the lobbyists in question represent the wealthiest people on the planet, that requires a very large amount of money.
Systems thinking demands that you do.
So, in fact, systems thinking would indeed say to pay strong attention to extremists. It’s the thinking that we keep treating the Republican Party as just another party, the way that they like it while they get away with whatever, is how we have got here.
Incorrect. Systems thinking demands that you look at the system (government, dems, repubs) in their entirety. "System" not "part of system". Anyway, g'day I'll let you have the last word if you'd like.
secretly, both parties want the same thing... it's secretly the one-party state.
If you want someone who's consistent on liking the free market, find someone who make that ideal a part of their identity. Perhaps someone who calls themself a libertarian?
This is a gross overstep of government power, ignoring everything else in the bill.
The Democrats want to increase spending (services) and the Republicans want to increase control.
Rather than "left" and "right" I once drew a 2D graph and placed a bunch of political parties (ideologies) on it. I don't recall what the axis were unfortunately. All I remember is that anarchy was in the lower left and totalitarian state was the upper right. It turns out the parties don't pull us back and forth left-right, one pulls us UP and the other to (on my graph) the right. Since what they want is not actually opposite, this seems to be pulling us ever more toward the totalitarian state in the far upper right.
I don't think this really captures it at all. At this point the median Democratic and Republican seems to want low grade autocracy to enforce their vision of what is right on everybody. (I chose the word median carefully, not everyone believes this way, but it also isn't an extremest view, something like what somebody right in the middle of the party acts like)