I was imagining "Cave Jackson" as an African-American NFL superstar and he's wearing his football uniform (complete with helmet and padding) while making that speech.
As the Founding Fathers of the USA intended: establish minimal governance to facilitate polite commerce, and otherwise stay the he11 out of each others' business.
I wonder how such an anemic federal govt could avoid becoming the client state of a major world power in the modern complex world where the stakes are so high, the opponents are playing the long game, and the oligarchs have no national loyalty.
It couldn't. obviously, if the US were actually founded as a libertarian minarchy and kept that way without a strong Federal government it would simply have dissolved into a fractious set of nations and eventually been consumed by European and Russian powers. Or New York.
But most libertarians just want to be able to smoke weed, shoot guns and never pay taxes, and they don't think it through.
It's the other way around. If you bind their hands (e.g. constitutionally reduce the power of the central government and have the states and cities take over what it currently does) then oligarchs have to fight in every state and town instead of in one place for everyone. Then sometimes they lose, instead of the status quo where a federal government controlled by oligarchs has its hand in everything.
The Founding Fathers (save one) also intended that slavery would exist. All of them were very rich. All of them were men, too (as their collective name suggests).
The problem with appealing to the Founding Fathers is that they were profoundly uninterested in equality of opportunity, due to who they were. It is a useful exercise to consider what they would have done — that does not itself demonstrate anything.
That the founders were flawed as human beings, is not an argument against limited government or more broadly the ideals that comprise the US Constitution.
The Founding Fathers intended the elimination of slavery, and banned it to a meaningful degree during establishment of the new nation, but had to compromise lest the fragile Union break before it could form.
Slavery eventually eliminated (before most other nations), at tremendous cost not appreciated by many benefiting from that payment.
Slavery in colonies is functionally different from American slavery.
Colonial slavery oppressed conquered people's on their local soil where they were the majority. This is hard to keep up for a global power constantly at war with its neighbors.
American slavery oppressed ethnic minorities ripped from their homeland and taken to a different continent. Slaves had a harder time coordinating rebellions as they were not a single conquered peoples, and were in the minority so couldn't count on winning battles of attrition.
American slavery, like the Roman version it was patterned against, could have continued for hundreds of years if not for the Civil War.
Colonial slavery though was a lost battle from the start. Colonial powers needed to develop their colonies, but the moment you do that you increase the chance of successful rebelion. The only way to defuse it is to reduce the oppression.
> The Founding Fathers intended the elimination of slavery
The Founding Fathers didn't have a shared opinion on the issue, and the only concrete action they jointly took was directly protect it and to bake in extra political power for slavers.
> but had to compromise lest the fragile Union break before it could form
The people those founding fathers who wanted slavery eventually eliminated had to compromise with were also founding fathers.
Don't disagree with your points, but it's worth considering:
1. The Founding Fathers were products of their place and time. Many other countries engaged in the slave trade and employed slave labor, and women played a similar role in other societies. Racism and sexism were commonplace around the world during their time. You can reasonably argue that American slavery was uniquely cruel and long-lived if you want, although I would say that position downplays the horrors suffered by slaves under other governments.
2. The Founding Fathers, for all their faults, were clearly very poignant observers of human nature and history. They thoughtfully designed an extremely successful form of government that has inspired countries around the world to copy their model and arguably contributed to material prosperity unparalleled in history.
None of that is to discount what you're saying, but it's only one piece of the puzzle.
The founding fathers of the USA hacked out a patchwork of compromises to put together a government. Great work, some of the ideas aged well. But they weren't prophets and they weren't building a plan for the cyberpunk future we're finding ourselves in.
Mmmh, here's my take: they are not infallible superheroes. They were fallible human beings.
Are there better people, today, who could lead the country? Of course. Will they ever actually be elected to do so? Sadly, no.
America in the late 1700s was a weird moment in history where educated, forward-thinking intellectuals (not nobility, not just the moneyed elite — actually a lot of men who (mostly) deserved to be called intellectual) actually had a chance to make the rules. They made pretty good ones. Some flawed rules, but good ones.
We're not going to get that again. The real-time feedback of TwitterDemocracy would prevent us from ever getting a document as general yet meaningful as the Bill of Rights, with basically unfettered rights to speech and assembly.
So until I see a viable path to put people in charge who actually surpass them in wisdom and foresight, I'm going to stick to what they put forward. It has aged and worked amazingly well, and have 0 confidence that the politicians of today, if starting from scratch, would do better.
