Given how difficult it is to predict policy outcomes this is probably a good idea. Even if a collection of policies are good on the individual level there is no way to figure out if the interaction will be net positive, nor if the cost of remedy reverses the calculus.
OSHA has no teeth (they are just a nuisance to the scofflaws)
FTC is underpowered
EPA needs shut down
FDA is on record for enabling very harmful medical devices
I remember something about Boeing colluding with regulators to put people in harms way.
I could hop on a search engine and dig up a tome-worth of completely unacceptable shit from the last 40 yrs in this regard.
Power abhors a vacuum. I would rather that power be in the hands of the citizen votes.
The fact is that all these government agencies are preventing specific harms. Throwing them out because of some vague “big government is bad because it might turn into a tyrrany later” isn’t an argument that the harms being prevented don’t exist. It’s a non-sequitor, like saying the sky is blue when someone complains about airplane noise.
>employed by American conservatives ... to deprive the federal government of revenue
which appears to refer to federal level. The general trend of federal receipts have been fairly flat above 15% for decades (except during great recession circa 2009), and the spending slightly different rising a bit above and funded by debt and/or inflationary effects.
My takeaway is here the beast has not been starved, although the beast is spending more of our children's future incomes in the form of increasing debt.
https://stats.areppim.com/ressources/us_spendxrevxgdp_29x10_...
But the writers of the constitution in 1788 wanted a strong one because the existing weak one sucked.
One could squint and say states matter today, but that's just admitting a need for glasses. They are ghosts of what they were, and increasingly need to be retired.
It will be nice when we put to pasture the policy-as-experiments across states for things that are clearly universally demanded: finance, health insurance, women's medical care, education, defense, gun control, decreased corporate control of the food supply, transportation, environmental regulation, and so forth. It's amazing how much the modern GOP has pushed folks towards this, may they continue their business Republican-led shenanigans to unite the country and encourage progress when otherwise we would be slovenly.
Why is this the case? Duplication of fixed costs are expensive.
Let's get rid of these crufty overindulgent home-owners-associations-on-steriods and federalize already.
(paragraphs 1, 4 serious, the rest in jest)
There's ~150 million people that think the opposite should be done.
Also, prior commentator didn't fully read the comment they were responding to.
The problem is that there are too few representatives and so they can build collations that explicitly exclude your interests while still representing you.
I think it would be much better to have some dual-system to send representatives to congress where you could either Vote or Petition to get a representative. If you Vote its basically the same as currently. But if you Petition you and ~150k other people do not get to Vote but the person you're petitioning for is your representative.
Modern capitalists prefer seasonal labor for agriculture. They don't have to feed/clothe/house people year round, and have no personal investment. Seasonal migrant agriculture labor cheap and easily exploited, with little legal protection. Slaves, like domestic a nimals (reprehensible as that simily is), must be treated well enough to keep working productively. There is no such need with migrant labor. If they are abused or killed it is easy to sweep under the rug. There'll be new migrants available next year.
NOTE: I'm not saying slavery is good, or even better than migrant labor. They are both highly unethical if you consider how corporations treat migrant labor today.
…except slavery still exists all over the place in industrialized countries? There’s nothing incompatible between industrialization and slavery, as myriad historic and contemporary examples have shown.
https://www.walkfree.org/reports/global-estimates-of-modern-...
2) Migrant labor is the replacement for slave labor in the USA. These are workers who do not legally exist and thus are subject to the worst of exploitations by employers and criminal concerns.
3) Human beings of all races have a pretty bad record of how they may treat other races/tribes/outgroups. Genghis Kahn killed and raped so many people that he altered the genetic profile of humans. African tribes routinely enslaved each other. Arabs took white slaves. People can be dicks. The list goes on and on: cruelty is a part of the universal human condition.
As bad as the USA, it's the only country to go to civil war to free slaves of another race, even if that wasn't the complete reason for the Civil war.
Even at that, the steam engine was in the process of replacing slaves for many tasks. There were just a lot of tasks left that the steam engine wasn't yet practical to replace slaves - but that would have happened anyway.
"free slaves of another race"? Some of those going to war were people of that race. On both sides.
This is also a bit ahistorical as Lincoln was willing to allow slavery in order to keep the union. It was really the south who chose to go to war in order to guarantee slavery would stay; the north chose to go to war in order to keep the union. The slavery issue was used by the north, initially, to keep the anti-slavery UK from siding with the south.
Of course there was some lead up to that but the actual flashpoint is that the south started it and they didn't do so to free northern slaves. Northern congressmen were not pushing for any bills that removed slavery from the south and etc; there wasn't an imminent (i.e. during Lincoln's presidency) existential threat that the North would end slavery in the South except the one the South manufactured.
Yeah, that's even better than what I stated.
And I forgot to mention that some of those slaves were blonde-haired and blue-eyed with skin lighter than most Caucasians. Maternal inheritance of slavery rule. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/white-slave-children-photog...
It's weird that you think that they had it better than migrant laborers.
An (immigrant) worker gets none of that and might barely be able to get by even without counting the healthcare (in the US).
Sounds to me like a slave might indeed be cheaper in some/many situations than a minimum wage worker. I'm not convinced either way.
A slave also needs more management. Migrants and free workers will get themselves to the job and in general work. A slave has no motivation to work harder so you need some form of "slave driver" to keep them working. If you try to move your slaves around like migrants move, then you need a manager to go with the slaves to keep them working - migrants manage themselves.
A slave is cheaper if you have a lot of repetitive, low-skill, year round work that must be done by hand. However most of that type of labor is easy for the industrial revolution to automate.
And just notice how often the writers mention not having enough food, or basic clothing. Then get back to us on the idea that slave owners would have taken even minimal care of slaves.
You’ve written how you think it ought to have worked. But that’s not how it actually worked.
Many types of slaves existed and still exist in the history of humanity.
The slaves around Julias Ceasar probably had a different life than the average native Columbus slave (they where almost all quickly worked to death genocide style and he was a total sadist).
Fredrick Douglas didn't have motivation to treat slavery fairly either. (few writers of the day did - thus making it hard for historians to figure out the truth, though in this area there is a lot more data than historians studying something of several thousand years ago).
You might want to check on accounts from e.g. Haiti where slaves' lives were considered very cheap and that's precisely why they were used for the dangerous labour around sugar production.
> Fredrick Douglas didn't have motivation to treat slavery fairly either. (few writers of the day did - thus making it hard for historians to figure out the truth, though in this area there is a lot more data than historians studying something of several thousand years ago).
