There are more urbanites than farmers. The numbers game plays out against the farmers. Besides, it was determined a century ago than enough automatic weapons in the hands of even a poorly trained army can take out even the best crack shots with a rifle.
The smart farmer, in this nightmare scenario, would be smarter off bringing a lot of these indentured workers in and forming a feudal style agrarian system. The farmer gets an army and the needed labor, the ex-urbanites get at least one square meal a day, and believe me botht he farmer and the ex-urbanite peasants will need it, because once fuel supplies run out, everyone is going to find out really fast just how labor intensive working the land can be when you don't have tractors and combines any more.
My grandparents and my oldest aunts (all in their late 70s now) picked blue berries by the ton for cash during the Depression, and when no work could be found, it was a garden, trade and my grandfather's rifle that kept the family going. My grandfather, his brother and his male in-laws all had trap lines to earn cash. This was in eastern British Columbia. They actually felt themselves quite lucky at that, and heard tough stories from their own kin in the Dakotas (my grandfather's parents actually rode a wagon train from the Dakotas into Alberta, and then his father moved the family across the Rockies a few years later).
While I remember my grandparents telling some fond stories of the times, mainly because the only way folks survived was to stick together, but they also said times were very tough, and families in the area were quite often only a meal or two from starvation, and any kind of disaster; a house fire or even a barn fire, was enough to see families go under. Children given to relatives while parents went looking for what work they could find.
Maybe not as many people starved in North America as some places, but a lot of people came damned close to it, far closer I think than most of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren realize.
That is until AGW shifts the grain belt northward, and Canada starts charging extortionate rates for Northwest Territory's grain crops. Don't worry, though. Canada will be able to build a nice big border fence to keep all those filthy American migrant workers from flooding across the border. Minute Men, meet the Empire Loyalists!
I'm curious as to how you, as a Libertarian, can justify the Sherman Act at all. After all, isn't the Unseen Hand Of the Unregulated Free Market (praised be its name from on high, copyrighted, trademarked and patented by The Tea Party Committee To Make Ron Paul God King) should make artificial and unwanted regulation of the market unnecessary, right?
And how exactly do you propose to create this rising tide? By cutting taxes to the wealthy, and somehow, out of a sense of honor and obligation, they will gladly replace the lost government funds that go into education, work programs, etc.? And how would this help anyone on welfare when the causes of a recession are external such as, I dunno, the meltdown of a major currency over which the United States has absolutely no control whatsoever?
You don't have a model. You have an ideological religion, and one that would prove quickly intolerable to the majority of society. Governments since Rome, and probably long before, figured out that if you don't keep the masses fed, at the very least you create massive social, and ultimately political instability. Hence the "bread" in "bread and circuses". Yes, it cost the Roman treasury plenty of coin, much of that gained from taxes, but the alternative was riots and social disorder, which were much more costly.
You don't prefer simplicity, you prefer magical Libertarian invocations. Back in the real world, real people, often through no fault of their own, face crises of an existential nature; whether it is health woes, long-term unemployment or underemployment, natural and man-made disasters. I would like you to go to them and prattle at them about how cutting them off at the knees will make the walk tall.
While I'm sure brains can be useful in gaining wealth, I don't think they are necessary. Inherited wealth, for instance, doesn't require a brain at all, and a thousand Einstein's could live and die never having achieved their potential because the resources were unavailable to sufficiently educate them.
I'm sure all those little lordlings hanging around the court of Louis XVI thought themselves quite clever for living a life of privilege while the peasants, scullery maids and all the other lesser classes lived in or near poverty. That is until Madame Guillotine rid them of those misconceptions... and everything else.
I think a wise man does not brag that he is rich, and a fool does, and if it ever came to food shortages, a fool will lose his head significantly faster than a wise man.
Libertarians have about as much interest in history as they do in economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, or pretty much any other body of knowledge. Their's is an imaginary utopia where temples are raised to the Unseen Hand Of The Unregulated Free Market, and the rich are free to enjoy their wealth unfettered by any necessity beyond purely voluntary noblesse oblige and the poor have won the freedom to starve without the horrible fear of the evils of state intervention to prevent their downward spiral, and the working classes are free to pick the master that they shall be wage slaves to, or if they choose, to join the poor and fight for the kindly alms of the rich.
