If you read newspapers and such from the beginning of the USA to the present
And if you read what I wrote, you will notice that I used the past tense: "the US was intended as a voluntary union of states".
Do you understand what the past tense is? Do you understand the word "intend"? Do you understand the difference between "was intended" and "is currently"? Or do I need to draw you a map?
Europe is overall centrist, (mostly centre right, with the occasional centre-left government, e.g under Hollande).
Oh, Europe is centrist alright, but it doesn't have a liberal center. European centrism is an authoritarian compromise between left-wing authoritarianism and right wing authoritarianism. Liberalism essentially doesn't exist in Europe.
You don't seem to know much about European politics
I grew up and spent half my life in Europe. I know European politics pretty well, but more importantly, I know other political systems and political thought as well, and I understand the political blindness and ignorance of Europeans.
No. It's not relevant to your argument, though. The Greek crisis was about controlling the debt of one small part of the EU, not the ability of the ECB to support overall reflationary policies, which it did. [...] For one thing, several European nations, even within the EU, do not use the Euro, and it is the central bank, the ECB, which can create additional liquidity
Therefore your statement that "European nations have largely the same ability to "print money" as the USA." is bullshit, since by your own description, most European nations do not, in fact, have that ability, nor do they have the freedom to borrow like the US does.
Ah, so if they believe it they are fools?
No, I believe you are. You don't even understand what kind of career advancement and selfishness we're talking about ("they could make more money working for a bank"). That's consistent with the fact that, in your own words, you are a failed researcher ("I work in a research organisation. I have worked as a researcher.") Research at academic and publicly funded institutions is cut throat and people who succeed at it are the ones who focus on their career advancement and visibility in the community above all else. Working for the good of humanity isn't going to get you tenure or a directorship.
A common misconception. In actual fact, the US has a large and strong political left. What is different about the US is that it has a strong liberal center that keeps the leftists and the theocrats in check, something is pretty much entirely missing in Europe.
European nations have largely the same ability to "print money" as the USA.
Have you been living under a rock? Did you sleep through the Greek debt crisis? Are you not aware the the EU has the Euro?
No, European nations cannot print money because the Euro is outside their control. On top of that, they are required to balance their budgets.
I work in a research organisation. I have worked as a researcher.
Well, as I was saying: "lots of researchers fool themselves and others into believing that they work for the good of humanity, but in reality, they are largely selfish".
If you haven't been living under a rock, you'd know that the House is also gerrymandered out the wazoo.
It was also gerrymandered up the wazoo when Democrats were in power. Gerrymandering simply strengthens whoever is currently more popular. If congressional districts were assigned rationally, Democrats wouldn't do very well anyway. The only way Democrats could do well if the US went to strict national popular majorities, but that is utterly unacceptable and incompatible with federalism.
In actual fact, liberals only make up about 17% of the US political spectrum and California is thoroughly unrepresentative of the country. The reason Republicans are so strong is because Democrats have fallen out of favor with the political center: moderates and independents.
I'm a good example of that: I used to be a registered Democrat but loathe what the Democratic party has become over the last decade. I won't vote for Democrats again until they clearly disavow people like Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Corey Booker, and Elizabeth Warren.
Apart from being a bloody mess and having a horrible UI, in what way was Google/Apache Wave even "distributed"? At least in its Google incarnation, it seemed to require centralized servers and maintenance.
The idea of a centralized service for building social networks is intrinsically defective. Social networks should be distributed, with no single point of failure or control, no single point to monetize users, and no single point to compromise privacy. What we need if we really care about privacy and individual control is some combination of web-of-trust, digital signatures, blockchain, and peer to peer networking.
And of course you want to see California's power trained: you're a Republican
I'm an independent and a classical liberal.
Democracy: an idea so good
Democracy isn't a single form of government, it simply describes all forms of government where the power somehow derives from the people. That encompasses everything from democratic socialism and fascism to minarchism and anarchism. Many forms of democratic government are corrupt, evil and destructive.
Among the many forms of democracy there are, there is only one form of democracy that I actually care for, and that is a classically liberal democracy with small government and free markets.
That was my point. Another part of my point is that I want it to be more fair. Do you, or are you content with leaving injustice there as long as you're comfortable with it?