How does an ex-slave treat slavery "fairly"? He lived that shit, he knows how despicable it is. What other side is there to present? The economic interests of the slaveowners?
>How does an ex-slave treat slavery "fairly"? He lived that shit, he knows how despicable it is.
He can exaggerate how bad it was for one thing. It is well known that people's memories are not exact to what happened, and it is likely he would remember dramatic incidents and not the day to day reality.
Try reading "uncle tom's Cabin" - a book that was written with the intent to start the civil war to end slavery. Despite that intent to presents a picture of slavery that was in general much nicer for the slave owners.
Don't take anything of the above as statement that slavery was good. Only that it wasn't in general as bad as what you see on TV.
If they were too harsh with slaves they'd spend a lot more time and energy managing their behavior. Even in prison privileges are given so they can be taken away. Slave owners probably treated their slaves well enough, in aggregate, that they were capable to work productively and did not have immediate cause for revolt. The slave owners had to live in close proximity to their slaves after all.
The Hollywood portrayals of slavery as essentially unrelenting cruelty and sadism don't make sense, except for on TV. Any farmer would have known that you don't get the best work out of your horses or mules by abusing and starving them. There's a knee point of optimal treatment for all labor arrangements. The EVIL fact that slaves were property of their masters does not change this.
Read the history of the cotton gin and then how steam power made larger transportation easier and expanded populations to consume cotton and tobacco. Industrially produced guns and other tools helped "manage" slaves and later prisoners.
Post-civil war, industrial prison system instituted chain gangs to recreate "legal" slavery and forced prison labor still exists in many states.
The US south ended slavery with the civil war, but most places in the world had a peaceful end. It wouldn't have been peaceful if it was economical as the rich would have fought to keep it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_period. "...could not accomplish anything independent of the states. It had no chief executive, and no court system. Congress lacked the power to levy taxes, regulate foreign or interstate commerce, or effectively negotiate with foreign powers. The weakness of Congress proved self-reinforcing, as the leading political figures of the day served in state governments or foreign posts. The failure of the national government to handle the challenges facing the United States led to calls for reform and frequent talk of secession".
The founders wrote reams upon reams discussing exactly what they wanted to do with the constitution and how they intended each and every bit of the constitution to work toward that goal. The intent was basically "we need just a little more centralization in order to deal with the truly national issues."
The government they created to replace the articles of confederation was weak by the standards of the time let alone modern ones.
2. Filibusters are not in the Constitution, weren't possible for decades after it was signed, weren't used for half a century after it was signed, and didn't become the "sixty votes required for anything" tool they are today until 10-15 years ago. The founders had nothing to do with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_State...
IMO it all comes down to the insight that the opposition party has nothing to gain from cooperating. If something good gets passed, the majority party gets the credit. If nothing gets passed, the majority party gets the blame, regardless details how that outcome was achieved and what role the minority party played. So blocking everything is the best strategy. IMO, it's disgusting to have politicians put party over country, but here we are.
The ones who represent me are highly skilled, very experienced, and have the seniority to ensure my hometown gets it’s fair share,
The ones who represent you are lazy, entitled scammers who should be prevented from fleecing my hometown by the imposition of term limits.
"The ones who represent me give me feelings of schadenfreude over how they deal with the other party and people"
"The ones who represent you give me feelings of angst over how my party is treated"
Now legislators are accountable to corporate donors, not their constituents. It's easy to track which legislators provide a good ROI. There's more to it than that, but those are the major causal events that lead to the change in legislator incentives.
A chart of filibuster usage over the past ~century speaks for itself: https://bit.ly/3mL6IOU
And that's not even fully up to date: the 2019-20 session ended with 298 cloture votes and the 2021-22 session with 289, per https://www.senate.gov/legislative/cloture/clotureCounts.htm .
> the first filibuster was 11 years after the Constitution was ratified
Sure, whatever - your citation is "wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United States_Senate" and mine is "wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster#Senate". The exact details don't matter: the relevant points are that it's not a mechanism created by the Constitution, was not common in the lifetime of the Constitution's drafters, and has massively different effects on the governance of the country now than it did in the 20th century, much less the 19th or 18th.
It's really a bipartisan agreement to defer to Senate Republicans on everything controversial, and to let them take both the blame and credit for it. Democrats are happy with that because when their votes don't count, they can pretend to support anything. When Democrats lose, it energizes their base. Republicans are happy to take credit for economically liberal and nationalistic legislation. And for the legislation that just rewards the wealthy for being wealthy (say, bailouts), movement right-wing and libertarian Republicans can vote against it (and they're mostly in the House) while small consistent groups of Democrats can cross over to make sure it passes anyway.
This is friends cooperating.
Yes true, but it didn't feel widespread then. It was mostly just people who follow politics closely. Now it's nearly everyone.
People forget how quickly Carter screwed up the economy.
Most of the journalists who remain popular tend to be those who are more radical/on the edge of cultural which is how they remained relevant beyond their era so it's easy to assume those people are representative of the population or even the educated class.
The oil shock and stagflation began under Nixon/Ford, and stagflation itself was spurred by Nixonian policy. People seem to forget this quite often. Carter was only president during the last 3 years of the 70s.
Volcker was appointed by Carter and made things really bad for a brief time, but those 20% interest rates ended stagflation, leading to Volcker's reappointment by Reagan.
Biden Abruptly Pulling out of an Afghanistan, was a complete utter disaster. Let’s blame someone else!
Carter made mistakes. His major economic political mistake was to tell everyone that they'd have to basically take one for the team. And we had 12 years of Republican presidents after because of it.
Nixon was just a major chump in many ways. Moreso than almost any other president.
Even a simple look at the timeline shows that is wrong. It doesn't even stand up to a cursory look at the evidence.
Reagan massively escalated the Cold War. There is literally a heading on his wikipedia page entitled "Escalation of the Cold War".
The Soviet Union fell after Reagan left the oval office! The 1989 Revolutions all happened after Reagan left. The breakup of the Soviet Union itself happened well over a year later.
Reagan left the US in bad shape. He slowed down inflation but massively expanded public debt. He left Bush such a crappy economy that it immediately entered a recession that resulted in him losing his reelection run.
Not only that, he started the decline of the US economy. https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/styles/slimmed_natu... Before Reagan nominal GDP growth was high, after the US turned hardcore conservative, GDP growth has been poor.