So your defense is that "many (unnamed) people agree with me." And you call me a douche bag. China's fortunes are tied to the United States' fortunes, and you are some some sort of halfwit if you think many Americans live at the subsistence levels found in parts of rural China.
But, for all of China's effort (and China didn't just start in the last few decades being a major exporter, it was probably the world's largest export nation a couple of centuries ago), large portions of the population, perhaps as much as half, still live in somewhat dire circumstances in rural China. In fact, it is a monumental social problem for China that the benefits of the economic boom are visited upon its people in unequal fashion, and there is considerable anger in rural populations over this. China is hardly in a position where it can declare rural poverty a thing of the past, and it is ludicrous to say that India isn't increasing its industrial capacity.
The harsh reality is that you are right. India is an emerging economy with the second largest labor force on the planet. If they concentrate every nickel they can beg, borrow, steal or earn into poverty, maybe, in a few decades, they might pull it off, but then they will be many decades behind the Russians, Chinese, Americans, Europeans and Brazilians, and in the long term they will suffer for it. In the short term, it is a gamble that means tens of millions remain in abject poverty. In the long term, it means being a space power, with full access to orbit, the Moon and beyond.
The fact is that history is full of sad tales of great nations left behind. China was probably the wealthiest most powerful nation on Earth in the 14th and 15th centuries. Blessed with some of the most fertile territory on Earth, a high population, a long tradition of civil government that had even managed to survive invasions and civil war, it could have become a major mercantile power, and by the time the Europeans reached East Asia in force, they would have been faced with a potent power standing in their way. Instead of leaping ahead, it withdraw, and let the Western Powers walk all over it. Even the upstart Japanese, once they figured out where the world was headed, leaped ahead of them to become probably the fastest agrarian to industrialized state in just over half a century, soon enough to be able to sit at the table with the big boys during the Unequal Treaties and even kick the crap out of the Russians.
I think countries like India and Brazil ponder the Japanese model of industrialization, and realize therein lies the formula to, in a few decades, to sit at the table with the big boys. Does it mean that many will live in poverty in the meantime. Sadly yes. Resources, no matter what monetary and economic scoring system you choose, are finite. But clearly they realize, as the Chinese have, that they are decades behind the major space powers, and there will come a time, maybe a century, maybe longer, when being able to access resources in space is going to be monumentally important, and they have a choice to either be one of the "Space Powers" or end up being client states.
The 12th, 17th, 24th and 26th amendments all changed some substantial electoral issue at the national level. Most certainly I'm not saying moving to proportional representation is likely, but it isn't quite as a hard as you say.
The chief problem comes in dealing with disputed elections. If a machine-based system (and it's useful here to point out that automatically tallying machines have been around for well over a hundred years) leads to a very close result, but there is no paper record/receipt kept, you end up with no backup mechanism (ie. a manual recount). That is ultimately the issue with the Diebold machines and the like. It wasn't that you had machine-tallying, which as I said has been around in one form or another for a very long time, but rather the machines were badly designed with opaque software that made understanding the underlying mechanisms very difficult.
Frankly, I don't think any mechanized or electronic voting system should ever be put into the field if the full source code and design specs of each machine is freely available for scrutiny and where a backup paper record is immediately available, or where, in the case that the printing functionality screws up (ie. paper jam) that the machine does not automatically shut itself down.
The reasoning, as is so often pointed out, is that an election must not merely be fair, but it must be seen to be fair. Entering your vote into a black box and then having that black box puke out the results, with little or no knowledge of how the data is stored, how the results are calculated and no backup means to count the votes in the case of questions of the black box's veracity, may in fact produce a fair election, but no one can ever say that it has been seen to do so.
Why not just a transferable vote system, which is essentially an elimination vote system without the need of a second or third ballot to decide the winner.
Oddly enough, mathematicians have spent well over a century now coming up with voting systems that deal with the kinds of situations brought up here, but the larger political parties in most FPTP jurisdictions want to retain their dominance, and do not want to mess with some of the more notoriously anomalous results that come from FPTP (or, more to the point, rely on such anomalies).
