If borders are not enforced, what is to prevent invasion? If the US were to open its borders to China, we would be a Communist country within 2 years. If we opened them to everyone, all kinds of drugs and contraband would flow freely. Foreign terrorists could easily plant bombs. The world is not exactly in love with the USA.
Opening borders would only work in a perfect world. Unfortunately, we have stark realities to deal with. A strong border policy is absolutely necessary while even one country declares us their enemy. Sadly, many countries would love to overthrow us.
Equal rights for all humans supports everyone's equal rights to defend their homeland from invasion. There is no contradiction here. A non-citizen's freedom of movement must never supercede a citizen's right to defend their self-government.
Besides, if anyone is serious about becoming a US citizen, they can immigrate legally and become naturalized, just like I did.
Complaints against our current political system are more boring, more tired, more unimaginative than the system itself. However, I will attempt to explain and answer these tired old prophecies of doom for the current system.
To demonstrate just how tired and boring your complaints are, I'll start with a quote from Benjamin Franklin's final address to the Constitutional Convention in 1787:
"Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other."
Why is a certain portion of the population chronicly bored with politics and agitating for radical changes, usually without proposing any?
If politics is boring to you, chances are your priorities and interests are not shared by the majority of your fellow Americans. The reason why this is true is that state and national politics are directed by pollsters who determine which topics are most important to the largest numbers of people.
This system may be annoying and we may all wish it weren't that way. However, it makes a lot of common sense. State and national leaders have to speak for a broad constituency with a wide spectrum of philosophies and ideologies. The political electoral process weeds out those people who are so focused on marginal issues that they alienate the majority of the people they want to represent. Those candidates who are left standing at the end of the day will not agree with every citizen, but will be acceptible to the majority of them, which is the definition of a democratic election.
The biggest problem with modern proponents of alternative political systems is that they hate history as much as politics, and thus propose solutions which they believe are brand-new, but that have already failed miserably.
Those who learn from history know that the structure of our government has been the underlying topic of public discourse in almost every public debate since June 7, 1776. The fact remains that there is no acceptible alternative to the system we have, Voter.com's appeals for pure democracy notwithstanding.
No, dissatisfaction with the political process is nothing new. In fact, the clash of ideas that named our major parties was the clash between a pure democracy (Democrats) and a republic or representative democracy (Republicans).
The clash between pure democracy or republic was a continuation of the clash between the federalists and the anti-federalists. The federalists had clearly won the day and established a strong national government through our constitution.
After the anti-federalists lost, the parties reorganized around methods of implementing the federal government. What precipitated the formation of the southern Confederacy and the subsequent Civil War was not only slavery, but also the old debate over federalism and a defect of the electoral process that brought Lincoln to power with less than 33 percent of the vote.
By the time of the Civil War, the Democrats were for slavery and state's rights, hoping to accomplish both by subjecting all major federal decisions to a referendum of the citizens of each state. At that time, the Republicans were either abolitionists or against the spread of slavery, imposed by the federal government regardless of the will of the people as expressed by referendum or state legislation.
What triggered the formation of the Confederacy, however, was not ideology, but a structural objection to the way in which Abraham Lincoln was elected President. The Democratic party was unable to agree on one candidate for president, so they nominated three candidates. All together, the 3 Democrats won 65 percent of the electoral votes, but Republican Lincoln was elected with only 33 percent because his votes were not divided. Thus, the majority of the country disagreed with Lincoln and voted against his ideas, yet the breakdown of the two-party system put his minority policies into the White House. After the Democratic south formed its own country, the Northern Republicans gained control of the federal government.
Now, almost all modern Americans, including me, are quite glad that Lincoln became president and that slavery was eventually abolished through his leadership. But the majority of our forefathers, Lincoln's contemporaries, would have disagreed with us. The question is, what would happen if a multiparty system were to leave us with a much less honorable president than Lincoln?
Despite the fact that one of our best Presidents would never have been elected in a two way runoff, the fact remains that the will of the majority was violated, ultimately resulting in what was best for society, the abolition of slavery. The majority opinion of the day was wrong, but shouldn't we see that as an aberration of the times?