I have no idea how Republicans managed to brainwash people so badly that they don't even look at the most basic evidence.
It can really be no other way, short of stuffing all the parliamentary rules like that into the Constitution.
Simply on the basis of accomplishments, whether for good or bad, the founders rank amongst the greatest people to ever exist.
There's a reason even we don't tend to push a US-style system on fledgling democracies, when setting them up. It's got well-known, grave, fundamental, and avoidable flaws.
The system is broken in ways that prevent fixing that very brokenness. We know exactly what's wrong, but can't do anything about it. You'd have to get a whole bunch of people whose personal power is tied up with the status quo, to, all at the same time, vote to weaken that power and the power of the organizations that put them where they are. Or you'd have to get at least some of the states that benefit from the brokenness to agree to weaken themselves. Neither is likely to ever happen—short of some very risky and probably-bad-rather-than-good developments that are more likely to end in authoritarianism than an improved democracy.
The supermajority of the electorate in the smaller states might be willing to exchange future political influence for sufficient wealth or some other compensation.
The vast majority of things the government touches turn to shit, including things with wide bipartisan support. How does making government able to do more, faster, fix that?
Overtime I've really begun to see this as propoganda that Reagan invented based on little to no empirical data. I'm not convinced that the government is anymore dysfunctional than any large corporation. The belief that the everything the government touches turns to shit does far more harm than good; and furthermore gets in the federal government's way of actually solving problems. The federal government may have a problem with incentives (like any corporation), but it's hard for me to believe they are inept. It ends up being a self fulfilling prophecy - the government tries to do something, a hundred road blocks are put up for fear of ineptitude, then when the government is slow due to said roadblocks, they are called inept. When those roadblocks are removed - for example in the vaccine distribution of 2020, it's clear that the government is capable of good outcomes. Millions of highly controlled and sensitive vaccines were deployed across the country in only a couple months under an administration that nearly became hostile to its deployment.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Robust systems are made up of interacting parts that tolerate partial failures. The reason the U.S. economy as a whole remains strong is because its least efficient businesses are continually failing, and their resources get reabsorbed by more competitive parts. When this ceases to happen (eg. the "too big to fail" banks in 2008, "what's good for GM is good for the country" in 1953), the economy as a whole becomes much weaker. There is no similar ablation process for the U.S. government - lately, there hasn't been an easy way to let parts of it fail while still preserving the government as a whole. This will likely lead to the collapse of the whole government, which is unfortunate. It can't avoid the dynamic common to all systems: the way to avoid total failure is to tolerate and adapt to partial failure.
All of this is to say is that even though large corporations and large governments are alike, the most efficient solution for a corporation (bankruptcy) is not a good solution for government and so despite the inefficiencies we are sort of forced to accept them as the engineering realities of the situation. I fully understand large governments have large government problems, I just don't agree with the notion that having a smaller government is a solution and that the small government meme has largely been toxic to the detriment of the middle class.
In theory democratic government is the check on this - if the government wastes too much money, the electorate is supposed to vote out their representatives and elect new ones that will cut the budget. (In this sense, Reagan-style conservatism is working as intended). In practice, this rarely happens, largely because the average voter is terrible about judging opportunity cost, and every expenditure seems worthwhile in a vacuum.
This is a bit like saying that the goal of government is GDP per capita. Yes, both are important, and both are indicators of doing a good job at something, but what a business does is the most important thing: how does it adapt to reality and make sure it is always doing something useful enough to pay for?
Government doesn't necessarily do things people want to pay for, as then it might do much less stuff, but people do want to feel as though they're getting value for money from their taxes, and that the government isn't spending so much that taxes go up vastly and their currency is inflated so much their careful savings are wiped out.
Why is the longevity of a nation more important than the values it stands for (as laid down in its constitution)? One could argue that it's better to have a great constitution that treats its citizens equally and fairly, even if the nation is short-lived and eventually disintegrates into smaller nations.
The interpersonal equivalent of this would be "It doesn't matter how great your relationship is if your marriage is dead". I'm not sure many would agree with keeping a marriage alive at any cost.
Relatedly, I'm not sure if the GP's Scalia speech actually gets the causality right. I think we could make a good case that the United State's dominance and longevity comes from two oceans, fertile cropland, and advanced technology, and form of governance is a mostly-irrelevant sideshow. You could plop a different government down in North America, and as long as it had adequate incentives for individual innovation, it'd still end up a superpower.
Spot on. Yet we continue to insist on using the system in a way (i.e., overly strong fed gov) that it's not good for. This isn't a Dem or Republican issue. It's history.
And the more taxes Uncle Sam collects, the stronger and more bloated he gets. At some level we need to come to terms with the fact that we're using a screwdriver as a hammer. That doesn't work well. Ever.
Yet nobody seems to be saying the answer is going back to horses and written mail in the name of making our government fit our lives better.
No one is suggesting horses or written email.
It's a simple understanding of history, and a practical and honest observation of how dysfunctional things continue to be. Yet we keep pushing that the answer is more of the same? That's naive. That's not sustainable.
I am not convinced in the "go back to the way it was designed" argument, since you either have to cherry pick the aspects you like, or advocate for reversing women's suffrage, emancipation of slaves, etc.
As soon as we agree that the founders got some things right and some things wrong, there is no more argument that they were prescient and we should revert to their designs.
IMO better to take stock of the current situation and seek changes based on their merits today, independently of whether they align to the ideas of 250 years ago.
A couple overly simplistic examples:
Jefferson wanted the Constitution rethought every 19 with modern wisdom to prevent it becoming a carceral joke society laughs at as dated and sad.
Madison felt the future was forever obligated to fit themselves into a past framework as a kind of thank you for the hard work the long dead performed.
“They did not want a strong federal government” is overly reductive and normalizes into a boring sound bite what was really a complex and lengthy back and forth.
It would be fair to say that most feared a strong executive turning autocratic/monarchic but that’s about all they agreed on readily.
I suppose I fall into Jefferson’s camp. Paraphrasing, he wrote to Madison “clearly the dead so not rule the living.”
To the flames with this outdated gibberish. To us it’s all hand me down spoken tradition we never witnessed anyway.
Are they really - or are they pretty obvious to anyone who casually glances at the headline of the policy, but the consequences are a problem after the next election. If you win you can always just blame the other side and if you lose you can blame the other side as well.
If you look away from the senators and consider the people the senators represent, it was intended to be even without the filibuster.
But what should be truly opposed is the cowardly way in which the filibuster is done today.
