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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

The US Federal Government has been meaningfully degraded by the brazen corruption of the people in power. Already there was a crisis of faith in authority; this is just going to make it much much worse.

I wonder if its time to rethink some of these institutions. It seems like Food Safety is especially important to the welp being of society; it might make sense to have food testing labs in every major population center/distribution hub. Funded by a tax on the food companies or perhaps even locally. Its just unbelievable that the entire US population is so vulnerable… what if a bad actor did something nasty deliberately?

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Seems because of Supreme Court ruling practically every federal agency likely needs to be re-chartered to have the same structure as the Federal Reserve.

Depending how far the Supreme Council takes the unitary executive theory, we might need a straight up Constitutional amendment. And while we're at it, those department heads should be directly elected by the People - imagine being able to split your choices for which parties control the FCC vs the ATF.

(Ideally we'd move towards Ranked Pairs voting too, diminishing the two-party stranglehold as well)

Technocrats shouldn't be popularly elected. Someone like RFK Jr. would be more likely to end up in a top position under popular election, not less likely. The American public does not generally respect expertise, but politicians mostly did until quite recently (with a few exceptions like climate change).

Except that rejection of expertise has been building, right? To the point that people were decrying the bureaucrats as unelected, wanting to tear it all down, and here we are.

I don't think department heads were particularly technocratic, either. That was more supported by the laws/customs protecting the actual workers who didn't lose their jobs every administration. The heads were political - just political with an eye towards getting appointed/confirmed, rather than popularly elected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministerial_rule

There is no real distinction between the Fed and the FTC. The different outcomes were the reason for the decision.

As you say, the current profoundly corrupt Supreme Court majority will make up whatever justification they need to get the outcome they want, case by case, and don't believe in the concept of precedent, even their own.

The only thing that can be done is "re-chartering" the court – immediate significant expansion/packing followed later by drastic structural reforms.

They need to be restructured such that their success or failure has a direct impact on the justices' retirement accounts.

Is this a pro-bribery comment?

It's a statement of fact. Bribery is happening.

Pro-gratuity

Well… the system mostly worked for a pretty long time. As I used to tell my kids, if you try hard enough to break something, you’ll probably succeed.

Breaking things is also a lot easier than building complex things.

Which, funnily enough, is _also_ something you can teach your children.

Yes but it was largely built on trust, under the assumption the American president would have the best interest of Americans as heart, even if he and his constituency may disagree from time to time. It was a fair assumption, which is now permanently broken.

We now must consider the possibility that our president is a malicious or foreign actor, intent on destroying the US. Granted, we DID consider this in the beginning after the revolutionary war. But we slowly forgot, and did not build in nearly enough protections. Modern America is nothing like post-revolutionary America. Everything is more complex, and our government bigger and power powerful than ever.

Generally the industry DOES lobby for regulation. In a deregulated industry, there's a rush towards the bottom - which means trust in the industry implodes. They don't want that. I don't believe the current administration is actually in line with the industry as a whole.

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