There are no other democracies out there that have the almost-unfettered rights to assembly and speech that the US has. This is important to me.
And FWIW, there are (by most measures) no other democracies out there which have gone as long under peaceful rule of law as the US. Every other democracy (save by some measures the UK) has fallen to coup or revolution in less than this duration.
Their latest constitutions may work to keep them stable as long as the US has managed. Or they may not. Time will tell.
I don't see that as necessary, given that most of the US remained under continuous democratic governance. The rest... got there eventually.
Even if you do count from the end of the civil war, I would not consider my central thesis destroyed by the small and frankly uniquely weird country of Switzerland. Switzerland is a country that has done very well for its people, but the lessons which have kept it stable and safe over the past two centuries (have a lot of mountains, and don't be worth invading) are not ones which extrapolate out.
And let's be honest -- Switzerland was not functionally independent in WWII. It wasn't necessary to invade, because they did whatever the Third Reich wanted with their stolen gold and borders. This is not the stability I am looking for.
> Switzerland is a country that has done very well for its people, but the lessons which have kept it stable and safe over the past two centuries (have a lot of mountains, and don't be worth invading) are not ones which extrapolate out.
Would you say that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political thought has been valuable and influential in the world?
> Even if you do count from the end of the civil war, I would not consider my central thesis destroyed by the small and frankly uniquely weird country of Switzerland.
What exactly is your central thesis? It sounds like you're presenting an argument of American exceptionalism, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point here.
Freedom of assembly and speech are table stakes in most democracies, and the US doesn't even rank particularly highly (#45) in the World Press Freedom index:
I really don't care what some random list says — ex, Germany does not have the same freedom of speech that the US has. There are literal banned books other blanket bans with regards to Nazi speech.
That's fine, they can do them, but the enshrined rights are simply not comparable, and it's ridiculous to claim they are.
"It's not the greatest country in the world professor, that's my answer.
Sharon, the NEA is a loser, yeah, it accounts for a penny out of our paycheck but he gets to hit you with it any time he wants. It doesn't cost money, it costs votes, it costs air time, it costs column inches. You know why people don't like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so damn smart, how come they lose so bad always?
Turns to conservative pundit
And with a straight face you're going to tell students that America is so star spangled awesome that we're the only ones in the world that have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, BELGIUM has freedom.
So, 207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom.
And you, sorority girl, just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day there's somethings you should know. One of them is there's absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we're the greatest country in the world. We're 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, Number 4 in labor force and Number 4 in exports, we lead the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending where spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.
Now none of this is the fault of a 20 year old college student, but you none the less are without a doubt a member of the worst period generation period ever period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don't know what the hell you're talking about.
> It has aged and worked amazingly well, and have 0 confidence that the politicians of today, if starting from scratch, would do better.
It has aged well only if you ignore the fact that millions of Americans who were at first considered property, and then “freed” only to be incarcerated and discriminated against, don’t have a say in what “well” means.
Politicians of today understand today’s problems and are better equipped to find answers to those problems. They are armed with a team of educated aides and have access to political science research. I’m confident they could devise a better, modern constitution today.
Underappreciated? The founding fathers have been rubbed continuously in every American's face for the last 200 years. Few people under-appreciate them. Every media property, every news article, every public figure continues to worship them as Gods. The status quo position is that the Constitution and the Founders were basically right about the important stuff, and that overall they were very cool guys (even if some of them had the minor flaw of owning slaves). At least this is the narrative that was driven into me throughout all of my education. It seems to be a common viewpoint for both liberals and conservatives.
I agree, though, that the Founders did create something remarkable: a genocidal empire that draped itself in ideals of equality and righteousness when it was largely built by slaves and exploited workers; professed to love diversity and Christian morals as it genocided untold numbers of Native Americans; styled itself as a defender against European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere while it built its own empire and repeatedly intervened militarily in Latin American countries; claimed to be in favor of free markets while using its military and police forces to suppress workers/foreign governments to favor American corporate interests; and so on. It really is a remarkable project.
Let's be honest. The Founders were wealthy landowners that wanted to create a political system that favored themselves, while deposing the British powers that were a rung above them.
It makes a lot of sense if you view it through the lens of people preferring the status quo. The "founding fathers" can always be used to justify leaving things as they were.
That's good if the status quo is working for you. It's not so good if you're somebody who the system fails for.
The really horrifying part is that there are people in the latter group who imagine that they're part of the former. The system is failing them, but for a variety of reasons they're convinced that any change will make it worse.