You should make 41 people vote against the bill, on record with their names, then go back to their constituents and explain why they did it in a town hall sometime soon.
Right now a senator can rely on the fact that their re-election is five years away when killing a bill which is supported by their constituents.
41 of them cannot assume they have years for the public to forget their vote on this particular thing (like hurting small businesses by inaction too).
Now anyone can start a filibuster, it largely goes unrecorded - and pressure for party unity prevents it from being killed.
A large enough majority can just change the rules. It isn’t that hard to actually do.
But they prefer it this way.
> people who vote in Republican primaries, who ate it up.
To the best of my knowledge nobody made a movie about Cruz's speech. Davis's speech, on the other hand, became the subject of a documentary debuting at SXSW:
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/austin/news/2022/03/09/docu...
From https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/filibustering-in-the-mod...
"When a Senator signals the intent to filibuster, an informal cloture process starts to determine if 60 votes exist to move a measure forward in two ways. One cloture vote is to approve a motion to consider a measure; the second vote is on the actual measure. If either cloture vote fails, the measure remains in limbo. "
Machaela Cavanaugh has been filibustering the legislature for weeks! 12+ hours a day, weeks on end. She has monumentally impressive resolve.
Actually, I think you missed it. The Nebraska legislature finally passed a bill today.
But then some geniuses decided that we should direct elect both and have two dumpster fires.
this was done because the election process via the state assemblies was so corrupt that Americans regularly made fun of the Senate for this fact.
Rather, you've just got these people who are, at the time of the government's founding, equally powerful (at least in sum) to the government — thus, peers to the government. These people can do whatever they like; they can even have their own private standing armies et al, because your own standing army — the military — isn't powerful enough yet to prevent that.
Thus, you have to give these powerful people a seat at the table, or they'll challenge the legitimacy of your government (or maybe even just get together to overthrow it.) Maybe that's even what they were just doing, until you got them to calm down and talk to you.
One might say that the whole process of establishing a government out of a feudal or contested state, is the bringing of these "peers" to a common table, convincing them that it's in their best interests to solve their problems with the nascent government using plain in-the-open debate, rather than violence or subtle manipulation.
Whereever the peers meet to have that open debate, then, is a de-facto "House of Lords." It doesn't need any laws about it to make it so. The laws grow up over time to enshrine what would be happening regardless.
And in that light, the way "appointment to" a Westminster-system House of Lords works, makes total sense. The government isn't granting people a seat at the table just because; rather, it's tracing the transfer of political power through dynastic inheritance (and explicitly stamping whoever received it with a heritable noble title, so that there's no argument about who the government thinks received the political power.) This is also why noble titles can be extinguished — if nobody directly inherits a lump of political power, then there should no longer be a seat at the table for "the person who currently holds that lump of political power."
The ideal end to a House of Lords, AFAICT, is that eventually all the noble titles go extinct; all the seats are removed; and the House becomes obsolete. I'm not aware of that having ever happened yet anywhere, but it seems to be the intention from the start of every government.
(The American system, at first glance, is incompatible with this end; but it could in theory have approached it, if the American people had been less fans of federalism, and had instead insisted that their own states revert to territories in exchange for seats allocated in a central parliament. I think this could have even been likely, in an alternate world where any of the colonies went down a monarchic or oligarchic route with their state governments.)
Isn’t this “lump of power” just monetary wealth, property, social connections etc? Why does it have to be passed onto a relative instead of any other individual the current power holder chooses?
Rarely people were "adopted". But generally because any relative who might be in line to the power would also have enough power to object to the inheritance passing to another. The hundred years' war was bad enough between two states. Having it within a state is not something the state wants.
In est, your "social connections" — Grey's "keys to power" — value stability of their own powerful positions in your government (or noble house, or family-run utility company/industry monopoly, or whatever other forms lumps of power can take.)
The key-holders' own political power exists regardless, but whether it translates to active ability to affect change right this moment depends on favor of the current ruler. Who better to place their bets on, then, as a replacement for a ruler who will continue to favor them — a ruler who will ensure the stability of the previous ruler's power base — than someone the previous ruler has been grooming for that very job from birth?
But I would argue that, at least for non-totalitarian states, there's also another, more interesting and crucial influence on what makes power legitimate.
When governments and noble houses generate revenue and get things done through free people who they employ or contract — not slaves or serfs or indentured servants — then it's the opinion of those free people on who is the legitimate next ruler, that actually determines who the legitimate next ruler will be. In a non-totalitarian state, a ruler cannot rule without the will of the people. To do otherwise provokes a populist-led revolution to abolish the seat of power altogether.
Looking at how lines of succession of royal seats of power work/are calculated can be enlightening, because there's a certain point where the rules cross over from "what anyone actually a part of the current royal house would want" into "what the population thinks makes someone a legitimate heir."
(The particular thing the population thinks makes someone a legitimate ruler, is usually a result of a centuries-long propaganda campaign by those in power; but no individual who wants power can entirely overwrite that belief during a succession crisis, which is the important thing here.)
Here's the way this works for the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46N-bulO-aM
Note in the above, the people that get referred to as "royals" and have little crown icons. Those are the people that the existing ruler grooms as potential replacements, trying to get them established in the minds of their power base.
But note how there are so many other candidates to succession outside of this small group. These other candidates are there not because the royal family would rather transfer power to them, but rather because the will of the people in this case is to follow this weird rule (patrilineal primogeniture) wherever it takes them. (Which is a kind of rule-utilitarianism, in the sense that a society notoriously following this rule wherever it may lead, tends to result in the fewest wars of succession.)
If Westminster gets hit with a nuke one day, and all the current UK "royals" die — and then some con-artist pops up who was living in Morocco, and claims that they're the secret son-by-marriage-twice-removed of the Earl of Sandwich — then what that person is trying to do, is to claim legitimacy in the eyes of the people. They don't hold any of the current "keys to power"; but they think they might be able to step into those relationships and be accepted by those "keys to power", if they can first get the people who work for those key-holders seeing them as the key-holders' new legitimate boss.
This is also true when deciding who initially forms government in a feudal/contested state. Who "won" the War of the Roses, between the houses of Lancaster and York? The entirely-separate House of Tudor. The houses of Lancaster and York, through their violent conflict, ended up killing all the groomed male heirs of both houses — making them both invalid choices for succession in the eyes of the people (because patrilineal primogeniture), and in the eyes of the "keys to power" (because no established relationships left with anyone in those houses.)