I certainly do want society to be more fair, which is why I help people whenever I can. What I object to is trying to use government to make society "more fair" because that is destined to fail. If you want to improve society, you need to do it through voluntary, private transactions, not through the jackboot of government.
They found that resumes sent with names that look like they belong to white males got responses more often than ones with female-looking or black-looking names. That is not equality of opportunity.
Even if those studies meant what you think they mean, so what? Decades ago, 90% of companies wouldn't hire me because I was a homosexual. Then they wouldn't hire me because I was an immigrant. These days, 90% of Silicon Valley companies won't hire me because I'm a conservative-leaning libertarian. Many minority and women owned businesses wouldn't hire me because I'm a white male. What does it matter? Equality of opportunity doesn't mean that every private business in the world needs to treat everybody exactly the same. And using government to try to force that outcome is incredibly harmful.
And if you're concerned that racial discrimination is so massive that there is a pool of skilled people who can't get a job simply because of their skin color, then you don't need to run to lawmakers in order to fix it, you can fix that problem by yourself and make a tidy profit in the process: hire them.
When faced with anti-discrimination laws on mortgages, for example, financial institutions resorted to "red-lining" to avoid making loans to blacks.
Redlining wasn't banks trying to "avoid making loans to blacks". Why would greedy, money grubbing corporations do that? Banks are interested in profit only.
In fact, redlining was mandated by the National Housing Act of 1934, the FHA, and the creation of federal underwriting guidelines, based on progressive ideas about how to improve society. Now, it is true that after government-mandated redlining ended, banks still didn't want to lend to people in those neighborhoods; but that is because government policies had destroyed those neighborhoods and they were now bad lending risks.
Your beliefs seem to be based on politics rather than reality.
You bet that my belief is based on politics rather than "reality": I believe that private citizens and private organizations have a fundamental right to freedom of association, regardless of the impact that exercising that right has on others.
Fortunately, it turns out that upholding freedom of association also tends to lead to the best outcomes for minorities. The ills people like you attribute to private freedom of association are, in fact, the result of government interference in freedom of association. Your erroneous history of redlining illustrates your confusion again.
The current Constitution sought to provide a government which balanced power between the States and the federal government. However, given the definition of government, this is impossible: either the States are empowered to resist the federal government, in which case the federal government exists in name only, or the States must be subordinate to the federal government.
That's a false dichotomy. The states only need to be subordinate to the federal government in a few areas: external borders, military defense, freedom of trade within the US, and freedom of movement within the US. That's all we need to have a "United States".
However, we did certainly attempt to follow through on these principles, and their failure was not due to apathy or ignorance, but violence and surpassing bloodshed.... Whatever else that represented, it was the triumph of federalism, and the ultimate abegnation of the principles of the Articles of Confederation.
Yes, that's the usual story people like to tell: Southern states implemented slavery and kept it up until the federal government finally stepped in, overrode the states, and took control.
Trouble is, it's completely wrong. Slavery only continued to exist after independence because the federal government protected it, among other things, through the fugitive slave acts. If we had lived up to our original principles, slavery would have collapsed on its own without any civil war. A bloody Civil War wasn't even necessary, given how much stronger the North was than the South; the reason it was so protracted and bloody is because Lincoln was incompetent.
I'd say that you were welcome to fight another war if you happen to disagree with the way that the last one went, but to be honest we'd really you rather not.
Again, you're posing a false dichotomy. Between a voluntary union of independent states and an all powerful central government, there is a wide range of options. It is perfectly reasonable to advocate for a weaker federal government than we have right now without wanting the US to return to its original founding idea. Your idea that just because we ended up needing a little more federal power, anybody who objects to unlimited federal power should just shut up is unreasonable.
What you call "backwater" is mainstream American. It's coastal California that's way out of touch.
And mainstream America doesn't even want to tell Californians how to live, mainstream America simply wants to be left alone by Californians. It's California that keeps insisting on pushing their environmental, welfare, social justice, and immigration agenda onto the rest of the country.
That assumes that the interests of all rural states are the same, that rural states are less populous, and that states are either rural, or not.