Much of the time, it's because they've been played off against other groups who are also having problems in the current system, and told it's a zero-sum game: if they do better, you must be worse. If you just keep revering the "founding fathers" eventually you too will be successful.
The worse they do, the harder they revere. It's a vicious cycle, and I have no idea how to break it.
That's why we are on constitution 2.27: they found that 1.0 was too minimal. The Confederacy tried to walk back in that direction a bit and found that it made their ability to run their "country" much harder (in addition to their other self-defeating pathologies).
That's a heck of a stretch of history. They wanted gov powers "limited" as opposed to "unlimited", but the concept that the US was set up with almost no government is a (false) Libertarian talking point.
I like to semi-ignorantly throw things out there for the off chance people will talk about it and I get to learn things:
Less federal and state government, more local government.
After decades of not being involved at all, I was shocked how easy it was to get involved at the municipal level and what kind of difference I could make.
Also: stop depending on government. Want schools to improve? Go volunteer. I cold called a high school and got involved in a FIRST robotics team and it's been amazing.
I think you got partially there. We need more of both local and Federal government.
Having more people working on providing basic services is a good thing. We are an incredibly productive species: we need to use that increased wealth to improve the quality of life for people. Government is one way to do that.
Volunteering is nice but it’s not the answer to systemic problems. I’m glad that you found a concrete way to contribute and find joy in doing so for your community... that’s great! But it’s not something that can replace Government or public funding.
> Volunteering is nice but it’s not the answer to systemic problems.
Agreed - a prominent example of this in the UK in recent years is the sharp rise in volunteer-run food banks. Which was a reaction to the huge cuts to public services, in both funding and availability, driven by our government's toxic right-wing ideology.
It's great that people stepped up to help, but it shouldn't have been necessary, and indeed wouldn't have been if things were being run effectively and for the benefit of all.
Just FYI - this is terrible advice when it comes to charity. Helping people in the developed countries costs a lot more than helping people in developing countries.
One charity trains seeing eye dogs in the US -- costs about $40,000 per person helped. A cataract surgery in India can cost as little as $40.
The counterargument is that this fails to address areas where one municipality's decisions impact another municipality. For example, suppose each township has a different order and coloring of traffic lights. This would cause car crashes wherever incompatible road networks meet. Or, suppose each township has its own electric grid, complete with different voltages and AC frequency. This would mean that equipment and training wouldn't translate to the next township over, prolonging any power outages. (See for example, the multitude of voltage standards in Japan.)
Overall, I would say that for any given problem, it should be handled at whichever level results in the fewest coordination/externality problems, with ties being broken in favor of more granular control.
The electric grid is going to be determined by what the power company provides. Industry has plenty of incentive to standardize that and they mostly do.
Every municipality (well, at least state, but usually county and sometimes city) does have the option to develop and enforce its own electric code. For the most part they've converged on a standard National Electric Code developed by an industry consortium, without any Federal requirements.
> The electric grid is going to be determined by what the power company provides. Industry has plenty of incentive to standardize that and they mostly do.
This has almost never happened without the threat (implicit or explicit) of regulation. The only time large corporations willingly standardize is when they have control over the entire market, and standards are a tool of cost cutting more than as a means of enabling cooperation with other companies.
NEMA, ANSI, IEC, ASTM, ASHRAE, I could go on and on. There tons and tons of standards independently developed by industry associations. Many of them later get adopted into law by various government, but the government is not forcing these to exist.
Overall, I would say that for any given problem, it should be handled at whichever level results in the fewest coordination/externality problems
This just makes too much sense for either the "More Local!!!" crowd or the "More Federal!!!" crowd to ever get behind. None of them ever want to concede the common sense fact that most of the time, "It depends."
Should we have more federal control? It depends.
Should we have more local control? It depends.
Control of what?
Are there coordination issues?
Is anyone's human rights trampled?
What are the externalities?
Can local governments other than SF and NYC actually afford the infrastructure and resources required to control whatever it is we're talking about?
Can states other than Cali, Texas, and NY afford it?
It's also very backward in practice. National governments love demands on municipal and local level, but the funds don't follow. So alot of it ends up in nice talks, but bad implementations where local level try to push back at lack of funding.
I'm sympathetic, but you have to consider free interstate travel and economies of scale.
A local or state government can't provide healthcare or a military, because then everyone else freerides. Just live in the low-tax state and move if you get sick, or bank on them if there's a threat.
Certain things depend on the feds not because they'll do it well, but because they'll do it less badly.