And yes, this all still applies even in a country with democratic elections.
Most modern democracies are templated off the Westminster system, and so don't directly elect a president, but rather elect a legislature who in turn appoint a Prime Minister, like a corporate board of directors appointing a CEO. Guess who's getting appointed? Someone with established relationships with keys to power; perhaps hereditary ones. (Consider: Justin Trudeau.)
For countries that directly elect a president and have term limits, the choice might seem to be more in the hands of the people... and often is, at the country's founding. But you then get a primacy of political parties as noble-house-esque government-in-waiting entities, each trying to find and groom politicians into figureheads for the "party line", such that it's actually the party, and not the individual, that establishes the continuous key-holder relationships and carries them forward. The political party acts in lieu of a noble dynasty as the immortal entity conferring stability-of-power to key-holders.
The one way in which political parties aren't just noble houses, is that they will sometimes voluntarily allow outside entities who don't "toe the party line", to come in and take over for a bit — if those outsiders hold their own lumps of power. For a noble house, this would be suicide—they'd be "overwritten" by the outsider's new dynasty. But a political party will continue on just as they were afterward... but now having absorbed and digested the key-holder relationships that the outsider brought with them, into itself. (Consider: Donald Trump.) Though, note, noble houses do absorb external key-holder relationships — they do it through political marriages.
Says who?
From Red Roulette:
> The struggle pitted Xi Jinping against an official named Bo Xilai. Both were sons of Communist "immortals", veterans of Mao's revolution. And both owed their careers to a Party decision made in 1981 and pushed by a high-ranking Communist named Chen Yun to establish a special office in the Party's personnel department called the Young Cadres Section. That section's purpose was to ensure that the sons and daughters of senior Party members were given good positions in the government and the Party. "If our sons and daughters succeed us," Chen Yun declared, "they won't dig up our graves."
> The Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989 gave this work added urgency. A key lesson that the red aristocracy drew from that turmoil was that, as the saying went, "you can best depend on your own kids." Each leading family chose an heir to be groomed for political leadership. Nominated by their fathers, Xi and Bo rose through the Party ranks.
It occurs to me after typing this that when you said “as entities” you were probably alluding to this dichotomy.
If you’re a big believer in the mythological principles of US government, the idea of people electing representatives shouldn’t be seen as a diminishing of the state. State power is endowed by the creator to the people.
Legislatures aren’t states. The governor is the head of state executing the laws of the people as expressed by the legislature.
If you're a believer in the somewhat more modern American ideal of a purely populist government then yes, the current Senate makes more sense, but then it doesn't make sense as to why the Senate grants equal power to each state no matter how populous.
This has been an argument since the beginning. The thinnest layer (Confederation) was found non-viable and was replaced by a somewhat thicker layer after about six years. There was a lot of argument then, and a lot of argument after the fact, leading to thinning and thickening of the layer.
> but then it doesn't make sense as to why the Senate grants equal power to each state no matter how populous.
Or, under the previous system, why Senators were elected for 6 year terms when they would more easily represent the states' current interests with 2 year terms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee%E2%80%93American_wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Indian_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shays'_Rebellion - Note that this last one was a Civil War.
The US is currently in 24th place on the corruptions index: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022/index/usa
And it seems that corruption was not unknown in the states during the Confederacy period, and is claimed to have increased during the Confederacy: https://www2.byui.edu/i-learn/examples/AF_beforetext.pdf
> Between 1776 and 1787 corruption in state governments increased. States where debtors gained control of the legislatures issued large quantities of paper money which depreciated rapidly in value. In Rhode Island the small farmers in the assembly adopted a Force Act requiring creditors to accept the money at original value. Creditors in other states were also discriminated against by mortgage stay laws which prevented mortgage foreclosures for indefinite periods. The problem of factions within a republic, that was supposed to be solved by keeping republics small like the states, seemed became acute as legislatures became controlled by one faction or another and those factions passed discriminatory legislation.
> There were many disputes and tensions between the states that arose over foreign and interstate commerce. The states began using their power to levy tariffs after the war when England dumped such quantities of cheap goods in America that domestic producers were threatened with ruin. As the tariffs were not uniform among the states, commerce gravitated toward such low-tariff states as Rhode Island. Other states, jealous of this trade, began levying retaliatory tariffs against the goods of those favored states. Merchants and manufacturers wanted an end to destructive interstate tariffs and commercial rivalry, as well as aid in their dealing with foreign governments. States also began to argue with each other over the control of rivers and ports so essential to foreign and interstate trade; causing more bitter disputes between the states.
I got the bookends, you can address "global economic whipsaw manipulation, climate crisis, mass incarceration, widespread poverty" if you want.
I normally wouldn't have copy and pasted that much text, but I thought I'd save anyone the time of having to scroll through a 63 page PDF.
And would it have been preferable if any colony could, itself, decide to start a confrontation? "in 1786 the Kentucky militia launched the first major frontier military action since the end of the Revolutionary War."
To save you the effort: I am familiar with US history.
You bet. And I will keep on keeping on into the future. Though I've probably reached my limit for this back-and-forth.
Calling a 10 year war a 1 year war is "familiar with US history"?
Let's go to another confederated country as an example of what might have happened had the US stayed under the Articles of Confederation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Switzer...
It looks like, after the founding and expansion of Switzerland, they had to deal with a number of civil wars (at least one involving no conflict, though others had deaths), as well as periodic wars with surrounding great powers.
I’ve read some interesting opinions on the internet. But I have never heard anyone advocating a pro articles of confederation position.
Had that stuck around, the US would be a dominated an expansionist New York, surrounded by some expanded British colonial entity in the west. The south would be a backwater set of post-colonial agricultural colonies.
I'd recommend hitting up the Library of Congress. I've found a lot of fraudulent versions of Founder writings online, but the Library of Congress should have digital scans of the originals.
Imagine a world where a judge in a post-colonial agricultural colonies tried to tell someone in the modern western world that because the Lord of the universe was very upset about abortion drugs, they were henceforth banned. That judge would be laughed at and life in the civilized world would go on.
I’m not seeing how the AoC would have prevented any of those things. (In respect to some of the global effects, they might have made it more likely the US was part of the global peripheries rather than great power in respect to them, but that doesn’t really change the global situation, just the local experience, and if you think the periphery experience of those things is better…I don’t know how to help you.)
America built in its own rotten boroughs problem as part of the foundation
It removed one of the big checks of "checks and balances" fame.
