No. We cannot have our cake and eat it too. We cannot have unprotected, open borders for decades, and then expect to identify and track foreign internal threats AND not provide the USGOV the means to detect and surveil. We cannot assume that because we're an HN regular who thinks power corrupts (it certainly does) the cost of that corruption is greater than what we pay if/when a foreign adversary acts against the US.…
Fun fact, "open borders" is a complete myth.
Complete myth is a stretch isn't it? "closed border" doesn't pass the sniff test either.
what are some recent examples of governments giving up power?
> what are some recent examples of governments giving up power? We have a whole category for it in the US and one of the two major parties devoted to it: Deregulation.
Boy, they got you good! There's no such thing as "deregulation." There's only rearranging regulation to protect the incumbents against competitors which would try to arise in an actual capitalistic system.
The amount of written law in the US gov has grown exponentially since the 1970s. https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20190903_R43056_5083d3b... The only time it slowed has been during brief gov shutdowns. As this report explains this includes plenty of non rules and administrative stuff and does count repeals but anyone who has followed Congress knows that the bulk of those bills is new spending and new rules impose…
I absolutely agree that the U.S. government has gotten more powerful since WWII almost monotonously. The times of honest reduction were in the 1990s and, potentially, now. That said, I would be careful about conflating the volume of rules and staffing with power. The bureaucratic imperative will drive a bureaucracy to expand. But it also does that to others, the net effect being a lot of intragovernmental arguing tha…
what are rules, but merely (legal) attempts to make the rule-maker more powerful ?
It's a real shame. Legislating isn't a full-time job naturally, but we've made it so by turning it into one of the most lucrative careers. We judge congress perversely by output of new laws.
Most legislative action happens at the state and local level where it’s not particularly lucrative. If anything we should probably make it more lucrative so that the already well off aren’t the only ones who can afford to do it.
Even federal legislative service isn't lucrative.
Biden made the bulk of his wealth only after being vice president and writing books / speaking. And he was a senator for multiple decades!
And before someone points out the "ancillary" financial benefits to being a legislator: (a) most of those are illegal if discovered & (b) typically the big money is made after retiring or losing office, by leveraging connections.
Sure, the disagreement stems from one’s presumption of what “minimal” means.
Minimal is defined in the Constitution. It explicitly says we give the federal government limited powers and no more.
It defines a proscribed set of powers but doesn't say the use of those must be minimized. On top of all of that all the powers currently used have either been ruled constitutional, are untested extensions of tested uses of powers, or haven't been challenged/are currently being challenged, we can all have our own opinions about what the Constitution does and doesn't allow but within the system defined the only opinion that directly matters is the Supreme Court's. Everyone else's only gets filtered through their selection and ... optional shall we say extra-constitutional means?
Ultimately my stance is the founders weren't perfect, their creation isn't some mystical perfect system handed down from on high [0] so we shouldn't weld ourselves into some imaginary form of what precisely they would or wouldn't want. They're dead it's our country now we have to live with it in a world they couldn't even imagine. Even the groups that do try to lay claim to the founders original vision are cherry picking their favorite version of the founders and their ideas.
[0] Remember their first try at it, the Articles of Confederation fell apart in 4 years and the Constitution was a broad overreach of the mandate that the convention was even convened for.
> it's not wrong to say governments (or any other large org really) rarely give up power It’s incredibly wrong to say this. More modern states fail due to gridlock and fragility than violent coercion. Individual actors rarely give up power without coercion. That doesn’t mean the system as a whole doesn’t ebb and flow as interests diverge and align.
Why are you LARPing based on first principles? Just give examples: * Trump's First Step Act. E.g., title III-- can no longer use restraints on prisoners during pregnancy-- and IV-- reducing mandatory minimums for drug felony convictions * Trump's Affordable Clean Energy rule which removed caps on emissions * Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act back in 1999 * Carter's Airline Deregulation Act back in the late 7…
The Patriot Act (2001), The Homeland Security Act (2002), The Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) (2002), The National Defense Authorization Act, The Affordable Care Act (2010),The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) (2015), The Real ID Act (2005),The USA Freedom Act (2015), The Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (2021), The Economic Stabilization Act (2008), The Executive Order on Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (2013), The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (1978), The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) (1994), The Bank Secrecy Act (1970), The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002), The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008), The Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis (2021), The Executive Order on Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (2013)
I was expecting to find that federal employment has grown faster than the US population, but it looks like that's not the case. Since 2000, the federal workforce seems to have grown about 14%, while the overall population increased by about 20%.
If you go back further it’s even more stark - there are 5% fewer Federal employees than there were when Clinton took office, overall population is up 30% and real GDP is up like 120%: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1cCLR
I wouldn’t imagine a government needs to scale proportionally to the population much like a business shouldn’t need to scale proportionally to its customer base. Most businesses should be able to handle twice as many customers with fewer than twice as many employees.