I remember reading a Scientific American article on the topic about thirteen or fourteen years ago that did a nice job of going over the different kinds of proportional voting systems and how they could be applied in the United States and the UK. The final summation was that there was no such thing as an absolutely fair voting system, but if you were looking for a more deeply flawed, unfair and ultimately disenfranchising voting system, it would be hard to get past just how bad the FPTP system. In three way races like there were in the last Canadian Federal election, you are often looking at almost 2/3s of the votes in a riding basically being tossed out the window, because all that counts is a pure mathematical plurality. If there 100 votes, red and white got 33 votes and blue 34, red and white's voters might as well have not even showed up.
The only defense I've ever seen of the FPTP system that makes sense is that it tends towards more stable legislatures because only the major parties have any hope of getting the number of representatives wearing their jersey to dominate it. Whether that is in Congress or Westminster or Ottawa, this is exactly what the entrenched political class wants; a system that may change the color of the government from red to blue or vice versa, but will give the odds of white, orange or yellow little chance of ever getting high enough numbers to interfere with the "approved" poles of power.
But when you consider that in a two way race, 49.9% of voters wasted their time going to the polls, it's hard to see how the stability argument can possibly override the disenfranchisement argument. In the United States, it makes even less sense than in a pure Westminster country like Canada or Britain. In the US you have a strong executive with an independent veto of legislation (unlike Westminster, where the weak executive of either a monarch or largely ceremonial elected head of state has stripped all but the pretenses of a theoretical veto power), so even with some sort of proportional representative voting system for Congress, a President could still moderate even the worst fringe party, and with far less likelihood that on a fringe matter that Congress could gather the necessary 2/3s of the vote to override it.
It strikes me that the US's division of powers is so refined that it literally begs for a different voting system, whereas too pure a proportional voting system in a country like Israel in fact allows small parties to punch far above their weight, to the point where they become obstacles to democratic will, rather than agents of it.
School boards in BC may be democratically elected, but they are creatures of legislation. The only independent legislature is one whose existence cannot be legislated away (ie. the English Parliament and all its descendants in Britain and the Commonwealth).
Long election campaigns are a side effect of fixed election dates. Here in BC, now that we have fixed four year terms (May of every fourth year) for the legislature, campaigns now start in truth months before the actual vote. I'd say the last election in 2009 started in earnest right after New Years, but there was no lack of pre-election "buzz" even before Christmas. You have to weigh that against the traditional Westminster power of the Government being able to time an election to their advantage.
Not that maintaining the power to dismiss a legislature at the Executive's will always plays for the incumbent. There are no lack of incumbent governments who have gone to the polls early and have ended up losing.
Here in British Columbia we have had two referendums in the past decade done by mail-in ballot. The results obviously take longer to tally because the time frame for mailing out the ballots, time for voters to make their choice and time to get the ballots mailed back and then counted. As I recall, the last referendum, on the HST tax, took a month or so all around for the results to be known.
Then how do you explain that virtually every poster on this topic who is from a country where paper ballots are used is telling you that they have reasonably reliable results within two to three hours of polls closing? I suspect it is because you do not have people counting the ballots. The secret of a successful paper counting system is to have a lot of polling stations, each one that might only count a few hundred ballots. This also means you do not get the kind of fatigue one would expect from a manual count where only a few people are counting thousands or tens of thousands of ballots.
In other words, I think your manual counting system is being overwhelmed.
I can't think of an election here in Canada where the final results are not known within 2 to 3 hours. The last election had a few more close races, so I think it was around 11pm Pacific that the various media outlets were calling the election.
Americans have been fed a lot of pure horseshit about manual voting, and yet I hear of no actual evidence of any of the major Western countries that use it where there is any evidence of any kind of mass screw ups or fraud.
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There are more urbanites than farmers. The numbers game plays out against the farmers. Besides, it was determined a century ago than enough automatic weapons in the hands of even a poorly trained army can take out even the best crack shots with a rifle.