> Legislatures aren’t states. The governor is the head of state executing the laws of the people as expressed by the legislature.
I'd watch that clusterfuck on pay-per-view. But sure, it'd still be an improvement if you want governors to appoint them.
I disagree on the point that the states have cleaned up their act, what has happened is that the Federal government has taken on more power and responsibility from the States, for better and worse.
Meanwhile, people have become more disconnected from their state politics and only focus on the federal. Up to the point of blaming the federal government for not acting when it is the state's responsibility.
Just like modern reactionary politics isn’t good for people or popular, the biggest fear of slave owners was that free whites would figure out that slaves gutted the value of their labors.
It doesn’t take a “genius” to figure out that having state legislatures select federal legislators is foolish. Anyone suggesting that the US Senate as constituted for the last century is a populist institution may require institutional help of another kind.
The 17th amendment was passed ~50yr after the civil war, a point in time when the overwhelming majority of the electorate had no memory of overt slavery and the people who did or who's parents did were even less influential than before due to immigration waves and industrialization (which concentrated population money and power in the northeast and Midwest generally speaking). Please f right off with your revisionist history.
>Anyone suggesting that the US Senate as constituted for the last century is a populist institution may require institutional help of another kind.
This is rich coming from the guy that just said an amendment passed in the 1900s was done to placate slave owners.
Regardless of the intent of the amendment, only a complete fool would claim that making appointed positions directly elected doesn't make the body formed by those positions more subject to populist sentiments than it previously was.
I'm not entirely sold on the idea that direct electing the senate is a bad thing but it doesn't take a genius to look at the situation before and after and see that there are pros and cons to both. Like you can literally pick up a history book and look at the influences the senate was beholden to and strongly pushed around by before and after the change.
Electing Senators directly took a long time to move forward because constitutional amendments are hard. Senatorial elections are statewide events, they are the only federal elected officials elected by the people of a state free of gerrymandering.
That something is working as designed is not an endorsement if the design is bad.
1) Things the founders got wrong on purpose. We've fixed a bunch of these, by e.g. broadening the franchise and ending chattel slavery with that whole Civil War thing. The way our Senate is composed is arguably an un-fixed one of these—it's that way on purpose, but it's, you know, bad.
2) Things they got wrong by accident. These are usually cases where politicking, application of game theory, and bad actors in general conspire to make things work differently than they were intended. This is stuff like the system stabilizing at two viable political parties, and the way the electoral college has worked in-practice almost from day one (but not the way the electoral college favors low-population states, because that part was on purpose, so would go under point 1 if we're regarding it as an error)
As originally designed, the US is not a nation with a strong central federal government that happens to be made up up 50 weak states and a handful of territories and districts. It's 50 strong states who happen to be united under one central but relatively weak federal government. In that context, having States represented equally, without regard to their populations, makes complete and total sense.
Completely by chance, that happens to indirectly overrepresent people you disagree with. That's unfortunate (depending on your ideology), but it certainly doesn't make the entire system broken or bad.
I would love to know what this by-definition version of "bad" is. That's a remarkable finding.
The idea of compromise rarely survives the day. It's a 100% or zero game, lest we look like we actually agree with some of the other side... oh the horror.
Since value is subjective, there is literally no other viable definition of broken, and if you think this is a modern idea, you haven't seen much of history.
The Union is predicated on the States agreeing to certain terms and conditions that guarantee certain State Rights while compromising on others.
One such compromise is representation within the Union, whereby the Lower House (House of Representatives) has the States represented proportionally by population and the Upper House (Senate) has the States represented equally regardless their population. Territories that aren't a State receive no representation.
Additionally, the Lower and Upper Houses each have different duties and powers afforded to them. The Lower House legislates matters concerning money, among other things, while the Upper House legislates matters concerning government appointments and foreign diplomacy (eg: treaties), among other things. Both Houses must also agree with each other on any bills that are intended to go to the President for signing into law.
The States in the Union are tantamount to independent countries in most other contexts, so States' Rights are a very big deal.
Prior to 1913 Senators weren't even elected by the popular vote, they were elected by state legislators. Literally elected by the State. One could argue that actually makes more sense.
Minority rule would be if 40% of the Senate could pass laws at will.
Fractious multi-party coalitions in parliamentary systems commonly fail to scrape together bare majorities- they're not exactly known for making it easy to produce supermajorities either.
Australia, even with a 2 party preferred, still often has smaller parties hold the balance of power. Often this is quite beneficial since the big party has to water down their ambitions.
Perhaps related, but I find minority governments to be the most aligned to how I think things should work. It's not that they can't get anything done, but rather they have to actually engage with the other parties to find common ground. Crazy idea, I know...
My understanding of what happened with the electoral reform promise is that the Liberals wanted a specific form of electoral reform: ranked choice. Unsurprising, because as the centrist party, they would stand to benefit most from that system. Which isn't to say I necessarily disagree with it; personally I think a system that encourages moderation is probably a good thing. Anyway, when the committee they put together to study the issue didn't come back with that option, they just shelved the whole thing.
The problem of using Switzerland as a yardstick is that barely any population anywhere can match up maturity and morality of them, maybe some nordics. Give a glimpse of same freedom/responsibility to otherwise mature British folks and we have brexit.
US has many fine things running for it, but politics (and healthcare, education, criminality etc) definitely ain't it and should not be taken as inspiration. The whole us-vs-them mentality that such longterm bipartisan system brings is very limiting. What if I like low taxes, while also supporting abortions and legal soft drugs? Or any other mix that would be pretty schizophrenic in US.
GP isn't talking about direct democracy but their governing cabinet which is basically how governing cabinets in the majority of Europe are formed.
I don't think that's fair, both to nordics and to British folks. People are mature because the system treats them as mature. If the system obviously has contempt for you and everyone like you, then of course you will act out like a youngest child.
It forces fringe, extremist and "eternal" oppossition parties to compromise and negotiate better terms and it can change elections that are really close.
The filibuster was a hack which has since been weaponized. It should be eliminated. If only to rationalize and normalize the Senate.
The anti-majoritarian case for maintaining the filibuster presumes that tyranny of the minority is preferable to the tyranny of the majority. Often dressed up dressed up in doublespeak slogans like "states rights" (John C. Calhoun) and "entrepreneurial freedom" (James M. Buchanan, Peter Thiel).
It works for that purpose and in that context and IMO is good.
We should return the Senate to be the States representatives in congress, and the House is the People. Instead of having both the Senate and the House be popularly elected.