More recently, in 1992, the multi-candidate system helped elect another president without a majority, Bill Clinton. Objective studies prove that Clinton would never have been elected in a two-way runoff, but Ross Perot siphoned enough Republican support from President Bush to give Clinton the edge he needed to win.
Now, some would propose a runoff system to make sure that the will of the majority is served in elections. However, there is already a runoff system, with the party primaries as the first round and the general election as the final round. Third parties disrupt this system.
However, if there were a series of more official runoffs, it would surely diminish the stranglehold of political power-mongers from the election process. But, those who propose such a system should recognize that neither Republican Lincoln nor Democrat Clinton would have been elected under it. Instead, we would be subjected to the annual alliance-building chaos that has caused so much trouble in the parliaments of India, Japan and every other democratic nation without a strong two-party system.
Is our current system perfect? Absolutely not, and it should be continually refined in ways that improve it. However, there are alternatives like pure democracy, poorly planned runoffs or weaker parties that are so utterly flawed that to attempt them again would be incredibly foolish considering historical wisdom and the high likelihood of human nature being impervious to technological change.
In the meantime, apathy is rampant, ranters complain and minority views seem to be marginalized by the majority view. Politics has been that way in this country for 224 years, and in post-Magna Carta Europe for centuries before that.
You, the author of the series of articles, may think your alienated ideas are new and different, because these ideas occured to you without much outside influence. Our technological professions train us to conclude that our ideas are often unprecedented. Politics is a much older profession, so it is true that most political ideas are ancient and well-studied, even if they seem new to you.
Thus, it would be wise for the author to study the long, long history of people who have made the same, tired, unimaginative objections to our political system over the years. Dissatisfaction with the system is even more boring and lifeless than the system itself, because the complaints are not usually accompanied by viable solutions or tempered by studious research.
Furthermore, my response to your complaint is equally overhashed and trite because dozens of generations of complainers have had to be educated.
Yet, as uninspiring as they may be, the political forces surrounding the current elections are just as monumentally important as they have always been. On the one hand, the conservative Republicans generally promote smaller government, the inalienable right to life, traditional moral values, citizen individualism, lower taxes, balanced budgets and re-engineering of government to cut waste and vestigial depression-era agencies.
On the other hand, the liberal Democrats promote larger government, socialism in health care and other industries, the rights of women to murder their unborn daughters, loose moral values, citizen dependency upon the government, higher taxes and re-engineering government by increasing the proliferation of projects and entitlement programs.
As for foreign policy, the Republicans are mostly insistent upon freedom and democracy in order to maintain economic alliances. The Democrats are soft on dictatorships and socialists like Fidel Castro, because they don't feel as strongly against government's control of the thoughts and private lives of citizens.
Both parties are insincere about campaign finance reform and generally clueless about education. Too bad, but nobody's perfect.
The best success that a third party can achieve is to help elect their most vehement opponents. Voting for ultra-liberal Ralph Nader will help elect conservative George Bush, while voting for ultra-conservative Pat Buchanan or Harry Browne will help elect liberal Al Gore, their polar opposites. Thus, third parties do far more damage to their own ideals than any good they may hope to achieve.
In the future, if third parties and independents become rampantly popular, then runoffs must be instituted in order to avoid the situation that led to the Civil War. However, while the two-party system continues to be predominant, no drastic changes are required. Instead, whiners and compainers should look for more realistic incremental reforms agreeable to a consensus, or else be proactive about their feelings of boredom by withdrawing their own boring drivel from public discourse.
I leave you with another quote, often ascribed to others, but here attributed to Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States and writer of the Declaration of Independence:
"In matters of taste, go with the flow. In matters of principle, stand firm as a rock... In times like these, it helps to remember that there have always been times like these."
Speaking of high-profile open source advocates, anyone remember that Al Gore's web site contained an HTML comment supporting Open Source (along with a traditional copyright notice -- go figure). This could become a campaign issue, or just more proof that the only difference between the brains of politicians and of movie stars is the time zone.