The smart farmer, in this nightmare scenario, would be smarter off bringing a lot of these indentured workers in and forming a feudal style agrarian system. The farmer gets an army and the needed labor, the ex-urbanites get at least one square meal a day, and believe me botht he farmer and the ex-urbanite peasants will need it, because once fuel supplies run out, everyone is going to find out really fast just how labor intensive working the land can be when you don't have tractors and combines any more.
And here we go, the Ron Paulites with their mod points come to mod me down.
Other than the bit about the Temple, I defy you Ron Paulites with mod points to tell me where my description of your Libertarian paradise is wrong.
Yes, because sooner or later even they will run out of bullets and fuel.
My grandparents and my oldest aunts (all in their late 70s now) picked blue berries by the ton for cash during the Depression, and when no work could be found, it was a garden, trade and my grandfather's rifle that kept the family going. My grandfather, his brother and his male in-laws all had trap lines to earn cash. This was in eastern British Columbia. They actually felt themselves quite lucky at that, and heard tough stories from their own kin in the Dakotas (my grandfather's parents actually rode a wagon train from the Dakotas into Alberta, and then his father moved the family across the Rockies a few years later).
While I remember my grandparents telling some fond stories of the times, mainly because the only way folks survived was to stick together, but they also said times were very tough, and families in the area were quite often only a meal or two from starvation, and any kind of disaster; a house fire or even a barn fire, was enough to see families go under. Children given to relatives while parents went looking for what work they could find.
Maybe not as many people starved in North America as some places, but a lot of people came damned close to it, far closer I think than most of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren realize.
That is until AGW shifts the grain belt northward, and Canada starts charging extortionate rates for Northwest Territory's grain crops. Don't worry, though. Canada will be able to build a nice big border fence to keep all those filthy American migrant workers from flooding across the border. Minute Men, meet the Empire Loyalists!
I'm curious as to how you, as a Libertarian, can justify the Sherman Act at all. After all, isn't the Unseen Hand Of the Unregulated Free Market (praised be its name from on high, copyrighted, trademarked and patented by The Tea Party Committee To Make Ron Paul God King) should make artificial and unwanted regulation of the market unnecessary, right?
And how exactly do you propose to create this rising tide? By cutting taxes to the wealthy, and somehow, out of a sense of honor and obligation, they will gladly replace the lost government funds that go into education, work programs, etc.? And how would this help anyone on welfare when the causes of a recession are external such as, I dunno, the meltdown of a major currency over which the United States has absolutely no control whatsoever?
You don't have a model. You have an ideological religion, and one that would prove quickly intolerable to the majority of society. Governments since Rome, and probably long before, figured out that if you don't keep the masses fed, at the very least you create massive social, and ultimately political instability. Hence the "bread" in "bread and circuses". Yes, it cost the Roman treasury plenty of coin, much of that gained from taxes, but the alternative was riots and social disorder, which were much more costly.
You don't prefer simplicity, you prefer magical Libertarian invocations. Back in the real world, real people, often through no fault of their own, face crises of an existential nature; whether it is health woes, long-term unemployment or underemployment, natural and man-made disasters. I would like you to go to them and prattle at them about how cutting them off at the knees will make the walk tall.
While I'm sure brains can be useful in gaining wealth, I don't think they are necessary. Inherited wealth, for instance, doesn't require a brain at all, and a thousand Einstein's could live and die never having achieved their potential because the resources were unavailable to sufficiently educate them.
I'm sure all those little lordlings hanging around the court of Louis XVI thought themselves quite clever for living a life of privilege while the peasants, scullery maids and all the other lesser classes lived in or near poverty. That is until Madame Guillotine rid them of those misconceptions... and everything else.
I think a wise man does not brag that he is rich, and a fool does, and if it ever came to food shortages, a fool will lose his head significantly faster than a wise man.
No kidding. Quit ascribing Mitt Romney's statements to poor maligned Marie Antoinette.
95% of Canada, eh? And just what sort of crops does one grow in tundra?