Return to more republican (i.e Republic not the party) style of governance, and less democratic, but I know that is heresy today where democracy is the new religion and people fail to learn the lesson of Athens
Ryan Chapman has a great video on DEMOCRACY: From Antiquity to Modernity [1]
Your claim is not based in the actual history of the US, but instead viewing it through a politicized and simplistic lens.
Other than an incredible brief era at the start of the US, we've been imperialistic in our foreign policy.
The majority of US problems come from the inherent duality of the political system. Every matter gets split among political lines, with one party for, the other against, regardless of merits. What would fix that would be to move to popular votes (real, proportional popular votes, not first past the post disenfranchising the vast majority of the population), which would result in more parties emerging, which would lead to more nuance, actual debates and compromises.
If your proposal is enacted, what changes? Governors, elected by first past the post (checking the stats for 2022, with 40-60% of the vote)[1], or state congresses, which are also elected by first past the post and thanks to gerrymandering are usually highly partisan with near total domination of one party[2], elect the two senators for the state. What's the difference? Same two parties as before, same stupid dividing lines on every single topic, same impossible to achieve supermajority needed to do anything significant.
Oh, and actual political finance limits. Whoever came up with "companies donating millions to politicians is free speech so nothing can be done to limit that" is either a massive idiot or extremely biased towards big money influencing elections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_gubernatori...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_state_legis...
Isn't this a straightforward deduction from combining an extension of the first amendment with corporate personhood?
I'd think that the actual problem (which manifests itself in many ways other than this one) is that latter legal situation, not the first amendment or the logic itself.
So Elon Musk wants to spend millions on politics it is OK, but if I and 10,000 of my friends want to form a corporation to spend millions it is idiotic??
And if you want to Limit Elon how do you get around the 1st amendment ?
I dont see how you can achieve that while maintaining a support free expression, unless of course you do not care about free speech?
You enforce that all media networks give similar time (and slots) to the different political candidates, treating time spent talking about a candidate or interviewing them separately from ad time.
- greatly reduce the power of the Senate, effectively limiting it to the ability to veto legislation and judicial appointments with a two-thirds majority (effectively a "state's veto" over a runaway federal government)
- the House of Representatives should be elected based on per-state proportional representation; districts are an antiquated concept from an era where people traveled by ship and horseback, and don't really make sense in an age of telecommunications, air travel, automobiles, etc.
- the President should be elected by a direct majority, as the electoral college has outlived its usefulness and exists only to enable a president to win an election with a majority of votes
I am not sure how that is different from today? Do you want all Reps to be "At Large" so instead of voting for 1 person, in CA would would vote for 54 people?
I am not sure that is tenable but an interesting concept.
I have always supported the Wyoming Rule, and supported taking congressional redistricting out of the hands of legislatures moving towards fixed allocation based on something non-political like zip codes.
On the Electoral College... 10000000% disagree. The President should absolutely not be elected by direct majority, that is taking the same mistake of the senate and making it for the president
First and foremost the office of president should be reduced in power, Congress and abdicated far too much power to the executive, that is what has made the Presidential election soo important, is should not be.
Secondly, I would be in favor of a change to the electoral process where by the votes are allocated proportional just like the house, instead of First Pass the Post like we do today, but I would Strongly Oppose just moving to a pure democracy system. That would effectively make many states have no vote in the election of the president and almost fully remove republicanism from the US system, if not completely put us on that path
The problem with state-appointed Senators is that it was warping gubernatorial politics. If you didn't like your Senator, you had to have the state governor replace him, and in practice most people were treating their vote for state governor as a senatorial vote anyway. Direct election of Senators just cut out the middleman.
Furthermore, we should be very careful with veto powers in a democratic system. Have you ever heard about a study which claims that the US is run by rich people? Well, the thing is, it's true, but not entirely. All classes are still capable of advancing an agenda. Louis Rossman can sit on a chair and yell into the microphone about right-to-repair[0] and get a bunch of state bills proposed. But rich people uniquely have veto power. They can, say, have a 'robust conversation' with a Senator or Representative to kill an R2R bill, or have New York State's governor change the R2R bill at the last minute to completely remove the legislative intent.
Filibusters are another veto mechanism; they raise the vote threshold from 50 to 60. Furthermore with the procedural filibuster they are significantly easier to use, so they get used all the time.
You know how Brexiteers were really mad about how the EU has a lot of unelected political appointees making law? They're not wrong about that. You see, whenever a political party in Germany, France, or the UK (pre-Brexit) wanted to push an unpopular policy, they'd make it into an EU-wide regulation and then blame the EU for it, because they think voters are stupid[1]. They were able to do this specifically because the EU works exactly like how the US Senate used to, with member state representatives not elected by the people and thus not accountable to them. And the only democratic accountability provided to stop this is to replace your member state's government with one that'll replace the appointee in the European Commission, which is now two levels of indirection.
Personally I'd rather live in the world with a straightforward democratic system with as little indirection as possible and few veto powers. Yes, you can point to rising populism as a counterargument, but the problem is that populism is rising because nobody's voice is getting heard. The more that the rich use their veto powers instead of relenting to the will of the majority, the more that the majority will turn to non-democratic means of power, and then we'll wind up in a dictatorship with exactly the kinds of people you don't want running things in office.
[0] Right to repair is a political campaign to undo several harmful effects of copyright and trade secrets law by explicitly requiring manufacturers to sell replacement parts and provide unlock codes to pair them onto equipment. It does not actually obligate them to repair the device, in fact that's counterproductive to the actual point, which is to restore ownership of your device (or car, or tractor) back to you.
[1] They're not.
Is 2 wolves and lamb voting on what they will have for dinner. I have no desire to be ruled by the majority. If we had a a straightforward democratic system we would have no free speech, no gun rights, no rights at all really. We would be like Canada or the EU, I have no desire for that dystopia ( and yes I did call the EU and Canada a dystopia for which I am sure many will disagree)
I abhor collectivism, and systems of government designed to promote majoritarianism over the minority... and the smallest minority is the individual
And yes, there must always be dinner. Ok, we aren't literally eating people in real politics, but still, winners and losers must be picked on occasion. This is simply because political resources are limited. Furthermore, the "2 wolves and lamb" situation is less common than you think. Literally speaking, one lamb cannot support that many wolves. Applied to human politics in the real world, 70% of the population can't benefit from harming the other 30% - there's not enough "meat" to go around. But 1% can benefit greatly from harming 99%. So in practice, democratic accountability puts bounds on how shitty governments can get.