I made no such assumption; I mentioned "rural states" because that's what the GP talked about. My point is that statements like "essentially making some people in extremely rural areas have a massively disproportionate influence on the 99% of the rest of the country" pose a false dichotomy, they take it as a given that either one kind of state dictates to the other kind of state or vice versa, with no other possibilities. In fact, people in neither state should have "massive influence" on anybody in another state; if California wants to be a left wing welfare state, Utah wants to be a theocracy, and Texas wants to be a libertarian free market state, they shouldn't be able to impose their preference on each other through the federal government. The reason why progressive and left leaning states want to use the federal government to impose their will on everybody else is because if they don't, people just run away from their uncompetitive high tax regimes. But that ought to be their problem, not anybody else's.
In practice you have single payer systems where doctors remain private but the government is the single payer (e.g. single insurer). This maintains the incentive to keep costs down.
We have that system in the US, with Medicare/Medicaid, and they are not keeping costs down: they spend more per patient than European systems and they spend more per patient than US private insurers.
The rest of your post is just common platitudes, disconnected from the reality of medical care in the US or abroad.
I live in a country with socialised medicine and, contrary to your assertion, government tries to control costs.
As I was saying: "Now, European nations are a little bit better at cost control in their socialized systems, but not a whole lot: they spend about 1/3-1/2 per capita of what the US spends. To be sure, that's a good thing: at that spending level, we could cover every American with Medicare without any new revenue or any changes to private insurers. But even European healthcare is vastly overpriced, has rapid and unsustainable growth in costs, and also delivers lower service for the lower costs."
Part of the reason European governments try to control costs is because they have to; unlike the US, they can't just print money, and the EU requires mostly balanced budgets.
Your view of the motivations of researchers is also bizzarely one dimensional.
Well, I probably know a lot more researchers than you do. Mind you, lots of researchers fool themselves and others into believing that they work for the good of humanity, but in reality, they are largely selfish.
On the other hand you seem to be advocating that people living with lots of empty land around them ought to have vastly more influence than town dwellers presumably because you live there and like having an excess of power.
You are posing a false dichotomy, namely that either California dictates to Nebraska how to live, or that Nebraska dictates to California how to live; either of those is tyrannical.
The correct answer is, in fact, that neither California nor Nebraska should have power over each other; the powers of the federal government should be limited to ensure that California and Nebraska coexist in a peaceful, well-defended union that allows free movement of people, goods, and services within the union. It's only progressive pricks that have taken this original, good idea and tried to turn it into an authoritarian central state. And the EU is, of course, doing the same thing.
(And, in fact, I live in California, but I would like California to have less power.)
California lacks effective government because it is effectively a one party state, the legislature control by a (super)majority of very liberal democrats.
Yes, though I think that's a good thing. California has become a magnet for radical leftists, progressives, wealthy bigots, and illegal aliens. While that's not so good for California, it's great for the rest of the country, which doesn't have to put up with these people.
You want to split it up into one state packed to the gills with the vast majority of the population, and two new sparsely populated fly-over states. If that's not gerrymandering, what is?
You erroneously believe that democracy automatically means majoritarianism. States and counties are supposed to represent cohesive populations with shared interests. The people of San Francisco have next to nothing in common with rural California. So in order not to steamroller over the people of rural California, the two populations should be separated.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you read what I wrote, you will notice that I used the past tense: "the US was intended as a voluntary union of states".
Do you understand what the past tense is? Do you understand the word "intend"? Do you understand the difference between "was intended" and "is currently"? Or do I need to draw you a map?
Oh, Europe is centrist alright, but it doesn't have a liberal center. European centrism is an authoritarian compromise between left-wing authoritarianism and right wing authoritarianism. Liberalism essentially doesn't exist in Europe.
I grew up and spent half my life in Europe. I know European politics pretty well, but more importantly, I know other political systems and political thought as well, and I understand the political blindness and ignorance of Europeans.
Therefore your statement that "European nations have largely the same ability to "print money" as the USA." is bullshit, since by your own description, most European nations do not, in fact, have that ability, nor do they have the freedom to borrow like the US does.
No, I believe you are. You don't even understand what kind of career advancement and selfishness we're talking about ("they could make more money working for a bank"). That's consistent with the fact that, in your own words, you are a failed researcher ("I work in a research organisation. I have worked as a researcher.") Research at academic and publicly funded institutions is cut throat and people who succeed at it are the ones who focus on their career advancement and visibility in the community above all else. Working for the good of humanity isn't going to get you tenure or a directorship.