Libertarians have about as much interest in history as they do in economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, or pretty much any other body of knowledge. Their's is an imaginary utopia where temples are raised to the Unseen Hand Of The Unregulated Free Market, and the rich are free to enjoy their wealth unfettered by any necessity beyond purely voluntary noblesse oblige and the poor have won the freedom to starve without the horrible fear of the evils of state intervention to prevent their downward spiral, and the working classes are free to pick the master that they shall be wage slaves to, or if they choose, to join the poor and fight for the kindly alms of the rich.
So your defense is that "many (unnamed) people agree with me." And you call me a douche bag. China's fortunes are tied to the United States' fortunes, and you are some some sort of halfwit if you think many Americans live at the subsistence levels found in parts of rural China.
But, for all of China's effort (and China didn't just start in the last few decades being a major exporter, it was probably the world's largest export nation a couple of centuries ago), large portions of the population, perhaps as much as half, still live in somewhat dire circumstances in rural China. In fact, it is a monumental social problem for China that the benefits of the economic boom are visited upon its people in unequal fashion, and there is considerable anger in rural populations over this. China is hardly in a position where it can declare rural poverty a thing of the past, and it is ludicrous to say that India isn't increasing its industrial capacity.
Because if you buy it off of foreign companies, you are ultimately beholden to foreign governments.
The harsh reality is that you are right. India is an emerging economy with the second largest labor force on the planet. If they concentrate every nickel they can beg, borrow, steal or earn into poverty, maybe, in a few decades, they might pull it off, but then they will be many decades behind the Russians, Chinese, Americans, Europeans and Brazilians, and in the long term they will suffer for it. In the short term, it is a gamble that means tens of millions remain in abject poverty. In the long term, it means being a space power, with full access to orbit, the Moon and beyond.
The fact is that history is full of sad tales of great nations left behind. China was probably the wealthiest most powerful nation on Earth in the 14th and 15th centuries. Blessed with some of the most fertile territory on Earth, a high population, a long tradition of civil government that had even managed to survive invasions and civil war, it could have become a major mercantile power, and by the time the Europeans reached East Asia in force, they would have been faced with a potent power standing in their way. Instead of leaping ahead, it withdraw, and let the Western Powers walk all over it. Even the upstart Japanese, once they figured out where the world was headed, leaped ahead of them to become probably the fastest agrarian to industrialized state in just over half a century, soon enough to be able to sit at the table with the big boys during the Unequal Treaties and even kick the crap out of the Russians.
I think countries like India and Brazil ponder the Japanese model of industrialization, and realize therein lies the formula to, in a few decades, to sit at the table with the big boys. Does it mean that many will live in poverty in the meantime. Sadly yes. Resources, no matter what monetary and economic scoring system you choose, are finite. But clearly they realize, as the Chinese have, that they are decades behind the major space powers, and there will come a time, maybe a century, maybe longer, when being able to access resources in space is going to be monumentally important, and they have a choice to either be one of the "Space Powers" or end up being client states.
Except no one really believes the MB is in charge.
The 12th, 17th, 24th and 26th amendments all changed some substantial electoral issue at the national level. Most certainly I'm not saying moving to proportional representation is likely, but it isn't quite as a hard as you say.
The chief problem comes in dealing with disputed elections. If a machine-based system (and it's useful here to point out that automatically tallying machines have been around for well over a hundred years) leads to a very close result, but there is no paper record/receipt kept, you end up with no backup mechanism (ie. a manual recount). That is ultimately the issue with the Diebold machines and the like. It wasn't that you had machine-tallying, which as I said has been around in one form or another for a very long time, but rather the machines were badly designed with opaque software that made understanding the underlying mechanisms very difficult.
Frankly, I don't think any mechanized or electronic voting system should ever be put into the field if the full source code and design specs of each machine is freely available for scrutiny and where a backup paper record is immediately available, or where, in the case that the printing functionality screws up (ie. paper jam) that the machine does not automatically shut itself down.
The reasoning, as is so often pointed out, is that an election must not merely be fair, but it must be seen to be fair. Entering your vote into a black box and then having that black box puke out the results, with little or no knowledge of how the data is stored, how the results are calculated and no backup means to count the votes in the case of questions of the black box's veracity, may in fact produce a fair election, but no one can ever say that it has been seen to do so.
Why not just move to a transferable vote system, which can deal with such situations?