Free speech is not a pesky barrier that democracy tries to get around. It is a peace treaty; an agreement by the government that it will not prosecute culture wars. Furthermore, said culture wars are usually pushed by extremely small minorities - i.e. one wolf splits the two hundred lamb votes in half so he can eat one or two of them in the ensuing chaos. That's how you usually get "two wolves and a lamb" rather than the opposite of "two lambs and a wolf", which is more common
And for the record: yes Canada and the EU have free speech. Maybe not as extremely guarded as America does, but it's still there.
I'm not going to get involved in the gun debate aside from pointing out that guns are not a backstop against abuses of government power. You have a pistol, they have nuclear weapons.
The only thing I can think of for why you'd argue that Canada or the EU are dystopias is that they have mildly more progressive governments and higher tax rates. While I'm not going to argue that paying tax is a moral imperative, I will argue that this is the kind of argument a wolf would make. In fact, wolves have been pointing out the whole "two wolves and a lamb" thing for a while now. This isn't an argument against democracy, it's a threat. "Give us what we want, or we'll stop asking nicely."
Collectivism and individualism are a false dichotomy. Any functional society requires both. Extreme collectivism was the fallacy of the Soviet Union, but extreme individualism has it's own problems.
I think we are seeing today that is not true. You seem to be under the same false narrative that the rich do not "pay their fair share", and the poor pay more than their far share when in reality nationally more than 50% of the population pays zero income tax, and 60-70% get more direct government transfer payments than they pay into the system
The people have been continually voting for more and more government largess funded mainly by debt, and by continually moving the goal posts on what "fair share" is and who should be paying that "fair share"
>>Free speech is not a pesky barrier that democracy tries to get around.... And for the record: yes Canada and the EU have free speech. Maybe not as extremely guarded as America does, but it's still there.
Canada and the EU disprove your statement, when people are arrested / convicted because their dog raised a paw on video, or because someone was offended by a tweet or have compelled speech laws to force one person refer to another person based on their declared preference... you can not claim to have free speech. Sorry no the EU nor Canada has free speech today.
>>I'm not going to get involved in the gun debate aside from pointing out that guns are not a backstop against abuses of government power. You have a pistol, they have nuclear weapons.
I guess UKR should just give up to Russia then if that is your logic.
In reality you can not control a nation or its people with tanks, jets, battleships and drones. The fighter jets can not kick down your door at 3AM to search your home... The military can not maintain a police state, and enslave a nation. Those weapons are for decimating, flattening, glassing large area's.
The government would not want to kill all of this people and blow up its own infrastructure. These are the very things they need to be tyrannical in the first place.
Remember it took 20 years, 4 presidents, trillions of dollars, and plenty of tanks, jets, and military arms to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.... All the nuclear weapons in the US arsenal amounted to nothing.
So it is good you refrain from the gun debate as you would lose.
>While I'm not going to argue that paying tax is a moral imperative
not only is it not a moral imperative, Income based taxation is actively immoral and unethical.
Some types of Taxation could be ethical such as a Single Tax system on natural resources. Income based taxation should be viewed for what is it, theft of labor, something I assume you accuse the evil rich of doing
Cancel culture is a US thing, bro.
Having lived for more than a decade in both the US and France, I'd say the former is probably a bit more dystopic in terms of how awful it is if you're poor. Also, waaaayy more mass shootings (muh gun rights!).
The only real difference in free speech restrictions between the US and France is you're not allowed to be Nazi in France. You can critique the government all you want, the whole ultra-woke pronouns is somewhat present amongst leftist types but overall if you're a public figure (eg bigshot CEO) with a habit of saying outrageous things you're probably better off being French than American, you're less likely to get completely cancelled for saying something that isn't politically correct in France, although that may change.
> Some types of Taxation could be ethical such as a Single Tax system on natural resources. Income based taxation should be viewed for what is it, theft of labor, something I assume you accuse the evil rich of doing
Let's get one thing straight here - a government is a protection racket. They take your stuff, in return give you "protection", but the exchange is never voluntary - you can't really opt out short of leaving the country. Because the government needs to know just how much of your stuff to take, they invent money - you can read Graeber's Debt if you'd like more info on this, but basically, there's a reason all primitve coins had the heads of kings on them. Because now you know that every tax season you have to give the taxman X gold coins or risk being thrown in jail, gold coins are valuable.
Now if you define a rich person as someone with a lot of resources, you'll notice two things -
1) insofar as they are exploiting the labor of others to enrich themselves, they can only do so *with the help of the government*. Employment contracts only work when you have the threat of force to enforce them.
2) the government being a protection racket, the more you have to protect, the more work it has to do for you - the government do a lot more work making sure Bobby Billionaire's 3 houses don't get robbed, his private jet works because of all the massive technical and regulatory infrastructure that exists to make sure it doesn't fall out of the sky or crash into something, and his hundreds of happy collaborators are all educated in some common language so that they can efficiently create wealth and controlled by a legal system that ensure they won't do anything that could harm his business interest then it does for Homeless Harry who lives off of rats he manages to trap using a piece of moldy peanut butter as bait.
So they "rich people should pay more taxes thing" is not a moral argument - it's just business logic.
You expect AWS to charge Netflix more than some one dev team running a website that 5 people visit per year? Because it seems logical that if you get more value out of a business, that business will charge you more?
Congrats, you believe the rich should pay more taxes, by the logic expounded in the preceding paragraphs ^_^
feel free to ask for clarification if needed, or you can try to point out any flaws in my argument if you see any :)
The current version, where you declare yourself filibustered, is too cheap. In the old days, they just filibustered stuff like voting rights, not procedures for borrowing money to support the adopted budget.
Still think they should make someone talk somewhere to keep the filibuster going. Cure seems worse than disease. Doubt they expected routine filibusters
There's no good reason to have the senate, let alone the filibuster and effective super majority required for legislation.
We would all be a lot better off.
Also, it turns out that when the legislature doesn’t act, because it was deliberately hobbled by its designers, you end up with an ultra powerful executive rather than things being left to the states.
It would be better if more Americans recognized the flaws in the design of our system of government instead of quasi-worshipping the Founding Fathers and insisting that any problems are because we are unworthy of their great design.
Minor quibble, but the filibuster is nowhere in the Constitution. And it was most recently modified in 1975.
And beyond that, it lets party politicians who don't really want to have to take hard votes hide behind the procedural hurdles.