A common misconception. In actual fact, the US has a large and strong political left. What is different about the US is that it has a strong liberal center that keeps the leftists and the theocrats in check, something is pretty much entirely missing in Europe.
Have you been living under a rock? Did you sleep through the Greek debt crisis? Are you not aware the the EU has the Euro?
No, European nations cannot print money because the Euro is outside their control. On top of that, they are required to balance their budgets.
Well, as I was saying: "lots of researchers fool themselves and others into believing that they work for the good of humanity, but in reality, they are largely selfish".
Does it? People were eager to join as long as it was about free trade, but that enthusiasm seems to have waned.
That just means that multiple service providers could offer the service; it doesn't make it a distributed service.
It was also gerrymandered up the wazoo when Democrats were in power. Gerrymandering simply strengthens whoever is currently more popular. If congressional districts were assigned rationally, Democrats wouldn't do very well anyway. The only way Democrats could do well if the US went to strict national popular majorities, but that is utterly unacceptable and incompatible with federalism.
In actual fact, liberals only make up about 17% of the US political spectrum and California is thoroughly unrepresentative of the country. The reason Republicans are so strong is because Democrats have fallen out of favor with the political center: moderates and independents.
I'm a good example of that: I used to be a registered Democrat but loathe what the Democratic party has become over the last decade. I won't vote for Democrats again until they clearly disavow people like Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Corey Booker, and Elizabeth Warren.
Apart from being a bloody mess and having a horrible UI, in what way was Google/Apache Wave even "distributed"? At least in its Google incarnation, it seemed to require centralized servers and maintenance.
The idea of a centralized service for building social networks is intrinsically defective. Social networks should be distributed, with no single point of failure or control, no single point to monetize users, and no single point to compromise privacy. What we need if we really care about privacy and individual control is some combination of web-of-trust, digital signatures, blockchain, and peer to peer networking.
Well, as you can see from the House, which does have proportional representation, they don't need "affirmative action".
And conservatives and classical liberals would do even better if Democrats weren't so profoundly corrupt and corporatist.
I'm an independent and a classical liberal.
Democracy isn't a single form of government, it simply describes all forms of government where the power somehow derives from the people. That encompasses everything from democratic socialism and fascism to minarchism and anarchism. Many forms of democratic government are corrupt, evil and destructive.
Among the many forms of democracy there are, there is only one form of democracy that I actually care for, and that is a classically liberal democracy with small government and free markets.
I certainly do want society to be more fair, which is why I help people whenever I can. What I object to is trying to use government to make society "more fair" because that is destined to fail. If you want to improve society, you need to do it through voluntary, private transactions, not through the jackboot of government.
Even if those studies meant what you think they mean, so what? Decades ago, 90% of companies wouldn't hire me because I was a homosexual. Then they wouldn't hire me because I was an immigrant. These days, 90% of Silicon Valley companies won't hire me because I'm a conservative-leaning libertarian. Many minority and women owned businesses wouldn't hire me because I'm a white male. What does it matter? Equality of opportunity doesn't mean that every private business in the world needs to treat everybody exactly the same. And using government to try to force that outcome is incredibly harmful.
And if you're concerned that racial discrimination is so massive that there is a pool of skilled people who can't get a job simply because of their skin color, then you don't need to run to lawmakers in order to fix it, you can fix that problem by yourself and make a tidy profit in the process: hire them.
Redlining wasn't banks trying to "avoid making loans to blacks". Why would greedy, money grubbing corporations do that? Banks are interested in profit only.
In fact, redlining was mandated by the National Housing Act of 1934, the FHA, and the creation of federal underwriting guidelines, based on progressive ideas about how to improve society. Now, it is true that after government-mandated redlining ended, banks still didn't want to lend to people in those neighborhoods; but that is because government policies had destroyed those neighborhoods and they were now bad lending risks.
You bet that my belief is based on politics rather than "reality": I believe that private citizens and private organizations have a fundamental right to freedom of association, regardless of the impact that exercising that right has on others.
Fortunately, it turns out that upholding freedom of association also tends to lead to the best outcomes for minorities. The ills people like you attribute to private freedom of association are, in fact, the result of government interference in freedom of association. Your erroneous history of redlining illustrates your confusion again.
That's a false dichotomy. The states only need to be subordinate to the federal government in a few areas: external borders, military defense, freedom of trade within the US, and freedom of movement within the US. That's all we need to have a "United States".
