Best leader your country never had

Kaiserguard said:
To be fair towards Cheezy, Western Democracies more or less also have sham elections controlled by capital instead of the party. In many ways, Soviet Communist polities are honest about democracy being a sham system.
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I don't think it serves us to regard an abstraction like "capital" as a political agent.

So I find a false equivalency here.

And this is coming from someone who thinks the US govt is presently terribly compromised by the the power that wealthy corporations can exert on its decisions.
 
Farm Boy said:
He thought the federal government shouldn't be doing those things. And considering the past decade of empowered federal government action coupled with the war of the states on anti-gay bigotry and racial oppression through the war on cannabis one might think, even yes you Cutlass, his concerns about federal government power and state's right were not totally off base. Maybe he was just fifty years prophetic for some of his faults in his day.
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The fact that the Feds often suck doesn't change the fact that the states pretty much always suck. :p
 
Gori the Grey said:
I don't think it serves us to regard an abstraction like "capital" as a political agent.

So I find a false equivalency here.

And this is coming from someone who thinks the US govt is presently terribly compromised by the the power that wealthy corporations can exert on its decisions.
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How about more specifically, the status quo. I don't think there is any democratic institution in the world less open to change then the US. This is both our strength and our weakness. It prevents radical change from destabilizing the government, but it also made sure that the struggle for civil rights took roughly a century between the abolishment of slavery and the civil rights act of 1964.
 
Cutlass said:
The fact that the Feds often suck doesn't change the fact that the states pretty much always suck. :p
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Except California. :smug: We run our state better than the Fedgov runs the country.
 
Hygro said:
Except California. :smug: We run our state better than the Fedgov runs the country.
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I think many Southerners believe their state does a better job than the federal government.

Suum cuique.
 
Cutlass said:
The fact that the Feds often suck doesn't change the fact that the states pretty much always suck. :p
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Problem is if you leave the fed as oversight instead of empowering it directly you get a relatively neutral enforcer over the state. You empower the fed directly and you lose that. Who checks the federal government? A rebellion? A third party? Neither of the two we've got has any interest in that and they're not going to find one. The last time we elected a third party at the federal level in any significant sense we had a civil war. Nobody checks the power of the fed. The fed even helps empower the states to oppress if illram's link on the ''government sucks'' thread is right. Plus if you get fed up enough with one state sucking you can go to another one without needing a visa/citizenship change. Say if California happens to be awesome enough. The states may always suck, but that's so much less crappy than when a supreme and mighty fed sucks. Which it's doing now.
 
Hygro said:
Except California. :smug: We run our state better than the Fedgov runs the country.
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Hygro said:
Two amendments in a 30 year span.
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That whole 'proposition' thing though is given as a textbook example of 'ridiculous policy-making/administrative law device'. I dunno, maybe you work well within the horrific system you've got, but how you 'run the state' surely includes that system.
 
Camikaze said:
That whole 'proposition' thing though is given as a textbook example of 'ridiculous policy-making/administrative law device'. I dunno, maybe you work well within the horrific system you've got, but how you 'run the state' surely includes that system.
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The proposition thing is flawed but contributes to the awesomeness of our state over all, for sure. We recently killed gerrymandering with it. It's not that we Californians are naturally superior and work well within the system--we're actually surprisingly close to the national norm. Instead, our system is actually really good.

Yes, our Constitution is longer than Harry Potter and most of our spending is stuck, but we still do it better than the federal gov't, which in turn does it better than most states.

If we could print our own money, it'd be unfair to everyone else.
 
Hygro said:
The proposition thing is flawed but contributes to the awesomeness of our state over all, for sure. We recently killed gerrymandering with it. It's not that we Californians are naturally superior and work well within the system--we're actually surprisingly close to the national norm. Instead, our system is actually really good.

Yes, our Constitution is longer than Harry Potter and most of our spending is stuck, but we still do it better than the federal gov't, which in turn does it better than most states.

If we could print our own money, it'd be unfair to everyone else.
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You also had massive public advertising campaigns about West Nile disease in the middle of arid areas nowhere near irrigation ditches. Did that finally stop happening?
 
Farm Boy said:
You also had massive public advertising campaigns about West Nile disease in the middle of arid areas nowhere near irrigation ditches. Did that finally stop happening?
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Can't remember it from the first place so, mebbe? Sounds pointless.
 
Eh, it was probably funded by county rather than anything reasonable. Sounds like something Illinois would do so long as somebody in contracting had a friend with a cousin. Zillion billion dollars for the cousin on the basis of a couple dozen cases per year instead of funding the pension or paying health insurance bills within 8 months, you know, all that.
 
My university has a lot of that. The regents vote for construction, one of the regents owns the construction company. Then they cut classes.
 
Farm Boy said:
You also had massive public advertising campaigns about West Nile disease in the middle of arid areas nowhere near irrigation ditches. Did that finally stop happening?
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That's county. They also pay two guys at a time to ride around in jeeps, one guy driving and the other spraying puddles in the gutter that will be dry in an hour.

Now that is a good government job!!!
 
Farm Boy said:
Problem is if you leave the fed as oversight instead of empowering it directly you get a relatively neutral enforcer over the state. You empower the fed directly and you lose that. Who checks the federal government? A rebellion? A third party? Neither of the two we've got has any interest in that and they're not going to find one. The last time we elected a third party at the federal level in any significant sense we had a civil war. Nobody checks the power of the fed. The fed even helps empower the states to oppress if illram's link on the ''government sucks'' thread is right. Plus if you get fed up enough with one state sucking you can go to another one without needing a visa/citizenship change. Say if California happens to be awesome enough. The states may always suck, but that's so much less crappy than when a supreme and mighty fed sucks. Which it's doing now.
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The problem with that theory is that many, if not most, of the states just won't do the right thing in the first place. Not without the feds pushing them. Now this was more true when federal elections were more competitive than they are today. But it's the states which are at fault that the federal elections are not more competitive.

And so problems like civil rights, some states will go there without the feds, but many won't. Is it actually 'more right' to leave an American in that situation than to have the feds deal with it?

You have to understand that there is virtually nothing that the US federal government does which it only does in response to the complete and utter failure of states to deal with those issues. If the states had dealt with those issues, the feds would not be involved at all.

And then there are issues where the states are fundamentally unable to get the job done. Like environmental regulation and welfare. Without the feds leading, these things simply do not happen. Or they happen in only a piecemeal and utterly sucky fashion.
 
Camikaze said:
That whole 'proposition' thing though is given as a textbook example of 'ridiculous policy-making/administrative law device'. I dunno, maybe you work well within the horrific system you've got, but how you 'run the state' surely includes that system.
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Actually, it brings CA closer to being an actual democracy. Unless you're arguing that actual democracy is bad, which wouldn't be an absurd thing to argue.

To call it ridiculous/horrific is an exaggeration.
 
@kochman - it's more direct democracy, but that's a peculiarly American approach to democracy, in line with the general American discretion-phobia. I'll grant that 'ridiculous' and 'horrific' are arguable, and are based on a subjective judgment as to the desirability of contradictory constitutional mandates, but that's how it's viewed from an administrative law perspective here.
 
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