Healthcare in Canada is the responsibility of provinces and each province has their own independent system. You need to be a resident of a new province for a few months before you can switch to a different provider. Healthcare doesn’t need to be federal
To an extent it's regional too. I don't actually interact with Health Canada or Health Ontario, I interact with Southwestern Public Health when I look up info, get a flu vaccine, look at regional covid info, etc.
I think it was: In the 1840s, someone saw that things looked to be going really well in Nauvoo, Illinois, and asked Joseph Smith how he governed the people there so well. He said ~ "I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves."
He has had much influence on the people of Utah today. Utah gets high rankings from various places about being well-run. I've read repeatedly in state status reports on covid-19, that Utah has among both the lowest death and unemployment rates in the USA, during this pandemic. Here is one article (admittedly this one is sponsored by the Gov's office): https://www.ksl.com/article/50105209/utahs-covid-19-economic... . But I see such things in the news from time to time.
So teaching correct principles and letting the people govern themselves seems to be a valuable consideration, probably among others that have been mentioned here.
> We shall disperse the Swiss Armed Forces. We have signed a treaty with the Russian Federation, in which we pay them $1B a year (less than 20% of our previous defense budget). and they promise to nuke everyone should someone invade us. We believe that renting a nuclear umbrella is a cost-effective way to maintain territorial integrity.
I think the point of the Russian hypothetical scenario is that the government does not care anymore.
> I will not interfere in your lives in any way, neither as a tyrant nor as a friend. I will not light up the night sky, but neither will I block out the stars.
But I think the Swiss, in this hypothetical world, still misunderstood Russia's defense position.
> The only way, in which I shall “govern” is that I will take the nuclear football with me, and should we get invaded, I will nuke everyone. Not just the invading force, mind you, but literally the entire world.
Honestly, it has more to do with revealing their governing style than about their ability to give you those promises. It tells you who they are and what they want. And the way they talk about it reveals something of how they think and how they'll be able to deal with other leaders (in and out of the country).
We know they'll be able to give you at most one or two, but it's not really their job anyway. Most of those promises are the jobs of legislators, not executives. But people imagine that they're learning how that person will execute, a thing that's a little hard to convey otherwise.
Complex systems, by definition, are difficult to govern democratically: effective changes are counter-intuitive, take time to work, make things worse in the beginning and can’t be attributed back to a single change. This puts evolutionary pressure on polititians who make right decisions.
The error in the article is, that the complexity of the world stems from formal government. This is partially true but not entirely. The social, power, business, human, legal etc. structures would continue to exist regardless of whether someone governs them. The nature of the complexity would change but it would not disappear.
Probably something like Culture in the novels by Iain Banks: Minds + Post-scarcity + Space Travel. As much as I like Star Trek, I don't have much faith in humans getting better at governing themselves.
82 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 19.6 ms ] threadBut most libertarians just want to be able to smoke weed, shoot guns and never pay taxes, and they don't think it through.
Also, self organization is an important feature of a complex system.
The problem with appealing to the Founding Fathers is that they were profoundly uninterested in equality of opportunity, due to who they were. It is a useful exercise to consider what they would have done — that does not itself demonstrate anything.
Slavery eventually eliminated (before most other nations), at tremendous cost not appreciated by many benefiting from that payment.
Colonial slavery oppressed conquered people's on their local soil where they were the majority. This is hard to keep up for a global power constantly at war with its neighbors.
American slavery oppressed ethnic minorities ripped from their homeland and taken to a different continent. Slaves had a harder time coordinating rebellions as they were not a single conquered peoples, and were in the minority so couldn't count on winning battles of attrition.
American slavery, like the Roman version it was patterned against, could have continued for hundreds of years if not for the Civil War.
Colonial slavery though was a lost battle from the start. Colonial powers needed to develop their colonies, but the moment you do that you increase the chance of successful rebelion. The only way to defuse it is to reduce the oppression.
The Founding Fathers didn't have a shared opinion on the issue, and the only concrete action they jointly took was directly protect it and to bake in extra political power for slavers.
> but had to compromise lest the fragile Union break before it could form
The people those founding fathers who wanted slavery eventually eliminated had to compromise with were also founding fathers.
1. The Founding Fathers were products of their place and time. Many other countries engaged in the slave trade and employed slave labor, and women played a similar role in other societies. Racism and sexism were commonplace around the world during their time. You can reasonably argue that American slavery was uniquely cruel and long-lived if you want, although I would say that position downplays the horrors suffered by slaves under other governments.