Why not just a transferable vote system, which is essentially an elimination vote system without the need of a second or third ballot to decide the winner.
Oddly enough, mathematicians have spent well over a century now coming up with voting systems that deal with the kinds of situations brought up here, but the larger political parties in most FPTP jurisdictions want to retain their dominance, and do not want to mess with some of the more notoriously anomalous results that come from FPTP (or, more to the point, rely on such anomalies).
I remember reading a Scientific American article on the topic about thirteen or fourteen years ago that did a nice job of going over the different kinds of proportional voting systems and how they could be applied in the United States and the UK. The final summation was that there was no such thing as an absolutely fair voting system, but if you were looking for a more deeply flawed, unfair and ultimately disenfranchising voting system, it would be hard to get past just how bad the FPTP system. In three way races like there were in the last Canadian Federal election, you are often looking at almost 2/3s of the votes in a riding basically being tossed out the window, because all that counts is a pure mathematical plurality. If there 100 votes, red and white got 33 votes and blue 34, red and white's voters might as well have not even showed up.
The only defense I've ever seen of the FPTP system that makes sense is that it tends towards more stable legislatures because only the major parties have any hope of getting the number of representatives wearing their jersey to dominate it. Whether that is in Congress or Westminster or Ottawa, this is exactly what the entrenched political class wants; a system that may change the color of the government from red to blue or vice versa, but will give the odds of white, orange or yellow little chance of ever getting high enough numbers to interfere with the "approved" poles of power.
But when you consider that in a two way race, 49.9% of voters wasted their time going to the polls, it's hard to see how the stability argument can possibly override the disenfranchisement argument. In the United States, it makes even less sense than in a pure Westminster country like Canada or Britain. In the US you have a strong executive with an independent veto of legislation (unlike Westminster, where the weak executive of either a monarch or largely ceremonial elected head of state has stripped all but the pretenses of a theoretical veto power), so even with some sort of proportional representative voting system for Congress, a President could still moderate even the worst fringe party, and with far less likelihood that on a fringe matter that Congress could gather the necessary 2/3s of the vote to override it.
It strikes me that the US's division of powers is so refined that it literally begs for a different voting system, whereas too pure a proportional voting system in a country like Israel in fact allows small parties to punch far above their weight, to the point where they become obstacles to democratic will, rather than agents of it.
School boards in BC may be democratically elected, but they are creatures of legislation. The only independent legislature is one whose existence cannot be legislated away (ie. the English Parliament and all its descendants in Britain and the Commonwealth).
Long election campaigns are a side effect of fixed election dates. Here in BC, now that we have fixed four year terms (May of every fourth year) for the legislature, campaigns now start in truth months before the actual vote. I'd say the last election in 2009 started in earnest right after New Years, but there was no lack of pre-election "buzz" even before Christmas. You have to weigh that against the traditional Westminster power of the Government being able to time an election to their advantage.
Not that maintaining the power to dismiss a legislature at the Executive's will always plays for the incumbent. There are no lack of incumbent governments who have gone to the polls early and have ended up losing.
Here in British Columbia we have had two referendums in the past decade done by mail-in ballot. The results obviously take longer to tally because the time frame for mailing out the ballots, time for voters to make their choice and time to get the ballots mailed back and then counted. As I recall, the last referendum, on the HST tax, took a month or so all around for the results to be known.
Then how do you explain that virtually every poster on this topic who is from a country where paper ballots are used is telling you that they have reasonably reliable results within two to three hours of polls closing? I suspect it is because you do not have people counting the ballots. The secret of a successful paper counting system is to have a lot of polling stations, each one that might only count a few hundred ballots. This also means you do not get the kind of fatigue one would expect from a manual count where only a few people are counting thousands or tens of thousands of ballots.
In other words, I think your manual counting system is being overwhelmed.
I can't think of an election here in Canada where the final results are not known within 2 to 3 hours. The last election had a few more close races, so I think it was around 11pm Pacific that the various media outlets were calling the election.
Americans have been fed a lot of pure horseshit about manual voting, and yet I hear of no actual evidence of any of the major Western countries that use it where there is any evidence of any kind of mass screw ups or fraud.