Slashdot Mirror
If borders are not enforced, what is to prevent invasion? If the US were to open its borders to China, we would be a Communist country within 2 years. If we opened them to everyone, all kinds of drugs and contraband would flow freely. Foreign terrorists could easily plant bombs. The world is not exactly in love with the USA.
Opening borders would only work in a perfect world. Unfortunately, we have stark realities to deal with. A strong border policy is absolutely necessary while even one country declares us their enemy. Sadly, many countries would love to overthrow us.
Equal rights for all humans supports everyone's equal rights to defend their homeland from invasion. There is no contradiction here. A non-citizen's freedom of movement must never supercede a citizen's right to defend their self-government.
Besides, if anyone is serious about becoming a US citizen, they can immigrate legally and become naturalized, just like I did.
Complaints against our current political system are more boring, more tired, more unimaginative than the system itself. However, I will attempt to explain and answer these tired old prophecies of doom for the current system.
To demonstrate just how tired and boring your complaints are, I'll start with a quote from Benjamin Franklin's final address to the Constitutional Convention in 1787:
Why is a certain portion of the population chronicly bored with politics and agitating for radical changes, usually without proposing any?
If politics is boring to you, chances are your priorities and interests are not shared by the majority of your fellow Americans. The reason why this is true is that state and national politics are directed by pollsters who determine which topics are most important to the largest numbers of people.
This system may be annoying and we may all wish it weren't that way. However, it makes a lot of common sense. State and national leaders have to speak for a broad constituency with a wide spectrum of philosophies and ideologies. The political electoral process weeds out those people who are so focused on marginal issues that they alienate the majority of the people they want to represent. Those candidates who are left standing at the end of the day will not agree with every citizen, but will be acceptible to the majority of them, which is the definition of a democratic election.
The biggest problem with modern proponents of alternative political systems is that they hate history as much as politics, and thus propose solutions which they believe are brand-new, but that have already failed miserably.
Those who learn from history know that the structure of our government has been the underlying topic of public discourse in almost every public debate since June 7, 1776. The fact remains that there is no acceptible alternative to the system we have, Voter.com's appeals for pure democracy notwithstanding.
No, dissatisfaction with the political process is nothing new. In fact, the clash of ideas that named our major parties was the clash between a pure democracy (Democrats) and a republic or representative democracy (Republicans).
The clash between pure democracy or republic was a continuation of the clash between the federalists and the anti-federalists. The federalists had clearly won the day and established a strong national government through our constitution.
After the anti-federalists lost, the parties reorganized around methods of implementing the federal government. What precipitated the formation of the southern Confederacy and the subsequent Civil War was not only slavery, but also the old debate over federalism and a defect of the electoral process that brought Lincoln to power with less than 33 percent of the vote.
By the time of the Civil War, the Democrats were for slavery and state's rights, hoping to accomplish both by subjecting all major federal decisions to a referendum of the citizens of each state. At that time, the Republicans were either abolitionists or against the spread of slavery, imposed by the federal government regardless of the will of the people as expressed by referendum or state legislation.
What triggered the formation of the Confederacy, however, was not ideology, but a structural objection to the way in which Abraham Lincoln was elected President. The Democratic party was unable to agree on one candidate for president, so they nominated three candidates. All together, the 3 Democrats won 65 percent of the electoral votes, but Republican Lincoln was elected with only 33 percent because his votes were not divided. Thus, the majority of the country disagreed with Lincoln and voted against his ideas, yet the breakdown of the two-party system put his minority policies into the White House. After the Democratic south formed its own country, the Northern Republicans gained control of the federal government.
Now, almost all modern Americans, including me, are quite glad that Lincoln became president and that slavery was eventually abolished through his leadership. But the majority of our forefathers, Lincoln's contemporaries, would have disagreed with us. The question is, what would happen if a multiparty system were to leave us with a much less honorable president than Lincoln?
