Exactly! In addition, the 10th amendment should prevent, but has not stopped Congress from passing most of the laws it has passed.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10/
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10/
1. The 17th amendment (1912) - Electing senators by popular vote broke the state representation in the federal government. States no longer had representation to protect their sovereignty.
2. The federal reserve act (1913) - enables government to self-fund by printing money and enforces everyone onto a single, centrally controlled bank.
3. The 16th amendment (1913) - Federal income tax - allows the federal government to directly tax citizens for the first time.
Those three amendments, in effect, decimated the federal system and centralized power. After that, they could pass what ever they wanted.
IMO the internet is re-igniting a public debate and push towards populism -- that and that's why you saw the 2008 rise of Ron Paul, Occupy Wallstreet, Tea Party, Bernie Sandars and now MAGA.
(yes, it was coupled with a financial crisis, but the government response led to push back).
Read Richard Wolff's Democracy at Work. This is the way.
How do you think you're going to reduce poverty and create wealth without capitalism?
Both the USSR and China both went through (at different times!) great famines due to their collectivization of agriculture. Further, their agricultural practices in general were learned from the capitalist countries and neither produced / produce enough. Both the USSR and China did / currently rely heavily on food imports.
Arguably, they only escaped feudalism because capitalistic countries provided enough cheap food to the global market to transition their economies off of mass labor in fields (the basis of feudalism).
didn't the ussr squeeze those farmers so tight to get industral equipment out of the capitalists by trading grain? yes, the capitalists graciously supported the ussr, the cold war was actually a big hug!
because they traded with capitalist nations they couldn't have existed without capitalism. sure, actually that was the theory at the time, that industrialized germany would join them in a mutually beneficial relationship. that didn't happen for some reason.
but what if we flip it? because capitalist nations traded with slave states and feudal nations, they couldn't have existed without slavery and feudalsim. because capitalist nations trade with violently repressive plutocracies, they can't exist without violently repressive plutocracy. seem fair?
how were china and the ussr organized is the actual question.
maybe you assume technological development was caused by capitalism. personally i think that's putting the cart before the horse.
It was probably because they had to build a wall to keep the citizens of the territory they were occupying from escaping communism.
To put it simply, the famine was primarily impacting Cossacks, which were throughout southern Russia at the time. You can look up the famines and see it’s not specifically targeted.
Though I do grant you, collective farming was the issue and it did have an undue impact in Ukraine.
Russia: purges, torture then murder of 'kulaks', Holodomor, Virgin Lands campaign, etc. Total deaths, estimate at least 30 million; Solzhenitsyn said 66 million.
None of those combined 70 million+ made it out of poverty.
Or was it the other way around?
Huh? Previously, state representatives elected senators; after the 17th, the voters did. How does either of these things end "state representation" ? You're insisting that "state representation" can only mean "representation of the people already elected by the voters", which is unjustifiably narrow.
> enforces everyone onto a single, centrally controlled bank.
Do you recall the situation before this?
> allows the federal government to directly tax citizens for the first time.
tricky to fight international wars without this, which obviously you could view as a plus.
Bullshit.
The smaller the democratic unit, the more likely it is to be unduly influenced by local power and wealth. State reps are far more likely to represent the interests of the local power and wealth than they are "their state" (by which I mean "the people of their state")
Who’s their boss? At the moment senators answer to the people of a state, previously they answered to state government.
This changes the reasoning of why we have laws at the federal level. The senators representing a state would be fired for giving up sovereignty; not so for those elected via popular vote. Those elected by popular vote are incentivized to give out goodies to the masses.
State legislators could easily fire and switch senators. Public opinion on the senators didn’t matter nearly as much. If a person of a state wanted influence over the senators they had to focus on local elections.
There’s a whole lot of changes, not really sure what’s being missed?
There's another critical date: 1971. That was the year that Nixon ended the Bretton Woods System. [1] Bretton Woods was a defacto global* monetary system. Other currencies were pegged to the dollar and the dollar was convertible to gold at a fixed rate. This created a sort of soft backing to the dollar.
After it ended the final constraint the 'government printing' (this is not an entirely accurate description of the process, but close enough for practical purposes) infinite money became a viable option; one which they have vigorously pursued since. The above link offers a number of fun graphs demonstrating the changes revolving about that date.
When a federal government can go tens of trillions of dollars in debt, that absolutely destroys any sort of economic normalcy. Because they can offer what's, from their perspective, monopoly money for real services while the rest of the economy is forced to use real money. This applies not only to businesses, but also states - which are constrained by financial realities.
I suspect when this current system we've created blows up, it's going to make 1929 look like a bull market.
I don't think it will completely blow up, but there will be enough economic pain inflicted such that the ordinary person will be happy to accept a central bank digital currency.
The cogs are already turning: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/g7-public-policy-...
Half the country wants nothing to do with the federal government. If you visit places like South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Indiana, etc the people there are openly saying “prepare, the government is attacking us”
Driving around the country you’ll see upside down American flags (meaning country in distress), gadsden flags, etc you’re much more likely going to get people to accept ETH then take over the org or something.
This is an entirely inaccurate description of the process. Only countries were allowed to purchase gold for $35 an ounce, with the assumption that they would also "buy" $35 with an ounce of gold. This would ordinarily be considered a bad deal because the dollar had already drastically inflated since 1934, but Europe and Japan were desperate for liquidity to rebuild from WWII, so they were happy to trade physical gold for what was essentially slips of paper. When the US noticed that they were increasingly trying to trade these slips of paper into gold, the US ended the ability to do so. Saying that the end of Bretton Woods was a bad decision is really just saying that you want the US to instantly become bankrupt.
There is no reason to peg your currency to an arbitrary metal. If the government wanted to stop itself from printing money, it would simply stop printing money. Bretton Woods was actually a weaker protection against "printing money" than say a debt ceiling because Nixon was able to reverse kill Bretton Woods single handedly, whereas raising the debt ceiling requires an act from Congress.
The government was always able to do that. Independent central banking made it harder, not easier (that’s why independent central banking helps trust in the currency, because it divorces monetary from fiscal policy, and helping maintain trust in the currency is why you do it.)