2. The Founding Fathers, for all their faults, were clearly very poignant observers of human nature and history. They thoughtfully designed an extremely successful form of government that has inspired countries around the world to copy their model and arguably contributed to material prosperity unparalleled in history.
None of that is to discount what you're saying, but it's only one piece of the puzzle.
Are there better people, today, who could lead the country? Of course. Will they ever actually be elected to do so? Sadly, no.
America in the late 1700s was a weird moment in history where educated, forward-thinking intellectuals (not nobility, not just the moneyed elite — actually a lot of men who (mostly) deserved to be called intellectual) actually had a chance to make the rules. They made pretty good ones. Some flawed rules, but good ones.
We're not going to get that again. The real-time feedback of TwitterDemocracy would prevent us from ever getting a document as general yet meaningful as the Bill of Rights, with basically unfettered rights to speech and assembly.
So until I see a viable path to put people in charge who actually surpass them in wisdom and foresight, I'm going to stick to what they put forward. It has aged and worked amazingly well, and have 0 confidence that the politicians of today, if starting from scratch, would do better.
And FWIW, there are (by most measures) no other democracies out there which have gone as long under peaceful rule of law as the US. Every other democracy (save by some measures the UK) has fallen to coup or revolution in less than this duration.
Their latest constitutions may work to keep them stable as long as the US has managed. Or they may not. Time will tell.
Are you taking the end of the US civil war as the starting point? If so, then Switzerland has a longer duration of peaceful rule of law.
Even if you do count from the end of the civil war, I would not consider my central thesis destroyed by the small and frankly uniquely weird country of Switzerland. Switzerland is a country that has done very well for its people, but the lessons which have kept it stable and safe over the past two centuries (have a lot of mountains, and don't be worth invading) are not ones which extrapolate out.
And let's be honest -- Switzerland was not functionally independent in WWII. It wasn't necessary to invade, because they did whatever the Third Reich wanted with their stolen gold and borders. This is not the stability I am looking for.
Would you say that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political thought has been valuable and influential in the world?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau
What exactly is your central thesis? It sounds like you're presenting an argument of American exceptionalism, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point here.
https://rsf.org/en/ranking
The real outlier in the US is gun rights.
That's fine, they can do them, but the enshrined rights are simply not comparable, and it's ridiculous to claim they are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"It's not the greatest country in the world professor, that's my answer.
Sharon, the NEA is a loser, yeah, it accounts for a penny out of our paycheck but he gets to hit you with it any time he wants. It doesn't cost money, it costs votes, it costs air time, it costs column inches. You know why people don't like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so damn smart, how come they lose so bad always?
Turns to conservative pundit
And with a straight face you're going to tell students that America is so star spangled awesome that we're the only ones in the world that have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, BELGIUM has freedom.
So, 207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom.
And you, sorority girl, just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day there's somethings you should know. One of them is there's absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we're the greatest country in the world. We're 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, Number 4 in labor force and Number 4 in exports, we lead the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending where spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.
Now none of this is the fault of a 20 year old college student, but you none the less are without a doubt a member of the worst period generation period ever period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don't know what the hell you're talking about.
It has aged well only if you ignore the fact that millions of Americans who were at first considered property, and then “freed” only to be incarcerated and discriminated against, don’t have a say in what “well” means.
Politicians of today understand today’s problems and are better equipped to find answers to those problems. They are armed with a team of educated aides and have access to political science research. I’m confident they could devise a better, modern constitution today.
I agree, though, that the Founders did create something remarkable: a genocidal empire that draped itself in ideals of equality and righteousness when it was largely built by slaves and exploited workers; professed to love diversity and Christian morals as it genocided untold numbers of Native Americans; styled itself as a defender against European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere while it built its own empire and repeatedly intervened militarily in Latin American countries; claimed to be in favor of free markets while using its military and police forces to suppress workers/foreign governments to favor American corporate interests; and so on. It really is a remarkable project.
Let's be honest. The Founders were wealthy landowners that wanted to create a political system that favored themselves, while deposing the British powers that were a rung above them.
That's good if the status quo is working for you. It's not so good if you're somebody who the system fails for.
The really horrifying part is that there are people in the latter group who imagine that they're part of the former. The system is failing them, but for a variety of reasons they're convinced that any change will make it worse.
Much of the time, it's because they've been played off against other groups who are also having problems in the current system, and told it's a zero-sum game: if they do better, you must be worse. If you just keep revering the "founding fathers" eventually you too will be successful.