Yes, that's the usual story people like to tell: Southern states implemented slavery and kept it up until the federal government finally stepped in, overrode the states, and took control.
Trouble is, it's completely wrong. Slavery only continued to exist after independence because the federal government protected it, among other things, through the fugitive slave acts. If we had lived up to our original principles, slavery would have collapsed on its own without any civil war. A bloody Civil War wasn't even necessary, given how much stronger the North was than the South; the reason it was so protracted and bloody is because Lincoln was incompetent.
Again, you're posing a false dichotomy. Between a voluntary union of independent states and an all powerful central government, there is a wide range of options. It is perfectly reasonable to advocate for a weaker federal government than we have right now without wanting the US to return to its original founding idea. Your idea that just because we ended up needing a little more federal power, anybody who objects to unlimited federal power should just shut up is unreasonable.
Yes, a strictly limited federal government, intended to preserve freedom of movement and trade within the US, and to defend the US against foreigners.
It wasn't supposed to create a progressive welfare state with a strong nationalist streak.
What you call "backwater" is mainstream American. It's coastal California that's way out of touch.
And mainstream America doesn't even want to tell Californians how to live, mainstream America simply wants to be left alone by Californians. It's California that keeps insisting on pushing their environmental, welfare, social justice, and immigration agenda onto the rest of the country.
I made no such assumption; I mentioned "rural states" because that's what the GP talked about. My point is that statements like "essentially making some people in extremely rural areas have a massively disproportionate influence on the 99% of the rest of the country" pose a false dichotomy, they take it as a given that either one kind of state dictates to the other kind of state or vice versa, with no other possibilities. In fact, people in neither state should have "massive influence" on anybody in another state; if California wants to be a left wing welfare state, Utah wants to be a theocracy, and Texas wants to be a libertarian free market state, they shouldn't be able to impose their preference on each other through the federal government. The reason why progressive and left leaning states want to use the federal government to impose their will on everybody else is because if they don't, people just run away from their uncompetitive high tax regimes. But that ought to be their problem, not anybody else's.
We have that system in the US, with Medicare/Medicaid, and they are not keeping costs down: they spend more per patient than European systems and they spend more per patient than US private insurers.
The rest of your post is just common platitudes, disconnected from the reality of medical care in the US or abroad.
As I was saying: "Now, European nations are a little bit better at cost control in their socialized systems, but not a whole lot: they spend about 1/3-1/2 per capita of what the US spends. To be sure, that's a good thing: at that spending level, we could cover every American with Medicare without any new revenue or any changes to private insurers. But even European healthcare is vastly overpriced, has rapid and unsustainable growth in costs, and also delivers lower service for the lower costs."
Part of the reason European governments try to control costs is because they have to; unlike the US, they can't just print money, and the EU requires mostly balanced budgets.
Well, I probably know a lot more researchers than you do. Mind you, lots of researchers fool themselves and others into believing that they work for the good of humanity, but in reality, they are largely selfish.
You are posing a false dichotomy, namely that either California dictates to Nebraska how to live, or that Nebraska dictates to California how to live; either of those is tyrannical.
The correct answer is, in fact, that neither California nor Nebraska should have power over each other; the powers of the federal government should be limited to ensure that California and Nebraska coexist in a peaceful, well-defended union that allows free movement of people, goods, and services within the union. It's only progressive pricks that have taken this original, good idea and tried to turn it into an authoritarian central state. And the EU is, of course, doing the same thing.
(And, in fact, I live in California, but I would like California to have less power.)
Yes, though I think that's a good thing. California has become a magnet for radical leftists, progressives, wealthy bigots, and illegal aliens. While that's not so good for California, it's great for the rest of the country, which doesn't have to put up with these people.
Sure! In the same way Bernie Madoff ran a money-making hedge fund!
You erroneously believe that democracy automatically means majoritarianism. States and counties are supposed to represent cohesive populations with shared interests. The people of San Francisco have next to nothing in common with rural California. So in order not to steamroller over the people of rural California, the two populations should be separated.
You mean the money for military bases, Indian reservations, bloated government healthcare, and inefficient educational systems? I'd say they thrive.
Receiving federal funds isn't a benefit, it's a liabilitiy.