Despite the fact that one of our best Presidents would never have been elected in a two way runoff, the fact remains that the will of the majority was violated, ultimately resulting in what was best for society, the abolition of slavery. The majority opinion of the day was wrong, but shouldn't we see that as an aberration of the times?
More recently, in 1992, the multi-candidate system helped elect another president without a majority, Bill Clinton. Objective studies prove that Clinton would never have been elected in a two-way runoff, but Ross Perot siphoned enough Republican support from President Bush to give Clinton the edge he needed to win.
Now, some would propose a runoff system to make sure that the will of the majority is served in elections. However, there is already a runoff system, with the party primaries as the first round and the general election as the final round. Third parties disrupt this system.
However, if there were a series of more official runoffs, it would surely diminish the stranglehold of political power-mongers from the election process. But, those who propose such a system should recognize that neither Republican Lincoln nor Democrat Clinton would have been elected under it. Instead, we would be subjected to the annual alliance-building chaos that has caused so much trouble in the parliaments of India, Japan and every other democratic nation without a strong two-party system.
Is our current system perfect? Absolutely not, and it should be continually refined in ways that improve it. However, there are alternatives like pure democracy, poorly planned runoffs or weaker parties that are so utterly flawed that to attempt them again would be incredibly foolish considering historical wisdom and the high likelihood of human nature being impervious to technological change.
In the meantime, apathy is rampant, ranters complain and minority views seem to be marginalized by the majority view. Politics has been that way in this country for 224 years, and in post-Magna Carta Europe for centuries before that.
You, the author of the series of articles, may think your alienated ideas are new and different, because these ideas occured to you without much outside influence. Our technological professions train us to conclude that our ideas are often unprecedented. Politics is a much older profession, so it is true that most political ideas are ancient and well-studied, even if they seem new to you.
Thus, it would be wise for the author to study the long, long history of people who have made the same, tired, unimaginative objections to our political system over the years. Dissatisfaction with the system is even more boring and lifeless than the system itself, because the complaints are not usually accompanied by viable solutions or tempered by studious research.
Furthermore, my response to your complaint is equally overhashed and trite because dozens of generations of complainers have had to be educated.
Yet, as uninspiring as they may be, the political forces surrounding the current elections are just as monumentally important as they have always been. On the one hand, the conservative Republicans generally promote smaller government, the inalienable right to life, traditional moral values, citizen individualism, lower taxes, balanced budgets and re-engineering of government to cut waste and vestigial depression-era agencies.
On the other hand, the liberal Democrats promote larger government, socialism in health care and other industries, the rights of women to murder their unborn daughters, loose moral values, citizen dependency upon the government, higher taxes and re-engineering government by increasing the proliferation of projects and entitlement programs.
As for foreign policy, the Republicans are mostly insistent upon freedom and democracy in order to maintain economic alliances. The Democrats are soft on dictatorships and socialists like Fidel Castro, because they don't feel as strongly against government's control of the thoughts and private lives of citizens.
Both parties are insincere about campaign finance reform and generally clueless about education. Too bad, but nobody's perfect.
The best success that a third party can achieve is to help elect their most vehement opponents. Voting for ultra-liberal Ralph Nader will help elect conservative George Bush, while voting for ultra-conservative Pat Buchanan or Harry Browne will help elect liberal Al Gore, their polar opposites. Thus, third parties do far more damage to their own ideals than any good they may hope to achieve.
In the future, if third parties and independents become rampantly popular, then runoffs must be instituted in order to avoid the situation that led to the Civil War. However, while the two-party system continues to be predominant, no drastic changes are required. Instead, whiners and compainers should look for more realistic incremental reforms agreeable to a consensus, or else be proactive about their feelings of boredom by withdrawing their own boring drivel from public discourse.
I leave you with another quote, often ascribed to others, but here attributed to Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States and writer of the Declaration of Independence:
Speaking of high-profile open source advocates, anyone remember that Al Gore's web site contained an HTML comment supporting Open Source (along with a traditional copyright notice -- go figure). This could become a campaign issue, or just more proof that the only difference between the brains of politicians and of movie stars is the time zone.