The worse they do, the harder they revere. It's a vicious cycle, and I have no idea how to break it.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/colonial-complai...
Less federal and state government, more local government.
After decades of not being involved at all, I was shocked how easy it was to get involved at the municipal level and what kind of difference I could make.
Also: stop depending on government. Want schools to improve? Go volunteer. I cold called a high school and got involved in a FIRST robotics team and it's been amazing.
Having more people working on providing basic services is a good thing. We are an incredibly productive species: we need to use that increased wealth to improve the quality of life for people. Government is one way to do that.
Volunteering is nice but it’s not the answer to systemic problems. I’m glad that you found a concrete way to contribute and find joy in doing so for your community... that’s great! But it’s not something that can replace Government or public funding.
Agreed - a prominent example of this in the UK in recent years is the sharp rise in volunteer-run food banks. Which was a reaction to the huge cuts to public services, in both funding and availability, driven by our government's toxic right-wing ideology.
It's great that people stepped up to help, but it shouldn't have been necessary, and indeed wouldn't have been if things were being run effectively and for the benefit of all.
One charity trains seeing eye dogs in the US -- costs about $40,000 per person helped. A cataract surgery in India can cost as little as $40.
Best research on (and framework of thinking about) charities comes from GiveWell - https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities over 10 years of research on this topic.
Overall, I would say that for any given problem, it should be handled at whichever level results in the fewest coordination/externality problems, with ties being broken in favor of more granular control.
Every municipality (well, at least state, but usually county and sometimes city) does have the option to develop and enforce its own electric code. For the most part they've converged on a standard National Electric Code developed by an industry consortium, without any Federal requirements.
This has almost never happened without the threat (implicit or explicit) of regulation. The only time large corporations willingly standardize is when they have control over the entire market, and standards are a tool of cost cutting more than as a means of enabling cooperation with other companies.
This just makes too much sense for either the "More Local!!!" crowd or the "More Federal!!!" crowd to ever get behind. None of them ever want to concede the common sense fact that most of the time, "It depends."
Should we have more federal control? It depends.
Should we have more local control? It depends.
Control of what?
Are there coordination issues?
Is anyone's human rights trampled?
What are the externalities?
Can local governments other than SF and NYC actually afford the infrastructure and resources required to control whatever it is we're talking about?
Can states other than Cali, Texas, and NY afford it?
On and on.
These are not simplistic issues.
A local or state government can't provide healthcare or a military, because then everyone else freerides. Just live in the low-tax state and move if you get sick, or bank on them if there's a threat.
Certain things depend on the feds not because they'll do it well, but because they'll do it less badly.
Good one. How much lower can you go?
He has had much influence on the people of Utah today. Utah gets high rankings from various places about being well-run. I've read repeatedly in state status reports on covid-19, that Utah has among both the lowest death and unemployment rates in the USA, during this pandemic. Here is one article (admittedly this one is sponsored by the Gov's office): https://www.ksl.com/article/50105209/utahs-covid-19-economic... . But I see such things in the news from time to time.
So teaching correct principles and letting the people govern themselves seems to be a valuable consideration, probably among others that have been mentioned here.
Does not compute.
Defence is a sovereignty matter.
I thought we knew this for 2000 years now, since Punic Wars.
Russia nor any other country won’t take the risk to be nuked in return if they’re not facing evident life-threatening events.
As a Russian I would certainly negotiate with the invader on how to split and share the invaded country.
I would say nuclear weapons in general are posthumous weapons.
> I will not interfere in your lives in any way, neither as a tyrant nor as a friend. I will not light up the night sky, but neither will I block out the stars.
But I think the Swiss, in this hypothetical world, still misunderstood Russia's defense position.
> The only way, in which I shall “govern” is that I will take the nuclear football with me, and should we get invaded, I will nuke everyone. Not just the invading force, mind you, but literally the entire world.
You're supposed to do what the voters voted you in for.
Delete this comment, then?
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-signs-executive-order...
At this point, I don't even know why presidents promise anything... we only have a choice between 2 of them...
We know they'll be able to give you at most one or two, but it's not really their job anyway. Most of those promises are the jobs of legislators, not executives. But people imagine that they're learning how that person will execute, a thing that's a little hard to convey otherwise.
The error in the article is, that the complexity of the world stems from formal government. This is partially true but not entirely. The social, power, business, human, legal etc. structures would continue to exist regardless of whether someone governs them. The nature of the complexity would change but it would not disappear.