151–160 of 367 posts
Finally, after a couple of plane crashes, fantastic investigative journalism, and a door blowing off mid flight (thankfully that was caught on video and shared). Too little, too late. We should regulate the regulators, bc I don't trust them either.
As an aside, For all those who talk about corruption and getting money out of politics I suggest reading Federalist 10 by Madison. Its a deep analysis of a need for a republican democracy. Any government that depends on human virtuousness will fail. The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances and putting multiple factions with different interests against one another.
> The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances I don't think this viewpoint can be supported empirically. The US government has much stronger checks and balances than most parliamentary systems where the prime minister is elected by the parliament. This means that there's no split possible between the executive and legislative branch. I think the result of this in the US is that…
I agree that the the Supreme Court is more important because of the inability of Congress to pass regular legislation.
However I don't think the root cause is "checks and balances". I think the root cause is the (unconstitutional) Senate filibuster. This prevents parties who control both Houses of Congress and the Presidency from passing laws. It is often the case that this happens (2016-18 for Republicans; 2020-22 for Democrats) and in those periods it should be possible to pass many laws and thus diminish the role of the Supreme Court. But the filibuster prevents this.
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> Its a deep analysis of a need for a republican democracy. > The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances this is a very US centric view constitutional monarchies seem to work as well, if not better by the various democracy/stability indicies > Any government that depends on human virtuousness will fail. the near term survival of the current US system certainly looks far from c…
Aren't most modern constitutional monarchies just a veneer over a republican democracy anyways? The monarch wields no real power -- even if on paper they may still retain a great deal. The US system is notoriously bad to get working and really seems to only work for the US. Anywhere else we have tried it has ended with some kind of failure. However, it's reasonable to call the parliamentary systems like the UK republ…
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> Any government that depends on human virtuousness will fail. The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances and putting multiple factions with different interests against one another. Absolutely! Any form of government that depends on an unbroken line of "good people" in power will fail, and fail much sooner than anybody thinks. Modern China has already reached the end of their…
> And government should only have as much power as you think the worst possible people in charge should have. This immediately falls apart, by that logic we should literally have no government or society to speak of. "Only as much power as you think the worst possible person should have" would mean literally no power - there isn't a single decision in my life I would pass off to the worst person I could think of. Wha…
I don't think society is dependent on government.
> would mean literally no power
Literally no power ensconced in the hands of a _single individual_, I think was the point.
What other industry is allowed to inspect itself? It completely ruins the point of an inspection. It's like being the judge and jury in your own trial. I'm amazed this is a thing in the first place.
What is the point of an inspection?
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>The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances and putting multiple factions with different interests against one another Completely American myopic POV. Stable, healthy democracies that are unicameral parliamentary systems include Norway, New Zealand, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Lithuania, Portugal, and Sweden. (Most of those countries don't have strong judicial review e…
Look at all those nations you listed that are very homogeneous. I want a nation with significant culture tradition differences listed that is like that. American exceptionalist is mostly BS but we do have some ways that we are very unique as a nation and that is how many different kinds of major cultures we have hanging out in US. People handwave the US as all the same but that is very much not the case. Even for as…
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> Any government that depends on human virtuousness will fail. The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances and putting multiple factions with different interests against one another. Absolutely! Any form of government that depends on an unbroken line of "good people" in power will fail, and fail much sooner than anybody thinks. Modern China has already reached the end of their…
> And government should only have as much power as you think the worst possible people in charge should have The problem is the worst people NOT IN GOVERNMENT already have more power than that, and can thus easily crush such a government and turn it into a de facto oligarchy.
Which company or individual has nuclear weapons? Could send you to war like Russia in Ukraine to die? Could print as much money as they want. Can raise arbitrary taxes and people have to pay or you just incarcerate them. Can send you to prison. Spy everything you do by force.
Governments can kill you, rob you, kidnap you, spy you, without consequences.
I don't know any individual or company with as much power as Governments have.
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> Any government that depends on human virtuousness will fail. The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances and putting multiple factions with different interests against one another. Absolutely! Any form of government that depends on an unbroken line of "good people" in power will fail, and fail much sooner than anybody thinks. Modern China has already reached the end of their…
> And government should only have as much power as you think the worst possible people in charge should have. This immediately falls apart, by that logic we should literally have no government or society to speak of. "Only as much power as you think the worst possible person should have" would mean literally no power - there isn't a single decision in my life I would pass off to the worst person I could think of. Wha…
Not at all.
Suppose the worst possible person is in the prosecutor's office. They get to decide who to prosecute. But they can't just file false charges against someone and throw away the key, they have to prove it in court with evidence and convince a jury of the defendant's peers. Moreover, we could prohibit prosecutorial misconduct and set up an independent agency for investigating and punishing it. And we could require vague laws to be construed in the defendant's favor and strike down excessively broad ones as unconstitutional.
It's possible for these checks and balances to fail -- there is some evidence that they have -- but in principle we could have stricter ones that work better. And if they work as intended, it doesn't matter how bad the prosecutor is, they don't have the power to cause harm, and they themselves are punished if they try to exceed the limits of their power.
But if they just do their job, i.e. investigate crimes and prosecute the offenders, they do have the power to do that.
And so it is with any other office in the government.
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Inspecting planes does require a lot of skill and knowledge. But one doesn't need deep expertise to detect loose bolts. My experience is that when quality breaks down, the effects are visible at multiple scales and multiple places. Who knows what else is non-compliant in the 737 MAX assembly line (surely this is why the FAA announced an audit). Loose bolts happen because multiple layers of protection were bypassed. h…
> But one doesn't need deep expertise to detect loose bolts. Oh yeah you do. Because some bolts should be lose and some shouldn't be. They would be studded or welded together if you never wanted to loosen it, after all.
As an aside, For all those who talk about corruption and getting money out of politics I suggest reading Federalist 10 by Madison. Its a deep analysis of a need for a republican democracy. Any government that depends on human virtuousness will fail. The only way to have a sustainable government is to have strong checks and balances and putting multiple factions with different interests against one another.
While the Federalist Papers are great works, I don't agree with taking them as enlightened guidance from on high. They were theorizing. No one of them really knew how a modern democracy/republic would actually work in practice. Remember, the authors of the constitution (large overlap) stated on the record that they expected they got a lot of it wrong, and expected large swathes of it to be amended and replaced once a…